The Opposite of Maybe: A Novel

They’re making love on Saturday morning—almost finished, but not quite close enough to the finish line to really and truly count—when the phone starts its earsplitting chirping right by their heads.

Jonathan, who had been lying on top of her, with his face contorted in what she was sure was ecstasy, groaning, “Rosie, Rosie, Rosie …” now comes instantly to a halt. His eyes dart to the telephone on the floor next to their mattress, and she says, “Ohhhh,
no
you don’t,” and they both start laughing. They know he can’t help it.

“No, no, no!” she says, and tightens her grip on him, still laughing. “Not now. Don’t get up to see who it is.”

“But I have to know,” he says mournfully.

“But why? You
hate
the phone. And you already know you’re not going to answer it.”

“I know, but I have to see,” he says. He bites his lip and gives her a sheepish look. “Come on, let me check it.”

“All right,” she says. “Go look, you big lug. But come back.”

He leans so far over the side of their mattress that he nearly falls onto the floor on his head, still tangled in the sheets. And then, laughing, he has to catch himself and walk on his hands until he can pull himself out of the wreckage and get upright on the floor.

Sex as vaudeville
, she thinks. This is what they never tell you about long-term relationships: how you’d just die if you were ever shown a video of yourself trying to have ordinary,
household sex on any given day. And how it would
still
be worth it to you.

He scrambles for his glasses and then peers down at the Caller ID, absently scratching the hairs on his belly. Last week he turned forty-five, and when they went out with friends for his birthday dinner, he proclaimed—in a toast, yet—that he had now officially become older than dirt. (Rosie, only a year younger, had been surprised to hear this.) Raising his glass, he had laughingly announced he was losing his eyesight, his hairline, most of his optimism, and just about the last shred of his vanity.

Now, watching him as he mindlessly pulls off the condom that has been hanging on for dear life and flings it across the room to the trash can, she thinks he really might have been serious.

The condom does a graceful midair arc and lands with a splat on the lampshade on her dresser. If it had been a gymnast, the Russian judge would have given it a nine. It definitely stuck the landing.

She looks at his face. He’s handsome still, no matter what he says. He has brown hair—okay, thinning somewhat and streaked with gray now—but his smooth, tanned face has hardly any lines, only a few crinkles around his wide brown eyes, which just now are scowling at the phone. That’s the trouble, she thinks: in the last two years, he’s looked perpetually dissatisfied. Maybe that’s what he was talking about on his birthday, how he doesn’t care about life the way he used to.

“It isn’t Soapie who called, is it?” she says. She has to go see her grandmother later today, and it would be just like her to call up at the last minute and try to change the plan. Especially since today is the day they are going to have The Big Talk—the “wouldn’t you really feel much safer with a home health aide” talk that Rosie has been putting off. She’s
even secretly arranged for a potential aide candidate to show up—a wonderful British woman who claimed on the telephone that she knows precisely how to relate to “women of a certain age,” as she put it. So this is all orchestrated and it has to happen.

“Nope,” says Jonathan. “The culprit is somebody named Andres Schultz, and he’s from area code six-one-nine,” he says. “Do you know him?”

“No. Not for me.”

“Let’s see … six-one-nine is … um … San Diego.”

“Oh my God,” she says. “Do you really know all the area codes? Seriously?”

Of course he does. Numbers have always attached themselves to him. And also, he’s a collector of antique teacups—the kind from the dynasties in Asia and Europe, not from little girls’ tea sets—and he’s in constant touch with collectors from everywhere. It turns out there’s a whole subculture of wacky obsessives just like him, always on the Internet, comparing, blogging, judging whose collections are the biggest and the hottest, and gossiping about who’s been written up in the journals. It’s a world she never knew existed.

By now the call has been shuffled off to the land of voice mail, but Jonathan still stands there watching to see if the message light is going to come on. When it doesn’t, he says, “Shit. No message. Who could this guy
be
?”

“It might have been a wrong number, you know,” she points out. She sighs. “But why don’t you just call him back and find out, so we can get on with our lives?”

“No,” he says. “I don’t want to talk to him. I just can’t believe somebody from San Diego would call here at nine thirty on a Saturday. It’s six thirty in the morning there. What is he thinking?”

“I have no idea. But do you know what
I’m
thinking?”

“What?”

“I’m thinking I want you and your sweet hairy self to come back over here and resume having sex with me.”

He makes a face. “I think Mr. Happy might have moved on to thinking about teacups, and you know how once he goes there …”

“Oh, I can persuade Mr. Happy,” she says. She sticks a foot out from under the sheet and wiggles her toes at him, smiling.

“Yeah, well, maybe once upon a time, but lately he’s become more temperamental. Also—well, frankly he has to pee.” He frowns, looks at the phone again and then back at her. “I tell you what: I’ll go have a serious talk with him, and then we’ll see what he wants to do about the situation.”

“Remind him that he actually likes this sort of thing,” she says, and watches Jonathan’s cute bare butt disappear around the corner of the bedroom door. He’s humming “Born to Run,” which is lately his go-to song for the morning pee.

“Hey, you know what?” he calls from the bathroom. “I bet this guy Andres Schultz is somebody answering my call for another Ming Dynasty cup. That could be good.”

“Fantastic,” she says.

They currently have thirty-eight teacups stacked up in their living room, nested in white, archival-quality boxes—teacups that will never again see the light of day. Apparently they have to be protected from sunlight, dust motes, and destructive air currents so they can last into eternity. Jonathan and those funny, obsessive guys he e-mails are no doubt saving the world from the problem of teacup extinction.

As Rosie has explained to their friends, every time Jonathan latches on to a new hobby, he goes a little—what’s the clinical term?—oh yes,
batshit crazy
. It used to be Bruce
Springsteen memorabilia, then it was
National Geographics
, and there was a brief foray into German shot glasses.

Funny how you don’t see something like this coming, and how after a while, you don’t even think it’s odd. As her friend Greta put it, when you’ve been with somebody for years, all their little insanities start to blend in with the good stuff about them, and even if you’re annoyed, you find you still love the whole exasperating package.

Still, she thinks, it would have been nice if they’d remembered to unplug the phone.

He comes back and slides into bed next to her, still naked, but now holding his laptop. Evidently Mr. Happy vetoed more sex. Fine. She should probably get up anyway and do her exercises, get ready for the day, and for Soapie.

“Let me just see if Andres Schultz is one of the guys on the e-mail list. Because the question is, why haven’t I ever heard of him? If he has my number, then you’d think …”

“Jonathan,” she says.

“What?”

“Do you think my grandmother is going to eat me alive when I tell her she has to get an aide?” she says. “Because I kind of do.”

This is yet another time when it would be so great if her mother were alive. Then she’d be the one to make all these arrangements and plans, take on some of the worrying. But Rosie’s mother died when Rosie was three, and that was when she went to live with Soapie.

Jonathan is clicking the computer keys and doesn’t answer her right away. “No, she’s old,” he says finally. “She knows she’s got to get help.”

“Yes, but she’s in denial,” says Rosie.

It’s true that Soapie is eighty-eight, but until recently she was the Betty White kind of eighty-eight, having her hair
done twice a week and going to spas. It hadn’t ever occurred to her that she might have grown old. She’s still busy writing her latest “Dustcloth Diva” book, telling America how to keep its refrigerators spotless and its ceiling fans dusted. And she’s still cussing. Wearing makeup and peignoirs. And smoking. Possibly even driving, although she’s been begged to stop.

It’s only in the last few months that she’s started falling down and forgetting little things, like how you turn off the stove and where did she put those blood pressure pills, and why are the keys in the refrigerator. And there are other things, too: osteoporosis, blurry vision, bronchitis, some bouts of irregular heartbeat that have led them to the emergency room more than a few times recently. And Soapie, predictably, has reacted with outrage to the discovery that she’s made of the same stuff as the other humans after all, bones and blood vessels and capillaries that break down and turn rickety.

“You want to know what I really think?” Jonathan says, still clicking away. “I think she’ll be relieved. She’s probably deep down scared about the falls she’s taken lately, and she wants somebody to suggest some help for her. I think it’ll go fine. Better than you think.”