The Stuff That Never Happened (27 page)

“I want to see you,” he says. “Please tell me you’ll pack up your blueberries and come to my apartment.”

I try to protest. I
do
protest. I tell him I can’t come to his apartment, I don’t think this is a good idea, it can’t come to anything, blah blah blah, but I’m laughing because he keeps groaning as I talk, and anyway, we both know I don’t mean it the way you have to really mean something like this, and when I finally run down and stop talking, he says, “I’ll come to meet you, then.”

“But—”

“No, no. This needs to happen. Now where are you? Tell me your exact whereabouts.”

“Union Square.”

“Great—Union Square. Meet me at the northwest corner. I’ll be there in ten minutes, eleven at the most.”

“Jer—”

“No, no. You are to wait, motionless, until you see me. Think no bad thoughts while I’m on my way to you. Then, once I’m there, we’ll figure out what we’re going to do with this newfound insanity of yours.”

I can’t stop myself from laughing.

“Promise me. No bad thoughts until you see the whites of my eyes.”

“But I really don’t think it’s a good idea for me to go to your apartment,” I say.

“And is this because, for the first time ever, you’re frightened of my overpowering animal magnetism? Or are you just worried that I’m going to force you to live there with me and be my love slave?”

“I—”

“Look,” he says, and his voice takes on an edge. “What
is
this? I’m not trying to lure you away from your life. We can’t sit down in a quiet apartment and talk about our lives? We’re adults, Annabelle. We have a past. We care for each other, but that doesn’t mean you’re in any danger. This can’t be
you
talking.”

“Okay, listen to me. I promised Grant I’d never talk to you again. That was part of the deal for getting back together with him. All right? Now do you understand?”

There’s a silence, and then he explodes in laughter. “You had to give me up? For all time? Wow. I’ve never been a bargaining chip before.”

“Yeah, well—”

“I’m not sure how I feel about this. I’m seeing myself in a whole new way here.”

“Could you just please—”

“Also, Annabelle, honey, I hate to point out the obvious, but surely you’ve noticed that you’ve already broken that promise, ah,
twice
now. Is it going to be that much more awful for him if you see me a third time?”

“I don’t know. I guess not. Maybe you’re right.” He
is
right. Of course he’s right. I’m being ridiculous. I’m a grown woman; I have my own life, apart from my life with Grant. And—well, I deserve to be able to look back at my past. This feeling, these longings, are not going to go away without my truly examining them. Even Ava Reiss would agree that you can’t truly move forward until you’ve been brave enough to know who you really are.

“You and I both know that people shouldn’t make those kinds of promises—or worse, even
ask
somebody to do that. Jesus. That’s like promising not to feel anything for the rest of your life, and the woman I knew twenty-six years ago would have never made that kind of promise.”

“Okay,” I say.

“I’m coming to meet you. We’ll take it from there,” he says and hangs up.

I call up Sophie and tell her about the blueberries I’ve bought and that I’ll bring to her soon. “Are you doing all right? Because I just got a call from Jeremiah, that old friend of mine we saw the other day …”

“Yeah, Mom. I remember Jeremiah,” she says and laughs. “That just happened, you know.”

“Well, he’s in the neighborhood and wants to meet me for another quick cup of coffee. So if you don’t need anything, I thought I’d do that. If you don’t mind.”

“Of course I don’t mind,” she says. “I’d be shocked if you didn’t go.”

“You would?”

“Mom. Come on. You take care of everyone. It’s what you do.”

•   •   •

HIS APARTMENT turns out to be a smaller Upper East Side version of the one we all had together, up three flights of stairs, with high windows, wood floors, and lots of light. He even has most of the same furniture as before: his desk, the bookcases, and the kitchen table are all the same. All around are stacks of books and magazines, papers, open file cabinets with manila folders spilling out of them. There are big, splashy, messy paintings on the walls, a wine bottle and one lone glass out on the counter. Stacks of mail. His laptop is on the couch next to a blue knit throw that I remember. I used to play with the fringe on that thing when I read to Brice and Lindsay.

He says, “So this is it—the palace,” and smiles. He takes off his black leather coat and waits while I remove my coat and hand it to him, and then he hangs them both in the closet and turns back to me, and there’s one of those awkward silences as if there isn’t a thing in the world that we can talk about. Which is weird because all the way here, he’d been telling me about his trips abroad, the lectures he’s been giving at universities, and the way that the world of museums has changed—all reassuringly dull topics that had allowed me to calm down, even to the point of feeling a little bored.

“So how long have you lived here?” I say. It’s such a Jeremiah space—the cooking smells, the casual disorder, the artwork—all of it exactly like it once was. Minus Grant and Carly, of course. And the twins. It strikes me that this might be like the home we would have made together.

“Oh—what is it now? Ten years, I guess. We lived in Germany for a bit after the twins graduated from high school, and when we came back to New York, we moved here.” His eyes twinkle at me and he takes my arm. “You should look around. I bet you’ll recognize most of the furniture. I have a tough time throwing anything away, you know.”

Except me
, I want to say.
That you did rather brilliantly
.

He walks down the hall toward the kitchen, calling over his shoulder, “Would you like some tea?” and when I say yes, he says, “Really. Make yourself at home.” I walk around, peeking into the tiny, black-and-white tile bathroom and then into the bedroom, which is right next to the kitchen, and is large and dim and with a disheveled bed right in the center of the room. His bed was always a mess, now that I think of it; we’d be practically in cardiac arrest we were so frantic for each other, and yet we always had to stop and remove clothing and books and papers from his bed before we could fall down on it and make love. And—well, here we are. This room is so much like the old room, it even smells the same. Here are his clothes, dropped everywhere, and I could go over to the bed and pick up his pillow and hold it close to me. I could stretch out here and close my eyes, and no time at all would have passed.

He’s talking to me from the kitchen—patter that I know is meant to put me at ease, but I’m barely listening because suddenly I have to sit down. I’m sitting on his bedroom floor with my head in my arms, flattened by emotion. Everything hits me at once: his voice, this place, the way he looks at me, how he can make me laugh, and yes, the awful way he left me. And then there’s sheer
wanting
. I want him. I look up at that bed with its covers all in a wreck, and I’m so scared that we two will soon be in it, rolling around just as if twenty-six years didn’t even matter.

And then I’m scared that we won’t.

There are pictures on the walls of the children—as bright-eyed toddlers, middle-sized kids, and then lovely young adults. I stare up at them from the floor, remembering Lindsay’s fat little hands circling my own and Brice’s crazy, maniacal laugh. And then I see it: a framed black-and-white photograph of Carly on the bedside table. I pull myself up and go over and pick it up. She’s wearing a French cloche-type hat, with little wisps of her hair sticking out, and she’s looking into the camera with her eyes brimming and huge with feeling and her mouth drawn up in a little knot.

Collateral damage
.

That’s what Jeremiah called her back then. Her and Grant. They were to be our collateral damage.

He calls from the kitchen. “Do you want Earl Grey or some of this herbal crap? Let’s see—I think there’s chamomile and, oh, here’s something called Sleepytime.
That
probably isn’t a good idea …”

“Earl Grey is fine.” Carly’s eyes in the photo look sad. I clear my throat and then call to him, “So, Jeremiah. Did Carly ever know … you know … about us?”

There’s a beat of silence. The refrigerator motor turns on. “God no,” he says. “At least I don’t think so.”

I take the photo and go stand in the doorway of the kitchen and watch him taking down two mugs from the cabinet and setting them on the counter. “What do you mean, you don’t
think
so? How can you not know something like that?”

I’d forgotten how he domesticated he is, the way he moves around so confidently in the kitchen, how he looks when he concentrates, and the way his square hands become so limber as he arranges things just so on a black wooden tray: the spoons, the cream, the sugar bowl.

He sees me watching and smiles. “Ahhh, Annabelle, perhaps you’ve forgotten the kind of relationship Carly and I had. We made it a point never to talk about anything except how terrible it was that I didn’t work as hard as she did. Surely you remember that.”

“So, you told me that day at the train station that you weren’t going to leave her, and then you went back home, but … then what? Did you just sit down and eat dinner together and act like nothing had happened?”

“Nothing
had
happened, in Carly’s world.”

“But I mean
you
. Were you sad? Were you angry? Didn’t she look across the table and even suspect a little bit how close she’d come that night to losing you?”

He pours the hot water from the kettle into a green teapot, and for a moment the steam obscures his expression. When he answers me at last, his voice is weary. “Oh, who freaking knows what she knew, Annabelle? Why does it even matter? I came back home, and the twins probably needed a bath, and Carly no doubt wanted to go off by herself. We probably ate dinner. Went to sleep, got up the next day. Time passed. What can I tell you? Why do females always love to muck around in this stuff?” He’s smiling. “What’s the point? Here. Let’s have our tea, and then I want you to come with me. I want to show you something.”

“No,” I say, and we’re both caught short by my tone. “No. How can you just say that? This stuff is
important.”

He bites his lip. “No, it isn’t,” he says. “Not really, not in the grand scheme of things.” He comes over and hands me a mug of tea and stands close to me and tilts his head, in his charming way, and says softly, “What
was
important—and what will always be important—is that you and I almost made a life for ourselves. Together. And when that didn’t happen, when I decided to do the so-called
right thing
, it didn’t really matter whether Carly knew or didn’t know, because the bottom line was that you and I weren’t going to be together. And that hurt both of us for a very long time, and now we’re here with apparently one afternoon to spend together out of the rest of our lives. And I, for one, don’t think we should spend it beating ourselves up. Okay?”

“So then there was nothing at all? No repercussions?”

“What
is
it with you?” he says. He looks amused. “You want some reassurance that you weren’t the only one who had to suffer? Is that it? Well, if it’s any consolation to you, I did suffer. I had to live with this woman for the rest of her life, knowing I wouldn’t have
you
anymore. Isn’t that enough suffering for one man?” He’s teasing me as he takes the photograph out of my hands and puts it facedown on the table. “Now come on, Annabelle baby, let’s drop this. Let me show you this thing I saved for you.” He wraps his arm around my shoulder and gently propels me into the living room. “You’ll get a kick out of this, I promise.”

And so, reluctantly, I allow myself to be led into the hushed, overstuffed living room and over to the desk that had once held so much fascination for me, simply because it was his. I remember being awed by the pens in the pottery bowl—oh, and the night I licked one of them. God, I was so young then!

“I was cleaning out some old boxes the other night, and I came across this,” he says. “Do you remember?” His eyes are dancing as he reaches into a drawer and pulls out a copy of
Goldilocks and the Three Bears
and presents it to me with a flourish.
Goldi
had been crossed off with Magic Marker, so it just said
Locks and the Three Bears
.

“Oh my God yes. I remember doing this,” I say. The cover has three cartoon bears with a blond child sitting up in a bed, wide-eyed. Carly had insisted that I not only change the name, but also that I draw a cap on Goldilocks’s hair so she would seem to be a boy. Locks. How is it that this one book didn’t get returned? We must have forgotten to take it back with the others. I look up at him.

“Carly’s foray into feminist lit,” he says, and grins. “Remember how she defaced all those books, and then it was you and I who had to go and tell the day-care lady what she’d done?”

“Well, but that’s not exactly—”

“What a raw deal
we
got, huh? But you know what I realized? Without this one single act of hers, you and I probably wouldn’t have gotten together.
This
was the beginning of you and me. Ta-da!
Locks and the Three Bears.”
He does a little flourish.

“No, no. Wait,” I say. “Jeremiah, that’s not what got us started. Don’t you remember? Carly made me sit up with her one night and cross out all the sexist things with her, and then
I
had to sneak them back in the next morning before the day-care lady noticed—only then she caught me, and she was so mad. It was awful. And remember? She told us she wouldn’t watch Brice and Lindsay anymore after that, and then you and I walked home together, trying to figure out what we were going to do with the kids.” I open the book and look at all the black marks I’d made, at my handwriting changing the wording, and everything about that uncomfortable night floods back—Carly lecturing me on how men will always try to take my power away, and me feeling so young and uncertain but going along with her just to be nice. Why was I always trying to be nice back then?