The Way Life Should Be (11 page)

As Flynn fiddles with the espresso machine he says, “Rebecca, meet Angie. Angie, Rebecca.”

“Angela,” I say. “Nice to meet you.”

“Both of you are from New York,” Flynn says. “Sort of.”

Rebecca smiles at me. “‘Sort of’?”

“I made the mistake of growing up in New Jersey. So he thinks I’m being dishonest.”

“How long have you lived in New York?”

“Ten years.”

“That’s a pretty long time. Only someone who’s never lived there would be so literal.”

“Hey,” Flynn protests.

“You started it,” she says.

He hands her a cup, and she gives him a twenty.

“Are you visiting people up here?” she asks me.

I nod.

“Would I know them?”

I shrug.

Flynn looks at me with sudden interest. “Yes, do tell.”

“It’s just a—friend. A guy named Rich Saunders.”

“Holy dooley!” Flynn says, at the same time that she says, “Ahh.” A look passes between them.

“Is there—something I should know?” I ask.

Flynn busies himself behind the counter.

“I don’t know Richard very well,” Rebecca says. “He seems like a—nice guy. He’s quite good-looking.”

Flynn lifts his eyebrows and pauses as if he wants to say something, but then thinks better of it. “That’s true,” he says.

“He gave me sailing lessons last summer,” Josh announces.

All of us look at him in surprise. “That’s right!” Rebecca says. “He was a good sailing teacher, wasn’t he?”

“I got sick. I threw up over the side,” Josh says.

“You did, didn’t you?” Rebecca laughs. “I’d forgotten that.”

“Next summer I’m going to science camp,” says Josh.

“Good on ya,” Flynn says.

Leaving the coffee shop, I walk across a small park to my car. The grass is as sodden as a sponge. Despite the rain, I wince at the glare; all the buildings in town are three stories or less, and the sky is huge and white. If I had an event tonight, I would be worrying about contingency plans: cancellations, rolls of plastic under the coat racks, rented umbrella stands. But I don’t have an event tonight, or any night. I don’t have any plans at all.

I think about that shared look, the questions forming in my own head. Is there something I should know?

Maybe I ought to be worrying about contingency plans.

CHAPTER 11

Rich kisses me good-bye as he leaves for work. I lie in his bed for a
while longer, gazing out at the sun through the window, as distinct as a lemon in the milky sky. Ever since we went up to Cadillac a few days ago, he has been attentive and sweet. He brought home groceries last night and made dinner (well, Ragú and ziti), and later, when I slipped into bed beside him, he turned on his side toward me, ran his hand down my hip, and murmured, “I could get used to this.” Afterward, when he drifted to sleep, I started to think. The charmless apartment, the seemingly deliberate cultural ignorance, the frat-boy proclivities—none of that really matters. He doesn’t fit my ideal—so what? He’s a nice, solid guy. Maybe my preconceptions are the real problem.

Maybe, in fact, he really is my love match after all.

I step into the shower, lather up with his manly deodorant soap, which I found repellent several days ago but now kind of like, wash my hair with his Suave shampoo that gives me static cling, and dry off.

As I’m standing there in my towel in the bathroom, the telephone rings. I run over to the phone by Rich’s bed and pick it up, figuring it’s probably him. “Hello?”

“Hello?” a female voice echoes.

“Hello? Who is this?” I ask.

“Who is
this
?”

“Angela. I’m—” I hesitate, wondering what I am “—a friend of Rich’s.”

“He never mentioned you,” she says.

“And who is this?”

“Becky.”

“He didn’t tell me about you, either.”

“Well, he wouldn’t, would he?” she says.

I don’t say anything, just stand there dripping, breathing into the phone.

“Fucking asshole,” she says. “Just tell him Becky called. And it’s the last time. I’m not calling again.”

There’s a click, then a dial tone, and I realize she has hung up on me.

I look at the phone as if it itself insulted me. Then I place it back in its holster. Becky. Why am I not surprised?

I finish drying off and open Rich’s closet door, looking for my robe. And then it occurs to me that if there’s an Angela and a Becky, there might well be an entire alphabet of women I don’t know about. I glance around the closet, poking at a few empty shoe boxes and a banker’s box, full of bills, on the floor. I don’t feel guilty or self-righ teous, just strangely calm. Pushing aside a pile of sweaters on the shelf above the hanging bar, I find a sheaf of white paper in the far back. I take it down.

As I begin leafing through the pile, I find e-mail after e-mail. Kissandtell. Women’s profiles, with pictures. DogLover, Blondy, Abgirl, CutiePie. At the top of the pile is a haiku:

Your name is real cute

I like Blondy with a Y

When can I see you?

The blood rises to my head. Riffling through the pages, I find e-mails before, during, and after our correspondence, a parallel cosmos of haikus and sweet nothings. Apparently he sent two other women the same haiku he sent to me, one that I thought perfectly captured the absurdity of our situation:

You’re so far away

I’m right here, far away too

Why can’t we be close?

Now that it’s addressed to someone else, I see that it’s as cloyingly generic as a Shoebox card.

It dawns on me that it must seem to him like random chance that I, and not another one of these women, came up to see him. I thought it was serendipity; he must have seen it as a roll of the dice. I thought I had found my soul mate; he was just playing out one of many options.

My head feels light. I have to get away from this apartment. I throw on some clothes, towel-dry my hair, and head out the door. It’s still early, and the light is thin. The sun is bright, even dazzling, but the air is strangely cold. It is unsettling to see the sun and not feel it; it might as well be a picture in the sky. I pull my coat around me, frankly grateful for the brightness, the illusion of warmth.

Walking down Blueberry Cove Lane, I pass the other town houses on the left and the barren expanse of dirt on the right, in which the seeds of new condos are being planted. The few trees along the way are half plucked; leaves drift in the wind, are carried up and over, brown-yellow-gold as they twirl toward the ground. As I get farther from his house, the road slopes up and then down through fields covered with low, hardy bushes. Truth in advertising: blueberries. From the top of the rise I see
a ribbon of ocean on the horizon line, dotted with little patches of land.

Gazing out at the water I take a deep breath, smell the pine and dirt. The sky is empty and pallid. In a sudden rush of feeling, like the flash onset of a fever, I am stricken with gloom—a piano scale of feeling in the key of, say, G minor, culminating in a jarring note of dread. The impulse to come here was not, as I have told myself, daring and romantic; it was foolhardy and ill-conceived. There is nothing here for me. I see that now. I am living in the town house of a guy I barely know. On a remote Maine island. With a stack of e-mails to other women, some identical to the ones he sent to me, on his kitchen table.

My thirty-three years are apportioned into boxes, a haphazard and senseless accumulation. My money won’t last long; I have nowhere else to stay. All I own is an old car without a gas gauge and some books and clothes and spatulas. I keep getting it wrong, only my mistakes get bigger. Ruining my career was bad enough. Ruining my life is more than I can contemplate.

“At the same time,”
I say, trying to stay calm. “You were sending haikus to all these women
at the same time.
”

We are standing in Rich’s kitchen. My bags are packed. He has just suggested that I may be making too big a deal about this. He shrugs, which in his body-language lexicon signifies something between annoyance at being caught and an inability to grasp why this matters so much to me. “I was keeping my options open,” he says.

“I wasn’t. I wasn’t corresponding with anyone else.”

“Look, we met online. I didn’t even know for sure that you were female.”

“
What?
”

“How was I supposed to know? You could’ve used somebody else’s picture—”

“Just stop. You were still e-mailing these women after I came up to Boston to meet you.”

“Look, look,” he says, stepping back. “We see this whole thing differently. I was flirting. It was harmless.” He turns away from me in the small kitchen, goes into the living room, picks up a ten-pound weight, and starts doing curls. “I thought you had a good time last night,” he says, panting a little, “but now, I have to say, you’re being a real”—
huff
—“downer.”
Huff.

The aftertaste of coffee is metal in my mouth. “By the way,” I say, “Becky says to tell you it’s over.”

“What?” He stops doing curls.

“She called when you were out.”

He just looks at me. “What were you doing picking up my phone?”

“I thought it was you.”

“I don’t care if you think it’s Santa Claus. Don’t pick up the phone in my house.”

“You know what? Fuck you.”

“What did you just say?” He takes a step forward, still clutching the barbell.

I wonder abstractly if he’s trying to appear menacing, but it doesn’t occur to me to be afraid. “I can’t believe you asked me to come up here, and now you’re acting like this,” I say. “I—I put my whole life on hold. My stuff’s in storage. My apartment is gone.”

“That’s not quite accurate, is it, Angela?” he shoots back. “You got fired from your job. You had nowhere to go. Saw this as a way out.”

“That is not true.”

“You practically begged me to let you come up here.”

I am reeling. “I can’t believe you’re twisting it like this! You
asked
me to come.”

“No, I didn’t,” he says. “You brought up the idea. And I said sure. I mean, yeah, why not? Take a vacation, whatever. You were a lot of fun in Boston. But then you get here and all of a sudden everything is so damn…serious.”

I laugh—snort—in disbelief. “Well, yeah! Hello. I had all my stuff in my car.”

“See, I didn’t really get that part,” he says.

“What do you mean? We talked about it before I came.”

“I thought you were coming for a visit. I didn’t know you were moving in, for Christ’s sake! I mean, c’mon—we hardly know each other.”

At that moment the telephone rings. I can tell we’re both thinking the same thing—that it’s Becky, or some other woman. He doesn’t make a move to pick it up, but both of us are silent. The ringing is relentless, a shrill contrast to our own seething exchange.

“Listen, Angela,” he says when the ringing finally stops. “I’m not quite sure…” He pauses.

“What I’m getting at?”

“No. I know what you’re getting at. I’m not quite sure what you want. From me.”

He says it like that, in two discrete phrases. And he has a point—they are two different, if related, subjects. But it surprises me all the same. “What do you mean?”

He shrugs. “I dunno. I just—I’m not really sure why you’re here.”

“I’m here because…” I feel a suffusing panic. Why am I here?

“Look,” he says. “I don’t know what you thought. I figured anyone who uses an online dating service would know what the deal is.”

“What the deal is,” I repeat stupidly.

He sighs, cricks his neck. Tosses the barbell onto the carpet, where it lands with a thud and rolls once. “I thought this was going to be less…complicated. You seemed so cool about things before.”

“But we never talked about this.” Then I realize what he means. “Oh—because I slept with you on the first date?”

He shrugs. Yeah, that’s what he means.

I take a deep breath. Step back. All right. Well.

“So tell me, Angela,” he says. “What are you going to do?”

All of a sudden the absurdity of my situation—no job, no money, no place to live—makes me smile.

“What? What’s so funny?”

“I don’t have any idea.” Then I can’t help it, I start to laugh. Being with this man was clearly an exercise in self-delusion—I conjured up the relationship out of thin air. If I had an ounce of self-respect, I’d get in my car and head back to New Jersey, move in with my father and stepmother, and start looking for a job. I’d chalk this up to an early midlife crisis during which I temporarily lost my head, and I’d very sanely move on.

“You don’t need to be with me to stay here,” he says, as if I’ve been thinking aloud.

“That’s ridiculous. Why else would I stay?”

“Because it’s this
place
you’re really interested in. Not me.”

“That’s not true. I liked the—idea of Maine. I had this fantasy. But you were part of that.”

“Right. Part of it. Not the first part, either.”

“An important part. A crucial part.”

“Nah. Just a part.”

“I didn’t even know you yet,” I protest.

“Exactly,” he says. “That’s what I’m saying. You didn’t come up here for me—not really. You came up here for an idea. A dream. Right?”

“But I never would have just—come here. Without a reason.”

“Maybe not,” he says. “But now you’re here. And it doesn’t really matter why you came, does it?”

In this moment I realize—as I somehow haven’t until now—that he’s right; I don’t want to go back to New York. There’s nothing there for me. I actually—how can I even separate it?—think I want to stay here for now. I’m not ready to leave. Despite Rich. And if I were honest, I would admit that I picked Rich as arbitrarily as he picked me, as much for the place as for his unique combination of attributes, many of which I blithely ignored or made excuses for from the beginning.

“Look, you can crash here with me as long as you want. But you’re a smart girl. You’ll figure it out. If there’s one thing I’m sure of, it’s that you’ll find a way to do what you want to do.”