Every Vow You Break(6)

“You don’t want to waste your next three years of college with a college graduate. I’ll cramp your style,” he said.

“I think you mean I’ll cramp your style,” Abigail replied.

“That, too,” he said.

So it actually felt good that immediately after meeting Ben, Abigail was plunged into an intense romance, the two of them joined at the hip, living, it seemed, in each other’s mind. They saw the same movies, read the same books. He wanted to write poetry, and Abigail, although she didn’t admit it to anyone but Ben, dreamt of being a novelist. They were together for the next three years of college, and then moved to New York City immediately after graduation, getting an apartment downtown not a whole lot bigger than a one-car garage. Ben changed after college, although it took two years for Abigail to really notice. At school, he’d been content to be a student, to be learning from others, honing his craft, absorbing the world. But once they were settled in New York, Abigail getting a job at Bonespar Press and Ben working at the Strand Book Store, he became obsessed with making it as a poet, befriending a circle of slam and spoken-word poets (even though he claimed to despise those particular genres), and spending more time sending out poems to literary magazines than actually writing them. When he got rejections, he sulked for days, and when he got accepted his mood would improve, but for diminishing lengths of time. He spent hours on the internet getting into fights on comment boards, and he drank constantly. Abigail joined him, but only at night. They would meet friends at Pete’s Tavern, and Ben would argue with anyone about anything, something he’d always done, but it was starting to exhaust Abigail. They brought the arguments home with them from the bar, and sometimes, hungover and exhausted the following morning, Abigail couldn’t even remember what they’d been fighting about. It was always something minor, like the time Abigail told Ben that she loved Shakespeare in Love and he’d been so upset that he disappeared for an entire night.

Three years after college, Abigail was ready to leave Ben, trying to figure out the best way to do it, when, by chance, she spotted him coming out of McSorley’s Tavern, his arm draped around a mutual friend of theirs, Ruth, a jewelry maker living in Brooklyn. Abigail felt a surge of betrayal and anger, like a sudden punch to her stomach, but that feeling lasted for less than an hour.

He’d given her a way out and she took it. Still, untangling their relationship, both logistically and emotionally, took nearly a year. It was the same year that the Boxgrove Theatre went out of business, and her parents, who had always represented, at least to Abigail, pillars of competent adulthood, suddenly seemed like a pair of frightened children. Abigail went home every weekend to help them deal with the enormous amount of stuff—the props and costuming—they’d acquired in twenty years, but also to provide emotional support. It wasn’t just that they were crushed by the failure of their business, they were crushed by what they both perceived as the failure of their lives. And they were in debt, mainly because of the loans they’d taken out in order to send Abigail to Wesleyan. All of this—the dissolution of her relationship with Ben, her parents’ failures—made Abigail feel hollowed out, purposeless.

She decided to move home, to help them, emotionally and financially, through their transition into new lives, but they refused.

“Please don’t let us drag you down, Abigail,” her mother said.

“Go live your life. We’re totally fine.”

But it was her father she was more worried about. He’d aged about ten years since the collapse of the theater. One night, after her mom had gone to bed, Abigail and her father had stayed up to watch Two for the Road on Turner Classic Movies. He drank steadily through the movie, finishing off the red wine from dinner, and afterward told Abigail that they’d already canceled their premium cable subscription, that it was going away at the end of the month, and he was trying to watch as many old movies on TCM as possible.

Something about that particular detail made Abigail so sad that she had to get up and tell her father she was going to the bathroom, just so he wouldn’t see her cry.

When she came back out, she said to her father, now watching Charade, “I talked to Mom about this, and she wasn’t thrilled by the idea, but I’m thinking of coming home for a while. I know that I could get a job at—”

“No, no, Abby. Your mother and I discussed this. Not a chance.

It’s totally enough that you come back on weekends, and you have that great job—”

“It’s not that great a job.”

“It’s in publishing. You’re in the greatest city in the world.

Please. We are one hundred percent fine.”

“Okay,” Abigail said. “I hear you both, loud and clear.”





CHAPTER 4

Back in New York, unmoored by her breakup with Ben and feeling powerless to help her parents, Abigail moved into a three-bedroom apartment with two strangers and took an extra job as a nanny for a family on the Upper East Side to just be able to pay her share of the rent. She kept thinking about her father’s words to her, that she had a job in publishing in the greatest city in the world, and somehow those facts, instead of making her happy, made her feel sad and worthless. She was where she’d wanted to be, but she felt like an impostor, a small-town girl playing grown-up in the city.

She started spending time with her college friend Rebecca, who was heavily subsidized by her parents and had her own place near Gramercy Park. Abigail knew that some of Rebecca’s fondness for her was attraction, and out of curiosity, and a requisite amount of attraction herself, Abigail got drunk one night with coworkers, then showed up at Rebecca’s apartment at just past midnight. It was a sexual encounter so awkward that both of them seemed to know, instantly, that they’d killed their friendship.