You Love Me(You #3)(15)
“Yeah,” I say. “Way too young, but I thought she had an old soul. Her favorite book was Desperate Characters.”
You wipe your hands, feeling threatened again. I tell you what I learned from Melissa, that reading doesn’t always promote empathy. She was a competitive fencer and she was in a love-hate codependent relationship with her best friend Apple (RIP Peach Salinger). “But that wasn’t the problem,” I say. “In the end, Melissa was in a relationship with one person and one person only.”
We say it at the same time: “Melissa.”
You feel for me. I endured Melissa’s numerous microbetrayals. I tried to love her, help her focus on her fencing (writing). And then she cheated on me. She slept with her coach (psychologist). You bury your head in your hands. “No,” you say. “Oh God, that’s horrible on so many levels.”
“I know.”
“A coach.”
“I know.”
I’m eating my sandwich and you’re looking at me like I should be crying. “It’s really not so bad,” I say, realizing that it isn’t, because look where it got me, to you. “You’re lucky to get your heart broken. That just means you have a heart.” I’m not ready to talk about Amy, about Love, so I move us past anecdotes into theory. “Everyone is the wrong person until you meet the right person…” You rub your empty ring finger. “I’m not bitter, Mary Kay. If anything, I hope they’re doing great…” Up in heaven, or dust in the wind. “I hope they found the right person.” I pray for a remorseful almighty lord—Hare Forty—and I take a big bite of my sandwich.
You let the waitress know that we would like another round—fuck yes—and you admire my healthy outlook on life. I tell you it’s no big deal. “So,” I say, because the door to your heart is cracked now, the tequila, the details about my life, and you’re finally ready for me to enter. “You and Nomi… real-life Gilmore Girls. What’s the story there?”
You let out a deep sigh. You look around the restaurant, but no one is listening to us. No one is close. I know it’s not easy for you, being on a date, but you are. You know it. You begin. “I was young but I wasn’t that young, and my life… well, I told you about my parents.”
“Mary Kay mom and dear old dad.”
You smile. “Yeah.”
“Did your dad put up a fight when you moved up here?”
I smell onions, layers peeling away, revealing the truth under the truth. You tell me you didn’t understand the divorce. There was no scandal, no cheating. “It was like one day, my mom woke up and she didn’t want her pink Cadillac anymore. She didn’t want him either.”
“Were there signs?”
“I missed them,” you say. “Are you good about signs? Reading people…”
Yes. “Well, who can say?”
“I think we all see what we want to see.” You look around again, so nervous, as if one of these people is going to text Nomi and tell her that her mother is on a date. And then you relax again. “Well, my mom sort of just announced that she was done with Mary Kay, that we were moving to Bainbridge Island, that she was craving nature.”
“And you don’t know why she left him?”
“No clue,” you say. “It was amiable. There was no custody battle, no fight. He was so calm that he drove us to the airport! He’s my dad and he’s kissing us goodbye like we were going away for the weekend. We left him all alone. My mother made me complicit. But then, that’s not fair to say because it’s like I said. It was all so damn amiable.”
I feel for you, I really do. “Jesus.”
“One day my mom’s harping on me to use more eyeliner and the next thing you know… we live here and she’s telling me that I don’t need lipstick. I didn’t ask her why we left, but then… what’s scarier than your mom becoming a total stranger?”
I think of where I stand with Love, powerless against a woman’s blind determination to make our child her own. “I get it.”
“And then, after all that, my mom spent every night on the phone with my dad, egging him on to eat better.”
“Strange.”
“Right? And this was before cell phones. I couldn’t call my friends back home. I didn’t have any friends here yet. I felt so alone. She was always in her room, taking care of my dad, letting him tell her how beautiful she is as if they were still married. I remember thinking, Wow. You leave him… You move to another state. But you never leave a man, even when you do.”
“Jesus Fucking Christ.”
You air-toast me with your empty glass. “And that, my friend, is too much information.” We’ve come full circle, inverted the joke, and you signal for another drink and you’re in flow, the levee broke. “It’s like… we all know about sham marriages. But what about a sham divorce?”
“That’s a good way to describe it.”
You stare at the table and the waitress plunks our drinks down and you thank her and sip. “I just wish I knew why she left him at all if she was only going to spend the rest of her life on the phone with him, you know? Because why not just stay together if that’s what it is? Why uproot my entire life?”