Really Good, Actually(17)
Although I hated eggplant, Jon was obsessed with it, and now I had two gorgeous, disgusting nightshade vegetables sitting in my fridge, mocking me for prioritizing the dietary preferences of a man who did not love me anymore. If she wanted some free eggplant or a big bundle of cilantro (another Jon favorite I detested), she knew where to find me.
She didn’t write back. The message rested, “seen,” under the last message I’d sent her, seven years earlier: SUCH a fun birthday, thanks so much for the invite, gotta do it again soon girlie! I didn’t remember the birthday, or a version of myself that used the word “girlie,” but I guess both things had happened at some point. A few weeks later I saw on Instagram that her dad had passed away. Her post said it was pancreatic cancer and that he’d been her best friend, forever–Scrabble partner, and biggest champion. I started ordering my groceries online.
It was hardest to run into Jon’s friends. They knew the best bits of what I was missing. Still had access to it, even: Jon’s sense of humor; his warm, woody smell; the way he rubbed your feet when you sat down next to him. (He probably wasn’t rubbing the feet of his friends in my absence, but my arches hurt like hell, and when I figured out why—that he’d been rubbing them probably three times a week for my entire adult life—I burst into tears.)
Plus, I assumed his friends all hated my guts. Some of them hadn’t cared much about me to begin with; others I mourned alongside everything else, one more part of the life I’d counted on now dissolved. There is a safe, easy intimacy between a woman and her male partner’s friends, or there can be. Before we moved in together, Jon had a number of goofy roommates I’d particularly loved, with whom it was easy to be the kid sister, the lone civilizing influence, the person playing Mario Kart with a generous handicap.
Once, I’d gotten to Jon’s while he was still in class and found them all playing some cowboy video game; they were chasing down a sheriff who’d bountied them, stealing gold and cattle as they went. Still, they said, the world was so well designed, you could do anything: shoot your father, catch fish in a stream with your hands, fall in love. They handed over the controls, and I got stoned and spent an hour picking flowers in a field to give to my horse. It was how I imagined it might feel to have brothers.
The best of all these not-quite-siblings had been Calvin. Essentially a large Labradoodle turned human, Calvin was a friendly, unmotivated man with curly blond hair and an easy smile. He had been Jon’s roommate in the early years of university, the two of them sharing a legendarily gross basement off King Street that the sun did not touch, where they pioneered dishes like “curry pizza” (exactly what it sounds like), “all-day egg buffet” (scrambled for breakfast, boiled for lunch, fried for dinner), and “dumpling surprise” (a frying pan full of dumplings, with a few pierogis thrown in “to keep us on our toes”).
Jon and Calvin were always having fun in ways that I thought were stupid and was secretly desperate to be a part of, hotboxing motorcycle helmets and shooting pellet guns at each other in armor made of stuff they’d found, or, in later years, an actual suit of armor Jon had stolen from the set of a pasta sauce commercial. They loved each other and seemed proud of their ability to say so, making showy displays of being the kind of men who could hug easily and support each other emotionally, but also beat each other up in a game of “full-contact croquet” or start a metal band called Gorgo’s Ass.
In our third year they moved above ground, somewhere not much better. Jon and I were an established couple by then, so we spent a lot of time lounging around their crumbling Kensington Market town house, eating cereal and skipping all our morning classes. We had always been wryly amused to meet whatever beautiful woman had come home with Calvin after his serving job at an upscale restaurant in the Financial District. Some made repeat appearances, but not many. None seemed to mind; they were just happy to be there, eating toaster hash browns in an unwashed kitchen with a man who called all women “bud” so he’d never get caught having forgotten their names. One summer he time-shared three girlfriends who all knew about each other, dating them on rotating nights. The entire experiment culminated in a debauched weekend trip to Port Hope, after which none of them spoke again. All of this is I guess a long way to say that Calvin, famously, fucked.
Which somehow made it extra surprising to find him standing inside the studio where I had begun attending a restorative yoga class since learning by happy accident that it was basically structured lying down. After a few months of lying prone in my bed, I wanted to get out there and lie prone somewhere else. I was grabbing a few more bolsters than I needed, feeling like this class might be one of the ones where I napped, or maybe cried lightly with a lavender pillow over my eyes, when there was Calvin, wearing flimsy athletic shorts and a T-shirt from something called guy fieri’s diners, drive-ins, and daves.
“Bachelor party,” he explained. “My cousin Dave. Kind of a lame guy, but honestly? Killer weekend.”
I laughed, slipping for a moment into an old way of being, when I could respond casually to a friend of Jon’s and not attempt to project doing great, thanks!!! with every cell in my body. I straightened my posture and instinctively wiped the area under my eyes. No black flecks—good. Calvin explained he was here because of a snowboarding injury and asked if I was “surviving,” which I’m sure he meant as a kindness, but the gentleness of his tone made me feel caught out and embarrassed, the neighborhood sad sack. I wondered what Jon had told him.