Really Good, Actually(48)
“Isn’t it supposed to take half the time you were with someone to get over them? I’ve got another three and a half years of basement wallowing, if that’s the case.”
“That’s ridiculous. Where did you read that?” Merris said. “Inessa’s husband died last July, and she’s been the scarlet lady of her birding group. Though I suppose she doesn’t necessarily have the . . . what would it be . . . fourteen required mourning years left.”
All the upstairs ladies talked about death like this—like it was an appointment they knew was coming up but had forgotten exactly when they’d booked it in for.
“It’s no bad thing to fall in love,” said Merris, and I snorted.
“I am not in love,” I said. “But I do like him. A lot. He’s infuriatingly difficult not to like.”
I had been surprised, lately, by the intensity of my fondness for Simon, and had indeed wondered in private if I was falling in love with him, which was unnerving. The last time I’d felt like this I married the man, so had assumed the experience was unique to finding one’s soul mate. But here it was, more or less the same, with some guy I’d found in a bar: the tension and warmth and sense of shared momentum. The feeling of being looked at, of wanting to look at someone more than I wanted to do anything else. The sudden realization that this human being is in possession, somehow, of the best and nicest brain, the warmest torso, the sexiest legs. The follow-up realization that you’re into men’s legs now, that this person has made that so. I knew, of course, that eventually I would reveal the part of myself that made him recoil, and he would go, and I’d be despondent, so for now I was just trying to enjoy the view.
“I’ve never been with someone so straightforwardly handsome,” I said. “I keep taking these languid photos of him lying around down here.”
Merris said it sounded like I was in love, or possibly reading too much Alan Hollinghurst. I said it was too early to call it and reminded her I was still seeing other people. Sort of. I was talking to them, anyway, in my DMs and on the apps, making flirty little comments, then retreating when they suggested meeting in person. It was important, I said, to know there were options, to have a frisson at the bus stop. Merris said that sounded exhausting and invited me to spend the countdown with her and the ladies upstairs.
“If we make it that far,” she said. “Betty’s fading already. Inessa’s mixing some Irish coffees to pep us up.”
I thanked her but declined; the plan was to go it alone.
“How alone can you be, with all those sordid direct mails?” she said, her haughtiness undercut by the nearly-there wrongness of the words she was using. When she opened the door, I could hear Betty telling Inessa that her new year’s resolution was to “smoke more, why not.”
I put my godforsaken bread in the oven and blew out my candle to let the baking smell fill the studio. Half an hour later my windows were fogged from the heat, and the tray I removed from the oven had a gorgeous, loafy-looking loaf of bread on it. I felt proud, then very silly, then proud again. I looked at the clock: it wasn’t even 10:30.
I decided to watch Titanic the way I had when I was younger, stopping when the boat hits the iceberg. As a child this habit had arisen from necessity: the first VHS finished with Jack and Rose in love, startled by the sound of ice grinding against metal. To see the rest of the film you had to eject the tape, put it away, and insert a second one, which seemed like a lot of work just to watch all the characters you’d grown attached to drown in the freezing Atlantic, so mostly I didn’t. To me, James Cameron’s masterpiece was a rom-com about two young misfits from different social classes who meet, decide not to commit suicide, and against their family’s wishes, have sex in a car.
Kate Winslet’s hand smacked the window at 11:27. This seemed impossible. It felt like an entire year had passed, like I was staring down 2020. I looked at my unassembled SKURNSK, the pieces piled in a corner, and my mattress on the floor. Panic or determination rose in my throat. It was this or try again to journal.
The single cartoon figure frowned up at me from the instructions sheet. Further into the instructional booklet was a diagram labeled exploded parts. It was a drawing of the bed frame’s component pieces laid out individually, all the little bits of metal and wood that would combine to make something useful and, if not stylish, more appealing to the eye than a loose pile of junk.
I took a picture of the page and composed an email to Jon about what such a diagram would look like of our relationship. Knowing I would never send it, I allowed myself to get a little flowery, describing a day on our honeymoon when crappy free wine and a frankly spectacular sunset had moved him to tell me that he felt “safe in my arms,” and I told him he was “my home,” and it didn’t feel hackneyed or embarrassing, because although it was without question both of those things, it was also, and more importantly, true.
Merris came back downstairs at ten minutes past midnight, two flutes of prosecco in her hands. She peeked around the half-open door to find me on the floor, surrounded by bits of cheap Scandinavian wood. I had a wet, red face and nine grapes in my mouth. Merris sighed. “I’ll get Lydia.”
I curled around the dog’s gargantuan body, letting her soft ears slip in and out of my hands. Merris had made an overture toward assembling the SKURNSK herself, then thought better of it; now she was sitting on a chair at the kitchen table while Lydia and I lay in bed.