“Perhaps she is drunk,” Valentina offers as an explanation.
“I think that should be your last appletini,” Ethan agrees.
“Don’t tell her what to do,” Arianna counters, even though all evidence points to the fact that I do not need to imbibe one more apple concoction.
“I’m not telling her what to do, Ari. I’m just agreeing that Rachel has had enough, and we should probably ask for the check.”
“But we haven’t even eaten dinner,” I gasp. “I’ve eaten lettuce soaked in butter. And you haven’t given me presents or sung
Happy Birthday
or had the waiter bring me out a piece of cake with a candle in it.”
Ethan makes the universal sign for the check, and I struggle to get up to my feet, waiting for Gael to stand up and help me and when he watches me, with a look that straddles being bemused, concerned, and mortified simultaneously, I steady myself and totter into the bathroom, followed by Arianna. She finds me by the sink, splashing water onto my face.
“This birthday really sucks,” I tell her.
“I’m sorry, this restaurant was a terrible choice,” Arianna agrees.
“It wasn’t the restaurant that was the terrible choice. It was my second first date who sucks. And my first ex-husband. All men suck.”
I am not nearly as drunk as I would like to be. I test the counter for dryness and then lift myself butt-first onto it, leaving my legs swinging underneath the marble shelf. Arianna leans against the stall door and watches me.
“I’m spending the rest of my birthday in here. In the shitter. It’s fitting, you know, to spend this birthday in the bathroom.”
“Gael sucks,” she agrees.
“Did you think he sucked before this?” I question. Could anyone have predicted that this evening would go this horribly wrong?”
“No, he seemed fine . . . great, in fact, at the dinner party.”
“He
was
great. He was a great guy, until we saw Adam at the party. That fucked up everything. Everything changed. Seriously, what kind of boyfriend picks up another woman at a bar during his girlfriend’s birthday dinner?
Your
boyfriend is giving you orgasms through backrubs and mine is picking up random Spaniard señoritas.”
She looks distinctly uncomfortable with this, but I can’t stop myself. “Am I that unlovable, Ari? That men don’t want to come home to me or even eat lettuce dipped in butter with me?”
“You are very lovable, sweetie. You’re just having a run of bad luck with men.”
“Where did you find your boyfriend? Was it a set up?” I ask.
“Who would set me up?” she questions.
“Well, where did you meet him? What does he do?”
“Rach, I don’t want to talk about him.”
“You’ve found this great guy. Are you going to marry him?” I ask.
“I don’t know. It’s really new.”
“What’s his name? Can I at least know his name?”
She squirms around uncomfortably, making some excuse that we should get back to the table because Ethan will have paid the check, and we can all leave to get some real food somewhere else. And with perfect clarity, I see her eyes moving back and forth from the door to my face, and I know.
My best friend is dating my brother.
“You’re dating Ethan? Ethan fucking Katz, my brother?”
“Yes, I’m dating your brother.”
“And you didn’t tell me?” I screech incredulously.
“Honestly, we didn’t hide it. You’ve caught us together a thousand times. I didn’t think it would take this long for you to put two and two together. We didn’t keep it secret to hurt you . . . it just happened.”
I want to shout out a long tirade about friendship, loyalty and brothers being off-limits unless she asked for my blessing up-front, but even in my drunkenness, I’m mortally embarrassed by how self-absorbed I’ve been for the last few months, how I’ve somehow missed that my best friend and brother have hooked up. Were clues really dropped in my path? How could I have missed all the signs?
All right, I
know
how I missed all the signs—I was too busy obsessing about myself and Gael and Adam. My fixation on my ex-husband turned me into a terrible friend. The worst sort. One who doesn’t even notice that her friend might have something she wants to talk about too.
I never get a chance to tell Arianna everything that is running through my mind in a matter of seconds, because I have just enough time to gurgle a bit then hop off the sink before I am vomiting up four appletinis and a piece of lettuce into the toilet with Arianna holding back my hair. That is a good friend; someone who will hold your hair while you vomit. I am a terrible friend who doesn’t keep track of what is happening in anyone else’s life, and she is a wonderful friend not even commenting on the amount of alcohol money that is literally being flushed down the toilet.
We don’t say anything else while she helps me clean myself up, and we leave the bathroom. I am too embarrassed to even start my apology; I don’t know where I’d begin.
I go out into the main dining room to pick a fight with my soon-to-be-ex-boyfriend. Who is standing next to the table, thankfully without Valentina, who has miraculously disappeared in my absence. This fact alone, though even more so coupled with the fact that I have vomited up a large portion of the alcohol, makes me feel better.
Though, by better, I mean seething mad. And I finally find my voice.
“You are taking me home,” I tell Gael.
“The others thought that maybe we’d do better at another restaurant. There’s a place up the street . . . ”
No one else looks as if they want to accompany us to another location and be privy to the argument that is about to go down. They shuffle towards the door, muttering things about babysitters or needing sleep. I don’t even bother responding, I just link my arm through my sister’s elbow and totter unsteadily towards the door, wishing I hadn’t consumed quite so many appletinis because I do my best fighting when slightly buzzed. No inhibitions about shouting out the truth, and the alcohol haze dulls any unkind words tossed back. My brother hails us a cab, and Gael enters docilely, giving everyone his lopsided smile as a goodbye.
I don’t talk to Gael for the whole cab ride back to my place. I would be hard-pressed to come up with a worse birthday, including the time when I was eight and missed my own party due to chicken pox. Even through my appletini smog, I’m so livid I can’t even look at him. I read the taxi driver’s name over and over again, thinking of a hateful word for each letter of his name. Monstrous. Offensive. Shithead. Evil. Sorry-assed-loser. The poor cab driver did nothing to deserve this abuse of his name, but I know that if I pick apart Gael’s name instead, I will start flinging the words I come up with directly at his skull.
Moses delivers us to the front door of my building. The unpromised land where the lack of definition to our relationship howls around in my heart like a maelstrom as Gael pays our cab driver. I don’t even bother taking out my wallet and pretending that I’ll split the cost.
Laidback
, I sniff, thinking about how I described Gael in the past to myself. More like “commitment phobic.” He’d never even given me a date when we’d go to the Guggenheim. Looking back on our relationship, we didn’t go on
any
of the dates I wanted, the kind he said he liked, too, when we first met—the spontaneous plans formed by what seats are on tap at the TKTS booth, the concerts, the people-watching in Central Park. Fine, the last one may not have been the best idea in the dead of winter, but the others were supposed to have happened by this point. Gael was supposed to be like Adam 1.0 before Adam became Adam 2.0. Instead, Gael and I have spent the majority of our time together either eating or screwing.
I should have been more suspicious of the fact that he never took me to the Kandinsky exhibit.
I should have bought a freakin’ ticket for myself.
He waits until we’re in my apartment, after I’ve slammed down my keys on the kitchen counter and kicked my heels off angrily so that one slides half under the bed. I jerk the faucet on and fill up a cup with water, not bothering to offer him one. I only take one sip and then spill the rest down the drain.
“Why are you so angry?” he finally asks.
“Are you kidding? It was my fucking birthday party. And you invite someone at the bar to our table?”
“I didn’t think it was a big deal,” he stammered, as if he had predicted an entirely different reason for my anger.
“Well, it is a big deal. In
America
, we don’t invite random women from the bar to join us at our table and then proceed to flirt with them in a language that no one else at the table speaks.”
“Her date stood her up. What was I supposed to do when she said that? Tell her ‘Oh, bad luck,’ and then go on my way?’
“Yes! Yes, that’s what you’re supposed to do. Or not talk with her in the first place,” I yell. I am certain that we’ll hear my neighbor knocking on the door in a moment, reminding me for the one-thousandth time that she has a baby, and that we have woken him up.
It feels good to yell, like the beginning of a run when you have lots of pent-up energy. It has been so long since I’ve actually argued with someone, told them how much they’ve hurt me.
“Well, I’m not like you,” Gael tells me. “I’m not going to ignore someone just to make you happy.” He sits down on the edge of the sofa, as if these words have ended the fight. “Besides, that’s not why you’re angry.”
“Why am I angry?” I ask. “You tell me, because apparently I don’t know why
I’m
angry.”
“You’re angry because of the lobster pin,” Gael informs me.
“Because I don’t like shellfish? Don’t you remember? I have a lovely lobster-shaped dish—that’s how much I love crustaceans,” I say, forcing him into admitting that the whole thing was a set-up. I knew it, I knew he was trying to force the issue. He can’t claim I didn’t like the gift when I have endured being seen in it all night.
“You thought it was an engagement ring and then you were angry when I didn’t propose.”
Hearing him admit to it makes me burst out laughing. He looks hurt, as if he can’t quite translate my reaction but knows that we are not heading where he wanted us to go.
“Why would you think that I wanted to get married?”
“
You
brought up getting married. The next time I go on a honeymoon . . . remember that?”
I have vague memories that he was the first one to broach the topic of marriage, but maybe I did bring up the topic of honeymoons. I am too drunk and tired and hungry to untangle it all in my mind.
“You’re pushing everything too fast, Rachel.” My name no longer sounds melodic as it spits off his tongue. “We’re just having fun and then you’re bringing up marriage. I don’t know what you think this is, but we never defined it, never said that we weren’t going to date others.”
He crosses his arms over his chest as if he is admonishing me for allowing my imagination to run to future places based on a few nights of sex. And this is, of course, what attracted me to Gael, this attitude of being in the moment. That’s what you get with a commitment-phobe who can’t even set plans to see an art exhibit. I am just a woman he is dating.
The robin-egg blue box is still on the table, and I sink down onto the sofa as if I’m wilting like a daisy in her final moments, and in one graceful—albeit drunken—movement, I snap the pin off my shirt while scooping up the box and chuck both at his forehead. The pin misses, and the empty box ricochets off his hairline. He ducks, more out of habit than danger. “Why the fuck did you do that?” he shouts. “You’re crazy.”
“I
am
crazy,” I agree. “And you set me up. You wanted me to think that you were about to propose to test me. What the hell is wrong with you?”
This was obviously not how he thought this argument would go. I’m assuming he thought I would admit how much I wanted to be married again, and he would be able to untangle himself gently from this relationship by reminding me that he was a free spirit, commitment-phobic, or whatever euphemism he wanted to use to explain why he was so terrible at considering another person’s feelings.
“You’re not crazy,” he backpedals, maybe because it’s my birthday or maybe because he’s scared that I’ll start crying and make this even messier. “But I just don’t think this will work out. I want fun, Rachel.”
“I actually wanted fun too. But, you know, you sometimes need to plan to have fun. Some things require reservations.”
Breathing deeply, staring at the robin-egg blue box on the floor, I am filled with reservations and regrets. I should have demanded that Adam see a marital therapist with me rather than throwing myself back in the dating pool again. I should have told him what was on my mind instead of hoping that he’d guess it. He may have stayed late at the office, but I am the one who failed to communicate.
It is strange how I can pour my heart out to strangers on my blog, but I never sat down with my husband—who obviously still cares somewhat about me if he’s reading my blog and sending me emails—and told him exactly what I needed before I told him that I wanted to separate. Thinking about this in my appletini fog makes it sound ludicrous.
I slammed doors and fumed. I never just turned to him and said, “You mean more to me than anything else in the world, and I want to work through this together. I want you to spend more time at home because I love you and I love being with you. Tell me what I need to do.” Instead, I only told him what he needed to do to keep me. And that isn’t a partnership, as much as I thought I was doing things right.