Life From Scratch (30 page)

I loved Adam. I loved my imperfect, workaholic Adam.

Now I close my eyes, rocking a little bit as the room goes dark for a moment. As much as I thought I wanted to bring the elements of my new life back with me to the past, what I really want, more than any other birthday wish I’ve ever made, is to meld what I know now with what I had then and build something entirely new in the process, to change Adam and I to something new, to something strange. Something potentially wonderful, again.

Except that when I open my eyes, Gael is still in front of me.

And I’m not really making a very good argument against the fact that I’m not crazy.

I realize what good blog fodder I will get in the future from this breakup, somewhere down the road when the facts can be changed so the innocent can’t recognize themselves. I let him down gently, allow the fish to wiggle off the line.

“You’re right,” I say simply. “But it’s me; it’s not you. I really think I need to be alone for a bit to work out everything I’m feeling about relationships. I’m still carrying a lot of baggage with me from my divorce.”

And this allows Gael to slip into the part of the perfect gentleman, reminding me how much he really has enjoyed our time together, how he wishes me nothing but the best, how he hopes we can still see each other from time to time. Perhaps catch a future exhibit at the Guggenheim.

And then he leaves.

And that is how I spent the thirty-fifth anniversary of the start of my life.

Four appletinis and no food and I should be snoring in a pool of my own vomit, but instead I have insomnia and I'm drunk blogging. Computers should come with a special lock key so you can't blog while buzzed.

Except if you can't be honest on a blog, where
can
you spill out your inner thoughts without qualms?

Once when I was little, my father told me to hold my tongue while he was on an important phone call, and I literally stood for a full three minutes pinching my tongue while saliva dripped down my chin until he turned around and shooed me out of the room. I remember that little muscle under my tongue felt raw after being stretched in wordlessness.

I have done nothing but talk since I started this blog, but I still haven't said the most important stuff—here or to the people in my face-to-face world. It's like starting with dessert and never moving on to the protein-laden part of the meal. And while dessert tastes good, woman cannot live on cake alone.

I'd like to record what I've learned by age thirty-five in case I forget it before the morning: that there is no point in saving face if it makes you lose everything else. That you should stick your heart, raw and beating on the table and hope that the other person picks it up; and if they don't, deal with the consequences of having your heart outside your body rather than never letting it leave your chest. Sometimes the most messed up things can be fixed, but you only know if that's true if you try. Failure is a possibility if you’re trying hard enough.

And now that the room is properly spinning, I think I'm going to go to bed.

Chapter Twelve

Sprinkling the Pepper

I barely sleep after I return to bed that night, and avoid checking my blog comments the next morning. I can’t bear the idea of everyone running from my blog, screaming in fear at my enormous neuroses, as if they’re tearing apart the city like Godzilla while even Adam squirms in his office in the face of my raw emotions. And he
knows
me; he knows how neurotic I really am. He knows that my blog post doesn’t even scratch the surface, from his experience.

I wait until close to
seven a.m.
to slip my coat on over the yoga pants and sweatshirt I’m using as pajamas. I walk through the bitter morning cold to Arianna’s apartment. I have the front desk call her to say I’m on my way up, and she leaves her door open a crack so I can walk right in. I find her in bed, the sound of Beckett’s deep breathing crackling through the baby monitor, and I slip into bed beside her, wondering only for a second if my brother occupied this very spot before me.

My parents had a rule that we could never share their bed. If we were sick, they would sometimes sleep in our room, but we were never allowed to sleep in their bed, this strange island, this unknown land. I feel like a child as I rest my head on Arianna’s other pillow and she strokes my head in a motherly manner.

“I read your post last night,” she tells me. “I couldn’t sleep, and then Beckett was fussing. I think he’s getting teeth. It was very good, your post.”

“I’m not even entirely sure what I wrote. I was in that post-drunk place where you’re not really sober, but you’re not buzzed.”

“You posted around two? I read it around four in the morning, and you already had over 100 comments.”

“I did?” I ask.

“People like honesty,” Arianna tells me.

“Were any of the comments from Adam?” I question.

“I looked. There was nothing there. But maybe he hasn’t read it yet. But I thought you were over and done with him.”

I look up at a stain on her ceiling. It’s in the shape of a teddy bear. Beckett snuffles in the next room, and then I hear the squelching sound of the binky. I don’t wish I was a baby again, but I would sure love to have some of his internal peace.

“Was Adam the failure you were talking about?” Arianna asks.

“One of them,” I admit. “I suck as a friend. I’m sorry about that, too. I’m sorry that I didn’t push you to talk to me about your relationship with Ethan.”

“I was sort of waiting for that,” she admits. “I’m sorry, too. It was wrong of us to be secretive; completely wrong. We should have come out and told you instead of dropping bread crumbs and waiting for you to notice and call us on it.”

“How long has it been going on?” I ask, breathing deeply as I catch of whiff of a smell that is comforting. Home-like.

“I guess it started after that dinner party you gave. I took the elevator down with the boys. Gael immediately said goodbye and walked off in one direction. And the other guy sort of lingered around talking to us for a bit, and then he went to the subway. And then Ethan offered to walk me home. I guess I never thought much about him before; he was just your little brother. But he came up, and we spent the night talking and when he kissed me . . . it just felt right. Is this too weird? Is talking about this too weird?”

“I’ll tell you when it gets too weird,” I promise. “Just stay away from talking about back rubs.”

We both look at each other and start laughing hysterically, the kind of laughter that you need to do simply to clear the tension from the room even though nothing funny has been said or done. “Ethan Katz,” she gasps, tears streaming down her face as I snort. “I’m in love with Ethan Katz.”

“You’re in love with him,” I repeat, suddenly serious again. Arianna is not one to throw around the word “love.”

She wipes her eyes with her sleeve and nods her head. “I am. Is that crazy? I don’t know where it’s going, but he’s wonderful with Beck, and he’s wonderful with me. He makes me eggs in the morning.”

“My brother makes you eggs? But Katzs don’t know how to cook.”

“He uses that recipe you posted on your blog a few weeks ago for scrambled eggs with herbs.
 
He brings me flowers. And he changes diapers. What more can a single mum want? I think I’m getting easier to please in my old age.”

“You still have months before
you’re
thirty-five,” I tell her, trying to steer away from learning more intimate facts about my brother. We will need to tread slowly with this topic, baby steps, even if I am happy for her and him. And I’m not just saying this because it’s the right thing to say when your best friend has found happiness with your brother. I’m saying it to myself because it is true. Everyone should find that someone worth making eggs for, worth waking up next to, and Arianna has been waiting a long time. “You’re young,” I tell her.

Arianna looks at me with gratitude over the fact that I am not strangling her, calling her a liar for keeping this news for so long, or demanding she choose one of us because she cannot have the whole Katz set. None of those things sound like good options, though I am aware that my reaction is tempered by the fact that too many other thoughts are competing for my attention as well as the fact that she held my hair while I vomited last night. Holding my hair during a drunken puking session goes a long way.

“So what happened after you got back to the apartment last night?” she asks.

Again, I catch the smell in the air, like sourdough bread, the tang of yeast. I sniff at the blanket but I can’t find it again. “We ended things. Like civilized adults.”

“How are you with that? Is Gael the failure you wrote about last night?”

I stare at my hand, at the ring from Me&Ro. It has started to meld with my hand, to form an imprint on my finger from daily wear. The tan line from my wedding band is nearly gone.

“I know that you have every right to hit me when I say this, Arianna, considering how many nights you sat up with me after the divorce while I cried. But I miss Adam.”

“I know you miss Adam, sweetie,” she says.

“No, I mean I really miss him, and I wonder if I’ve done the right thing, and I feel like we should have another go at it.”

“
Rachel
,” she begins. And actually, that’s also where she ends. As if my name is enough of a statement to convey how terrible an idea it would be to call up my ex-husband and attempt to reconcile.

“Listen, I’ve learned a lot this year. A lot about myself. It sort of snuck up on me, the learning about myself. I am so terrified of failing that I never really tried to save my marriage. But this is a theme with me, isn’t it? Before I let the marriage fail, I never tried to have a baby with Adam because I was too scared to push it because I thought Adam might say that we’re not on the same page about parenthood. I never tried cooking not just because my mother scoffed at women who bother with learning their way around the kitchen. I never tried because I was terrified of failing at it. In creating huge kitchen disasters because I had no one to help me learn. I didn’t trust myself to be a good-enough teacher for me. I never told Adam what I needed to tell him because what if he didn’t listen? What if he didn’t give it to me?”

“What if he did?” Arianna asks.

“Well, that’s the problem with being scared to fail. You usually end up failing in the end by default, because you don’t grab what you want. Somehow I talked myself into the idea that it would mean more to me if he came to all the right conclusions by himself. That it would mean less if he spent more time with me because I asked him to, rather than because he wanted to. I know that he hasn’t told me in a straightforward manner that he misses me, but he obviously hasn’t moved on if he’s reading my blog and sending me messages.”

“
If
it’s him reading your blog,” Arianna says. “What if there’s a newly-divorced woman at the law firm who’s desperate for your advice? Remember how you used to read blogs about relationship problems? What if your mystery reader turns out to be a fifty-year-old legal secretary?”

Beckett begins his morning cooing through the monitor. We listen to him talk to the mobile above his crib as if he is asking each stuffed figure a series of important questions.

“But if I find out definitively that he misses me and is thinking about me, then wouldn’t it be worth trying a second time?”

“Rachel, you were so miserable in that relationship. Don’t you remember all the nights you sat on the sofa and waited for him? And were frustrated and waited for him? And waited for him and waited for him and waited for him?”

“I do,” I admit. “But I never told him how much it hurt, not clearly and passionately. I just withdrew more and more, as he did the same. I feel like I called it quits too soon. I made myself fail so I could get the failure part over with quickly. And what I should have done was work my ass off…” And this is where my throat catches.