Life From Scratch (33 page)

“Are you working at a different law firm?”

“No, I’m an English teacher. I teach high school English and composition at a private school. That’s actually how I met Laura—through her brother, who works with me at the school. You don’t need a teaching degree to work there, but I’m taking some additional classes regardless.” He has placed the book on the table, and I stare at the spine as if it contains my response.
Candide
by Voltaire. He looks down at the book too and moves it slightly closer to himself. “I actually have you to thank. If you hadn’t left, I wouldn’t have stepped back and seen how unhappy I was being a lawyer. I really only practiced law for you, and without you there, I didn’t need to do it anymore.”

“For me?” I exclaim. “But I never told you to be a lawyer.”

“I know you didn’t. I chose that myself. But, come on, Rachel, you knew I wanted to be a teacher. I was only doing law school to make my parents happy—I had no desire to practice law. But how could we have lived in this neighborhood on a teacher’s salary? Even now, I’m only doing it on savings. At some point, I’ll be pushed out to one of the outer boroughs.”

“We didn’t have to live in this neighborhood!” Our conversation is beginning to skate a little too close to an O. Henry story, and I stop savaging the corner of the napkin to look him straight in the eye. “You loved being a lawyer. You loved it so much, you never came home.”

“I never came home because I had to work ridiculous hours to support the lifestyle you wanted!”

We’re getting progressively louder, and other diners have peeked over from their respective booths. I recognize one table from our old apartment building, an elderly couple from the fourth floor who bought cat food by the case and needed someone to help schlep it upstairs each week. They give me a disapproving look, and I note the clump of cat hair clinging to the bottom of the woman’s coat before I return to my argument with Adam.

“What kind of lifestyle did you think I wanted?”

“Cruises. You were always talking about cruises. And private school for our future children.”

“I wanted to go on a cruise because I wanted you to be trapped on a boat with miles of water around us and no Blackberry service, where you couldn’t sit in the room working and leave me swimming on my own, like you did on every single vacation.”

“I had to work like that because I needed to make money to pay for those vacations. I had no time to do anything
I
wanted to do. God, Rachel, until I became a teacher, I hadn’t been to a museum in years. I was so relieved the day I walked out of that office,” he spits out.

I am so stunned I can barely breathe.

He worked those hours because he thought I wanted a lifestyle that it never occurred to me to want. And I only placed out those ideas for vacations in order to get him away from said work schedule and grab a little time for us as a couple. Now I realize how I sounded to him: whining for cruises, begging him to let me take him clothes shopping, booking us nights at expensive bed and breakfasts. I expect to see O. Henry sitting at a nearby table, twirling his handlebar mustache and nodding at our ridiculousness.

“You bought me combs, but I sold my hair,” I tell Adam.

Maybe because I have spoken to him in his language, using words from a short story, his body visibly relaxes, and he starts laughing. So do I. We’re both laughing without taking a step back to look at the fact that we’re cracking up over the demise of our marriage. It just feels good to laugh after so much tension. His hand slaps the table a few time, and I watch his fingers come down against the edge. The ringless third finger on his left hand.

And that is what pushes me over the edge, that image of his hand without the reminder of me around his ring finger. My laughing crosses over to real tears, and I am crying as I did in the apartment, except this time with an audience staring at me inquisitively. It is almost as if he is seeing me cry for the first time, a train wreck that he can’t help but gape at from across the table. He doesn’t reach out for my hand or offer me a Kleenex or get me a cup of water. He just watches me cry, as does everyone else in the coffee shop.

“This,” I try catching my breath, “this is the first time you have opened up to me in years. In years.”

“Can we go back to the apartment?” he asks. He glances back at the cat couple. “Are you okay going back there?”

He pays for both of our drinks, grabs his copy of
Candide
, and helps lead me out of the restaurant. I keep my head down, nose running, as we exit through the frosted glass door. I want to tell him that I still love him, that I want another chance, but since we just shared a laugh about the end of our marriage, it doesn’t seem the appropriate desire to admit. He keeps his hand on the small of my back until we are on the sidewalk, and it feels like an anchor, a small stone keeping me here, keeping me mentally here instead of floating backwards through memories or moving forward to sitting alone in my apartment after this.

His key sticks in the front door lock just as it always did, and he bumps the door with his hip, just as he always did, and I walk past the mailboxes, over the threadbare rug, holding my breath as if I am passing a graveyard. Mailbox gravestones. It has been months since I’ve been back in this building, almost a year.

He opens the door to our old apartment, and I can see that he has changed very little.
 
Everything I left behind is still here. The only thing new is a bookshelf housing an assortment of used books.
 
The shelf where I used to leave my purse is now lined with several pots of cheery, yellow crocus plants. The doors to the bedroom and bathroom are closed. The kitchen still looks unused except for two empty and washed out beer bottles sitting to the left of the sink on the counter. The Picasso poster is still hanging in the living room.

He doesn’t offer me anything to drink, and I choose the sofa to sit on and cry while he grabs the box of Kleenex out of the bathroom. He sits down next to me, waiting for my tears to burn themselves out, but they keep coming and coming again, like
Alice in Wonderland
.

“Rach,” he begins softly. He was always good at calming me by speaking softer and softer, until I had to quiet down simply to catch his words. “Why did you come here today?”

I know he is asking me why I acted on whatever impulse flitted through my mind, but without being able to put that into words, I tell him the story of Rob Zuckerman and the case of the wrongly accused cyberstalker. I take a deep breath and set my heart down on the table. “I wanted the reader to be you. I wanted it to be you missing me as much as I have missed you.”

Then he takes my heart and squeezes it through his fingers until it is just a mess of pulp and gore. “I’m dating someone, Rach.” I stop breathing for a moment; I am literally holding my breath, but I only notice this when I gasp out all of the air I’ve trapped in my lungs. It doesn’t matter that I already knew that he was with Laura. It still hurts to hear him say it aloud; to know that perhaps things are actually quite good with her. “And so are you,” he adds.

“I’m not,” I tell him. “I’m not anymore.”

“So is that what this is? You’ve broken up with someone and you don’t want to be alone?”

His voice isn’t accusatory; it’s simply inquisitive. Questioning. I shake my head, looking around the room for signs of Laura. A picture of her cats, an object they’ve purchased together. But the room reveals nothing. I realize how little I actually know about her beyond her stories about panties and incredible alcohol consumption. Maybe she’s really someone Adam can discuss Voltaire with over manicotti at the Italian restaurant on the corner.

I want to form an argument for myself, ask him to choose me over her. But without knowing anything more about her beyond her design work and cats, it’s hard to form an argument. How can I point out myself to be the better woman when I have no idea whether or not I am actually the better woman?

I’m well aware of how hypocritical I’m being after carrying on a relationship with Gael, but while the image of myself in bed with Gael has been put to rest, I am immediately haunted by the new image of Adam rolling around with Laura, bringing her to orgasm (because, in my imagination, she’s the type of woman who orgasms every single time—from sex, from backrubs, from him looking at her from across the room. She puts Arianna to shame.) In my old bed. In
our
old bed.

He continues to watch me, his hand tucked behind his ear, his elbow resting on the back of the sofa. It is the way he used to read books, the pages held in front of his face. I imagine all the times we’ve sat on this very couch, reading books together. And now he reads books with Laura.

“I wanted to see you because I thought I finally understood something,” I hear myself say. What the hell am I doing, giving him more ammunition for my ultimate embarrassment? “How you could love work so much that it becomes your whole life. I thought you weren’t coming home from the office because you had these expectations of wifely duties that I wasn’t fulfilling. That you wanted me to take care of you. To support you. Well, now I know how to take care of someone; to make chicken soup when they’re sick and make pancakes for breakfast. And the only person I want to take care of is you.”

I stumble onward, unable to stop talking. “I used to sit in this room alone. Every night. I used to watch the clock and yell at you when you walked in the door. I thought that if I pointed out the time to you enough times, loudly enough, you would come home earlier. I didn’t want to just
ask
you to come home early; I thought it meant more if you thought of it yourself. That’s all I wanted, Adam, just your time. You gave me more of your time when you were in law school, even when you were studying for the bar and you had
no
time. You always found some and gave it to me. I knew how precious your time was, and the fact that you would give it to me spoke volumes.”

I start crying again, and Adam proactively hands me a Kleenex. “But now I know my nagging was just one more thing you thought I was asking for—you thought I wanted your time and your money and something had to give. It’s too late, but what I should have done is make you
want
to be here. By taking care of you, too. And I should have
asked
for what I wanted rather than waiting for it to occur to you.”

“Where did you get this idea about wifely duties?” Adam asks, genuinely confused.

“You said it! You said I never was supportive.”

“Of me wanting to be a teacher! I didn’t care if you cooked or didn’t cook. If you did the laundry or if we sent it out to a service. Rach, I was talking about the fact that you knew I wanted to be a teacher, knew I loved the world of literature, but you never told me that it was okay to go that route. I thought if I didn’t work as a lawyer, give you the life you wanted, that you’d be disappointed in me.”

“I didn’t
know
how much you wanted to be a teacher. I’m sorry that I overlooked that; that I missed that. It never mattered to me what job you held. I thought you loved being a lawyer so much that you wanted to be a lawyer more than you wanted to be with me.”

Adam is silent for a long time.

And finally, he says, “I’m sorry.”

It’s not enough. It’s not nothing, but it’s not enough. The fact that he’s dating Laura, coupled with those sole words, sort of shuts the door on more conversation. There is nothing left to say or do; even his eyes flicker towards the door as if he’s subconsciously telling me to go. I scoop my heart off the table and place its mangled remains back in my chest. I gather my purse and say vague supportive comments about having a good future and thanking him for allowing me to get these thoughts off my chest.

He watches me collect my things, not stopping me, which shreds my heart a little more. But that’s sort of the thing about time—once it passes, you can’t move backwards. And while it is nice that I realized all these things about our relationship, it is now too late. The time to have done this hard thinking was years ago, and I can only move on from here, keeping in mind all that I learned.

Except that I’ll be alone forever
, I think dramatically, while he’ll have Laura and their cat babies.

I say goodbye, and Adam tells me feebly to wait, but I know it’s just a pity “Wait,” one of those “Waits” you say when you can’t think of any other word to say and you know one is expected of you. I don’t wait. I just give a really cringy smile and dump my Kleenex in the garbage can that
I
purchased at the Duane Reade. I twist the knob on the door that
I
painted a few years back and step into my old hallway.
This is the last time I will ever be here
, I think.

I go back downstairs, sniffling the whole time. This is the worst part about gaining knowledge—what’s the point in doing all this mental work and coming out with these answers when it’s too late to use the information?

Now it just feels like torture to finally know the right response but also know that there is no chance to use it. I push my way back out onto the street. During the time that we’ve been inside, it has gotten dark and cold. I pull my jacket tightly around my chest and begin walking back towards the subway.

I start composing blog posts in my mind.
Adam has moved on without me. He and Laura are probably talking about me as I write, drinking their wine out of the glasses that my Aunt Leah gave us for our wedding
.