The One in My Heart (31 page)

Until the day I would be left all by myself.

I started tapping, a torrent of geekery on everything there was to know about shuttered, harrowing Moria, which had once been a magnificent city of broad avenues and great carven halls. Until someone dug too carelessly and too deep, and unleashed an ancient demon that caused its untimely destruction.

Only after I’d pressed send on my last text did I realize that what I’d written about was not the end of Moria, but the end of us.

I FELL ASLEEP, PHONE IN
hand, waiting for a response.

Any response.

When I woke up there were a dozen new texts, but they were from my grad students, about a problem with our lab machines. Nothing from Bennett.

It was the sanest choice he could have made. But I didn’t want him to be sane, logical, or grown-up. I wanted him to engage.

Then at least I wouldn’t feel so profoundly alone.

Machine issues took up the whole day. Any moment I wasn’t talking to tech support on the phone, technicians in person, or my grad students about how our experiments could be redesigned to bypass the outage, I checked to see whether Bennett had texted me back.

He never did.

Had I been IM’ing into the great digital void? No, I’d broken up my essay on Moria into many separate texts. As I tapped out each new sentence, I’d seen the little notifications that popped up under earlier text bubbles.
Read 10:35. Read 10:37. Read 10:38. Read…

Read, but not answered.

That night I lay in bed for hours, trying to fall asleep. At some point I made the mistake of reminding myself that he loved me, which only made me curl up in misery. Next thing I knew, I’d gone downstairs and grabbed my purse from the living room couch, where I’d deliberately left it, so I wouldn’t have a phone next to me.

Put the phone back. Put the phone back!
shouted the still-rational part of me.

But I might as well have been shouting at a pack of zombies to stop advancing.

I crawled back under the covers and started tapping. Munich, the snow, the Englischer Garten, and, at last, him. I described our make-believe encounter in Proustian detail, every course eaten, every drink consumed, every flicker of the light as reflected in his eyes. And then, an entire dissertation on our imaginary lovemaking.

I used to touch myself, weaving this fantasy. But unlike you on your masturbation couch, I didn’t want to orgasm right away. I wanted to draw it out for as long as possible.

But I never managed.

Sometimes I came as soon as I got to the part about the two of us returning to your hotel room. Sometimes I didn’t even last that long—we’d have barely sat down to coffee. And sometimes all you had to do was say hello, and I’d come to a fiery end, like the Death Star.

Both of them.

Oh, God, now I’d gone and compared myself to a space explosion, the celluloid depiction of which was riddled with scientific inaccuracies. If his phone was ever hacked—or mine—I’d never be able to show my face in public again.

Yet I kept going. I told him exactly where I stroked, rubbed, and sometimes pinched. I told him how I liked to keep the room absolutely dark, and my eyes tightly shut, so that my fantasy took on the greatest clarity and verisimilitude. I told him how afterward, still trembling from my multiple climaxes, I’d peel off my pajamas, feel the sheets against my skin, and imagine instead that it was his hands and his body upon me—and perhaps start the process all over again.

When my shoulders started locking, because I’d held the phone at a strange position for too long, I finally set down the device from hell and groaned into my pillow, dying from mortification.

And imagined him sleeping soundly while my midnight insanity invaded his phone, packet after packet of relentless crazy.

And relentless yearning.

“
BENNETT
’
S WORKING TONIGHT, RIGHT?
”
ASKED
Zelda the next evening, which happened to be the start of the weekend.

I sprinkled some salt into the eggs I’d just finished beating. “His shift is until midnight.”

Thank goodness, or I’d have to explain why I was staying home. But what was I going to say tomorrow evening, when he had no shift and I was still hanging around my own house?

“I do admire that boy,” said Zelda, checking on the leftover scalloped potatoes she was reheating in the oven. “I’m not sure I’d still work—let alone work so hard—if I had that sort of money sitting in the bank.”

I lit the stove, set a pan over the flames, and dropped a pat of butter inside. “He probably knows he’d be up to no good if he didn’t stay busy.”

“He won’t hear any arguments from me about keeping busy. You, darling, on the other hand, could stand to become a little
less
busy.”

“Won’t be long now before my tenure review.”

When’s the wedding?

August.

Why August?

‘Cause she’ll have passed tenure review and I’ll have finished with my fellowship. And we can have a nice long honeymoon before her schedule goes crazy again in September.

“Isn’t the butter hot enough?” Zelda reminded me.

I started. “Right. Thanks.”

The mushroom, spinach, and ham I’d cut up for our dinner omelet went into the pan. Zelda sneaked in with her fork and stole a piece of ham. “Since you’re home tonight, how about we stream a movie?”

“Sure.”

Anything to keep me from sending deeply humiliating texts that added up to the length of Broadway from end to end.

Of course I hadn’t had any replies from him. And that was the most humiliating part of all: He conducted himself with dignity, whereas I behaved like an adolescent in the throes of her first breakup, all self-indulgent misery and hormone-driven drama.

I put half an omelet and one scoop of scalloped potato on the plate for each of us and carried the plates to the living room. Zelda had just sat down next to me, remote in hand, when her phone dinged with the sound of an incoming text. I picked up the phone from the coffee table and handed it to her.

Had Bennett read my texts? Or had their scent of lunacy been too strong for him to do more than scroll through, shaking his head at that endless spew of verbiage?

“My God!” cried Zelda.

I almost dropped my plate. “What’s going on?”

“Frances Somerset texted from the hospital. Her husband had a heart attack.”

“What?” I clutched the rim of my plate. “Is he okay?”

“They’re operating right now, a quadruple bypass.”

“Jesus. Does Bennett know?”

“She’s been trying to contact him. His hospital says he’s in surgery and they don’t expect him to come out for at least another two hours.”

I turned off the TV. “Which hospital is his dad at? Does his mom need someone to stay with her?”

Zelda exchanged further texts with Mrs. Somerset. Fifteen minutes later we were in a cab, huddled close together on the backseat.

“It can all go away in a heartbeat,” murmured Zelda, as the cab glided forward.

I stared out the window. Cones of orange light from street lamps punctuated the night; shadows of still-bare branches swayed back and forth on walls and sidewalks.

At the hospital we found Mrs. Somerset in a nondescript waiting room. Dressed in an incongruously glamorous gown of black cashmere, she rocked back and forth in her chair, her hands over the lower half of her face.

We said hi. She leaped up and hugged both of us. “Thank you so much for coming.”

Mrs. Somerset had no further news on her husband’s prognosis, and she still hadn’t heard back from Bennett. But she’d managed to get in touch with her other children. Imogene would be getting on a red-eye flight that landed early in the morning. Prescott, halfway around the world, wasn’t expected to reach New York until late the next evening.

“Have you had any dinner?” I asked. “Can I get you something?”

“No, we were on our way to a fund-raiser when Rowland—when we had to come to the hospital. But please don’t trouble yourself. I don’t want anything.”

I got a coffee for her, tea for Zelda and me, and a couple of muffins—Mrs. Somerset might not want to eat now, but hunger caught up to everyone sooner or later, no matter the circumstances.

We waited. From time to time Mrs. Somerset would give us an update from her far-flung children.
Prescott is at the airport, about to go through security. Imogene has boarded—her boyfriend is coming with her. I hope Prescott doesn’t miss his connecting flight—the layover in Taipei is less than two hours.

Around midnight Zelda moved to a seat in the corner—she was dropping off. I draped both our coats over her and went back to my chair. Two TVs were mounted on opposite walls of the waiting room, their volume muted. The one I happened to face had been set on a cooking channel. Chefs ran about frantically, mopping their foreheads with towels, shouting soundless commands at their underlings.

“Evangeline,” came Mrs. Somerset’s soft voice.

I glanced toward her. “Yes, ma’am?”

“Do you happen to know why Bennett set up the meeting with his dad, just the two of them?”

After a moment of hesitation, I nodded.

“Did he…Does he want a reconciliation?”

I thought of Mr. Somerset on the operating table, his chest open, his fate in the hands of strangers. “Yes.”

Mrs. Somerset covered her face with her hands. “Oh, God. If only he’d made that appointment for one day earlier.”

“Maybe Mr. Somerset guessed. Maybe—”

I forgot what I was about to say. Bennett stood in the doorway, looking tired, grim, and more than a little scared. Mrs. Somerset exclaimed and rushed up to him. He enfolded her tightly in his arms and murmured, “It’s okay. Everything will be fine.”

Since the news of the heart attack, I hadn’t thought too much about our breakup or my unfortunate texts. But the moment he looked my way, embarrassment pummeled me.

Especially since I hadn’t come clean about my sexual obsession solely because I went a little crazy. There had been an ulterior motive: I’d wanted to turn him on and stick a knife in his heart at the same time, to make an already painful separation even more difficult for him.

To punish him, because he wouldn’t let me have my cake and eat it too.

Because he, the one who had made every mistake in the book, had turned out to be the braver, wiser, and more principled of the two of us.

By far.

“Thanks for staying with my mom,” he said, and hugged me too.

His strong arms, his wintry scent, the feeling of being safely enclosed—yet another memory to torment me when I was alone again.

He didn’t wake up Zelda, but spoke in whispers with his mom. Then they sat down together, her hands holding tightly on to his, her head on his shoulder.

I left and returned with a coffee for Bennett. “There are couple of muffins here, in case you’re hungry.”

He accepted the coffee. “Thanks. I’m okay for now.”

I sat down cattycorner from mother and son and wished I’d taken Zelda home at midnight, before I turned into a pumpkin. Without thinking I reached for my phone, only to feel my face scald. Hurriedly I put it away and looked up at the TV.

On-screen a chef was crying, wiping ineffectually at the corners of his eyes.
I really thought
, read the closed-captioning,
I really thought I had a chance. Not just to go past this round, but to go all the way, win the big prize. My mom thought so too. My friends. Everybody.

If broken dreams were an actual substance, we could build a six-lane highway to the moon every day of the week.

Something made me glance in Bennett’s direction. His mother seemed to have fallen asleep, her eyes closed. His gaze was on me. But I couldn’t tell whether he was looking at me or merely happened to be staring in my direction.

“I was at a coronary bypass too,” he said.

I remembered that he’d been in surgery, except on the operating end. “How did it go?”

“It went fine. But during the previous major bypass at the hospital, the patient died midprocedure.”

My hands tightened around each other. “I’m sure your dad will pull through.”

“I hope so,” he said, his voice so low I almost couldn’t hear. “I really hope so.”

I wanted to reassure him.
You’ll have time. He’ll recover. I can feel it.

But I’d thought that Pater was going to make it too. I didn’t think it was possible for my father to be felled by a random car accident. After all, misanthropes were supposed to last forever, growing more bitter with each passing year.

I got up and sat down next to Bennett, taking his free hand in mine. I didn’t say anything. Words were of no use here. One way or the other we would know before the end of the night.

He lifted our clasped hands and kissed the back of my palm.

And then we waited.

I WAS STARTING TO DRIFT
off when someone said, “Are you Rowland Somerset’s family?”

Bennett and I both scrambled to our feet. “Yes, we are,” he said, giving his mom a small shake.

She jerked and sat up straight. “What’s going on? Is he okay?”

The woman in green scrubs was Asian in feature and about forty years old. She shook our hands. “Hi, I’m Dr. Pei. I’m happy to inform you that the surgery was successful. Mr. Somerset is now in recovery and should come out of anesthesia in about an hour or so.”

I had tears in my eyes. So did Bennett. Mrs. Somerset wept outright with relief, leaning on her son. The commotion awakened Zelda, who leaped up at the news, which led to many hugs being exchanged. Then we all shook hands with Dr. Pei again, thanking her—and her team—profusely.

“Will we be able to see him?” asked Mrs. Somerset.

“Very briefly,” answered Dr. Pei. “He won’t be able to speak because he’ll still be intubated, and I would ask that you do not excite him, since he needs to rest.”

After the surgeon left, we celebrated some more. Bennett and his mother shared a muffin, texted his siblings, and drank a toast with their cold coffees.