Life After Coffee (20 page)

“Nice trumps smart. Pretty trumps nice. That’s the order it goes in: pretty, nice, smart.”

I should act horrified to hear something so blatantly backward. But in all honesty, it’s something I’ve suspected of men all along. At least he’s being honest.

“Except nice got boring,” he says into his whiskey.

“At least you’re left with pretty.”

“You’re pretty, Amy.”

“I’m pretty today. Normally I’m a straggly haired fashion disaster.”

He curls his fingers into the hair around the nape of my neck and gently tugs. He knows that move makes me helpless. Are we really doing this? I turn in the seat to face him. I’ve missed his face. I didn’t even know how much I missed it. It’s something I must have known all along, without knowing that I even knew it. Buried knowledge.

“To me, you are perfect,” he says. And the way he says it, with such gruffness to his voice, trying to compensate for the emotions hurtling through his body, I know that he means it.

And right in that moment, nestled in the top of our kingdom on the hill, he feels it so intensely that I start to feel it too. The love buried under the rubble that is the ruins of our relationship has fought its way out to the air. And it’s taking its first deep breath in ten years. The effect of the whiskey has suddenly drained from my body and I’m cold all over. He still has his hands coiled in my hair. We’re both stuck, staring into each other’s eyes. And then it’s completely obvious: we love each other. We never stopped.

Matt pulls my face forward till our lips are barely apart. This would be the moment for me to pull away. Everything up to now has been silly games.
This
is deadly serious. This is how lives get changed. This is how I lose Peter forever. Now that I’m right in the middle of the moment where the choice actually needs to be made, I’m not so sure I want to lose him after all.

And then Matt kisses me. This time there’s no pulling or pushing away. No more thought to who or what I might be losing. No care to who in the hell might stumble across us. No one will stumble across us. Because we’re in our own private universe. It’s a universe where we’re both twenty-seven and anything is possible and life is carefree, even though we don’t yet know it. He pulls me all the way into his body and holds me there tightly. I can feel his lips are shaking. I don’t think I have legs anymore. If he were to let go of me now, I think I’d just vanish into the ether like a will-o’-the-wisp. I consider telling him to stop, but I know he wouldn’t listen. I’d only be saying it so I could say afterward that I tried to stop it. I tried to put the cork back in the bottle—it just wouldn’t go. But we’re not stopping. Because we know that when we do, we’ll have to take our first breaths in a brand-new world. And we’ll have to admit: everything’s changed.

CHAPTER 22

So everyone thinks I’m flying to Urban Monocle’s headquarters in Chicago today to talk with Tim Rowney about managing the quality assurance lab at their LA roastery. Over the trajectory of my life I’ve learned that the best lies are the ones that include the most detail. This one’s detailed enough that anyone outside the coffee world who hears it won’t want to know anything more about it, in case they accidentally die from boredom while listening. And the advantage of this is that when Peter tried to question why I had to be gone for a whole week, I started talking about bean density and the best way to measure different degrees of water activity and his eyes glazed over and I won. I got a week off. No further questions. He’d only been back from his course about four minutes before I walked out the door, so him being freshly detoxed of anger was also probably working in my favor—or else he might have put up more of a fuss.

I arrive at check-in just a few seconds after Matt. Perfect timing. Our lives have already stepped into a pattern of synchronized coordination. I wonder if he’ll sweep me up into a full-body embrace then and there and kiss me hard on my mouth just like he always used to. I get closer and am about to go in for the embrace when I see he’s talking to himself. Has the strain of an impending affair sent him over the edge already? And then I notice the white wire hanging down from his head like his ear is wearing a tampon. He’s on the phone. He waves hello as we get closer and then stands awkwardly beside me in line, occasionally raising his eyebrows toward me in acknowledgment. Not exactly the big beginning to an illicit week away that I was imagining.

Eventually, after I’ve checked about two months’ worth of Facebook updates, he finishes his call.

“Sorry about that,” he says. “Work.”

“Right.”

He gives me a chaste hug and a peck on the cheek. I look at him quizzically. This was not the same tone we were employing last time we met.

“Paparazzi,” he says, and gestures over his shoulder. I don’t see a soul there, but I’ll take his word for it. “Hello!” he shouts into thin air. I jump a bit, as do the elderly couple standing right in front of me. “Mike! What’s up?” He’s on the phone again. This time he wanders off, walking in disorganized figure eights all around the area so that I’m forced to shuffle both his and my luggage forward as the line progresses. He finds his way back to me just before we’re about to check in.

“Sorry.”

“It’s okay. I expect you’ve got a lot of wrapping up to do to extract yourself for a week.”

“Extract myself?”

“From work?”

“Oh, right,” he says, looking at me like he’s suddenly remembered he forgot to turn the oven off.

I’m about to try and clarify with him that he actually
is
intending on extracting himself from work in order for us to have some time to figure out what’s going on here, when his phone rings again. Apologetically I hand over the tickets and passports to the agent, who processes them all with a disapproving eye. I’m not sure whether she’s disapproving because Matt’s still on the phone, or because he’s left me to haul the bags onto the scales, or because she just
knows
. Whatever she’s disapproving of, I’m right there alongside her. This phone call is a particularly long one and it takes us all the way through security—with a quick break for the phone to go through the scanner—and up to the moment of boarding itself. In fact, we are the very last couple to board as Matt is determined to talk right up until the moment the agent threatens to shut the gate. Only then does he hit “End” on his call, like it’s no big deal at all.

“Matt!” I growl at him as we finally get ushered on board, and he pulls his phone out of his jacket and starts firing off a text message. “You have to turn that thing off.” We make it to our seats. Thankfully, we’re in first class so we don’t have to do a walk of shame through the entire plane.

“Sir, I’m going to need to ask you to set your cellular device to airplane mode for the duration of the flight,” says a smiling and impossibly pert flight attendant who’s just popped up out of nowhere.

“Of course,” says Matt, still rapidly texting. “I’m doing it right now,” he says as he continues to text. I’m sitting next to Matt, quietly dying. At my postmortem the coroner would be pretty quick to pinpoint the exact cause of my death: terminal embarrassment. Just as the flight attendant’s bright red smile threatens to freeze in place, he switches off the phone and puts it back in his pocket.

“I don’t know how Kimberly stands it!” I say as the plane’s engines kick into motion. And then I remember how she stands it: she’s happy to put Matt first, second, and third. And I could never do that, which is why Matt and I broke up and he and Kimberly got married. “And how is Kimberly?” I say. I don’t know whether I’m feeling competitive again or curious, but all of a sudden I kind of want to talk about her, to find out what really has gone so drastically wrong in their marriage that he’s decided to bow out for a week and skip off to Barbados with me.

“She’s fine. Same as ever. Boring as ever.” I give an infinitesimal shake of my head. I wonder how Peter would describe me if the situation were reversed. “Don’t feel bad for Kimberly. She’s had a wonderful life. It could have been your life, but you were too busy running off, trying to fix the third world. She was there and she was persistent. She grew on me.”

“Like a cunning fungus up a damp wall.”

“Are you comparing me to a damp wall? And what about Peter? What’s he made you into?” he asks.

Breadwinner. Second-class parent. Adulterer. These words all come to mind, but I don’t utter any of them. I am aware that lying to my husband and then scooting off for a week away with my ex is pretty disloyal. Unacceptably disloyal. However, I feel that comparing him to fungus, or a leech, or something else uncomplimentary would just be crossing the line. I mean, the line’s already been crossed, but saying mean things about him to the guy I’m cheating on him with would be like crossing the line and then pulling down my pants, squatting, and peeing upon it. And I’m trying not to let my brain even think about how terrible a mother this little illicit trip makes me. This is the first time I’ve got on a plane and left my children for nothing to do with work. Is it really
that
bad a thing to do? Sometimes people do this. Sometimes parents take a vacation somewhere nice . . . just not normally while lying to the father of their children about it. I should stop trying to sugarcoat it: I am an excuse of a mother. And just as I was beginning to get the hang of it too. I put my head on the window and watch Los Angeles passing by below. My kids are somewhere down there, missing me.

The world’s pertest flight attendant walks back through the cabin, and Matt stops her to order a whiskey. I’m possibly back to admiring unadmirable qualities in men here, but somehow proactively ordering a drink makes him seem so confident and cool. So decadent. I’d never dare do that. Once when I was on a flight, my mouth was so parched that the only way I could stop my lips from sticking to my teeth was to apply a thick coating of lip balm about every eighteen seconds. Did I push the call button and ask for a beverage? I did not. These days I always bring a bottle of water on board with me. Peter never drinks alcohol. No beer. No wine. No spirits. He didn’t do the drinking thing in high school (just to be contrary), and as a result his taste buds missed out on some crucial formative years. Now he can’t stand the taste of it. I’ve tried making him all kinds of jazzy fruit cocktails to get him interested, but no—he just doesn’t like it. Every time I drink a glass of wine in front of him, it feels a little awkward. On the upside, I have a built-in designated driver.

The flight attendant brings Matt his drink and he smiles in thanks. Her smile back has a bit more oozy warmth to it than is strictly warranted. She’s not flirting—necessarily. It’s just that one of Matt’s smiles will make you emit sudden warmth—even if you didn’t know you had any to spare. That’s how he’s gotten as far as he has in life. He’s utterly determined to achieve his ambitions—the same as me, but the difference is he’s learned how to make people feel good about giving him exactly what he wants. It’s more than merely being charming. He makes people feel like they just stepped into tropical sunshine. He makes problems melt away. Wouldn’t you like to bask in a tropical sunlight that melts all your cares away and has you thinking that everything is possible? Everybody wants a chunk of that.

“How are you doing?” he asks, turning to face me.

“I’m okay.” Better now that he’s turned his attention away from his phone and the flight attendant and has focused all his sunshine on me.

“You sure?” he says, smoothing my hair back behind my ear. There’s no way he could smooth Kimberly’s hair behind her ear; it’s way too big and bouncy. It’d just ping right out again and they’d be back exactly where they started.

“Yeah. I’m thinking about the kids.”

“The kids will be fine. Kids are happiest when their mommy is happy,” he says. I wonder if he’s considered how
unhappy
the mother of
his
kids is going to be when all this finally comes to light.

“What are we doing here? Really?”

“Let’s just give ourselves a couple of days at least before we start worrying about all the implications and complexities here. We’ll work it out. People work this kind of stuff out all the time. For now, I just want to enjoy you. I’ve missed you.”

“I’ve missed you too,” I say, and lay my head down on his shoulder. It’s comfy here. I could stay like this all the way to Barbados. I just might.

“Are you still worrying?” he asks after a moment.

“Yes, I’m a human being.”

“Please. Just relax. We’re going to have some wonderful days together here and then we’ll figure all of this out. It’ll be just fine, I promise. It always is in the end.”

I’m about to tell him that it’s the journey from “here” to “just fine” that’s worrying me more than our potential for reaching a happy ending when he kisses me. And for about five seconds there’s a tidal surge of emotion in my chest and I kind of forget about everything. It’s like I can actually feel every molecule of love I ever had for him trickling back into my bloodstream. He kisses me once more, this time softly on the nose. And then in my favorite gesture, he rubs his hand over the top of his head. Look at the man. He is gorgeous. He’s not making it difficult for me to develop some pretty serious feelings here.

“I’ve got to say. I’m a little jealous of Peter these days,” he says, leaning back in to kiss my earlobe. “He has you whenever he wants you.”

“He doesn’t generally want me.”

“Oh?”

“Well, it’s hard, with the kids and stuff.” Our red-lipped flight attendant is glancing over now as Matt starts to work his way down to kissing my neck. He suddenly stops short.
What? Wait!
I was enjoying that.

“You know why I’m most jealous of Peter?”

“No?” Could it be because he got to spend the last decade with me? Because he got to marry the woman of your dreams? Because I bore his children that should have been yours?

“Because he’s so damn talented.”

“Excuse me?”

“That script of his, the Irish one. It’s so fresh. Unmessed with. He’s free to write things like that. Real stuff. He’s a real writer. He’s not trying to pretzel his act so it meets the target demographic requirements and includes a lead that’ll appeal to a global audience. He can just write. He’s so free. And I’m in handcuffs.”

“Handcuffs?”

“I’m just a brand, Amy. I don’t know if I actually have any real or good ideas anymore at all. Everyone just sits there and says, ‘Yes, yes, yes, Matt. Whatever you say, just make us the money.’ It sucks. You know what I did before I left?”

“Lied to your wife about where you were going?”

“I floated this extra-crappy idea for a reality show. Just to see what the reaction would be.”

“What happened?”

“They all fell for it. That’s what that flurry of phone calls was about—everyone trying to get in on the ‘great’ new idea. Except it was a sack of shit that I just made up on the fly.”

“What’s the idea?” I ask. Maybe he’s being overly modest.

“Storm into some office building somewhere and offer a worker one million dollars to walk out of their job then and there—providing they do an entertaining resignation.”

“Okay.”

“And then as soon as they get outside, we tell them there is no million dollars. It’s just a setup. And then film their reaction.”

“That’s god-awful. I think you could even get sued for that.”

“Exactly! It was meant to be a bad idea. But no one said a thing! When I get back, I’m firing everyone who said they liked it.”

“A little harsh maybe?” Is he in the habit of setting people up like this, I wonder?

“I’m like the emperor wearing the suit of invisible clothes. Except there’s no one to tell me I’m naked!” I look at him. Where has the honey-sweet man of two minutes ago gone? He’s insane right now. “There’s no one to tell me when I’m naked!” he repeats again, louder. I think he’s actually trying to get a rise out of people by shouting the word
naked
in first class.

The red-lipped flight attendant makes her way over. We’re about to get in trouble.

“Sir,” she says, the smile in place as ever.

“Yes?”

“I’m so sorry. This is completely unprofessional of me, but I just had to ask . . . Could I have your autograph?”

“Of course,” he says, all signs of bolty-eyed insanity melting away. He’s instantly back in control, the savvy Hollywood producer. “And may I ask what your name is?” he asks, in a tone with an unacceptable level of flirt to it.

“It’s August,” she says, melting like chocolate left on the dashboard in the very month of her namesake.

“That’s my favorite month!” he says.

“How can it be?” I object. They both look at me, and it’s pretty clear they’ve completely forgotten I was ever there. “It’s way too hot.”

“So what are you working on right now?” she asks, like she really wants to know the answer.