Love Love (12 page)

T
hey made breakfast together. It took a little doing to gather the equipment—they found the frying pan hiding underneath a giant bag of Doritos in the pantry, and they had to be creative with the ingredients, too. The loaf of bread on top of the fridge was pocked with mold, so while Roger scrambled the eggs, Judy warmed rice cakes in the toaster oven. The kitchen was as small as the one in her own apartment, not big enough for two people to walk by without touching each other, but that was okay. In fact it was more than okay when Roger, with a whisk in one hand and broken eggshells in the other, hugged her from behind and kissed her neck. She fell wholly into it, pressed her body against his. All she was wearing was an old T-shirt of his, and she felt him getting hard again, but instead of it exciting her, it tinged her with sadness.

It was possible that she'd been mistaken, wasn't it? That she'd made the whole thing up? Maybe it was another facet of her fear of intimacy, a way for her psyche to bring her to emotional ruin. The answer was simple: She'd have to fuck him again, perhaps as many as a hundred times to absolutely make sure, and the raunchiness of her thoughts made her smile.

They set the table together, her placing the forks on the left of the plate, Roger following her and sliding the knives on the right, the tiny clang of the metal salt and pepper shakers ringing like a bell. Usually the morning after was more awkward than this. This was a good omen.

The eggs were overcooked and the rice cakes stale, and outside, the landscaping crew for the townhouse association was out in full force, polluting the air with the numbing noise of their trimmers and blowers. It should've been a bad breakfast, but when Judy looked across the table, not a whit of the external unpleasantness mattered. Because there was Roger—long-faced, calm-faced Roger, forking up piles of egg bits and heaping them on top of the rice cake, trying to make an open-faced sandwich out of it.

“I don't think that's gonna make it taste any better,” Judy yelled across the table to make herself heard over the landscaping noise.

She was trying to be funny again and was possibly failing. Roger smiled small and shrugged, then took a crunchy bite. While he looked out the window and chewed away, she watched him, and whatever spell she'd been under—possibly the afterglow of sex—was starting to shrivel.

Was he an overly sensitive guy? Would she have to watch her words, to make sure she wasn't hurting his feelings? Who exactly was he, anyway? She knew so little about him, and it would take work to find out who he is. And conversely, while she was finding out about him, he would find out about her, all her issues, her peccadilloes, her psychoses. All her previous relationships had ended badly, so why would this one turn out any different?

She was being pessimistic, but after Brian abandoned her, she didn't know if she had it in her to do this again. Maybe it was too soon. Besides, it wasn't as if Roger was perfect. He had this weird fake-orgasm thing, plus that enormous tattoo. The mysterious pull the dragon had on her had abated, and all that remained now was the harsh reality of what he'd done to himself. Who in his right mind defaces his body like that? Obviously Roger had his share of problems, and she had enough of her own, thank you very much.

“Well hey,” Judy said. “I should get going.”

Roger blinked a couple of times.

“I'm sorry, what?” he asked. In his left hand, he held a full glass of orange juice, and in the other, the remaining half-moon of the disgusting rice cake. In her sudden panic to escape, she hadn't even noticed that he was still in the middle of his breakfast.

“Oh, nothing,” she said, and she forced a smile to her lips. She picked up her knife and fingered the smooth curve of its handle. It looked practically brand-new compared to the one by Roger, which made sense, since she hardly ever went deeper than a single layer of
her own utensils tray. On one side of the blade were tiny engraved letters, GIORGIO and WALLACE.

Last night she'd been too drunk to notice, but he was a slow eater.
Slow
was a good adjective to describe him, actually. Even the way he sat down, it was like an old man aware of his delicate bones. He was careful while she was careless. He was patient while she was hurried. They were different people, but who knew, maybe they would have a good time for however long it lasted. With low expectations, everything was a gift.

Roger took his last bite and chased it with his glass of orange juice.

“Thank you,” Judy said. “I had a nice time.”

“Me too,” he said.

Outside, the gardening crew shut down their machines, and the room overwhelmed them with silence. They sat there staring at each other, neither speaking, the moment elongating until they were both smiling.

“When's the last time you played this game?” Judy asked.

“I'm not sure if I've ever played it,” Roger said.

“No siblings?”

“Just me.”

“So what's the deal with the tat on your back?”

“Young and stupid.”

“Anything else I should know about?”

“I like bread.”

“Bread?”

“Plain bread, with nothing on it.”

He had nice eyes, shaped like canoes, wider and bigger than her own.

“I can go on all day,” Judy said.

“I hope you do,” Roger said.

She lost, but only because she'd been double-teamed. At some point, Momo had sneaked down from the bedroom and scared the hell out of her when he jumped onto the dining table.

T
hey drove back to Red Bank to get her car. She'd parked on Front Street by a busted meter, but that hadn't stopped the city from slipping a pink ticket underneath her windshield wiper for leaving a vehicle overnight.

“Fucking A,” Judy said. According to the time scribbled on the parking ticket, they'd just missed the meter maid.

“If only Momo had come down a little earlier,” Roger said.

Judy closed her eyes and felt the glossy paper between her fingertips. A warm breeze blew in from the Navesink River, birds chirped, and a little while ago, she was in bed with this very nice man, having a very nice time. Life was good, and this ticket was a small, inconsequential thing.

She opened her eyes when she felt a tug on the ticket.

“It's my fault,” Roger said. “Why don't you let me pay for it?”

“No, I'll handle it.”

“I really would like to.”

“I said I'll handle it. Okay?”

Roger reluctantly let go, then thrust his hands into his pants pockets. “Okay,” he said, and he leaned in to kiss her. It was a good kiss, longer than a peck and shorter than a faked-up romantic face-sucking, a solid B+, maybe even an A-.

Grading kisses. It was like she was back in junior high.

10

A
t the traffic light on Pittstown Road, Kevin cut a quick left at the last second and was almost rear-ended. As the long, angry car horn blared, he glanced at the rearview mirror and saw the driver, a woman in a red top, pound her hand against the steering wheel in frustration.

“Sorry,” he said to no one but himself.

But he wasn't really sorry. As Kevin ramped onto the interstate and away from the tennis club, he was actually proud of himself. He'd always been a man of routine, taking the same road to work, slurping on the same medium cup of coffee bought at the same coffee shop, but this morning, he broke out of his pattern. He'd felt an impulse, and instead of quashing it as he had his whole life, he followed it.

Kevin flipped open his cell phone and speed-dialed Bill's extension and hoped it would go to voice mail; it did. He informed Bill about the Monday-morning game with Robert Weathers III, the CEO who had to win every game, telling him to take it easy, none of Bill's inside-out forehands because Robert's left knee was bothering him.

Now driving down Route 287, he got off at the Somerville exit and passed the large round insignia of a dancing stopwatch on the peak of Time to Eat Diner. On Fridays, he and Alice had met for lunch there. He would order the burger topped with a fried egg and crumbled blue cheese, and she would get the chicken francese with asparagus and roasted peppers. For how many years did they eat there? A decade or more, not that it mattered now.

After the divorce papers were signed and Alice had vanished from their house, the sudden void had shocked Kevin into a numbed stupor. It's like that, friends told him, friends who'd gone through the pain of separation. Strange to have all that emptiness, but they
assured him he'd get used to it. But they were wrong. As the months rolled on, he thought of her more often, more than he ever did when they'd been together.

Kevin turned into the entrance of the Somerset Medical Center and followed the curves until he found the sign for Outpatient Services. He located her car after spinning around the parking lot twice. She'd removed the Obama bumper sticker he'd stuck on for her, but the remnants of the glue still remained. He hoped the gray rectangle remained forever.

He'd tried to get over her. That first month, he went out with a different woman each Saturday night, two of them certifiable knockouts, dinner and dancing and even sex with one of them. But by the second month, Kevin could start to feel an odd blooming inside him, the opening of some dark, sad flower. And now, eleven months after he lost his wife of fourteen years, there was a black bouquet embedded in his chest, wishing for the person who was no longer there.

As he stared at her car, he could imagine her so clearly, shutting her car door with an easy pitch of her hips, slinging her purse over her right shoulder, tucking a loose curl of her strawberry-blond hair behind her ear as she made her way toward the hospital. Wearing a beige blouse and a knee-length black skirt, she would be dressed as anonymously as every other woman heading toward the entrance, but she wasn't everyone.

Kevin parked his car in the visitor's lot and killed the ignition. He was here because he wanted to see her. Because he wanted to tell her everything that happened so far and what he was planning to do. Ultimately, she wouldn't care, he knew that, but that didn't matter. He opened the door. He rose and took in the crisp autumn air, wishing he'd worn something else than the white Izod shirt and the matching white shorts.

As he walked toward the entrance, he pictured where Alice would be, sitting in one of the myriad white and gray cubicles of the human resources department. Often someone like Kevin, someone who'd never worked in an office or for a corporation, would proclaim how terrible it was that so many people made a living in such bland, stifling conditions, but Kevin felt otherwise. Sitting in a cubicle all day would never be his thing, but how nice it would be to be a nameless cog in the machine of an enormous company. Maybe it was just a condition of wanting what he didn't have, but in his job, he always had to be on.

The security guard eyed Kevin as he approached the desk.

“Good morning, John McEnroe,” he said.

“You can't be serious!” Kevin said.

The guard pushed the sign-in clipboard toward him. “That might be the worst McEnroe impression I've ever heard.”

“Hence, my day job,” Kevin said, signing the ledger.

He was glad he told the guard where he was headed, because the entire HR department had moved up from the second to the fourth floor. As he entered the elevator and watched doctors and nurses file in, Kevin recalled being here for Alice's fortieth birthday, a small surprise party her friend and coworker Eileen had set up. There weren't many fond memories from last year, but this was one of them, the conference room decorated with red roses, pink streamers, and yellow balloons, and Alice was genuinely surprised and happy to see Kevin there beside the chocolate cake ablaze with candles. He whispered “Happy birthday” into her ear as he took her in his arms, and she'd hugged back with such vigor, as if to try to force their bodies to merge. “Thank you,” she responded in kind with a whisper of her own, her lips close enough for him to feel the warmth of her breath.

If only he could stop the video of his mind right there, but that wasn't possible, because on the very next day, Alice said she was moving out. Kevin hated the way these two memories were conjoined, how their embrace of love spoiled into an embrace of good-bye.

On the fourth floor of the main wing, Kevin followed the signs for HR and tried not to think of what Alice told him that night before she left, but of course he did. She said he wanted so much, more than she was capable of giving. So much of what? What was it that he wanted? What was it that she wasn't able to give?

Her answer: Everything.

He asked: Was it possible for her to be just a tad more specific?

Instead of engaging him in another useless argument, Alice turned silent. So that was the last word she'd spoken to him as his wife,
Everything
, which was ironic, because to him, it meant absolutely nothing. Nothing and everything; without one, there couldn't be the other, so maybe it did make sense in some twisted way.

He found himself in front of her office, bold black letters on a clean white oval sign announcing human resources. There was no door, just an opening, so he hugged the wall as surreptitiously as he
could, peeking around the corner. He looked and waited and, oddly enough, didn't see a single person.