Maine (5 page)

In the past, she had felt like she was pulling Gabe along in her little red wagon, but not anymore. He wanted them to live together. They hadn’t had one of their nasty blowups in months.

Now, his suitcase packed and stacked neatly beside hers in the bedroom, they sat on the couch, eating pancakes and bacon that Gabe had made. She watched TV and he read
Sports Illustrated
. Cunningham hadn’t come home the night before, and she willed him to stay in whichever girl’s bed he had landed, not wanting him to shatter their nice day. He often clambered in after a basketball game with a friend or two in tow, eating all the groceries (which she had bought and paid for) out of the fridge without asking, and switching the channel to ESPN, even if they were watching a movie. It was his apartment, so she couldn’t really complain. And Gabe—always annoyingly passive and laid-back when it came to his friends—never said a word.

Once, she and Gabe had hosted a dinner party, and she had gone to extravagant lengths: a linen cloth on the big table in the living room, roasted chicken and strawberry pie, bottles of champagne they couldn’t afford. Cunningham was supposed to be in Chicago that weekend, but at the last minute he had decided not to go. After the salad course, he bounded in in his sweaty gym clothes and sat down on the couch, two feet from their dinner guests.

“Can I get you a plate?” she had asked him reluctantly.

“Sure,” he’d said.

Not
Yes, please
or
Thank you
, just
Sure
.

He didn’t join them at the table. Instead, he ate off his lap on the couch. He filled a coffee mug with Veuve Cliquot, and turned on Sports Center, muting the volume since they had music on. Maggie felt enraged, giving Gabe a pleading look.

He was drunk, watery-eyed, and just laughed.

She mostly disliked Cunningham because he was Gabe’s partner in crime, the person Gabe was inevitably with when he lied about where he’d been or drank so much he had to call in sick to a job the next day. Cunningham brought out the bad teenage boy in Gabe, as she imagined he had in high school, when they’d sneak out of chemistry class together and go jump in the old stone quarries that, years later, their hometown filled in after some other fearless teenager accidentally fell to his death.

Now she imagined what it would be like here, after Cunningham had gone: her pale blue couch and love seat in place of his two oversize pullouts. (“Why do straight men always make it their mission to fit as many sofas into a room as possible?” her friend Allegra had said when she first saw the place.)

Maggie clicked through the channels—a Woody Allen movie, a roundtable of political pundits, an infomercial about closet organizers that could change your life for the low, low price of $29.99.

She stopped at the infomercial.

Gabe looked at her with a raised eyebrow. “Really?” he said.

“It’s my hour,” she said. “At one you can switch to baseball.”

“I don’t know about that,” he said. “It depends on whether I can tear myself away from watching the Storage Saver 5000.”

She grinned. “Now I know what I’m getting you as a housewarming gift when I move in.”

She found infomercials strangely soothing, the way they made it seem as though a piece of plastic might actually eliminate all chaos and uncertainty from your life. She had been watching them since she was a kid, though she never bought anything. Her grandmother seemed to have developed a slight home shopping addiction since her grandfather’s death, a fact that Maggie’s mother and brother found hilarious, while she herself thought it sad.

She imagined Alice and other lonely old ladies and frazzled young housewives and overworked co-eds all around the country watching at this very moment, picking up the phone at the promise of “no more lost shoes, and no more lost hours—instantly get more time with your loved ones, more precious time to do what you
want.
”

“We should make an effort with my grandmother when we’re in Maine this week,” she said. “Invite her out to dinner with us and really refuse to take no for an answer.”

“Sounds good.”

“I should probably make plans to visit my mom in California soon too. Maybe this fall.”

By then she would know the outcome. She imagined them all sitting around Kathleen’s picnic table, discussing baby names while the sun set over the mountains.

“Absolutely,” Gabe said distractedly.

He and Kathleen didn’t get along as well as Maggie might have liked. Her mother thought Gabe had a lot of growing up to do, and he in turn had no shortage of worm-farm jokes in his arsenal. Maggie sometimes got offended when he mocked her mother’s job, or the fact that her house was always a disaster, even though she herself made similar comments all the time.

“Do you want to come?” she asked.

“Sure,” he said. He squeezed her shoulder gently, kneading his fingers into her skin. “But maybe we can stay in a hotel this time.”

A while later, Gabe dropped his magazine onto the floor. He got up to take a shower, kissing her on the forehead when he passed.

“I can’t wait to be at the beach, where a dunk in the ocean is all you need to wash off,” Gabe said as he walked toward the bathroom.

“You know, some people do still bathe in Maine,” she said with a smile.

“Yeah, but not me, baby doll.”

“Well no, not you, of course not you.”

He closed the bathroom door and she heard the water start.

Maggie stretched out on the couch and began to read over some draft pages of the novel she was working on. She had vowed to spend at least four hours a day on it in Maine. She had been neglecting her real work lately, and phoning it in somewhat at her day job too.

For the past two years she had been doing background research and writing copy for
Till Death Do Us Part
, a true-crime cable show about women who murdered their husbands.

Her boss, Mindy, was very relaxed. She didn’t care if they worked from home or in the office as long as they got their stuff done. Maggie went in all the same, afraid that too much time at home alone would make her depressed, or that she’d watch nine hours of television every day and eat the entire contents of her cabinets by lunch.

Maggie enjoyed the job mostly, but some days when she sat around a table with those other bright, creative people, she thought for a moment or two of how they all dreamed of being somewhere else.

Other than her mother, no one in her family mentioned it when she published a short story in a literary journal, even if she told them about it in advance. But when they saw her name in the credits for
Till Death
, they’d call her immediately.

Her stepmother had been the last to call, breathless with excitement: “I just saw the one where the woman shoots the husband after she sees his Visa bill, and it turns out he wasn’t even cheating. He really
was
sending all those flowers to her, but the florist got the address wrong. The poor guy! Your father says to tell you that thanks to you he’s never buying me roses again.”

On the weekends, Maggie worked from home, trying to finish her novel, and occasionally writing other people’s online dating profiles for extra money. She had written one for a friend as a favor a year earlier, and then that friend’s sister had asked her to do one, and then a co-worker of hers.

“You could actually make some mad cash on this,” Gabe had said to her once, and she had told him to stop being crazy.

But she kept getting offers, and had even been asked by a friend at
New York
magazine to write a step-by-step guide to the perfect profile. (She had declined, as few things seemed more mortifying than being known as an authority on online dating.)

Maggie had briefly joined Match.com before meeting Gabe. She went on four or five dates, but every one of them felt artificial, as if she and the guy were two characters going out to dinner in a play. Maggie could never remember their real names and thought of them exclusively by their screen names—they were always WarmLover10 or BookNerdSeeksSame, instead of Alex or Dave. And she quickly tired of translating their profiles: A guy who said he was six foot two was most likely five foot eight. If a guy actually claimed to be five-eight, it meant he was four and a half feet tall.

Now the door to the apartment opened and shut with a slam: the unmistakable sound of Cunningham arriving home. She cringed, wishing she had gone into the bedroom so she wouldn’t have to talk to him.

Maggie heard Gabe turning off the water in the shower. She was grateful at least that she wouldn’t have to be alone with Cunningham for long.

“Hey there,” he said. “What’s happening, lady?”

“Just hanging out,” she said.

“I thought you guys left for Maine already,” he said.

“Nope. Tomorrow.”

“Cool cool. So, what’s the word?”

“Not much,” she said, always unsure of how to answer that particular question. “How’s Shauna?” Her reliable fallback.

“She’s okay,” he said. “She took a new nursing job in Westport.”

“But I thought she was moving here soon. She’s going to commute to Westport from New York?”

He shook his head. “No ma’am, and thank God for that. I’m not ready to give up our bachelor pad yet.”

She started to say more, but Gabe appeared then, wrapped in a towel from the waist down.

“What up, my man!” he said, giving Cunningham a high five.

“Honey, Ben says Shauna got a new job in Connecticut,” she said, feeling her words heavy with implication.

“Yeah? Good for her.”

She tried again. “Shauna’s not moving to New York then.”

Gabe walked into the bedroom, and she followed behind. She closed the door. Her chest tightening, she said, “Gabe, please tell me that you’ve already told him I’m moving in.”

“Keep your voice down,” he whispered.

“You haven’t told him yet,” she said, weighing in her head whether this was simply bad or worse than that.

“I wanted to wait until after Maine to talk to you about this whole living together idea,” he said. “Do you really think we’re ready?”

She sat down on the bed. Heartburn rumbled up into her throat.

She pulled a couple of Tums from her purse on the floor and chewed them slowly. She wanted to tell him she was pregnant, then and there, but she knew she could say it only once and the moment needed to be perfect. Instead she said, “You asked me to move in.”

“Whoa,” he said. “All I said was I had been thinking about it, and then you ran with the idea.”

She breathed in deeply. “Please tell me this isn’t happening,” she said.

“Babe, chill out. You haven’t given your landlord notice yet, right?”

“Right. But Jesus, Gabe, I was just about to.”

She wished that she already had.

“But you didn’t! So we live apart one more year. What’s the big deal?”

The big deal is that I’ve already told everyone I know—every person at work, every friend, both my parents. I’ve already started redecorating this goddamn apartment in my head, and told Allegra’s cousin that she can have my place as of August first. The big deal is that in seven months, I’ll be giving birth to your child
.

“I don’t understand,” she said. “We’ve been talking about it all the time.”

“You’ve been talking,” he said. “I didn’t want to ruin our vacation, but when I talked to Cunningham about it, he said he wasn’t ready to move out yet, and I can’t abandon him. Hey, you’re always telling me to follow through on my commitments, right?”

He could not follow through on finding steady work or taking care of her when she got sick as he had promised, but she was supposed to be dazzled by the fact that he felt compelled to keep living with Ben.

“So Cunningham knew I wasn’t moving in before I knew it,” she said.

Anger filled her, anger that she knew would turn to sadness and fear as soon as Gabe was out of her sight, and for that reason she wanted to fix this, to make some sense of it.

“I have my own place. Maybe you should come live at my apartment. Or we can find a brand-new place, and Cunningham can get a roommate off Craigslist,” she said.

“A total stranger?” Gabe said, as if most everyone in New York didn’t live with total strangers. “Why do you want to live together so bad anyway? What’s the difference between that and what we have now?”

Because I’m thirty-two years old. Because my cousin Patty is the same age
and already has three kids and a house. Because I want to know when you come in at night. Because I love you
.

“You’re the one who suggested it in the first place,” she said.

“I thought that’s what you wanted.”

“It was!”

“But it’s not really what I want. I feel like a big part of the reason you want to live together is just to keep tabs.”

She shook her head. Was this really happening?

“Damn right,” she said. “I thought maybe the possibility of living together meant you’d stop being such a liar, but I guess I was wrong.”

“Guess so,” he said. “Hey, this time you didn’t even need to go through my e-mail to find out.”

She knew all her snooping was wrong, though it never felt wrong when she did it. It gave her a weird high, looking at his e-mails while he was in the shower or out for a run. Maggie told herself that she only wanted proof—just once—that Gabe wasn’t doing anything inappropriate. But she’d always find something: acknowledgment that he had lied about where he was, or an overly friendly e-mail exchange with an ex. And then she would be devastated and unable to explain her sudden sorrow to Gabe.

“Like Ronald Reagan said, trust but verify,” she had told Allegra once to explain why she checked up on him this way, and Allegra had widened her eyes: “Jesus, we’re getting our moral relativism from Reagan now?”

He was still wearing the towel. He let it drop to the floor and pulled on a pair of boxers and jeans.

“We’re done,” he said. “I’m gonna go watch the game. Come out if you want.”

“You’re gonna watch the game,” she said, feeling suddenly hysterical. “You’re going to watch the fucking game? I don’t think so.”