People Who Knew Me (23 page)

“You better not be next,” he said as we chatted about Janine and her coming child.

“A baby? Not me,” I said. “Unless it's immaculate conception.”

He waited for me to elaborate.

“Drew and I haven't had sex since June.”

I knew when I said it that it was something I shouldn't say. Not to Gabe, at least. Confessions like these lead to affairs. Somehow I didn't care. I wanted to test the theory, prove it wrong. Or maybe I wanted to prove it right.

The last time I'd had sex with Drew was when I imagined he was Gabe. Drew tried, his male needs overpowering the obviousness of my disinterest. I pushed him away, said I wasn't “in the mood”—a cliché excuse played out on every sitcom that ever aired. Eventually, he stopped trying. We didn't talk about it.

One Saturday night, I woke up to the sheets rustling. He was turned from me. I knew by the force and repetitiveness of his motions that he was masturbating. I pretended to sleep. I was embarrassed for him. The next morning, I snuggled up to him—out of pity or guilt or something else that closely resembled affection.

“Remember when we first met, how thrilling it was to just touch each other?” I said to him. I had some hope that we could just admit we'd changed, that it wasn't the same, that it wasn't good anymore.

But he said, “It's still thrilling to touch you.”

I kissed him on the mouth, but felt nothing. I remembered that first night, in his dorm room, talking for hours. I remembered staring at his hands, imagining them touching me. I didn't even need to be naked; just his hand on my skirt sent a jolt through my body.

Then there were Gabe's hands—soft, like he moisturized them, but also tough, like those of a farmer who labors in the fields from sunrise to sunset. During the workday, I dreamed about them reaching up under my skirt to caress my thigh. My panties got wet enough that I had to go to the restroom and pat them dry with toilet paper. I hadn't lost the ability to desire; I'd just lost the ability to desire my husband.

The realist in me knew that if Gabe and I had a “beginning” and then went well past it—years past it—I wouldn't desire him, either. But that's the thing about lust—it silences the realist. It deceives you. It convinces you that what you're feeling will last forever.

After my sexless marriage confession, Gabe said, “Not since
June
?”

His shock made me think he'd never gone more than a week without sex. I shrugged.

“That's sad, Em,” he said. I liked when he called me Em. Everyone who knew me well—and only those people—called me Em.

“It is what it is,” I said.

His eyes diverted to his computer screen, in response to the ding of a new email. He scanned it, then looked back at me.

“It's been a long week,” he said. “Drinks after work?”

*   *   *

We went to this Mexican place a few blocks from the office. One of the regional associates suggested it, touted its margaritas as the best in the city. The chances of us seeing him—or someone from Berringer who also took his recommendation—were reasonably high. We weren't doing anything wrong, though. If we were, we would have chosen somewhere farther away. Wouldn't everyone assume that? As it was, we were just friends. We'd made that clear from the day I started. In fact, that's how Gabe introduced me to the staff—“This is my old college friend, Emily.” We waved off the imagined suspicions of others who warned us with their raised eyebrows of the complications, the risks involved with attempting a friendship with the opposite sex. There was a common understanding: if both parties are single, the claimed friendship is simply a preface to something more; if one or both parties are married, the claimed friendship is simply a preface to something disastrous.

We played like we were above all that.

We played dumb.

I'd started taking notice of a few love affairs in our building—north tower trysts, I called them. I could see it in their eyes in the lobby, in the elevators. It was an attentiveness to surroundings, a concern for who might see through their charade as they pretended to be consulting about business, using code words that, in a language only known to them, translated to,
I want to fuck you in a storage closet
. Because that's how these things go. They're sinful and impulsive and thrilling. They occur in the backseats of cars, on corporate-carpeted floors, in secret rooms that only janitors know exist. There are bruises and rug burns and pulled muscles and an urgency usually reserved for greedy, impulsive teenagers. They—these trysts—are exciting because they're dangerous. They can break up marriages, families. They can cause two people stupid enough to conduct their affair on the same floor of the same building to lose their jobs—and much, much more.

But Gabe and I were just friends.

*   *   *

The margaritas came in glasses the size of bowls. I licked the salt off the rim of mine and took a drink.

“This is pretty good,” I said. “Peter was right.”

I perused the menu, trying to decide between a combo platter involving a tamale and an enchilada, or a trio of tacos. I felt Gabe's eyes on me, perusing me instead of his own menu.

“Does Drew know about me?” he asked. It was out of nowhere; we never talked about Drew. I made a point of pretending that he didn't exist, effectively placing myself in two different worlds—the world with Gabe and the world with Drew (which was really a world without Drew).

“Of course he knows about you,” I said.

Gabe looked to me for more information.

“He knows you're an old friend from college. I didn't remind him that you were the date I ditched for him all those years ago,” I said. “Would you like me to tell him that?”

He rolled his eyes, annoyed.

“Come on, Em. We know I don't give a shit about that. And you know that's not what I'm talking about.”

I released my shoulders from their tensed-up position by my ears and put down my menu.

“He knows you hired me at Berringer,” I said, knowing this wasn't what he was talking about, either. That was really all I'd told Drew, though. I didn't mention the dinners out with Gabe, the drinks, the attraction. Some nights, while I was out with Gabe, Drew called and left messages. The next day, he'd ask where I'd been. I claimed I'd made friends—girlfriends—at work and was out with them. He claimed he was happy for me, happy to hear I was having so much fun. We were both terrible liars.

“So he doesn't know much of anything that matters,” Gabe said flatly.

I wanted to tell him there was nothing between us that mattered, but I knew that wasn't true. He would argue back with a truth that would only make it impossible for me to continue compartmentalizing my life, guilt-free.

“I don't know what you want me to say,” I said.

“Look,” he said sternly. “I like you, Em. I liked you way back then and I like you now.”

I stared into my margarita, hoping to find some kind of resolution among the floating ice cubes.

“I like you, too,” I said weakly.

“I don't like you in the way I like Doug at work,” he said. “You must know what I mean.”

I nodded because I couldn't bring myself to form the words that agreed with him. I didn't know if I was ready to make all this real. We hadn't kissed, nothing had happened. We could just keep going as we were, playing dumb.

He went on: “I'm not sure how much longer I can keep this up.”

“This?” I asked softly.

“If you haven't noticed, I don't date anyone. I'm just waiting. For you. Maybe you should do me a favor and tell me to stop.”

But I didn't want to tell him to stop.

He hadn't even taken a sip of his margarita. Everything he said was said sober, clearheaded.

“I don't know what you want me to say,” I repeated.

He provided the words on my behalf: “I know you like me—in that way—too,” he said. Then: “What I don't know is if you would like me if you didn't resent him so much.”

“Him” being Drew.

I looked up, as if startled by a sudden loud noise.

“Whatever I feel for you has nothing to do with Drew.”

I was angry and let it show. If Gabe knew me as well as Drew did, he would have known that I only use such a defensive tone when I'm aware I'm wrong.

“I think it has a lot to do with Drew. You're lonely. You're angry at him. If you betrayed him, I bet you feel like you'd just be making things even between the two of you.”

I was quiet.

“And you wouldn't be wrong in making things even. Maybe I would want that, too, if I were in your shoes,” he said. “But I'm in my shoes and I don't want to be someone's weapon of revenge.”

“You're not that,” I said.

“I know I'm that,” he said. “I'm asking if I'm
just
that, or if I'm something more.”

He was different from Drew. He wanted to understand how I felt, what I wanted. He pressed, he challenged. Drew did neither. Drew played the role of the oh-shucks, unobservant-but-well-meaning guy. He didn't ask what he meant to me, he didn't ask if I still loved him, if I was unhappy. He didn't possess the courage to want to know.

“You're more to me,” I admitted, both to myself and to him.

“How do you know?” he asked.

If he was taking the risk of asking me such things, I could take the risk of being honest.

“I think about you all the time,” I said. And I did. When I went to bed at night, I resorted to kissing the back of my hand, like a desperate teenager, imagining his lips. When I woke up in the morning, I picked out my clothes according to what would be most attractive—for him. The fantasies sustained me.

“What about Drew?”

“I don't really think about Drew,” I said.

Whatever resentment I'd felt for Drew had given way to a sort of apathy. I wasn't angry anymore; I wasn't anything. I'd been under the impression that a marriage was in trouble when there was bitterness and rage. But, in the months that had passed since Drew had moved in with his mom, I'd realized that a marriage was truly in trouble when there were no feelings at all.

“So what are we doing?” Gabe asked. He clasped his hands together, like he did at the conclusion of business meetings.

“I don't know,” I said. “It's a question I've been going out of my way to avoid.”

He sighed. The waitress came to take our order.

“We need a minute,” I told her. She nodded and walked away.

“Life's short,” Gabe said to me, looking at me intently, refusing to blink.

“It is,” I agreed, holding his stare.

Not taking his eyes off me, he raised his hand in the air like a kid with an answer in elementary school, catching the waitress's attention. She returned to the table, little notepad in hand again.

“Can we just get the check?” he said to her.

She looked at him strangely, then nodded, put her notepad back in the pocket of her apron, and went to a register at the rear of the restaurant.

“Let's go to my place,” he said. It was a demand—not an invitation. “I have leftover Moroccan takeout.”

*   *   *

I'd expected his place to be the kind of swanky bachelor pad you see in movies featuring high-powered businessmen looking for love. In those movies, the guys always have commitment issues. They subsist on liquor and have a woman's bra strewn across some piece of furniture. They decorate to attract the bra-flinging women—modern, sleek, sharp edges everywhere. Their couches cost a few grand and aren't even comfortable, but that doesn't matter because this type of man is never home anyway.

Gabe's place was not like that, though. It was in Greenwich Village, so it cost him a penny prettier than any penny I'd ever see, but it was humble, wholesome even. He admitted that he didn't know a thing about how to make a home; he relied on the Crate & Barrel store on Madison for guidance, even knew the name of one of the employees—“Jeff with a
G
,” so Geoff, a gay guy who moonlit as an aspiring ballet dancer. Gabe's couch was full of soft pillows. A throw blanket was resting on the armchair. It wasn't folded neatly, as if he'd recently used it, curled up in it to watch TV late at night. There wasn't a liquor bottle—or bra—in sight.

“I love the dining table,” I said.

“Reclaimed wood from a barn upstate. Supposedly.”

I wanted to linger there, in the dining area, for hours. I wasn't sure what would happen if we ventured toward the bedroom. I went into the kitchen, drew a finger across the marble countertop, as if checking for dust. I even opened his refrigerator, inspecting his daily life. There was a carton of orange juice and some white Styrofoam take-out containers.

“The Moroccan food?” I said.

He nodded. He was humored by me, my snooping.

“Want some?” he asked.

I shook my head. I had too many knots in my stomach to be the slightest bit hungry.

He walked toward me, entered the space I'd previously considered personal, my own. We'd never been so close before. I could smell his breath—musty, unfreshened, but not bad. I closed my eyes, either to prepare for him to kiss me or to play the childhood game of believing the entire world vanished if my vision went black. I was terrified and exhilarated simultaneously, the way you feel before a huge drop on a roller coaster.

He put his hands on my arms, as if to steady me. I thought of Drew, but only about how he was with his mom, in Jersey, so far from this, so far from ever having to know about this. He said he'd acquired his mom's early bedtime—seven o'clock. He wasn't even awake.

Gabe kissed my forehead first, left his lips there for a while, introducing them to my skin slowly. I tilted my chin up toward him, offering him my mouth. He took it—gently, with care. I'd never kissed someone with such full lips before, lips that could envelop mine. Drew's lips were thin. When he smiled, they disappeared completely.