Room for Love (38 page)

“Obsessively.”

“Oh shit.” He laughs. “Well, yeah, I guess you're right, but I'm looking forward to getting to know you better.”

“So why do you love me then?” I ask, jumping down from the railing.

“Because you're hot,” he says. “Kidding! We have fun together and you're smart and sexy and you get my work and love my dog and make me laugh.”

“I don't know,” I say, looking off into the night, trying to figure out what the hell I'm trying to express to him. “I just think sometimes that I've been trying to turn you into someone you're not. I mean, I love so many things about you, but I haven't really been happy, which is weird because you are exactly what I want in a man.” I look down, suddenly ashamed, and add quietly, “Or what I thought I wanted.” I look up at him. “My fear is that I liked you so much I didn't take the time to really look at you or us and figure out if we were right for each other. It's like we're both in love with love and were so happy to find this person who fit the fantasy.”

I don't know where these words are coming from. I've certainly never thought them, not consciously at least. “You let me down a lot,” I say. “You love your work and don't really care that much about mine, and some people don't need a boyfriend who wants to read their articles or ask how their day was or get excited about fixing up a house so it looks like a place where both people live, but I guess I'm somebody who needs a lot of attention, who needs to be adored.”

“I adore you,” he says softly, with such a sad expression that I think I might dissolve into a puddle, like Amélie did after letting the man of her dreams walk out of her world without telling him that she loved him. “Look, Jacquie, I thought a lot over the last couple of days. I know I'm gone a lot and it's been hard and we fight and stuff, but I'm aware of that and I want it to be different. I'm really trying. I love you, I want to get to know you better, I want us to get to know each other better. Shit, I'm putting myself on the line here.” His cell phone rings and he takes it out of his pocket, flips it open, looks to see who's calling, opens his mouth as if to apologize for taking the call, then apparently changes his mind, silences the phone, closes it, and puts it back into his pocket.

He really is making an effort.

So what is wrong with me? I start to cry and Anthony reaches out to comfort me.

“What's wrong, Jacquie?”

“Anthony, I think I fell in love with a version of you that I thought I could turn you into, the one who would take me into consideration and be interested in my life and include me in his, some future Anthony I thought I could force you to become. But that's not fair, it's not who you are.” Who the hell am I? This isn't me talking. This couldn't be thirty-two-year-old, unmarried Jacqueline Stuart. Anthony isn't a guy you dump. Anthony is a guy you walk off into the sunset with, happily ever after, fade to black, cue generic classic love song covered by nineteen-year-old pop star. Who am I channeling? Courtney, who just two days ago told me that Anthony might not be The Guy? Joanne Love, advising strong women nationwide to hold out for the man with whom you can “truly be the version of you that you love the best”? Certainly not my mother, who, if she were here, would bang me over the head with a wrought-iron frying pan she just happens to have in her purse and apologize to this tall, handsome, potential son-in-law for my brief lapse in sanity. I just can't fathom where these strange, unrehearsed words are coming from.

Here is Anthony, beautiful Anthony, saying he loves me, saying he wants to make it work, promising that it will be different. And I am making all kinds of excuses, telling him all the things that are wrong with us. Fighting him as if I know some secret. What's going on? Am I the commitment-phobe that Alicia accuses me of being? Am I so scared of love that I'm willing to let another wonderful man out of my life just to avoid having to commit? I start crying harder, my chest racked with sobs.

The truth is simple. I am a simple creature, an Aries woman, baby of the zodiac, wide-eyed, trusting, basic in my desires, transparent of emotion, with the rudimentary needs of a child. I do know what I want. I know what I need. And no matter how often I choose to doubt it when it serves my purposes, my gut never fails me.

“Anthony, I'm so sorry,” I sputter through my tears. I take a moment to breathe regularly again. “I…” I look into his sad, blue eyes, wanting so desperately not to hurt him. But I don't have any choice. “I don't love you.”

He looks down at his hands.

“You're a confused girl, Jacquie,” he says, hitting the railing hard with his fist.

“No,” I say. “I'm not confused. I am sorry and so sad, but I am pretty clear about this.”

“Fuck,” he says, pounding the railing with his fist. I put my hand on top of his, and he tugs it away before turning to walk silently down the dark, empty path toward the highway to hail a cab.

I look into the water at the glimmer of the city reflected in its blackness as hot tears spill down my cheeks, for Anthony's pain and for mine, for yet another love lost. As I get older, breaking up becomes more and more terrifying. I know that every time I leave someone, I'm upping the ante, announcing to myself and the world that I am confident that someone better for me exists out there. But I am not confident at all. I am throwing myself into the abyss.

Suddenly all I want is to be in my apartment. I know it's a cold, black, dank hole these days, but it's still my home. The home I should never have left. I wonder if I can sleep there, find a dry corner. I know it won't be very comfortable, but I really just want to go home.

I start walking back to the party. After dragging myself for a minute, I begin to run—like a bandit with the heat on my tracks, which is not easy to do in three-inch heels. By the time I collide with the crowd spilling onto the sidewalk and see Steve and Jeremy getting into the only cab on the block together, I'm done with the shoes and pull them off. I keep running, but have to glue my eyes to the ground to avoid broken glass and rusty nails, and I smash into Sam, who's stomping angrily down the street with Charlie limping after her. I wonder if she kicked him in the shin—or the balls. She glares at me and keeps stomping. My sister is passionately kissing DJ Boring against the door of a gallery across the street. I imagine she'll crash at Jake's place tonight. I stand in the middle of the street, cushioned by the balmy air, for a moment before taking off sprinting again.

When I reach Fourteenth Street, I admit to myself that I cannot run any longer. Craning my neck for a cab, I see a crosstown bus coming. I jump on, greeted by a frigid air-conditioned gust, and collapse, winded, into a solo seat on the left side of the bus, jiggling my left leg over my right into the aisle as the city drifts past—fast food, dive bars, the all-night bustle of the Meatpacking District. I look at my reflection in the window, my hair pulled up on top of my head, makeup long gone, face calm, even the little wrinkle usually visible between my brows at peace. I rub my goose-pimpled arms for warmth and wipe smudged mascara off the skin under my bottom lashes and focus again on the passing city. I love New York so much, I could make out with it. I look at the front of the bus, suddenly aware that we've been immobile for a while, impatient that we're only at Seventh Avenue. When an insistent clanging indicates that the driver will be lowering the front steps to allow a disabled person to board, I lose it.

“Oh my God!” I announce too loudly, shoving through the standing passengers and banging out the back door, swooning into the caress of hot air that catches me as I burst from the icy bus. Now I run as fast as I can again, waving my arms around, hoping to catch a cab. They're all full of passengers, their extinguished call lights taunting me. I'm contemplating hitching when I miraculously spy a taxi spitting a raucous foursome into the street. A man in a steel-gray suit and I leap at the back door at the exact same time, but I am a woman with a mission and he sees “don't even consider it, buddy” all over me and demurs, stepping backward and bowing his head.

“Eleventh Street and Avenue A, please,” I tell the driver, now zipping past Urban Outfitters, cheap shoe shops, discount lighting emporiums, gyms, 99-cent stores, Diesel, Whole Foods, Union Square, Virgin Megastore, Trader Joe's. I'm bouncing up and down on the cheap vinyl seat. We can't get there fast enough. I hide my face in my arms as we screech to a halt behind a tow truck making a left turn onto Third Avenue, telling myself to breathe, dammit, breathe, breathe, breathe. Finally we're whizzing down Avenue A, by the cigarette-smoking crowd outside a chic Asian place on my left, a woman talking and gesticulating wildly to herself on the right. For a minute I think she's crazy, despite her slender hips and good haircut. I stare at her over my shoulder, mystified as she shrinks behind me, until it hits me that she's deep in conversation with another person on the other end of her phone. I had forgotten cell phones existed for a second. It occurs to me that I know exactly which charming two-bedroom in Park Slope I'll be sleeping in while my apartment's in rehab and start to laugh, feeling a bit crazy myself, hopping out onto the crowded street nearly hysterical.

I run toward my apartment, fast, hard, till I'm out of breath and sweating and feeling like Bridget Jones racing to catch Colin Firth in my underwear or any number of starlets running breathlessly through airports and train stations to stop the love of their lives from zooming off to a new life on the opposite coast. But I am alone, racing only to get home. The air around me warms my damp skin like a furnace as I unlock the front door to my building and jet up my stairs. When I push the door open, my apartment is completely black and it smells bad. I feel completely let down. I stand in the doorway and wonder what the hell I expected anyway. A surprise party?

I drop my bag in the hallway outside the front door and slowly enter my apartment, the door clicking shut behind me. By the time I'm halfway through the dark hallway, I'm deflated and acutely aware of the fact that I have nothing—no boyfriend, no apartment, no life. As I'm standing there paralyzed by self-pity, a rustling on the other side of the room startles me and I scream.

“Jacquie?”

I hear the scratch of a match, the whir of a flame, and a candle is lit, illuminating Zach, the cute hardware-store boy. I never noticed he was a leftie before. He looks disheveled, bundled in his faded jean jacket that's lined in lamb's wool. He lights another candle. He hasn't shaved in days and the stubble on his face is the amber color of maple syrup with sunlight shining through the bottle. His eyes are sleepy, a very pale blue like the sky when wispy white clouds are floating past. I'm ashamed of myself for thinking in such mushy metaphors. Steve would never stand for that crap in the magazine.

“Hey,” Zach says.

I slowly approach as he pushes himself up to a seated position. “Zach,” I say, breathing in sharply. “You're still here.”

“I fell asleep.”

I look around at the candlelit furniture he's dragged back in from the roof, the garbage bags, the beautifully sanded bookshelves standing incongruously in the middle of the hollow shell of the home I loved so much. I can't think of one thing to do to start making it better.

“What can I do?” I ask him. “Give me a project.”

“It's the middle of the night,” he says.

I look at him in a way that says, “What's your point?”

“You could rub my hand,” he says. “It's sore from all the sanding.”

“Okay,” I say shyly and lower myself in front of him to sit on my heels. My knees hit the cold, dusty floor. Zach stretches out his left hand toward me. I turn it over and rub his palm firmly with my thumbs, working the flesh between the small bones of the front of his hand with my other fingers. The skin there is surprisingly soft, so different from his rough, calloused palms. I feel my face flush and glance up at him to see if he noticed. He smiles. I'm thankful for the fan sending cool air at me from the corner.

“You're good at that,” he says. My heart pounds on my rib cage, reminding me of its existence. He gives me his other hand, which is bloodied and scraped across two knuckles.

“Oh my God,” I say.

“I forgot about that.”

I grab one of the candles and make my way into the bathroom, where I manage to find a tin first-aid kit, with Band-Aids and a bottle of alcohol inside. I grab a paper towel from the kitchen on my way back and look at Zach sitting patiently Indian-style watching me. With his hair sticking up he looks about twelve.

“You're an Aries, aren't you?” I ask.

He nods. “How did you know?” I shake my head and kneel down to clean up his hand.

“Hey, what are you doing here?” Zach asks once I'm done putting alcohol on the wound.

“I broke up with my boyfriend,” I say, feeling like I might cry again.

Zach reaches out to touch my shoulder and I pull away from him, pushing myself up and moving to the other side of the room.

“I'm sorry,” Zach says, standing up to take the Band-Aid that I hold out in his direction. We're silent for a minute as he puts it on his cut. Then he says, “I guess he was that guy you were fighting with in the street the other day at the fire, huh? He wasn't good enough for you anyway.”

“What?” I snap. “Who the hell are you, Zach, to judge me or Anthony? You don't know him. You don't even know me. You're just some guy who's fucking Serena.”

“What?” he says, rushing over, inches from me, his cheeks flushed. “Serena's my sister.”

“Your sister?” I choke, my face and chest getting hot. His sister? Serena and Zach brother and sister? I feel totally thrown.

“What the hell?” I say. “Oh my God, I can't believe you … Why didn't anyone tell me?”

“I assumed you knew,” he says. “Wow. God. I figured you knew.”