The Opposite of Love (4 page)

However, because success was much more enjoyable when shared, as was sex, she chose a man and let him keep her company for as long as was comfortable. And even though she still had a uterus, which apparently still had that switch it loved to flip, she found that the voice of hope could be muted. She found a defense against the coercive nature of her romantic thoughts: Walls. Walls made it possible to shut down the internal conversation before it even began. If hope never got in, it would never get the best of her.

Melanie stood to wash her dishes and put them away. Never mind that the stainless steel appliance she bought for that purpose was the top-of-the-line model and set her back almost two grand; it still left the occasional spot or two on the glassware, so she washed all her dishes by hand.

“Finish up,” Melanie said. “We’ve got kickboxing class.” She ran a fingertip underneath each eyebrow, checking for stubble. Her leg and bikini wax were up to date, but she maintained her eyebrows herself.

Jen groaned. “I’m gonna need Tylenol.”

Jen revved up her bright yellow Jeep Wrangler and Melanie hopped in her Volvo SUV. They took Seven Hills Drive down the hill from her house to St. Rose Parkway and Melanie marveled at the west mountains rising tall from the valley floor with their menacing height and jagged peaks. In all her life, it was a sight she never got used to and it still made her feel small. She led the way to the 24 Hour Fitness on the corner of Maryland Parkway and Silverado Ranch.

Melanie watched her sister in the mirrors of the aerobics room as they both punched and kicked at the air. Jen caught her a few times and gave her a cross-eyed goofy grin. Although Jen scarcely remembered their father, being only five when he died, Jen was his daughter, with his silky sandy blond hair, twinkly blue-green eyes and a gift for using them that could only be inherited. Jen could look at Melanie in a certain way, both amused and conspiratorial, and Melanie would feel like she’d been let in on a joke.

The kickboxing class was brutal; just what the doctor ordered. Afterward, Jen gave Melanie a sweaty hug and thanked her for her advice before heading home. Melanie stayed at the gym to do some upper body weights and take a shower. As she went through her usual circuit on autopilot, she thought about Jen and wondered if her sister’s resolve would stay strong.

Melanie had a hard time understanding the torture Jen put herself through; this wasn’t the first time she’d dragged herself down a self-destructive path over a man. She knew there was a lure there, an enticement, some kind of toxin to which many women succumbed, even became addicted. But Melanie couldn’t see herself giving up so much of her self-respect, for what? To be with someone who treated her badly? Why?

Her inner counselor told her it was an abandonment issue, especially in Jen’s case. Melanie remembered being able to gradually come to terms with their father’s death, even though she herself had only been nine at the time. They’d lost the family cat a few years before, and their mother had pointed out the similarities between the two deaths to try and help the girls cope. And while that had been helpful for Melanie, Jen was only two when the cat died and hadn’t remembered it. Jen’s first real experience with death had been the loss of the man she’d thought would always be there—to that point, the only one she’d ever loved.

After their father’s death, Sarah, Melanie’s older sister, had been quiet. For a long time. At fourteen, she said little and ate even less. But when she snapped out of it six months later, she was her old self again, and when she turned eighteen she promptly got married. That marriage didn’t last. Neither did the second one. But the third one was going on fifteen years and had produced a boy and a girl who were beautiful, smart and—more importantly, Melanie thought—healthy.

For Melanie, experiences were divided into two groups; the things she could handle and the things she could not. Having survived the loss of her father, she had never encountered anything that even came close to dismantling her. Everything was in the "things I can handle" category. By design, perhaps.

Sarah, on the other hand, was a scorekeeper. She felt that life could only give you so much grief and then things would get easier. This point came, she was sure, after her second husband left her for an aerobics instructor. She met her third and current husband and entered the payoff stage, but life still gave her occasional challenges, perhaps to shake her faith. Or perhaps to remind her of how much she had to be grateful for.

And Jen, well she seemed to just relish the pain, wallowing in every heartbreak and disappointment, the same way she used to pick her scabs as a kid because she said seeing her own blood made her feel alive.

Melanie rarely remembered her dreams, so when she woke up feeling angry or guilty or even happy for no conscious reason, she knew she had dreamed something to cause it and she would lie in bed struggling in vain to remember.

The dreams she did remember usually involved work; a deal that she’d been struggling to close, a conniving colleague, running late to catch a plane. These were welcome dreams, as they helped her to work out whatever professional issues she was toiling with, and it was common for her to find solutions to her most vexing problems this way.

But the ones she couldn’t remember left her uneasy, sometimes even shaken up. The feelings they elicited could be alarmingly powerful. Occasionally she would wake up trembling, her heart racing, feeling out of control, and it would take her ten minutes in the shower to shake the effect. On those occasions, she wanted more than anything to remember. She was especially curious, fascinated by her own reaction, because there were very few things in her waking life that could elicit such a profound physical effect.

And on this particular spring morning as she neared waking, she dreamed of a man. She dreamed of touching his hair and felt the silkiness of it and decided he was young, maybe in his twenties. With a blur of skin she could feel the warmth of his embrace, the blending of their limbs and torsos, the feel of smooth, silky nakedness, of safety, and decided it was a lover. There were swirls of vibrant color; blues and scarlet purples in an aurora borealis. There was a bonding of spirits that made her giddy with contentment. She dreamed of touching his face and felt the stubble, saw the lines of laughter around his eyes, and decided it was her father. And she woke up.

A breeze nudged the vertical blinds on the arched bedroom window so that they clicked against each other in a gentle rhythm. Spring and fall in Las Vegas only lasted a few weeks apiece, and soon it would be too hot to sleep with the windows open, so she enjoyed it while she could, throwing off the comforter and letting the breeze flow over her sleep-warm skin.

It wasn’t out of the ordinary for her to wake up aroused. But when she reached for the drawer in the nightstand, she had a vague feeling of shame that she couldn’t account for, so she concentrated hard on a recent memory of Derek.

Melanie had put her hair in a ponytail and applied powder and lipstick. Still a little flushed from a vigorous swim in the pool, she’d thought she had all the color she needed, but she knew the lipstick would be necessary to please her mother.

They sat across from each other on the patio of King’s Fish House in Henderson, and when the waitress came Catherine ordered a Pinot Grigio. Melanie ordered a beer.

“So this is how you go out in public now?” her mother said.

Catherine wore subtle makeup with neutral lipstick, her dyed-blond hair in a shoulder-length bob that made her appear younger than sixty-two. She was always well put together, even when she was at home.

“It’s just lunch, Mom.”

“Yes, but you never know who you’ll run into.”

“Are you setting me up with someone today?” Melanie joked. Her mother’s expression remained unchanged, and Melanie glanced around the patio in wide-eyed horror.

“No, dear, I’m not. But I might if I thought it would do any good.”

Melanie closed her menu. “Are we going to have this conversation again?”

“It looks that way.”

“Can we not? I’d like to have a nice lunch.”

“This is more important.”

“If I told you I have a date tonight, would you drop it?”

“If I thought it would lead to anything serious, I’d drop it.”

“How do you know it won’t?”

Her mother heaved a deep sigh. The waitress arrived with their drinks and took their food order, and Melanie was spared the answer.

“I talked to Jennifer last night,” her mother said when the waitress walked away. It had been a week since Melanie had counseled her on Justin. This was a welcome change of subject, and she sat up, took a sip of her beer. “Oh yeah?”

“She told me about Justin and how you helped her with that situation.”

“Uh huh.”

“Are you sure you’re in a position to be giving her advice?”

Melanie’s mouth dropped open. It was a rare occasion indeed when the quality of her counsel was called into question, and it stung.

“Close your mouth, dear. It’s not that I don’t think your heart is in the right place, but why are you advising your sister on how to break up with someone?”

“Because that’s what she needs.” Melanie cleared her throat to keep the defensiveness out of her voice. “Justin is a jerk and he cheated on her. She needed help getting over him.”

“What she needs is to know how to make a relationship work, and I’m sorry, but that is a subject upon which you’re in no position to give advice.”

The stab of this statement was undeniable, but before she could address it, there was a point of clarification that needed attention.

“So you think she should have tried to make it work with Justin?”

“I’m not saying that at all. What I’m saying is that if you’re going to give advice to your little sister, it needs to be more balanced. As it is, you’re just telling her how to get out of a relationship, and if she gets good enough at it, she’s bound to end up just like you.”

The barbs were coming so fast now that Melanie was reeling, barely able to focus after the right jab before the left hook caught her chin. She downed several swallows of her beer and took a deep breath, kept her voice low.

“First of all, Mom, there would be nothing wrong with Jen ending up just like me. However, I doubt that would ever happen. She and I are very different people.”

Catherine cocked her head to one side and smiled sweetly. “How so?”

Melanie could sense there was a trap here, that her mother would be making her point on whatever answer Melanie gave, so she was grateful that the waitress chose that moment to deliver their lunch. She bit into a fish taco as she scanned her answer for gaping holes in reason. Finding none, she still delivered it with an unaccountable sense of dread.

“Jen is going to be dating someone else by the time the weekend rolls around. That’s just how she is.”

“And why do you think she’s that way?”

“Honestly? I think it’s because of Dad.”

“So you think she’s trying to replace your father?”

“I think she’s trying to fill that void, yes. But I don’t think she chooses men very well, which is why none of them work out.”

“Well at least she’s trying.”

Melanie ignored this. “Sarah used to do the same thing. Only she married them. It’s only because she got better at choosing the men she dated that she found Richard.”

“Yes, but again, at least she was trying.”

“What’s your point, Mom?”

“My point is that you seem to think that your sisters are the ones who didn’t adjust well to the loss of their father. In fact, I’d say it’s you who hasn’t adjusted, even after all these years.”

Melanie stopped eating and stared at her mother. Catherine took the opportunity to continue picking even, balanced bites out of her salmon Caesar salad. Her mother would never order something that one ate with one’s hands, and Melanie knew Catherine hated it when she did. As children, she and her sisters hardly ever had finger-food. Catherine thought it was unnecessarily messy and hated the way it looked.

Melanie was still mulling over her mother’s last statement. It was complete nonsense of course. Melanie had always been the strong one, the one who could get through anything, the rock that her sisters came to for support. She was the one with the MBA, the award-winning real estate agent, and now one of the top consultants in her field. And here her mother was saying she wasn’t well adjusted?

“Ok, Mom. How do you figure that?”

“You’ve insulated yourself because you don’t want to lose anyone the way you lost your father.”

“Bullshit.”

“Language.”

“I just haven’t found the right guy yet.”

“And that’s another thing. You blame the men you date for your inability to have a relationship. You never take into account what
you
might be doing wrong.”

Melanie leaned in and snapped, “But you’ve got that part figured out, haven’t you? Why don’t you tell me what I’m doing wrong.”

Catherine let loose another of her exasperated sighs. She shook her head and resumed eating. After a few minutes, the tension at the table cooled a few degrees.