The Opposite of Maybe: A Novel (2 page)

He’s wrong about this, of course, but it’s a nice sentiment. “I just hope she doesn’t hurt the home health aide too badly,” Rosie says. “She’s apparently a nice, cultured British lady. Her name is Mrs. Cynthia Lamb.”

“Maybe you should have hired Mrs. Cynthia Lions and Tigers instead.”

She strokes his arm. “Did you find Andres Schultz on the e-mail list or whatever?”

“Nope. No sign of him.”

“So, how about—?”

“What?”

“You know. Sex?”

Silence, then: “All right. I think we can make something happen here.” He closes the laptop and puts it on the floor, and takes off his glasses. “Wake up, Mr. Happy! We’re going in!”

She puts her arms around him and wiggles into position, and he starts idly kissing her cheek, only it’s not great because they’re not lined up just right, and his big scratchy chin is hurting her face, and then the way he starts rubbing her back makes it seem as though he’s cleaning a fish.

Finally she says, “Stop a minute. Just stop.”

“What are you, the director?” He lifts his head and looks at her.

“What are you thinking about?” she asks him.

He hesitates. “Do I have to tell you the truth?”

“Yeah.”

“Well, actually,” he says with a sheepish laugh, “I was kind of thinking that when we’re done here, I’m going to Google Andres Schultz.”

She removes her arms from around his neck.

“You said the truth!” he says. “You’re not allowed to say you want the truth and then get mad about it.”

“You know,” she says, “I think it’s great and all that we’re so comfortable with each other that we can have all this crazy stuff going on: the hilarious Keystone Kops falling-out-of-bed thing, and Googling people and flinging condoms about the room—but sometimes, just sometimes, wouldn’t it be nice if it was … romantic again?” She touches his ear, the soft little lobe.

He blinks. “Romantic is overrated. Sometimes you get it, and sometimes you don’t. We get laughs and realness, which has got to be better over the long haul.”

“I know,” she says. “But can’t we shift gears? We used to be able to shift gears. I think once upon a time, the phone could even ring, and we didn’t pay any attention to it. Remember that?”

He says, “There’s nothing wrong with us. This is just life. Middle-aged life.”

“I know, and I don’t want you to take this the wrong way, but don’t you ever worry about us ending up like every other couple we know? You just know that Joe and Greta are checking their e-mail during sex, and that’s probably why Greta wants to kill him all the time.”

Greta has been Rosie’s best friend since they were kids, and even back in second grade, they promised each other that when they grew up and got married, their husbands would have to be best friends, too. Who would have thought that could actually happen? But it did. And there are two other couples in their main circle of friends, also: Lynn and Greg, and Suzanne and Hinton. The eight of them have all gone on vacation together and hung out at each other’s houses for years now.

But here’s the thing: even though they’re all the same age, the others have loaded up their lives with what Jonathan calls all the “unsavory entrapments of adulthood”: big-ass houses, SUVs, stock portfolios, riding lawn mowers, scads of children, and a considerable amount of domestic bickering.

Jonathan and Rosie are the holdouts, the crazy kids who never bothered to grow up and get married. They get teased that they’re hippie artist types, and that all they do is sleep late, have lots of sex, and eat meals that all qualify as either brunch or midnight snacks. Their four-room apartment is still furnished in what Rosie thinks of as “Early Grad Student”—bricks-and-boards bookcases, an Ikea couch and table, beanbag chairs, throw rugs, and posters on the walls.
It’s cozy and comfortable and has a rooftop garden and a great view of the river, and yes, they’re happy here, but more than once she’s felt she had to defend it against the others, as if they maybe just didn’t try hard enough to get ahead. No, no, she’s explained. They
picked
this life on purpose. It wasn’t through laziness or by accident that they didn’t get married and start collecting silver and china and 401(k)s. And children.

Every now and then she can’t help pointing out that she and Jonathan actually do work very hard, and not just doing their art. Even though she did have some early amazing success and had some poems published in magazines, for years now she’s been teaching composition classes at the community college and teaching English as a second language in adult ed.

And as for Jonathan, he’d once been a promising potter—awards and prizes and reviews in the
New York Times
—and the two of them had a whole life traveling on weekends and summers going to art shows and craft fairs showing his work all over the country. But then about five years ago, he was turned down for some prestigious shows he’d always gotten into, and the shock of those rejections didn’t seem to wear off. She’d watched as he seemed to spiral down into a depression. He didn’t call it that, of course; he called it “getting realistic.” He said he’d rather have health insurance and social security benefits than creative genius, which was all bullshit anyway. He took a job in a mail-order ceramics factory, where he now makes figurines from other people’s designs.

A few months after that, he’d discovered the world of teacups and pretty soon he’d started collecting them himself. Hardly a fair substitute, from her point of view: rows and rows of neat, orderly boxes in their living room, traded for the messy richness of the wet clay, and the light in Jonathan’s
eyes. They’d stopped traveling, too; no more vagabond trips to Mexico, no more camping.

She never would have believed things would go this way—that his love for making things from glorious, squishy, formable, tactile clay would evolve into something that’s merely stewardship of untouchable old artifacts. She tells him that when he’s not home, the teacups ask her to let them out; they beg to feel the coolness of wet, life-giving tea once again, or of human lips against their rims. Once she told him she’d heard one distinctly
begging
for even a Lipton tea bag.

“You’re jealous of them, aren’t you?” he said to her once, and he wasn’t even kidding. “I think you actually see them as rivals.”

“Yeah, they’re little Lolitas,” she’d said. “Thirty-eight little Lolitas. One of these days, you’re going to come home, and I’m going to have them all out on the table, all waiting to be admired and petted.”

“Please,” he’d said. “Don’t even joke about that.”

She looks at him now across the pillow, at the deep crease between his eyebrows, the lines etched underneath his eyes, and the way his lips are pursed in slight disapproval. His life is like one big fat
NO
. And what’s going to happen if they don’t even have sex to pull them back together?

“Do you want to get up and go get breakfast?” she says.

Maybe he hears something in her voice, because he says, “Not yet. I want to pretend it’s the past, and we don’t know about Caller ID or Google.” He moves on top of her and looks down into her eyes, cradling her head in his gentle potter’s hands.

“Impossible—” she begins, but he puts his mouth on hers and gives her a long, slow, unlikely kiss, and with so many years of experience, of habit, the automatic-pilot part of them
takes over, and somehow, despite everything, the familiar rhythms begin again.

He gets up and gets the scented oil, and the air fills with the fragrance of roses and lemons as he massages her. He sweeps her long brown hair out of the way, and leans down and kisses her cheeks and neck and that spot he loves by her collarbone, and by the time he has worked his way down, they are suffused with a drowsy passion.

Afterward, they lie there quietly, touching each other, watching the way the sun slants in, how at this time of year it’s beginning to catch the glint from the river down below and flash its wavy patterns above them. In the next few months, she knows, the light will become sharper and will move all the way across the ceiling, jiggling and bouncing in the wake of the boats that will come. Another year will have gone by.

“Oh my God,” says Jonathan. He sits up. “Uh-oh. You know what happened? I forgot to put on another condom.”

The wavy patterns shudder on the ceiling. “You forgot?” she says. “How could you forget?” But she knows why. He’s not used to them. Mostly she uses a diaphragm, but a couple of weeks ago when she was washing it, she noticed it had a hole in it, but she couldn’t get an appointment for another right away, and so Jonathan said he’d wear a condom in the meantime.

She looks at him in dismay.

“Yeah. Well,
we
forgot,” he says. “You could have mentioned it, too.”

There’s something she’s supposed to do at a moment like this—go out and get some morning-after pill or something. Does she really have to jump up and hurry to a clinic? She’s got better things to do. He’s watching her, biting his lip again, waiting for the verdict.

“I think it’s all right,” she says after a moment. “One of the good things about being so damn old is that I don’t think I’m in danger of getting pregnant.”

“Why? When does menopause come?”

“Oh, it comes when it wants to. My periods are already weird. I think I’m halfway in menopause already.”

“But you don’t know?”

“You never
know
. It’s all mysterious with periods. They do what they want.”

“I don’t know how you women cope,” he says.

“Us? I don’t see how you guys get along with those things flapping around on the front of you. That’s way worse.” She looks at him and smiles. “Oh hell. Let’s just get up and go have some breakfast,” she says. “Okay?”

“Okay,” he says. “Could I Google Andres Schultz first, do you think?”

“Do you have to?”

He smiles at her, and yes, she sees how much it means to him that Cup Number Thirty-nine might be waiting out there in San Diego, might
right now
be sitting in a white box that will come and join the others in their living room. For a moment, she feels what it must mean to him.

She’s about to say it’s fine, he should go ahead and Google Andres Schultz, but then she doesn’t have to. “Nah, you’re right. I’ll wait,” he says. “Let’s go eat.”

Once they’ve walked down the hill and are sitting in their usual comfy booth at Ruby’s Café, with coffee and the
New York Times
spread around them, she can’t help herself. She says, “Would you possibly consider coming with me to Soapie’s this afternoon? You can meet Mrs. Cynthia Lamb and watch her audition for the part. Might be fun.”

“Rosieeeee,” he says, making a face. “I’ve got things to do. I’m a busy man.”

“Come on,” she says. “Sometimes we have to stick together. It’s family.”

It’s so unfair. Jonathan is from a huge family, with whole battalions of people to shoulder the burdens of life with—a mother, aunts, uncles, cousins, brothers and sisters, all of whom call him whenever they please—but she only has this one old lady. He’s always ducking calls from his brothers who want to schmooze about their cars, and his mother, who likes to chat endlessly about her theories about life and death and celebrity divorces. He says that family is the real reason Caller ID was invented.

Suddenly a curly-haired toddler in a pink tutu materializes at Rosie’s side and hands her a doll and one half-smashed blueberry.

“I wanna sit in the window,” she says.

Surprised, Rosie lifts her up and sets her down on the cushion next to the window. From across the room, the child’s mother stands up and shrugs, mouthing,
Is this okay?
over
the din. Rosie smiles back at her and gestures that it’s fine, suddenly noticing that the place is crawling with young families today. Babies in strollers are tucked into all the available corners, kids lean out of backpacks and high chairs, and young couples, harried from the task of keeping everybody sorted out, hand babies back and forth across the table.

“Jesus, it’s like they’re giving out babies with the breakfasts,” says Jonathan. “Be careful how you phrase your order. I think they’re doing a very loose interpretation of the word
eggs
.”

The little girl looks up and claps her hands. She has a smudge on her nose that might be syrup.

“You’re very cute, you know that?” Rosie says.

Jonathan shakes his head and whispers, “What, is this the one they’re giving us? Don’t we get to pick, at least?”

“Sssh, this one’s lovely,” she says to him.

“She may be damaged, though. Look at that mark on her nose.”

“Would you stop? It’s syrup.” She laughs and wipes it off with the corner of her napkin.

He’s frowning, looking at the little girl as though she’s a wild feral animal.

“What if you just make a quick appearance, Jonathan? In and out. Say hi, smile at Mrs. Cynthia Lamb, tell her you hope she ends up working with Soapie, and then you can leave,” Rosie says.

“I’ve got a million things to do today. I work all week, and my Saturdays—”

“What? Really, what?”

He’s quiet for a moment, looking longingly at the sections of the newspaper strewn out across their table. They have a brilliant system for sharing the
Times
each week, which they’ve perfected over the years, and Rosie can see he’s
trying to surreptitiously locate the Style section for her so that he can shut her up and get on with his precious Arts section. She puts her hand down on top of the paper and looks him in the eye. Finally he clears his throat and says, “No, no, no. This is
not
going to be a negotiation, where I say what I’m doing and then you say it’s not important.”

“I already know what you’re doing today. You’re going to Google Andres Schultz and then you’re going to blog about teacups. And no, it isn’t as important as human beings, Jonathan. We have to stick together sometimes. We have families, you know.”

“My name is Sega,” says the little girl, getting up on her knees and tugging on Rosie’s sleeve. “What’s your name?”

“Sega?” Jonathan says in a low voice. “
Sega
? Seriously? After the video game system?” He gives Rosie his head-exploding look and talks in a low voice. “Do you hear this? People are naming their kids after games now?”