Time of My Life (4 page)

Chapter Four

I
arrive early at Café Largo, a characteristic from my old life that I could never shake. Henry, though so fastidious and meticulous in nearly every aspect of his life, ran perpetually late—an anomaly that only pure human quirk can explain. I’d learned to adjust to it—waiting in restaurants, waiting at home for him to come to relieve me so I could finally, desperately, have a girls’ night out, waiting for him to get out of the house while Katie and I were already parked in the car—but my personal clock never matched up with his. Most couples do. Most couples acclimate so that a year into the relationship, the early one is almost always constantly running a good twenty minutes behind or vice versa, but Henry and I, well, we just never clicked.

I’m ensconced in a back booth, my fingers keeping time on the citrus-colored tiled table to the saxophone that soared in the background, when I look up and see Jack coming straight toward me.

“Hey,” he says, leaning down to brush my lips against his, his lavender tie skimming the tabletop. He surveys me, his brow furrowing. “How do you feel? You look . . .” He tilts his head to the right and pauses. “You look different. Did you do something with your hair?”

I scoot over, and he slides into the sparkly red leather booth beside me. I peer over at him rather than answer.
Jack!
I want to clamp onto his shoulders and shake him to make sure that he is real.

Instead, I press my palm over his sweaty hand.

“No,” I say. “I haven’t done anything with my hair.” I smile. “But it’s nice to see you.”

He scrunches his face as if I’d just told him that the world was flat.

“But I’m feeling better, much better, so don’t worry. Maybe I just needed a good day of rest.”

“Maybe,” he mumbles, unconvinced, and reaches for a menu, pulling his hand from under mine.

If I looked lighter, different, it might have been because of how I spent my day, because I felt lighter, different, too. After the cab had deposited me back at our apartment and after it became permanently clear that there were no take-backs, that this wasn’t some sort of fluke or sick joke or eccentric dream gone bad, and after I plopped on my couch and tried to breathe and breathe and breathe, I made a decision. A shaky one at first, but then I carved it into my soul and swore to abide by it:
This was my second chance, this was what I’d been fervently hoping for.
So I opted to embrace it rather than run. It was, after all, all I could do, anyway. And with my decision planted, I looked up my old number at work, which, after finding it, came rushing back to me. How could I ever have forgotten it?

My career, right up until we packed it in for Westchester, was the one place I slid into the comfort of my skin. There were no reminders of a mother who ditched her family, no hints that I might be mired in a stagnant relationship with a boyfriend who loved me, yes, but who lacked a certain ambition and who might be a tad too worshipful of his own mother, no loneliness that plagued me even when I cuddled with Jackson underneath our IKEA headboard or drank merlot with my equally up-and-coming friends at the latest restaurant written up in
Time Out New York.
At work, I came into my own, as if I were inhabiting another person entirely, thriving on the creative highs and camaraderie of building a campaign from the ground up.

So, with a clearer head, I redialed Gene and assured him I’d be back tomorrow, in time for the meeting with Coke. Only this time, rather than spending the twenty-four hours leading up to the meeting in a frantic flurry trying to nail the quintessential pitch, I spent the afternoon rereading old e-mails, revisiting old photographs, reacquainting myself with my former life. A life, which viewed from wiser, well-worn glasses, didn’t look so bad to begin with. Besides, I already had the perfect pitch for Coke, the one that would launch my career like a rocket ship, on a course that even I couldn’t have anticipated. A course that would slam into a brick wall when Henry’s sperm collided with my egg, and we’d produce the delicious Katie, who was born the color of spring calla lilies and who, though I’d sacrificed just about everything for her, I loved more wholly than anything else I’d ever touched my life through.

“Hellooooo!” I look up to see Megan,
Megan!,
standing by our booth.

“Meg!” I shout, and dig my elbows into Jack to push him out of the booth. “Meg! Oh my God, it’s good to see you!” I throw my arms around her neck, and out of the corner of my eye, I can see her shoot a perplexed look at Jack, who just replies with an “I have no idea what the hell is wrong with her” shrug.

“Er, Jill, I saw you three days ago,” she says, breaking our embrace, even as I try not to let go.
That’s right, we did! God, how I missed my single life, when Jack and I painted the city, out every night, the rush of undiscovered opportunity always beckoning.

“I know, I know,” I say. “But you just look . . . you look glowing.” Her eyebrows dance downward, and my own eyes widen. Have I given anything away?
Crap.
I usher her into the booth, and plop back down on the other side of Jack.

“So . . .” I rub my hands together. “Let’s order! And then let’s share. What’s going on with you? How have you been? Where’s Tyler? I’ve
missed
you.” I reach my hands across the table to clutch hers and smile.

“Seriously, Jill, what’s going on? You’re starting to freak me out.”

“How so?” I ask, and take a deep gulp of water: I’m suddenly parched.

“Well, for one, you’re talking very, very fast. For two, you’re acting like we don’t do this every other week. For three . . . ,” her voice drifted. “You look different. Did you self-tan or something?”

“I know!” Jack chimes in. “I said the same thing.”

“I did nothing,” I reply, as my blood rushes to my chest, and I hope that my hives don’t run flush the way they’re prone to during fits of anxiety. “You guys are ridiculous!” But even as I say this, I can hear my pitch is off a decibel and the words come out like race cars.

“It must be the meds talking then,” says Jack, just as Tyler makes his entry, and I bound from my seat to nearly tackle him. After Megan’s death, Tyler spiraled downward into an abyss of steely blankness, as if Megan were the only color in his life, and without it, there was only white, black, and gray. He numbed his pain with booze, and slowly, wrenchingly, pulled away from all of us, isolating himself in an angry cocoon where none of us could reach him and he didn’t want to be reached.

But now, here he was, so vibrant with his ruddy cheeks and his strawberry hair and his paunch that Megan playfully rubbed when she (re)broke the news about her impending pregnancy, and said, “Pretty soon, I’ll actually be bigger than him.”

I try to feign surprise at their announcement. I push glee into my voice and ask the waitress for another round of beers (“None for her,” I kid, as if the poor struggling actress who bused tables for a living was in on the joke), and I imitate the revelry that imbued our lives that night years ago, even though I knew that it would be so short-lived, too short-lived.
But why not?
I think.
Why not savor this moment and drink it in as it’s meant to be swallowed?
Let Megan and Tyler taste this happiness because soon enough, in six short days when she’d find blood in her underwear and cramps that haunted her from the inside out, they’d be stripped of all that. And then, four years later, when Meg is asleep at the wheel, they’d be stripped of so much more.

So I drink like there is literally no tomorrow, as if I don’t know what that tomorrow would bring, and I bask in the glow of finding my second chance. I slip my hand under the table, and I weave my fingers into Jack’s, and I try to forget that what happens next might already be fated, that we might all be fated to make the same mistakes over and back and over again, and that my coming back, my second chance might not be a second chance at all.

F
IVE HOURS LATER,
I stare at the ceiling, long after Jack has passed out beside me, and listen to his gentle wheeze of air—in out, in out, in out. I roll my thumb over my ring finger, an unconscious habit, and am struck by its nakedness. My rings, my signs of devotion to Henry and to my family, are no longer there, taken, gone, just like everything else from my future self.

I watch light bounce off the walls from the cars on the street below. Henry. Where was he now? There was no way of knowing. We weren’t set to meet for another three months,
if I choose to meet him again,
I remind myself. Jack rolls to his side, lets out a sigh, and flings an arm around me.

It had only been a day, but still, I didn’t miss Henry. I should; I knew that I should, but what I felt wasn’t the ache of a wife who might have lost her husband. What I felt instead was relief. Relief from the mundanity of our lives. Henry provided so many things—security, warmth, a round, solid partner—but zeal, fire, no, not them, and now, free from the suffocation of my seemingly claustrophobic relationship, I only felt free.

Maybe this is why my mother left.
The thought startles me, shaking something inside. Maybe she couldn’t take the passive familiarity that comes from sharing a bathroom or swapping the same stories night after night over dinner or scraping bird shit off the Range Rover that was supposed to give you that shiny, picturesque life. Maybe it was all too much, or really, all too little for her. Maybe she dreamed of something more, and when I came along, and then Andy, my brother, came along, she couldn’t take one more fucking minute of the Stepfordian existence that she’d built with my father.

Not that my life with Henry was Stepfordian. My life with Henry was perfectly placid. Ours was the marriage that people looked at and said, “They’ll make it. They’re not going to be the ones to split because he chased around his secretary or she slowly drank herself to death.” We
were
that couple in the Range Rover ad, only ours was the picture taken after five years of marriage, after we’d stopped noticing the other’s intricacies, after we’d already wooed each other and pledged ourselves to each other, and had, thus, in many ways, surrendered to complacency.

I’d read about this in
Redbook
—that scientists have discovered that in the first year or so of marriage, your brain receptors still register chemicals that make you want to dry hump your spouse on every flat surface that you can find. Then slowly, these chemicals abate, and eventually, if you don’t find ways to jump-start them—I remember that the doctor who was interviewed suggested exhilarating experiences such as skydiving—then you’re stuck waddling around the vestiges of your younger libidos and memories of what you once had.

I’d mentioned this to Henry one night when he was calling from San Francisco to say good night to Katie before her 7:30 (sharp!) bedtime.

“Maybe we should go skydiving together,” I said, chopping a cucumber in our granite-countered, white-tiled kitchen. My head was angled to hold the phone between my ear and shoulder, and somewhere within one of my vertebrae, a cramp was beginning to form.

“Where’s this coming from?” He laughed. “Besides, you’re scared of flying.”

“I know,” I sort of whined. “But we need to relight the spark. And I read that this might do it.”

“Our spark is just fine,” he answered. “Stop worrying about our spark. Can you put Katie on before I run to a meeting?”

“Sure.” I set down the knife and wandered into Katie’s perky pink playroom, where she was pulling out the hair of a now nearly bald blond doll she’d insisted that I buy her during a two-minute trip to Toys “R” Us for a neighbor child’s birthday present. Henry blew her kisses over the phone, then rattled off a quick “love you” (to me), before he dashed toward his waiting clients.

So now, with our spark nearly extinguished, I hardly feel bad about not missing him.
It’s not like I didn’t warn him,
I think. It’s not like I didn’t leave that goddamn
Redbook
article on his nightstand when he got home from his trip and asked him to read it so that he, too, could see the stupid signs that our marriage was a plundered ship that was slowly sinking under its own weight.

“Hey,” Jackson says softly, rousing me from the memory. “Why are you still up?” His voice is creaky from sleep.

I shrug, though he can’t see it in the darkness of the bedroom.

“Come here.” He pulls toward me, and I inhale his scent of sandalwood and vanilla that even seven years later always reminded me of him, even when I was still close enough to remember why we’d come undone. As the years went on, those reasons, as they tend to do, became murkier, like a pond after a rainstorm, and after I got home from my power walk with Ainsley on which she broke the news of his upcoming wedding, I locked myself in the bathroom and heaved out purging tears for nearly thirty minutes. Then I splashed my face with water, dotted concealer under my eyes, and headed toward the market. I had dinner to plan, a family to feed, after all.

Jack shifts himself on top of me and tugs down the strap of my tank top, fluttering kisses on my shoulder and across my collarbone. In response, my hips rise to his without question, and he presses back down on mine. Quickly, too quickly, I’m tossing my shirt over my head, and he’s making his way over my breasts, down to my belly button, then back up again, until the wait is almost unbearable, and I pull him inside of me.