“I know.”
“It was interesting to finally see it,” she said. “I liked your roommates.”
“They liked you too.”
“Really?” She seemed genuinely pleased by this information. “What did they say?”
“I talked to Sang the other night. He thinks you’re cute. I got the feeling the Friedlins liked you too.”
“They were great. I’m just sorry Max wasn’t there.”
“He’s been having some problems with his parents.”
“I know.” She gave me a funny look. “He told me all about it. Five or six times at least.”
“He did?”
“We talk a lot on the phone,” she said. “You didn’t know that?”
I should have known, of course. The evidence had been right there in front of me for weeks. Why else would Max have been so pissed at me? Why else would he have treated my private business as though it were his private business too? Even so, the possibility that he and Cindy might have struck up an independent friendship had never occurred to me. They belonged to different worlds, separated by borders only I was allowed to cross, or so I liked to pretend. Objectively speaking, I understood that it was the height of arrogance to think this way, but it was hard for me to be objective about my own life and harder still not to feel like they’d betrayed me in some way, sneaking around behind my back.
“I know you talked,” I lied. “I just didn’t know you talked about his parents.”
“Are you kidding?” She laughed, scraping a piece of something
off a fork with her thumbnail. “That’s all he talks about. That and
Taxi Driver.”
“And what an asshole I am.”
“That too,” she agreed, without smiling to soften the blow.
All that was left to wash was the roasting pan. She transferred it from the counter to the sink and squirted some detergent onto the greasy bottom. When it had filled up with hot sudsy water, she turned off the faucet and wiped her hands on her jeans, leaving sharp imprints on the denim.
“I have such a sweet tooth these days,” she said, wandering over to a cabinet by the refrigerator and pulling out a bag of gumdrops. She ripped open the bag and dumped the candies into a bowl. “His parents were a lot nicer than I expected. The way he talks about them, you’d think they were these horrible rich people dripping with diamonds and furs.”
“That’s what he can’t forgive,” I explained. “They’re not-so-horrible rich people with good taste who love him.”
She rolled her eyes, as if to suggest that everyone should have such problems, and popped a yellow gumdrop into her mouth.
“I can’t believe they’re in Paris.” She shook her head in what appeared to be genuine wonderment that anyone could actually be in Paris. “Can you imagine?”
“They travel all the time. Anywhere you can think of, they’ve probably been there.”
“I can’t wait to go to Hawaii.” She glanced at the clock over the sink as if her flight were departing in a matter of minutes. “I hear it’s incredible.”
“There’s a girl from Hawaii in my entryway,” I said, unable to stop myself. I recognized this habit as a bad one, my need to establish a personal connection with any subject under discussion. I hadn’t been this way before college, I was almost sure of it. “She says that after you’ve lived there for a while you don’t even notice how beautiful it is. You might as well be in New Jersey.”
“Kevin’s taking me,” she said.
“Kevin?”
“My old boyfriend. We’re going there for our honeymoon.”
I held up one hand, trying to get her to slow down. The moment of truth had apparently arrived, much sooner than I’d expected, and already I was stumped. I couldn’t remember her ever mentioning an old boyfriend named Kevin. In fact, there was only one old boyfriend of hers that I knew of.
“Your boss from Medi-Mart? I thought he was married.”
“It’s sort of a pre-honeymoon,” she admitted. “The divorce won’t be final for about a year.”
“Doesn’t he have kids of his own?”
She looked at me. For the first time all night, I thought I detected signs of hostility in her face. After a few seconds, her gaze traveled slowly downward to the soggy dish towel in my hand, which I’d unconsciously twisted into a tight rope, as if I’d been trying to wring it dry.
The gumdrops were
stale and chewy, with more than enough adhesive power to make you fear for your fillings. Nonetheless, I kept reaching for the next one and the next one and the one after that, matching Cindy drop for drop as she tried her best to fill me in on the strange turn her life had taken.
“I made the decision on the way home from New Haven. The next day I went down to the store and told him I would marry him.”
“You told him?”
“Yup.”
“And he said yes? just like that?”
She nodded, clearly gratified by the amazement in my voice.
“He never really got over me. After I broke up with him he kept calling and writing these crazy letters. He said he’d leave his wife, run away with me to California, anything I wanted.”
“Did you tell him?”
“Tell him what?”
“You know. That you’re pregnant … with—”
“With
what?”
My voice faltered. “Someone else’s kid.”
“What do you think?” There was something almost playful in her smile, and I could see she enjoyed having the upper hand for once. “He’s not stupid, you know.”
“And he didn’t mind?”
“I don’t hear him complaining.”
I still felt lost, like I’d wandered into the theater when the movie was halfway over. I needed to backtrack a little, to start somewhere a little closer to the beginning.
“So why did you guys break up in the first place? I don’t think you ever told me.”
“You never seemed very interested.”
“I’m interested now.”
She made a face. The mischievous pleasure of a moment ago had faded; she seemed a lot more like herself or at least the version of herself I was familiar with.
“I got pregnant.” She glanced up at the clock again. “The fall after we graduated.”
“I didn’t know that.”
“It’s not something I advertise.”
“So what happened?”
She examined her fingernails. Her voice was soft.
“I went to a clinic.”
“Is that what Kevin wanted?”
She seemed impatient with the question, as if I hadn’t been listening closely enough.
“He wanted to marry me. That’s all he’s wanted since the day we met.”
“So why didn’t you?”
She looked at me like I was an idiot.
“I didn’t love him. I thought I deserved to spend the rest of my life with someone I was in love with.”
“But you don’t think so now?”
I meant the question to sound sincere and apologetic, but it must not have come out that way. Her smile was bitter.
“Right now he seems like a pretty good bargain.”
She was watching me closely, and I squirmed under her gaze, grappling with an unexpected sense of loss. I’d never thought of Cindy as a person to be madly in love with, someone you’d ruin your life to run away with. But now that she had revealed herself as precisely this kind of person, I wondered how I’d missed it.
“Anything else you need to know?” she asked me.
I had lots of questions, but it didn’t seem like the right time to ask any of them.
“I don’t think so.”
“Okay,” she said. “Then let me ask you something.”
“Fire away.”
“How do you feel about all this?”
“All this?” I asked.
“Yeah,” she said. “This mess we’re in.”
“That’s a hard question.”
“Take your time.”
I certainly knew how I should have felt. I should have felt awful about putting Cindy in a position where she thought she had no choice but to marry someone she didn’t love and even worse about indirectly helping to break up Kevin’s family. Most of all, though, I should have felt ashamed of myself for letting another guy take responsibility for a child I’d fathered. This was a direct violation of what I’d been taught all my life was the most basic definition of manhood—a man took care of his kids. You could have the crappiest job in the world, a wife you couldn’t stand to be in the same room with, a rustbucket car with bald tires and a cracked windshield, and a house with a leaky roof, but if you took care of your kids, you could hold your head up around anyone. Certainly this was the principle on which my father had based his own life. If it ever slipped my mind, he reminded me every time we saw something
on the TV news that mentioned a single mother on welfare. “Where’s the father?” he demanded time and time again, his anger undiminished by repetition. “Off making a baby with someone else? Drinking wine out of a paper bag on the street corner? Why don’t they ask her where the father is?”
But when I looked inside myself in response to Cindy’s question, I could detect only muted traces of guilt and embarrassment, and even then I couldn’t help wondering if what I was noticing were not these emotions themselves but the void created by their absence, since what I was mainly feeling just then was a combination of wild gratitude and awestruck relief, as if I’d just been rescued from a riptide or carried out of a burning building. I sat up straight in my chair and let go of a deep breath, like someone who had just completed some serious reflection.
“I feel okay,” I said carefully. “This seems like a pretty good solution for everyone involved.”
There wasn’t much
left to be said after that. We exchanged searching looks—mine meant to communicate sorrow, hers stoical determination—and made a few futile stabs at small talk that ended when I looked at the clock and pretended to be surprised at how late it was.
“Jeez,” I said. “I better get going. Tomorrow’s a work day.”
“You sure?” she asked. “Kevin’s coming in a few minutes. I thought you might like to meet him. Only if you want to, I mean.”
Sometimes people you think you know say things that suddenly make them seem like total strangers. Did she really think I wanted to meet Kevin? Or was she just trying to exact some kind of payback for the humiliation I’d inflicted on her in New Haven? Neither theory seemed to add up—she didn’t seem naive enough for the first or calculating enough for the second. Maybe she just thought it was a good idea for Kevin and me to at least know what each other looked like, given the peculiar bond we’d be sharing for the rest of our lives.
“I’d like to,” I said, in a tone that clearly indicated otherwise. “But I’m trying to get to bed around nine these days. I can barely open my eyes at four in the morning as it is.”
“Whatever,” she said. “It was just a suggestion.”
Without another word, she got my coat from the hall closet and walked me to the door. She put her hand on the doorknob, but didn’t turn it.
“I guess I won’t be seeing you for a while,” she said.
“I guess not.”
She looked up at me, her eyes shining strangely in the dim hallway.
“You’re just going to go back to school and forget all about me.”
“No, I won’t.”
She shook her head, but I didn’t know if she was asking me not to talk or apologizing for making a scene at the last minute.
“Cindy,” I said.
I put my arms around her, unable to fathom how it had come to this. Her breath was hot and damp against my neck, and I was startled by how good it felt to be holding her again.
“I wish you could have loved me,” she said. “It would have been so much better.”
I held her tighter, willing myself not to think about the life I wasn’t going to have.
“You deserve to be happy,” I whispered.
She pulled away with a gasp, looking up at me with an expression that seemed to combine hope and alarm in equal measures.
“We all do,” I added, in case she’d misunderstood me. “Everybody deserves it.”
I’d long ago
formed an image of Kevin as a middle-aged Lothario in a short-sleeved polyester shirt, so it took me longer than it should have to identify the cool-looking guy leaning against his car in front of Cindy’s house. He was tall and skinny, with shaggy blond hair hanging past the collar of his denim jacket and a kind of loose-limbed
slouch that had probably been perfected during years of smoking in high school bathrooms; he looked like a soft breeze might knock him over. If it hadn’t been for his work clothes, the gray trousers and skinny tie, you might have pegged him for a musician, or at least a guy who worked in a record store. He couldn’t have been much older than twenty-five.