Good at Being Alive(99)
The dots circle as he types his response. I wait with bated breath for him to give me something, anything, that indicates what he feels.
And then his response lands on my phone with the weight of a punch to the gut.
Theo: Okay.
Okay.
Not I’m crazy about you and I’m sorry I haven’t said it. Not even I can’t swear I know where this is heading, but I’m happy with you and I want to see where this takes us.
Just okay.
I swallow hard. He’s got other things going on, but yeah…I’d hoped he’d say or do something more. That he’d tell me he was flying out, that he’d call though I told him not to, that he’d declare his feelings in some unequivocal way.
But that isn’t who he’s been, nor is it who he’s likely to become.
And I’m pretty sure it’s what I need.
Theo
Being in love is as awful as I’d suspected it would be.
I stare at the phone in my hand with no idea what to do next. I miss her. I miss her the way you miss oxygen when you’re drowning. The way you miss your home when you leave it for the first time. I miss her in all these ways and I miss her beyond that too.
She’s right, of course, about everything. I’ve given her nothing. I’ve promised nothing, and it had less to do with this story going public than it did the fact that I was still hoping I could save myself. There are pieces of Bex—just like her mother—that are unknowable. She is capable of understanding things I’ll never be able to grasp and doing things with such subtlety that I won’t even know they’re happening. I wanted to avoid a relationship because you can never entirely know another person…and now I’ve fallen for the most unknowable person of all and probably destroyed any chance I had with her.
I go for a long run, hoping to drive this ache from my chest, but it’s still there when I return to my barren flat, a flat that no longer serves me. Do I actually miss Rick and Jessie’s house? No. But I miss the sight of my glowing wife there, with a frayed blanket over her legs and some unwieldy tome or unexpected magazine in her lap. I miss her mattress and mine, pushed together on the ancient shag carpet, our hands linked as we fall asleep under the hum of the air-conditioning.
Until Bex, and in spite of owning the company, I was never a fan of travel—it seemed like a lot of effort when London had enough of everything I need: museums, beautiful architecture, great restaurants. Now, however, I’d give London up in a heartbeat if I could be exploring the world with her instead.
Dawn comes, and the story breaks. I’m made to look exactly the way I knew I would: like a suave lothario with a reputation, one who was “close” with the husband he cuckolded, though I’d met Wendy’s husband only a handful of times over the past decade. My lawyers will demand a retraction, but the story is halfway across the world by now. People are going to remember what they read today, not the press’s one-line clarification a week hence.
It’s only six a.m. in New York when Lars calls. I let it go to voicemail. What the fuck am I going to do? How do I fix this? I’ve probably ruined any chance that the show will get picked up. The company’s done. Bex will try to forgive me, but I doubt she can. Not when I kept her in the dark about everything—not when I can’t give her the things she needs.
I spend the day in my apartment, ignoring the ringing phone—reporters asking for a comment—and photographers outside.
Instead, I swipe through all the pictures I took of Bex when I was pretending to photograph the view. I’d tell her to get out of the way, then make sure she was in the outer third of the frame and hope she didn’t notice.
Pulling her hair back after a long run in Paris—I told her I wanted a picture of the Seine. In Capri, laughing at something and so lovely the camera barely caught the scenery behind her. Holding the decapitated doll by its leg in Amsterdam, shivering on a black sand beach in Iceland. I was gone for her long before I ever recognized it.
I pick up the phone for at least the twentieth time and put it down again. She asked me not to call and anything I say will be insufficient. She never knew where she stood with her family. I can’t be one more person in her life giving her a pat on the head but letting her think she’s not my world.
When I’ve gone through her photos for at least the tenth time, I look up “Bright Star,” the Keats poem Rick used to quote to Bex’s mother.
It describes a star, serene and mysterious. A star that surveys the earth, removed from it, beyond it—I’d have assumed it was just about a star, but I guess Rick thought it was about a woman he couldn’t understand but didn’t want to be away from.
It’s how he felt about his wife. It’s precisely how I feel about Bex, the girl who peacefully floated beside me in Porto Moniz, barely a year after she got arrested for threatening to punch a horse. Who’d make a joke about her dead family and kiss a stranger, graveside, then burst into unexpected tears.
It bothered me that I couldn’t understand her, because not understanding her meant I could never predict whether she’d stay.
Except you can’t know whether anyone will stay. You can’t know if they’ll choose someone else, if they’ll take the wrong train, if they’ll jump off a balcony. A streak of sunlight—it can’t be held. You can only stand beneath it for as long as it chooses to remain. Maybe that’s what real love is. If you get lucky, it lasts. If not, your sunlight vanishes in the most painful way possible, the way it did for my brother three years ago or for Bex’s dad when his first wife died.