Chapter 21 I Looked for You Inside of Everyone Else #2
I took her hand in mine and did what needed to be done.
“Elizabeth, I’m sorry I wasn’t a better husband to you.
I’m happy for you and Brad. I wish you both many years of marital and familial bliss.
For the sake of all that is good, including our workplace sanity, let’s never, ever talk about our crappy marriage again. Please?” My eyes were pleading.
She nodded in agreement. “I’m sorry, too, Matt. I went about everything the wrong way.”
I released her hand. She smiled warmly, sympathetically, almost piteously.
It was better to let her think I was lonely and pining for her than to fuel the fiery resentment she had always had toward me because I never got over Grace.
Her suspicions were right, but I would never admit the truth to her.
Brad had been my friend since I’d first started at National Geographic as an intern.
I had met him around the same time I met Elizabeth.
He’d always had a thing for her and she’d always had a thing for me.
I’d almost felt like an asshole for marrying her, so when she cheated on me with him, I wasn’t shocked.
In fact, I’d had a strange urge to high-five him. Isn’t that terrible?
Elizabeth went back to her office and I headed to Brad’s office. It was time to be the bigger man, or at least the equally flawed, human man. I had blown the phone call with Grace, but it had shaken me loose; I didn’t want to stay in this rut of self-pity and hatred forever.
Standing in the doorway of Brad’s office, I cleared my throat.
He looked up at me from the other side of his desk. “Heyyyy, man.” He always stretched the “hey” out, stonerlike.
“Brad, I just came by to say congratulations on the pregnancy. Well done, my friend. We all know I couldn’t have done it better myself.”
“Matt—” He tried to stop me.
“I’m kidding, Brad. I’m happy for you guys. I swear.”
“Yeah?” He quirked an eyebrow.
I nodded. “Yeah.”
“How ’bout a drink after work. Just the two of us?”
Well, I’m sure you fucked my wife on every available surface of the apartment I used to own, and now she’s pregnant with your child, so . . .
I clapped my hands together. “What the hell. Why not?”
We went to a hoity-toity cocktail lounge on the Upper West Side near my old apartment, which he and Elizabeth now shared. I fucking hated that bar, but it was familiar territory for both of us.
My scotch was served in a martini glass with an ice cube. There were so many things wrong with the drink but I downed it anyway. “Are cigars in order yet?”
“No, that’s after the baby’s born. You’re not really into kids, are you?”
“No, I hate them. I just want an excuse to smoke a nice Cuban,” I lied, for fun. What else is there in life?
“Well, the time will come. By the way, your sister in-law called. She’s sending us the antique bassinet.”
“What?”
“Yeah, she thought it should go to us. She thinks of Elizabeth as a sister.”
The bassinet was a family heirloom; it was meant to be kept within the family. “Monica is not the damned keeper of the bassinet.”
Brad picked up on my hostility and tried to change the subject. “Are you dating anyone these days?”
“No, just fucking,” I lied again, for amusement. “Finally got rid of that old ball and chain, you know?” I was finding it hard to stick to my goal of being the bigger man here.
“That’s great for you,” Brad said, uncomfortably.
“Another scotch please!” I called out.
“You know, sometimes Lizzy gets pissed at me for the smallest things. Like the toilet seat—she’s mad if I leave it up, but she’s mad if I leave it down.” He looked at me and shook his head. “She says my aim isn’t good enough.”
I actually felt sorry for him. “Listen, you’re gonna have to learn to piss sitting down. It’s part of being married. It’s actually kind of relaxing, like a little break.”
“Really?”
“Totally.”
My second scotch came. I drank it faster than the first.
“You know, I forgot to tell you that Lizzy found another box of your pictures and some rolls of undeveloped film. She said she wanted you to come by and pick them up since we’re . . . you know . . . trying to prepare the spare room.”
Jesus. “Okay.”
He checked his phone. “Shit, we have Lamaze class soon. I gotta go, man. Want to come up to the apartment and grab that box?”
“Sure, let’s go.”
We walked the few blocks to the apartment, hardly speaking along the way.
Once we got to the building, I shuffled behind him into the lobby.
The two scotches, combined with the weirdness of being in my old building, suddenly hit me.
“You know what, Brad? I’m just gonna wait here for you to bring the box down. ”
“Are you sure?”
“Yeah, I’ll wait.” I smiled weakly and took a seat near the elevator. A few minutes later, he returned with a dark gray plastic tote.
“Thought you said it was a box?”
“Uh, yeah, it was, but Lizzy took everything out of the box and put it in here for more efficient storage.”
“More efficient storage?”
He could barely make eye contact with me. “Yep.”
I was sure Elizabeth had gone through the entire box and thrown half of it away. I wasn’t surprised. “Thanks, Brad.”
“See ya, buddy.” He slapped me on the back as I turned to walk away.
Once I got back to my loft, I sat on my old leather couch, turned on U2’s “With or Without You,” kicked my feet up on the plastic tote, and closed my eyes.
I imagined that I had built a life, not just a career.
I imagined that my walls were covered with pictures of my family, not animals from the fucking Serengeti.
Taking a deep breath, I leaned forward and opened the tote.
It was everything from that time, preserved in black-and-white photographs.
Grace and me in Washington Square Park. At Tisch.
In our dorm. In the lounge. Grace playing the cello.
Grace naked on my bed, taking a photo of me, the camera masking her face.
I ran my finger over it. Let me see your face, I remember saying.
Grace and me in Los Angeles, playing Scrabble at my mom’s house.
My mom teaching Grace how to throw pottery in the Louvre.
Grace sleeping on my chest as I looked up into the camera.
Slowly, I took each photo out of the tote. The last photo I pulled out was taken on the day I left for South America. It was what they call a “selfie” now. Grace and I were lying in bed, looking up into the lens as I held the camera over us and clicked the shutter.
We looked so happy, so content, so in love.
What happened to us?
At the bottom of the bag, I found a cassette tape and an undeveloped roll of film. I removed it from the canister and held it up to the light. It was in color, something I rarely used back then; it wasn’t until I started working for National Geographic that I used color on a regular basis.
I got up, set the roll on the counter, popped the cassette into an old tape player, and drank until I passed out, listening to Grace and her friend, Tatiana, playing a violin-and-cello duet of “Eleanor Rigby.” They played it over and over, and each time, at the end, I could hear Grace giggling and Tatiana shushing her.
I fell asleep with a smile on my face, even though I felt like one of those lonely people they talk about in the song.
THERE WERE STILL a few film-processing stores around downtown. The PhotoHut was long gone, but I found a camera store on my way to work the next morning and dropped off the mysterious roll of film.
When I arrived at the office, I spotted Elizabeth in the office kitchen, near the coffeepot. “I thought you’re not supposed have caffeine when you’re pregnant?” I said.
“I’m allowed to have a cup,” she shot back as I brushed past her. I smirked and walked toward my cube. I could feel her walking behind me, her ballet flats shuffling against the carpet, kicking up electrical currents. She had a habit of dragging her feet.
I flipped on my computer and turned to see her standing behind me, waiting to acknowledge her. Her hair was sticking up, floating off her shoulders from the static electricity. I couldn’t help but laugh.
“What?”
“Your hair.” I pointed, like a five-year-old.
She scowled and wrapped her hair in a bun, grabbing a pencil off my desk to hold it in place.
“Thanks for getting a drink with Brad and picking up the tote last night.”
“Thanks for organizing my personal shit for me. Did you toss anything from the original box?”
“No, I could barely look inside of it. It was like a shrine to Grace.”
“Why were you so determined that I get all that stuff back, then?”
She shrugged. “I don’t know. I feel bad, I guess.”
“What exactly do you feel bad about?” I leaned back in my chair.
“Just . . . you know. How . . . I don’t know.”
“Tell me,” I urged with a smug grin. I couldn’t help but take pleasure as she struggled for words. She was clearly still envious of Grace.
“Just the way you put her on a pedestal and talked about her, like she was the one who got away.”
I leaned forward. “You’re not telling me everything—you’re doing that weird eyebrow thing that you do whenever you lie.”
“What weird eyebrow thing?”
“You wiggle one eyebrow, all crazylike. I don’t know how you do it. It’s like a creepy twitch.”
She self-consciously raised a hand to her brow. “It’s nothing that you don’t already know. I mean, we were so busy back then.”
“What are you talking about?”
Elizabeth’s eyes darted all over the room, like she was mapping out her exit strategy. She looked down at her overpriced shoes. “Grace called and left a message for you once, and . . . it was just . . .”
I stood. “What are you saying, Elizabeth?” I didn’t realize I was shouting until the room went completely silent. I could feel our colleagues peering around the walls of their cubicles at us.
“Shhh, Matt!” She leaned in. “Let me explain. It was while we were in South Africa.” She crossed her arms and lowered her voice. “You and I were already fucking. I didn’t know why she was calling.”