Gray （2019） #2
I’ll miss Rio, but I’ll survive. Hell, if I survived losing Jackson, I’d surely survive this parting. Rio was a blip on my radar, a passing diversion, and I’d known he was a bit of a nomad.
Saturday, November 16, 2019, St. Jude—MJ is the most popular anchorwoman in our city in a generation.
Thus, when out in public, she is often besieged by adoring fans, just asking if she is really Mary Jane Mitchell; others ask for autographs; and still others, more intrusive, ask her to pose for selfies with them.
This happens at Saks, at Nordstrom, at restaurants, even while standing on a corner waiting to cross the street.
Once while standing in a disorganized line at the post office, several people, recognizing her, implored her to do an exposé of the inefficiency and general incompetence of staff at the local post office.
So, I wasn’t surprised today at lunch when our drinks were interrupted by a young woman who approached and asked to take a selfie with her while her boyfriend stood nearby looking embarrassed.
After the selfie, the young woman turned to me and, eyeing me up and down, asked, “Should I take a selfie with you, too?”
“I beg your pardon?” I asked.
She sighed with dramatic exasperation. “Should I take a selfie with you?” she repeated. “Are you anybody? You look like you could be somebody,” she added, taking in my dangling double-cross earrings, goatee, and open wing-collared tuxedo shirt.
Before I could answer, “No,” MJ snapped, “He’s my friend. He is everybody.”
Suitably chastised, the young woman nodded and walked away but not before I heard her say to her companion, “I should have known he was nobody. I didn’t recognize him.”
In a rare moment of fury, MJ started to rise to her feet. My hand on the sleeve of her vintage pink Chanel bouclé suit—MJ is also the best-dressed anchorwoman on TV—arrested her movement.
She settled in her seat. “How are you doing?” she asked, laying her hand over mine and entwining our fingers, “since Rio left? The coward.”
I casually disengaged our fingers—I am always uncomfortable with displays of physical affection with female friends in public. It makes me feel deceptive somehow, as if I am sending a dishonest message, a misdirection.
“I’m fine,” I said. “I survived losing both my parents and Jackson. This is nothing—”
“This isn’t nothing,” she said carefully while scanning the menu in front of her.
“No. I suppose not. Still—”
“You’re not gonna say your affair with Rio was a bad idea? It wasn’t—”
“No. It wasn’t. But it wasn’t a particularly good idea, either.”
“How do you mean?” she asked, putting down her menu.
“I know I was in love with him on some level. Certainly, there was something thrilling about getting a chance at love with my teenage crush. And yeah, he was in love with me too. But sometimes I’d wonder what he was playing at.
He often seemed uncomfortable with our relationship—he told me he worried that I was becoming a habit, whatever that means.
At other times, he seemed impatient, like he was stuck in bed waiting for a stubborn fever to pass so he could get back to living his life. ”
“I think that’s bitterness talking,” MJ said. “You were together a year and a half. I saw you two together. I didn’t understand it, but straight or not, he was definitely in love with you.”
“That’s part of Rio’s charm—making you believe his nonsense. He convinced me that our romance was special, that he was only able to love me, a man, because I was I and he was he.”
“You don’t think that’s true anymore?”
I shrugged.
“Well, let me tell you this,” MJ said. “When you and he were together, you looked happier than I’ve seen you at any point since Jackson left.”
“I guess I just feel really stupid. I really did—do—love Rio. And I thought—improbable as it was—that he loved me. It never occurred to me that he would just walk away one day.”
“I get that.”
“Why does everyone find it so easy to leave me?”
“Who’s everyone?”
“Grampy Eddie, Dad, Mom, Juan, Jackson, Rio…”
“Rio was an asshole. He dropped you like a bad habit. But Grampy Eddie and your parents didn’t choose to leave you—they died. Juan was a picking-season romance and you were fifteen. And I know Jackson didn’t find it easy to leave you.”
My head snapped up and my tears stopped. “Thank you for canceling my pity party. You’re right. I’m being a jerk.”
“You’re human. You’re hurt. Give yourself the grace to grieve.” She covered my hand with hers; I fought the urge to pull away.
“Let’s order lunch,” I said, “and speak of other things.”
MJ nodded and picked up her menu again while signaling the waiter to bring another round of drinks. She knew our conversation had gone as far as it could because I don’t do vulnerable.
“How’s your love life these days?” I asked to make up for my shortcoming. “Tell me.”
“There’s nothing to tell.”
“Why don’t you ever talk about it?”
“Oren, there is literally nothing to tell. I don’t have a love life.”
“Oh. Well, now that I’ve sworn off men, I can help you find one. Let’s see… You’re beautiful, you’ve been voted best dressed TV personality how many times? You’re famous—”
“Stop,” she said, throwing her hands up in surrender. “I don’t actually want a man.”
“Oh—”
“I mean men are fine, though gay ones are less irritating—”
“True, that.”
“I’ve had affairs. They all ended in tears—theirs by the way, not mine. It eventually dawned on me that I didn’t really want to be in a romantic relationship. And I don’t like sex—”
“You don’t like sex?”
“No, it’s too…intimate. It always leaves me feeling as if I’ve been cut open for some man to gaze at my innards.
And it’s messy. And you know how I hate messy.
I can’t even have kids, so I finally asked myself what was the point of enduring something I don’t enjoy?
Oh, and kissing, well, that’s just gross. ”
I stared at her in stupefaction. How had we been friends this long and I did not know this about her?
“Have I shocked you?” she asked.
“No, no. I’m just surprised you never said anything before.
She shrugged. “I don’t think about it much. I have a great life, the career I dreamed of, friends like you.”
“I’d like to propose a toast,” I said. “To you—for knowing what you want and don’t and for living your best life accordingly.”
We clinked glasses. “By the way,” she said, “I think Perils is seeing Toderick again.”
I rolled my eyes. “They’d better elope this time,” I said. “I’m not buying them a third wedding present.”
“And I’m not buying a third bridesmaid dress or planning another shower.”
“Amen,” I added, and we clinked glasses again.
Monday, December 9, 2019, St. Jude—I ran into Jackson unexpectedly again at the mall today. I was wandering aimlessly when I heard, “Oren?”
I wheeled around. “Jackson!”
I stared at him. He was dressed all in gray: gray jeans tucked into gray-and-black Doc Martens, and a dove-gray cable-knit turtleneck under a pebble-gray sheepskin bomber jacket lined with shearling.
I was startled because it wasn’t anything from our shared wardrobe.
In all our years together, Jackson had never shopped for clothes; he’d simply worn whatever I bought for myself.
“We have to stop meeting like this,” he joked.
“What are you doing here?” I asked.
“Claude took Oren to see The Nutcracker, so I thought I’d do some Christmas shopping. Oren was so excited. He said Claude told him it was a ‘date’ so it had to be just the two of them, so Octavio wasn’t allowed to go.”
“I’m glad you stayed close with them.”
“They have been a godsend, especially after Kitt first left. There I was with an infant I had no idea how to take care of.”
I nodded.
“So, what are you doing? Christmas shopping?”
“No. I don’t really have anyone to shop for. I really just like looking at all the gifts for sale and feeling the excitement of the shoppers and imagining their collective delight when they exchange and open perfectly wrapped gifts…I’m sorry, that sounds pitiful, doesn’t it.”
“No,” Jackson said. “It sounds like you.”
I nodded.
“How’s Rio?” he asked me suddenly.
I shrugged. “Fine, I guess. He moved to Italy, where he appears to be growing his hair and roses beside a woman named Poppy.”
“Oh!” he said. “I’m sorry. I know he was your it boy.”
“He was,” I said. “But you were the love of my life.” And with that admission, I let go of Rio fully and once and for all.
He looked at me sharply, clearly startled. For my part, I was embarrassed to have admitted so much when I didn’t intend to. Hoping to change the subject, I asked, “How about you? Are you seeing anyone?”
“No,” he said. “There have been a few guys, mostly younger. It’s hard when you bring a kid into the mix.
None of them stuck. None of them were you.
” Now it was his turn to look embarrassed.
“The truth is,” he continued in a rush, “I don’t know who I am without you. I don’t know how to be without you.”
And there we were, two halves of the same tree, each leaning against air.
Jackson broke the awkward silence. “I’m actually glad I ran into you,” he said. “You’ve been on my mind a lot lately.”
“Why?”
“I never apologized to you—for hurting you, for destroying us. I’m truly sorry. You deserved better. I would never in a million years have thought I’d be the one to hurt you. In my clumsy attempt to lessen your pain, I implied that I’d stopped loving you—I hadn’t—haven’t—”
He looked so distraught, so much like the old Jackson, my Jackson, my PK, my preacher’s kid, I wanted to take him in my arms and comfort him. Instead, I asked, “How’s little Oren?”
Jackson beamed. “He’s good. He’s in preschool. Growing like a weed. Smart as a whip. Always has his nose in a book—he reminds me of you…”
“Face it, you’re a bookworm magnet.”
Jackson laughed, a warm familiar sound I hadn’t heard in ages and hadn’t realized until now, I’d missed.
“And co-parenting with Kitt is working out OK?”
“No. Last month, I filed for and got full custody of Oren after years of no contact—no calls or texts—not even a card on his birthday—from Kitt.”
“I’m sorry. Why—”
“She thought she could replace you,” he said quietly.
I glanced at his left hand, at the platinum wedding band I’d first placed on his finger at the jewelry counter in Tiffany so long ago.
He followed my eyes, twisted his ring with his left hand self-consciously.
“I couldn’t bring myself to take it off.
That would have felt like I’d lost you completely. Do you mind?”
Afraid to speak, I shook my head no in response to his question. Looking at him, watching his face, seeing the way he looked at me, I wondered if we could find love again on the other side of the apocalypse. If we could, it was only because it was he; because it was I.
“Why are you wearing two watches?” he asked.
“Because wearing one would have felt like losing you completely.”
He looked at me, puzzled. Shut up, you ass, I told myself, before you make this conversation more awkward. Then, before I could stop myself, I blurted, “Do you want to get lunch?”