19 Context
19
CONTEXT
Gretchen
The nice thing about having a confrontation during a demolition party taking place over two stories is that bystanders don’t notice it. In an attempt to keep drywall dust separate from eating and drinking, we’d designated the second floor for partying and the first for demo. Most people had been upstairs while Teddy was here, because that was where the DJ, bar, and food were. Only Rory, Jack, and Maiv had witnessed the train wreck. Jack had left with Teddy, and Maiv had disappeared somewhere.
Which left Rory. I braced myself for either a freak-out or an over-the-top display of empathy. I certainly didn’t want a freak-out, but I also didn’t want empathy. I didn’t want to talk about it anymore. I just wanted to get on with my life. Which right now meant tearing some shit down, which ideally would have the side effect of calming my brain, which was on fire.
Rory only said, “What’s all this stuff about a lemon tree?”
“It’s a song. It’s about a kid whose dad tells him not to trust love. It was an important song for Teddy when he was a kid, and he’s returned to it lately.”
“Important how?”
For some reason I found myself telling her about Teddy’s mom and the actual lemon tree. God damn it, had she tricked me into talking?
She got out her phone, and soon the song was playing.
“I’ve heard it,” I said—peevishly, but I couldn’t help it.
“I haven’t.”
“OK, well, I have demo to do.”
I was shaking, but what could I do but keep on going? That was what I did. I made a plan, and I executed it. That’s what had gotten me this far. I looked around. Everyone was here. Well, most people were upstairs, though I did have hard hats and sledgehammers on hand down here for folks who wanted to channel their inner Hulks. But upstairs were all my people. Rory’s husband, Mike, and his daughter, Olivia. Friends from college. Suz and some folks from the strip mall. Current and former families from Miss Miller’s. My mom and Ingrid. I could see them up there in my mind’s eye, chatting and smiling and dancing.
I was lucky. I had a great life. I had built a community around my studio. It was normal to have cold feet when you were on the verge of a big expansion like I was, but I had to remember what I was doing, and why.
“You OK?”
Maiv. Even Maiv was here. I’d been glad she’d accepted my invitation, but now I kind of wished she hadn’t. I didn’t need someone else on my case.
But she didn’t get on my case. She was holding two sledgehammers, and she said, “I’ve been eyeing that weird diagonal wall near the back door. Your contractor says it’s not structural. There are some weeds growing through the asphalt in the parking area in back, and I was thinking if we took out that wall, we might be able to see the parking area through the door. Then if you don’t mind, I thought I’d prop open the door and take a photo showing both the inside and outside and maybe paint from it later.”
Weeds in asphalt: exactly Maiv’s thing. And, handily, right now beating the shit out of a wall was exactly my thing. We put on respirators and got to work.
“So Teddy and Jack showed up?” she asked after we’d gotten a few swings in.
I grunted vaguely, the same way Teddy had when I first met him.
Fucking Teddy. How dare he come in here and threaten not only Pillar Two of Midlife Crisis: Averted, but Pillar One? I was his muse and he thought the building I’d already bought and was renovating literally as we spoke was a mistake?
Maybe I’d been too hard on him, but one thing I do not appreciate is being backed into a corner by men who think they know what’s best for me.
I took a big swing, and to my shock, tears started leaking out of the corners of my eyes. My body was confused. I’d been powering through my confrontation with Teddy on adrenaline, and then I’d crashed. But now I was literally tearing down a wall, which required… more adrenaline? Strength? I don’t know, but it required something I didn’t have right then.
I kept trying, though, lifting the hammer and bringing it down on the drywall as my eyes leaked.
Maiv, being an excellent sort of human, didn’t say anything, though I could feel her watching me.
Rory, though she was also an excellent sort of human, did not do likewise. I guess she was an excellent sort of human who knew me too well, because she marched right up and said, “I’ve listened to the song a bunch of times.”
I sighed and swung, morbidly satisfied when a chunk of the wall came down. But then I put down my sledgehammer. Even though Rory was on my last nerve, I didn’t want to asphyxiate her with drywall dust. And ultimately, I knew I wasn’t getting out of this without having a conversation. Or at least listening to a monologue. At least my eyes had stopped leaking.
“I think it’s you who’s taken the message of the song literally,” Rory said when I took off my respirator and aimed a resigned sigh in her direction. “You’re the one who’s afraid of love.”
“I’m not afraid of love. I’m retired from trying to find it. It’s not the same thing.”
“But what if love finds you? Have you thought about that? Because it seems like it has.”
“Ooh.” That had come from Maiv. I glared at her, but it had no effect. She just looked at me like, What? Damn it. I should have left her as a camp friend.
I turned back to Rory. “This is all fine for you to say, from the vantage point of your one-in-a-million happily ever after, but the song isn’t wrong. That’s why it’s so lovely. It’s devastatingly true. The lemon flower is sweet, but the fruit is sour. I mean, it’s a perfect metaphor for love.”
“Maybe the issue isn’t the lemon, or the flower,” Rory said. “Maybe it’s just that lemon trees aren’t meant to live in pots in New York.”
“Huh?”
“It’s about context.”
There was that word. It kept coming up this summer. “What do you mean?”
“Lemon trees don’t thrive in some conditions, but they might in others.”
What was she on about? “Are you saying I’m taking the wrong metaphor here?”
“Well, if you’re taking the song to mean love is hopeless, that any relationship is doomed, I’m gonna go with yes.”
This was all so confusing. “So what do I do with my metaphorical lemon tree, then?”
“Plant it somewhere properly?”
“It’s a song !”
“Do I need to remind you,” Rory said, annoyingly undeterred, “that I, too, once had an imaginary boyfriend who became real?”
“Oh my God, this isn’t The Velveteen Rabbit ! It’s OK to have standards for what you will and won’t accept. It’s OK to have boundaries. As I’ve told you a thousand times, I’m retired from men. From love. From all of it.” Maybe I needed to explain the pillar thing, if we were dealing in metaphors here.
“Yes,” Rory said, “but is it possible that the boundaries we put in place, often with the best of intentions, can end up getting stretched?”
“Only if we let them.”
“That’s my point. Sometimes we need to let them.”
I was about done here. I wasn’t mad or buzzing with demolition energy anymore; I was tired. “Can you just speak English?”
“I think you’re making a mistake sending Teddy away.”
I glanced at Maiv, who had remained silent, but I’d felt her attention on us. She gave me a shrug that seemed to signal agreement with Rory.
“All right,” I said looking between them. “Noted.”
“I also think it’s possible he might be right about this place,” Rory said quietly.
Wow. Wow. I felt like she’d stabbed me in the back. It was one thing for Teddy to swan in here and tell me I was making a mistake, but Rory? The person who’d been by my side on the professional front for years? Who had come with me to showings and helped me pick out a damn toilet?
I took a breath. Rory had been by my side professionally. But also personally. For so many years.
Did I… need to consider the possibility that she was right? About all of it? Were my Midlife Crisis: Averted pillars about to come crumbling down? Or, worse, had they only been made of cardboard to begin with?
“I…” Didn’t know what to say. My mind was reeling, and I feared that if I tried to talk, the eye leaking would start again.
“Happy birthday to you!”
A crowd of people approached, making their way down the stairs, led by my sister holding a cake with a little bonfire on top.
Right. It was my birthday. I was forty.
I felt like I was floating outside my body as I listened to the rest of the song. I looked at the blaze and missed camp with everything in me. I missed the hole behind the shower building. I missed Teddy. Even after what he had done, I missed him.
“Hello?” my sister said, making me realize that I was just standing there. “Make a wish and blow already. There are actually forty candles on here, and the ones I lit first are already nubs.”
I drew in a breath, looked at those candles, and thought, Is this all there is?
I awakened to the strains of “Moon River.” Great. Even my subconscious was on my case.
Somehow I’d made it through the rest of the party, mostly by returning to beating the crap out of my building. But as I’d swung that sledgehammer over and over, I’d started to think.
What did it mean that I was still asking myself Dad’s old question? I’d thought I’d answered that question months ago. I’d retired from dating and I’d bought the new building. I had a mortgage to show for my trouble. Not my trouble. My ambition .
Unlike Dad, I’d responded to the question by doing something. By changing something.
But, as I’d let my tired arm fall, as I’d stopped beating on the walls of my building—the walls of my life, it felt like—I’d had to face the idea that maybe I hadn’t answered the question correctly .
Well, I’d answered it correctly in a technical sense. Is this all there is? No. It hadn’t been. So I’d changed my life.
But had I made the correct changes?
Had Rory been right? Had Teddy been right?
Teddy.
I could barely stand to think about him. I’d been so set back on my heels over the idea of being his muse. It should have been flattering. And in some ways it was. It was amazing to think I might have had anything to do with that song I’d heard.
But I didn’t want to be a muse. I wanted to be a girlfriend. A partner.
Or I had. Before. I’d excised that wanting, though. Completed my crone-ification quest. Taken the weakness, the rot that was holding me back, and cut it out.
Right?
There was a little voice inside me that was hard to hear underneath all the demolition noise. Demolishing a building is loud. Demolishing your life is louder.
But when I held my breath, closed my eyes, and really listened , I could hear the voice, clear as anything. It was saying, Maybe we got it wrong .
I was afraid, so afraid, that I’d lashed out at Teddy earlier not because I was offended by the idea of being his muse, but because I was in love with him.
Pillar Two came crumbling down.
And now I was dreaming “Moon River.” I’d been dancing in the dream. On a stage. I’d had to squint, had been blinded by a light shining on me. I remembered the way the light glinted off the sweat on my forearms.
How would I have worked up that much of a sweat dancing to “Moon River”? All I could come up with was that “Moon River” was a reminder of camp, and camp was a reminder of what I wanted to do when I was allowed to follow the wanting in a pure sort of way.
Or maybe I hadn’t been dancing to “Moon River.” I was pretty sure, based on the lights and the sweat, that I’d been dancing to something else. That I’d been performing .
Perhaps my subconscious wasn’t on my case so much as it was telling me that I’d gotten it wrong. That I had to go back and do a retake of the Is this all there is? test.
Pillar One came crumbling down, too.
A swell of violins had me bolting to seated. I was actually hearing “Moon River.” It wasn’t in my head, an echo from a dream. It was here—like, here . In reality for losers.
I went to the window, suddenly knowing what I would find. Dreading what I would find.
But inside the dread was a sliver of something else. It felt an awful lot like hope.
Which was funny because what had I been doing since I’d decided to retire from men but giving up hope?
But hope, it finds you, the sneaky motherfucker.
It wasn’t exactly like the movie. I lived in a little bungalow with a small yard. It was only one story. So there was no looking down from a great height, Juliet style. There wasn’t a lot of distance between us, either. He was right there , a foot from my window, jammed in between my house and a lilac hedge. In the movie, Lloyd was somehow illuminated even though it was night. Teddy was illuminated, but not in a romantic, cinematic way. He was blinking against the bright, motion-triggered floodlights I had mounted to my house outside my bedroom—hey, a woman alone needs to be careful.
In other ways, it was exactly like the movie.
He was holding a boom box over his head, Lloyd Dobler style, and it was playing “Moon River.”
I laughed. Which was probably not what Teddy was going for. But it was all so absurd. But also… happy-making. When I examined my croneish heart, when I examined it honestly and not just defensively, I found I was happy Teddy was here. That was my first reaction. It was that God damn hope again.
I opened the window warily. I wasn’t exactly sure why I was wary. I was nervous about what he was going to say, I guess. But I was also afraid of my own reaction, of this hope that was starting to flow through my body.
“This would work better if there was a moon,” he said.
“How did you know which window was my bedroom?”
I did realize that asking logistical questions was perhaps not the point.
He didn’t seem to mind. “I walked around your house like an unhinged creeper and looked in all of them—some of them had a crack in the curtains big enough to figure out what room it was—and made my best guess.”
“What are you doing here?”
“Following you back to your regular life in Minneapolis and holding a boom box over my head outside your bedroom window,” he said, quoting the joking line he’d given me about what he was never going to do.
I was so glad he was here.
“I’m sorry,” we both said simultaneously.
“You should put that down,” I said when, after our in-stereo apologies, he didn’t move. “I’m not sure that movie has aged well. Standing silently outside the bedroom of someone who has rejected you is actually kind of creepy if you think about it.” I winked to show I was kidding.
I winked to cover my fear.
“The other thing the movie doesn’t get right,” he said, wincing as he set the boom box on the lawn, “is how much it hurts your arms to hold a boom box over your head for so long. You took forever to wake up. This song has looped like twelve times.” He pulled his phone out of his pocket and stopped the song.
“The music wasn’t coming from the boom box?” I exclaimed. “What a rip-off!”
“Hey, man, you try getting a boom box in the middle of the night, forget a cassette of ‘Moon River.’”
“Where did you even get a boom box?” And why was I still asking logistical questions?
“Marion hooked me up with an ancient friend of hers who uses it to teach aqua aerobics for seniors.”
I smiled at him. I couldn’t help it. It was very un-crone-like. Bordering on goofy, I feared. “What are you sorry for?” I knew what I was sorry for, but since he was the one standing on my lawn with a boom box, I thought I’d let him go first.
“So,” he said, “here’s the thing: I love you. I’m in love with you.”
The light went out, and for a moment I thought I had died. That my heart had stopped and I’d literally died. But then I realized no, it was only the lights timing out.
“Wave your arms around,” I said, and he did. This hadn’t happened to Lloyd, either.
“So,” I said, “you love me, and you’re sorry about it.” Ouch.
“No. I’m sorry I crashed your party and didn’t lead with that fact. That truth. Which, just so we’re crystal clear, is that I love you.”
“But you’re not sorry for anything you actually said.” I paused. “You’re not sorry you told me I was making a mistake with the new studio.”
“For the way I said it, maybe. But for what I said?” He paused. “No.”
He wasn’t sorry, because he wasn’t wrong. I was going to have to face up to that fact and decide what, if anything, to do about it.
The lights went out again, and he waved his arms like he was flagging down a passing car.
“Why’d you play ‘Moon River’?” I asked when he was reilluminated. “Why not that song about the lake that you said I inspired?”
“Two reasons. One, I see now how that whole muse speech came out wrong. You did inspire that song, but it doesn’t mean you’re responsible for it. Two, dancing to ‘Moon River’ that night was the most romantic thing I’ve ever done. Ever wanted to do. And I would very much like to do it again someday.”
“Yeah.” I paused. “So would I.”
So this was it. This—standing in front of a man and telling him you loved him—was scarier than taking on a ginormous mortgage and renovating a building full of asbestos and leaky pipes. But it helped that my “So would I” triggered the biggest, goofiest grin from him.
The lights went out.
“God damn it!” he exclaimed, and he was starting to sound annoyed. When the lights came back on, he said, “I know you’re scared. I’m scared. But I think this”—he waved his hand back and forth between us—“is a thing. I think it’s real in any context, not just in the woods. I don’t know if there’s a fairy tale where the crone and the asshole in the cabin across the street live happily ever after, but there should be.” He blew out a breath. “I’m bad at speeches. I’m better at songs. But yeah, I love you.”
The stupid eye leaking was starting again. I didn’t want him to see me cry.
But wait. That was part of my problem, right? If someone was going to be your person, they were going to see you cry every now and then. The prospect made me feel sick. But also hopeful.
He cleared his throat.
I loved him back. I loved him so much.
He dug in his pocket, looked down at his hand, and said, “Ten dollars for your thoughts.”
“Well,” I said, “you better come inside, then, because I have a lot of them.”