Chapter 12. Seth
I am not in town. I am in Nashville, at my brother’s house, with my family.
But I am very tempted to sneak out, charter a plane, and fly to Florida, just for the pleasure of replying to Molly Marks’s email in the affirmative.
My brother Dave walks into the den, where I am holed up, attempting to assemble a tricycle for my nephew.
“Need help?” Dave asks, looking skeptically at the sea of bolts and screws and random shiny red metal bars scattered on the floor around me.
“I might just throw it away and write him a check,” I say. “How much do you think? Five hundred?”
“He’s three.”
“All right. See if you can attach that wheel with that metal thing over there.”
“The Allen wrench?”
Dave is a mechanical engineer. My lack of familiarity with tools pains him.
Within minutes, and with scarcely a cursory glance at the inscrutable diagram that passes for instructions, he has assembled the mini red bike, handlebar tassels and all.
“We should get some sleep,” he says. “The boys will be up at five, and we can only hold them back so long.”
I can’t wait. I love Christmas here. We didn’t grow up religious—my mom’s a lapsed Catholic and my dad’s a secular Jew—so as kids, the holidays were mostly about presents and latkes. But Clara, my sister-in-law, is a big Christmas person. She has three trees of varying themes, pays professionals to cover their entire house in twinkle lights, and hosts Christmas dinner for twenty.
I am not quite ready for bed, however.
I want to gloat.
“Hey, guess what,” I say.
“What?”
“Molly Marks emailed me.”
After we hooked up at the reunion, Dave told me I’d never hear from her again.
I enjoy it very much when he’s wrong. Especially when the matter concerns girls I have crushes on.
His face immediately darkens. “No.” He shakes his head so vigorously it’s like he’s been possessed by the devil. “Delete it. She’s not good for you.”
The extremity of his reaction gives me pause. Objectively speaking, he’s almost certainly right. But that’s not enough to dampen my excitement. Molly’s thinking of me. That means something.
“It’s been fifteen years,” I object. “You can’t know she’s bad for me.”
“Yes, I can. She treated you like shit. She doesn’t get a second chance after that.”
His protectiveness is heartwarming, but I’m not convinced he’s right. People can change.
“We were kids when that happened. I had fun with her at the reunion.”
“And then she blew you off. A nice little reminder that she’s still the same person.”
“She didn’t blow me off, she just said she’d see me in five years. Would it be so bad to just—”
“Okay, yeah, write her back. Hell, fly her out here. Get married by a justice of the peace on Christmas morning. I’m sure you two will be very happy.”
I sigh. It is my opinion that he is not giving me, or her, enough credit.
“You don’t get it,” I say. “You have a wife and family and love and I have… lots of friends and a gym membership and a really big office at a law firm. I’m lonely. So why not take chances when they present themselves?”
He inhales long and deep, like we’ve already had this conversation two hundred times.
Which, of course, we have.
“Your problem,” he says, “is that you think a woman is going to miraculously make you happy. You keep jumping into all these relationships, talking yourself into thinking you’re in love when you’re not. I’m tired of watching you get yourself hurt.”
“Well, what do you suggest I do? Stop dating?”
“No. I want you to find someone. We all want that. But you act like love is going to solve all your problems, so you make bad choices. And Molly Marks? That’s a bad choice.”
I shouldn’t have said anything to him.
I hold up my hands in defeat. “Okay. Point taken.”
He nods warily and says good night.
I wait for him to close the door and then immediately pick my phone back up to exercise my allegedly terrible judgment.
From: [email protected]
Date: Mon, Dec 24, 2018 at 9:35pm
Re: Subject: Hey
Merry Christmas, Sir Marksalot.
I’m in Nashville at Dave’s with the fam. I take it you’re in Florida, pining for me?
I can’t stop grinning as I wait for a response, which arrives almost immediately.
From: [email protected]
Date: Mon, Dec 24, 2018 at 9:37pm
Re: Re: Subject: Hey
Yes, desperately pining. By which I mean hoping you might be around for a quick bout of meaningless sex. Oh well, YOUR LOSS. Merry xmas etc
I’m sure she would be content to let our exchange end here, but I’m in too good a mood at the idea she wants to sleep with me again—even in a booty-call fashion—to let it drop.
From: [email protected]
Date: Mon, Dec 24, 2018 at 9:39pm
Re: Re: Re: Subject: Hey
Someone is sure eager to lose our bet. Which, by the way, you are. Look what I came across on the socials from your best friend Marian:
Marian Hart..… is with Marcus Reis..… at The Gulf Yacht Club..… Feeling bliss!!!
What a lovely holiday season I had here in my hometown with such a beautiful group of friends and family. Basking on the catamaran with the one and only Marcus—is there anything like an island sunset with one of your favorite people?
Not to panic you, of course.
I press the send button, knowing her competitive nature will leave her powerless to ignore me.
From: [email protected]
Date: Mon, Dec 24, 2018 at 9:41pm
Re: Re: Re: Re: Subject: Hey
You must be feeling very smug. But please remember I allowed they might briefly date before ultimately going their separate ways. I do have five years to be right. (Including about us.)
Enjoy your sex-free Christmas cheer.
Dave pops his head back into the room.
“You’re doing it, aren’t you?”
“Doing what?”
“Emailing her.”
“Well, when a woman admits her desire for a late-night assignation, it’s only polite to reply.”
“Don’t make me confiscate your phone.”
“Respectfully Dave, fuck off.”
He rolls his eyes and shuts the door.
But he’s right.
I already feel that tingle of what if setting in. That obsessive part of me that meets a woman twice and starts naming our babies. If I embark on an extended email flirtation with someone I have this much history with—someone I still like so much—it will only get my hopes up. Despite my chronic optimism, even I know that I can’t put myself in an emotionally vulnerable place at this time of year.
The Dark Times are coming. By which I mean: New Year’s.
You might think that a person like me—a man known for his perennial pep—would rejoice at the start of a new annum. You would think I’d be a resolutions man. A “this year I’ll run a seven-minute mile and climb Kilimanjaro” type of guy.
I’m not.
As a rule, I’m rarely depressed, but something about the start of the year bums me out. The dread begins around now and gets worse as we approach New Year’s Eve, a holiday I find overrated and disappointing.
It could be a comedown from the holidays. Christmas at Dave’s is always great, his unwelcome opinions on my love life notwithstanding. I roll around with the boys, douse them in presents, joke around with the fam, destroy everyone at UNO. And then I leave—always by the twenty-seventh, to avoid overstaying my welcome. And I go back to Chicago, which is invariably frozen, and I stare at the calendar and wait for the sadness to set in.
I am never as lonely as I am in the aftermath of being so happy.
On the surface, my life is packed to the brim. I have interesting work, a bustling social life, no shortage of women to date, and a calendar of sports and cultural events I keep full.
But it’s full of the wrong things.
I want what Dave has. I want my own cute kids and my own smart, funny wife and my own loud, peanut butter-smeared house in the suburbs.
There were many years when this wasn’t such an ache. When my law firm was my true north. Being an attorney was my dream from the time I was in junior high. I’ve built a reputation as one of the best family lawyers in Chicago.
But I’m bored. And worse than that: unfulfilled.
I keep finding myself wondering if I should be doing something different—volunteering, or making a lateral move, or even starting something of my own—and then I get too busy with work and too distracted by my quest for true love to pursue it.
I’m probably just frustrated. I have everything I want professionally. And once I have a family, work won’t matter as much.
Besides, this feeling always fades by the middle of January, as work jolts back to life (the postholiday season is a popular time to file for divorce) and the Christmas lights come down and everyone gets back into the routine of existence.
I’m happy again. It’s like magic.
But that week of comedown is brutal.
This year proves no different.
The tricycle is a hit with Max. My mother and I make an eighteen-pound turkey. Clara leads her full house of dinner guests in a caroling session, complete with printed songbooks and an accompanist from the music school at Vanderbilt.
I don’t email Molly, even though I think about her.
But then I fly home, back to the tundra. I unpack in my pristine apartment. I turn on the gas fire to approximate some form of the cheer I just left, and it flickers like a mockery of my empty home.
I stay in New Year’s Eve, dishonestly pleading exhaustion, and twist the knife by waking up in the morning and opening Facebook to peruse all the joyful times other people were having.
And that’s when I see it.
A rare social media post from Molly Marks. It’s dated from a few days ago, but it’s not so old I can’t use it as an overture.
I snap a screenshot and paste it into an email.
From: [email protected]
Date: Mon, Jan 1, 2019 at 11:09am
Subject: Congrats!
Hey Mollson—
Happy New Year! I just saw your news. Congratulations—I loved her on Headlands!
BOXOFFICEGOSS.COM: Golden Globe winner Margot Tess attached to rom-com from producers 6FiftyX
Tess, who took home Best Actress in a Drama Series for her role as Rhathselda in the sweeping historical epicHeadlands, has signed on to star in and executive produceDaughter of the Bride.The rom-com, about a woman searching for love at her own mother’s wedding, was written by Molly Marks. Simon Larch is attached to direct.
I should absolutely end this email here—keep it casual, let her either write back or not. But I’m happy for her, and I want to let her know that she deserves to be proud of herself. I suspect it’s not a feeling she indulges in often. So I add:
I have to confess something: after the reunion I went back and watched (okay, you got me, rewatched) your movies. I love how I can relax and not worry someone is going to tragically die and tear my heart out. And I can always hear your voice in them—that sarcasm that lets me know a foul-tempered wretch is responsible for all the happiness on-screen.
Congrats, champ. You’re doing God’s work.
Hugs.
—Seth
I hit send and then freeze.
Hugs?Why did I write that?
I spend a few minutes poking around to see if my email app has some sort of “I regret sending that please delete before the recipient sees” function, but no dice.
Oh well. Hugs!