Chapter 18. Seth
Her name is Sarah Louise Taylor, and she’s absolutely perfect for me in every way.
We met back in August, at a Legal Aid fundraiser. She’s a Cook County public defender, a stressful, low-paying job that she adores because she loves justice, fairness, and equality with her whole heart. She inspires me. With her encouragement, I’m putting the steps in motion to open the nonprofit legal clinic I’ve been toying with starting for years.
She’s a distance runner—she qualified for the Boston Marathon this year for the fourth time—and we get up early every Saturday morning and go on long runs together. (My pace is quite leisurely by her standards, but she’s helping me improve. I now have the lung capacity of an eighteen-year-old.)
She grew up working on her parents’ farm in Kansas, and is an incredible vegan cook devoted to using local produce. This is obviously difficult in the long Chicago winter, but you would not believe what she can do with preserved lemons and roasted beets. I haven’t eaten meat in months.
She’s an only child and longs for a big family with kids and dogs and relatives running around. She can’t wait to get pregnant—she thinks she’ll love the experience of creating a life inside her body, being so close to someone she loves so much. We spend a lot of time talking about what we’ll name our kids. (Current favorites are Jane, after Sarah’s mom, and Sam, after my godfather.)
She’s generous and intuitive in bed, and on Sundays we stay in and make love. She likes to lock eyes, go slow, check in. The first time we had sex, she cried, and it made me cry too.
Her apartment is filled floor-to-ceiling with pictures of the people close to her—frames crowding on frames of treasured friends and family. Because who could meet Sarah Louise Taylor and not fall head over heels in love with her?
Certainly not me.
Currently, Sarah is in Milwaukee at a conference, which has afforded me a prime opportunity for a boys’ weekend in New York with Jon and Kevin. Sarah thinks I’m here to enjoy restaurants and theater with old friends. In fact, I’m here to buy her an engagement ring under the guidance of two people who have much better taste than I do.
It’s only been six months, but we are both ready to settle down. I know she’ll say yes.
Jon and Kevin meet me for brunch at my hotel in Union Square, and we all exchange bear hugs. Jon and Kevin both live in Brooklyn, and even though it’s a short flight from Chicago to New York, we don’t see one another more than a few times a year. I’m envious of their proximity to each other. I have lots of buddies in Chicago, but for some reason, I don’t have a best friend.
They look great. Jon’s silver fox hair is swept back in a more fashionable cut than he usually wears, and he looks like he’s added a few pounds of muscle to his slender physique. I’m sure all his students have crushes on him. Kevin’s grown a rather dapper mustache, waxed at the corners, and his huge Tom Selleck frame is clad in one of his looks—a fashion editor to his core, he always wears looks—today’s involving a frayed asymmetrical sweater and leather pants.
“So how is the illustrious Sarah Louise?” Jon asks.
“The dream and the vision,” Kevin intones.
“I miss her,” Jon says. “And I’ve only met her once.”
“I miss her, and I haven’t even met her,” Kevin says.
I grin. “We should fix that. Maybe I’ll bring her here for our engagement trip.”
“Oh God, why?” Jon groans, wrinkling his nose. Jon notoriously hates New York, despite having lived here since graduating college.
“So where are we going first?” I ask them.
“Roman Roman,” Kevin pronounces. Kevin took it upon himself to spearhead my search as soon as I mentioned I wanted to propose. “They specialize in antique engagement rings. Beautiful stuff. Highly unusual pieces. You’ll love it.”
“Sounds perfect,” I say.
We finish brunch and amble through the Union Square greenmarket. I love the smell of farmers markets, the fresh flowers and dirt. I’ll have to take Sarah Louise here. She thinks she’s not a New York person, but I bet she would be if we came together.
A woman with a chic blond pageboy greets us as soon as we walk into the jewelry store. “Kevin!” she says, moving in for a hug.
“Seth, this is Adair,” he says. “We go all the way back to my days at Iconic. I had her pull some pieces for you.”
“For Sarah Louise, right?” she says with a warm smile. “Kevin told me all about her and I think I have some options that might be perfect.”
She leads us through the wood-paneled, minimalist space to a small room with a case of glimmering rings in black velvet waiting on a table.
She pulls out a platinum ring with a large, round center stone. “This is an estate piece. Rose cut, two carats. Incredibly classic.”
Kevin makes a noise like he’s having an orgasm. “Want,” he moans.
“That’s pretty,” Jon says.
“I’m not sure,” I demur. Something about it seems too much. Like it would make more of a fuss on Sarah’s finger than she might be comfortable with. “It might be too… statementy.”
Adair nods like she knows what I mean. She puts it back and pulls out a much smaller ring with a diamond surrounded by green sparkly rectangles.
“Art deco,” Adair says. “Brilliant cut, flanked by these four exquisite emerald baguettes. So delicate—look at the filigree along the edges.”
“Ooh, I love that,” Jon says. “Reminds me of the Chrysler building.”
“Right?” Adair laughs. “I often suggest art deco pieces for people whose taste is a bit more quiet—the style is so striking, but delicate.”
This ring is cool, and definitively all wrong for my girlfriend. Sarah Louise is a midwestern girl. She is plains and cornfields and natural platinum hair. She does not want a green engagement ring, art deco or not.
Adair shows me ring after ring. I learn about Asscher cuts and Old Mine cuts and look at something called a Fancy Yellow diamond that costs $78,000.
“I think she’d want something more… un-yellow,” I gulp out.
A new tray is brought in.
We look at a half-carat solitaire that seems stingy, and infinity rings that look more like wedding bands than engagement rings. I like them all. But none of them is quite right.
What keeps occurring to me is that these rings are ever so slightly too specific. I keep imagining them on the hand of someone like Molly Marks—someone who might not want a ring at all until she saw these, full of history and character.
I can see Sarah walking into this store and thinking she wouldn’t want to wear someone else’s ring. I can hear her saying, “Oh, but what if they’re bad luck?”
“You know, I’m just not sure she would want something used,” I say apologetically to Adair.
“He means antique,” Kevin says, horrified.
“I get it,” she says, “don’t worry at all. You might check out Trinket, in Williamsburg. Lots of super pretty pieces. Most of it’s a little more modest, which is what it sounds like she might want.”
I nod, although I’m not sure she would want modest. She’s a public defender but she appreciates nice things. Her friends certainly wear substantial rocks. And I don’t mind buying her something expensive.
Still, Kevin seems to think this is a very good suggestion. We hop on the L train and take it to Bedford Avenue in Brooklyn. All the people look like they live in a different city from the one we just left. They are not just fashionable, they are outfitted, ready to see and be seen at 12:30 p.m. on a random Saturday.
“Didn’t you use to live here?” I ask Jon. “Wasn’t it all guys with lumberjack beards in really tight jeans?”
“Uh, yeah, back before I got priced out in like 2010. Now it’s all finance bros and models.”
Jon is a middle school teacher. He does not truck with finance bros and models.
“I have a bad feeling about this,” I say. “Sarah would hate it here.”
Kevin shushes me. “If you’re not careful you’ll end up with one of those big boring Tiffany rocks.”
Tiffany.
Yeah.
I instantly get the bad feeling that what Kevin considers big boring rocks might be exactly what Sarah Louise would want.
We edge our way into the jewelry store, which has old-fashioned gilt signage on the window and is about the size of my foyer in Chicago. Everything in it, including the salesgirls and the crowd of mostly women browsing, are tiny. Jon is slight enough to fit in unobtrusively, but Kevin and I take up about 80 percent of the remaining space.
The twenty-year-olds who work here ignore us, so we just browse. Adair was right that this stuff is pretty, but it’s also aggressively dainty. Some of the rings seem deliberately too-small, like they might be more befitting a child than a grown woman. Some are just bizarre, like a tiny opal set in the mouth of four interlocking snakes.
I can imagine Sarah being confused and disappointed if I bought her one of these.
Even more vividly, I can imagine Molly Marks laughing at them. Thinking them affected and twee.
I don’t know why I keep thinking about Molly. I haven’t spoken to her since she dropped me off at the airport in LA.
Probably because something about that day hurt. I got on a plane and put on a legal podcast and spent the four and a half hours back to Chicago trying not to remember the way her face crumpled when I said I’d met someone.
The way I’d wished, just for a moment, that it hadn’t been true.
“Do you want to see anything here?” Kevin asks me.
“I don’t know,” I say. “It all seems a bit…”
“Precious?” he supplies.
“Yes!”
“I agree—this doesn’t feel in keeping with the way you’ve described Sarah.”
We leave the store, and I feel like I can breathe again.
“Listen,” I say. “I think maybe we should go to Tiffany.”
Kevin looks at me like I have stabbed him in the heart.
“A lot of her friends have rings from there,” I say before he can object, “and I know she likes them, and I just want to get her something she likes.”
“Sounds like the right move,” Jon says. He turns to the street and flags down a taxi. “Tiffany, on Fifth Avenue,” he says firmly to the driver.
“Maybe afterward we can have tea at the Plaza,” Kevin grumbles, squeezing in next to me. “Take a carriage ride through Central Park.”
“Sarah would love tea at the Plaza,” I say, trying to explain who she is. “And carriage rides in Central Park. And going to the top of the Empire State Building. She’s not cool. And I love that about her.”
Jon pats my knee. “You don’t have to apologize.”
“Tiffany is very classic,” Kevin allows grumpily. “I’m being a snob.”
We walk into the store, and I let out a breath. Immediately I know that I’m right, surrounded by all that iconic robin’s-egg blue. Sarah Louise will see the box alone and squeal with delight.
We find a sales associate, and I quickly pick out an oval halo ring with a diamond band in an expensive-but-not-ludicrous price range. I hand over my credit card and receive a bag in return.
Jon and Kevin clap when I hold it up in the air.
I smile, but I feel strangely flat.
I try to corral my thoughts to the appropriate image: Sarah Louise, diamond ring sparkling on her French-manicured hand, crying with joy.
But instead, I keep imagining Molly Marks, seeing the Tiffany blue and rolling her eyes at me. “How creative.”
I’m relieved when Kevin says, “I’m starving. I want a burger.”
“Let’s go to P. J. Clarke’s,” Jon suggests. “It won’t be too busy yet.”
We walk the fifteen minutes to Third Avenue, and I begin to worry about losing my little blue bag filled with thirty-thousand dollars’ worth of diamonds.
“Should I tuck this into my underwear or something?” I muse. “Does New York still have muggers?”
“Here, give it to me,” Jon says. “I’ll put it in my tote.”
I hand it over and feel strangely lighter.
We get to the restaurant, which is already noisy with midtown types speaking over each other at the bar. It reminds me of happy hour at the spots in Chicago near my office, and I feel more like myself. We order beers and I pound mine while waiting for my burger.
“You all right, chief?” Jon asks, eyeing my second glass as it arrives.
“Great!” I say, reflexively.
But even with a buzz I feel glummer than a guy who just bought his girlfriend an engagement ring should.
“What’s Alastair up to?” I ask Jon, to change the subject.
He and Kevin exchange an odd glance.
“I don’t know,” Jon says. “We… broke up.”
“What? When?”
“Just before Christmas.”
“And you didn’t tell me?”
“Well, I wasn’t ready to process it. We’d been talking about getting engaged for so long, but he wanted to open things up and I felt uncomfortable about it, so we decided to take a break. And then…” He shoots another glance at Kevin.
“We actually have some news for you,” Kevin says. He takes Jon’s hand over the table. “We’re together. Like… together together.”
I put down my beer midsip.
“You guys! What? How long has this been going on?”
“Since New Year’s Eve,” Kevin says. “We didn’t want to tell you if it wasn’t going to be anything serious.”
“So it’s serious?”
“We’re moving in together at the end of the month,” Jon says with a shy smile. “As soon as my lease is up.”
“Oh my God, you guys. Wow. I’m so happy for you.” I raise my glass. “To love! And to happiness!”
Maybe it’s just my second beer hitting me on an empty stomach, but I feel much happier now. Like the news of my two best friends finding love together has made me more joyous than planning to propose to my own girlfriend.
“You know who called this?” I say. “Molly Marks.”
“What?” Kevin laughs.
“Yeah. At the reunion. She said she thought you two had a spark.”
“I guess she noticed it before we did,” Jon says.
“Oh please,” Kevin says. “I had a huge crush on you already. You know that.”
Jon smiles at him. “What I meant is, I’ve had a huge crush on you for my entire adult life. I just didn’t know it was reciprocated.”
“It’s much reciprocated.”
They lean over and kiss.
They look right together. Natural. Relaxed.
I wonder if I look that way with Sarah.
But I don’t want to think about Sarah, because the person in my head right now is Molly. And how I’m losing the bet, one to two.
And how she’ll make fun of me relentlessly if she finds out.
And how much I want her to.