Chapter Seven
From the curb, Vivienne and Jacob’s townhouse in the West Village looks like any of the other ones on the street.
White, brown, or red bricks, iron fire escapes snaking down the fronts, large windows that let in the light and frame glimpses of life: corners of bookshelves, edges of cushioned armchairs, the terra-cotta red of potted indoor plants.
Back when we were dating, Jacob lived closer to campus, on the Upper West Side, in an apartment his parents bought back in the seventies when his dad was in med school in the city.
Unlike me, who functioned on a tightly calculated budget in which every last cent was accounted for, Jacob had the luxury of a wealthy family background that afforded him a two-bedroom apartment on his own—when I was sharing with two, sometimes three, roommates (one of which would often “accidentally” eat my emergency ramen)—and a safety net if science didn’t work out.
Not to forget about the trump card that was his father, a medical director at a hospital in Hartford, whose tennis partners and colleagues and Yale secret society members hold sway over the country’s most important research foundations, either by donating to them or sitting on their boards.
It’s not that Jacob isn’t also a capable, smart, and meticulous scientist, or that his work hasn’t furthered our understanding of pattern separation in the hippocampus. But the leap to discovery is a little less scary if you have a soft place to land.
I scan over the set of names on the doorbell panel, spotting theirs at the bottom. Duchamps & Bellingham. Like the author line on their recent paper in Computational Biology, which I read on the way over, only here it signals their private life together. Their shared home.
“There you are.” Lewis appears behind me, his hand hovering in the air as if he was about to tap me on the shoulder.
In the short time between the end of this afternoon’s program and now, he’s changed into a white T-shirt and dark blue jeans.
A gray blazer dangles over the crook of his arm, and his mouth is pressed into a tight line.
“Dr. North.” I wick away the bead of sweat that trickles down my hairline and waffle between the greeting options.
Step into the arc that his arm forms in the air?
Or give him a peck on the cheek? I have no clue.
Why did we fail to talk about the etiquette for saying hello to your fake boyfriend, and waste our time with useless research-related stuff?
He takes a step back. “You’re late,” he says, aggravated, as I sink back onto my heels.
If I know anything, it’s that this greeting was a few degrees too cold to pass for an authentic relationship.
A peek over his shoulder tells me the sidewalk is empty, and the panel beside the door is old-fashioned, just an intercom and no camera. Nobody here to witness our awkwardness.
“Sorry. I was on the phone to my parents. What are you doing out here?”
“Waiting for you. I figured it’s not quite convincing if we arrive separately.”
I close my eyes. Have I been single this long to forget relationship 101? “Right.”
“I also picked up a bottle of wine,” he continues and lifts up his navy canvas backpack, “so that one of us keeps track of basic decency.”
This time, I can’t stop my face from sliding into a scowl. “I’m getting this really crabby vibe from you. Is there anything you want to talk about?”
“Well yeah, you’re late, we didn’t exchange numbers, so I had no clue where you were and I didn’t want to go in there”—he nods at the door—“and make up random excuses for why my pretend girlfriend wasn’t showing up.
” I shush him at the word pretend, but he carries on ranting.
“Which makes me wonder if this ‘easy’ plan of yours”—he uses his index and middle fingers to swipe angry quotation marks into the air—“doesn’t need a major revision because you clearly failed to account for some very important details. ”
My brain spools off flashbacks of his pages-long reviews, spelling out every tiny gap of logic in my research papers. “So, you’re calling me careless? Again?”
He sets his jaw, but even his silence is answer enough.
Ouch.
As my spine stiffens, I take a breath and remind myself we’re not competitors but collaborators now. We can’t risk our colleagues seeing through our act. So, as much as his jab hurts, for once, he’s right—we should’ve planned this better.
I fiddle with the tips of my hair that I left loose and falling to my elbows today, and force myself to not rise to his bait, but to breathe it out like the poised thirty-two-year-old woman I am.
“I’m—” I blurt out at the same time as he says, “Sorry.”
I nod at him. “You go first.”
For a moment, he peers down at me, then quickly blinks away again. His Adam’s apple bobs up and down and a blush forms at the tops of his cheeks, like maybe he’s jittery, too? “Look—I’m sorry. All these people in there make me a little nervous,” he admits. “I’m not a huge networker.”
It’s not only his honesty that surprises me.
It’s his nerves. On social media, he usually moves headlong into arguments with me, and even in person I have yet to see him as anything but confident.
His emails read as standoffish and cold, and I know he can be boyishly charming if he tries, like he did on the plane.
But shy?
“If you want to skip the small talk in there, you can just hang on to my arm and look pretty.” I push playfully against his chest, but the joke’s on me, because he has a very firm chest. Before I can stop myself, a “Well done, Dr. North,” slides out of my mouth. I look up at him, eyes wide.
He tenses under me, his gaze locking to the point where my hand touches him. For a moment, all I can think about is holding his hand on the flight, when he was just a surprisingly hot and bashful researcher and not the colleague I’d been engaging in paper wars with.
My throat is working overtime these days, swallowing down all the unwanted feelings.
The prickle in my nerves, the awareness of how attractive he is.
I already damned myself by opening my mouth, so I may as well keep going.
“I suppose this doesn’t come from typing up condescending remarks to my research? ”
“No,” he says, lowering his voice. “It’s from programming real hard.” It’s ridiculous, but also a little bit sexy, the way he drags out those last words, the way his mouth quirks around them.
Is he flirting with me? The thought flits across my mind, but then I remember where we are. What we’re about to do.
“Oh, you’re getting into character,” I note and drop my hand.
Lewis’s gaze follows the movement before he swallows. “One last thing. You should probably start calling me by my first name. Unless you want people to think that, you know,” he pauses, “we get some kink out of calling each other ‘Doctor.’ ”
It’s Jacob, not Vivienne, who answers the front door once we’ve made it through the lobby.
He pulls it open in the self-assured way I remember well and steps into the sliver of hallway space, arm flung wide in what I suspect is supposed to be a welcoming gesture.
I stare at the collar of his crisp white shirt, the knot of his ochre-patterned necktie.
“Frances,” he greets me in his deep voice. I forgot how tall he is, how he’d duck when stepping into the subway, standing out in any crowd. How I always had to crane my neck to see his face. How utterly and terribly small I felt next to him.
When I meet his dark eyes, my memories superimpose with the present version of him.
Then: wide-eyed and excited in the lab, sleepy with his hair sticking up to one side, and, at the end, with disdain pulling at his features.
Now with the same dark brown hair, although receding at the edges of his forehead.
Same upright posture making him seem taller than he already is, same glasses that look like he picked them up in another decade, the half-frame obscuring his eyebrows.
But the tweed jacket with elbow patches is new, as is the mustache.
He’s leaning harder into the role of classic professor from some private New England college, made of old money and heaps of nostalgia.
He looks like he’s trying too hard.
And yet…
Yet he also looks like the man I used to love, who pushed me through doubts and insecurities in my career, who made me cinnamon toast when I was racing hard to meet deadlines. Who whisked me away to his parents’ sprawling Connecticut home when the noise of the city became too much.
Neither of us has said anything yet and in my case, I know it’s because I’m overwhelmed by this reunion. Just as I’m tracking the changes on Jacob’s face, his eyes roam over me, too, and I wonder what he notices.
A touch feathers over my back. Lewis. I’d almost forgotten about him. With his fingertips pressing into the space between my shoulders he can undoubtedly feel how my heart’s thundering at seeing Jacob again.
Here’s the man who broke your heart, I remind myself.
Here’s the man for whom you’ve never been enough.
Here’s the man who only wanted you to succeed when he was succeeding more.
And then it’s as if I’ve opened a cobwebbed room somewhere in my brain.
The memories come tumbling out, stacking up into piles of resentment.
Snapshots of Jacob with his tight-lipped expression that last time I saw him.
When I dropped off the last of his shirts and toiletries in a tote bag, a few days before leaving the city.
Not to be a cliché of any thwarted ex-girlfriend ever, but suddenly I am glad that Lewis is at my side, even if it’s just for show. With his hand on my back reassuring me, I lengthen my spine, until my chin’s up and my confidence is back.
Still, I’m not sure how I want to greet Jacob—a hug seems out of place given how we left things, but a handshake feels too formal. So I stay put and say, “Jacob, hi.”