Chapter 2
Two
Victor
I’m mid-flow when my phone rings.
Not during the live stream, thank goodness.
I finished that forty minutes ago and I’m recording another yoga session, but at least the fifteen hundred people who tune into my Tuesday intermediate flow class are not watching me fumble the transition from warrior two to triangle pose because my phone is buzzing against the hardwood floor of my home studio. I glance at it.
Adrienne.
I hold the trikonasana pose for the count of five, then stop the recording and pick up.
“I’m in the middle of recording,” I tell her.
“You answered, so you must not be,” she says pleasantly.
I adore Adrienne. She represents major media companies and a handful of Hollywood moguls, and she argues for sport. I’m also a little afraid of her, which I would take to my grave before admitting to Kelsey.
“I’ve got a lot of shit to do today,” I say.
“And I’ve got a meeting with a producer in an hour. Can you take a break? I’m downstairs.”
I look out the window of my apartment at the street three floors below, where Adrienne is standing on the sidewalk with an insulated mug in one hand and a paper coffee cup in the other. She raises the paper cup in salutation.
“All right, fine, come up,” I say.
The intercom buzzes and I press the door release, then pull on sweatpants and swap my damp tank top for a dry T-shirt. I reach the door just as Adrienne’s heels click up the last set of stairs.
“You look sweaty,” she says, handing me the paper coffee cup as she passes me into the apartment.
“I was doing yoga. Did I mention that I was in the middle of recording?”
She sweeps her eyes around the living room I’ve turned into a fitness studio—cleared of furniture, mirrored on one wall, with a rolling camera rig in one corner and a stationary bike in the other—and gives a nod of apology.
I lead her to the kitchen in the middle of the apartment.
Beyond it is my tiny bedroom and the bathroom that was even tinier before I convinced my landlord to let me carve some space out of the bedroom to expand it.
The apartment is small, but rent-stabilized, and I’m only in NYC half of any given year anyway.
Adrienne sets her bag down, peels her coat off, and sits with the brisk economy of a woman who has three more meetings today and is already thinking about tomorrow’s. “Wedding stuff,” she says, without preamble.
“I figured.” I settle into a chair opposite her at the little round table in the corner of the kitchen. “How are the preparations coming along?”
“Kelsey has a spreadsheet,” Adrienne says. “I’m starting to have nightmares about the spreadsheet.”
“Kelsey’s had a spreadsheet for her wedding since she was eleven. I helped her make the first one.”
Adrienne blinks at me. “Of course she did. Of course you did.” She flips the lid of her insulated mug open and takes a sip. “I need to talk to you about Jason.”
Sweat that’s not from doing yoga prickles under my arms. I take a sip from the paper cup she brought me. A golden milk latte. A bribe or peace offering? Adrienne must have noticed somewhere along the way that I don’t drink caffeine after eleven a.m. “What about Jason?”
“The photographer sent over her pre-wedding questionnaire,” Adrienne says. “It’s got questions about any family dynamics she should be aware of. Divorced parents who can’t share a frame. Step-family tensions. That sort of thing.”
Step-family tensions. Not until after…well. That’s not something the wedding photographer needs to know about. “And what did you tell her?”
“Kelsey told her that her dads have always been mature about co-parenting.” She pauses, and there’s enough dry precision in that pause to fill a courtroom. “But then I realized that I’ve never actually seen you two co-parent.”
“Well, it’s not like Kelsey needs active co-parenting anymore,” I say. “She’s all grown up now.” I have a flash of a gap-toothed Kelsey at seven or eight, giggling while I chase her around the monkey bars at the playground near Leah and Jason’s brownstone.
“Okay, but I’ve only ever seen the two of you carefully, adroitly, never be in the same place at the same time.”
Who uses the word adroitly? I almost ask that question out loud because there’s no other way to respond to what Adrienne just said that isn’t either a lie or a confession.
And fuck if I’m confessing anything to my almost-daughter-in-law.
“So?” I take a sip of my latte.
Adrienne studies me with an expression that probably makes junior associates confess to billing irregularities. “So, when is the last time you and Jason were in the same room for more than two hours?”
My downstairs neighbor’s dog barks his face off for half a minute, then stops. Probably a delivery person rang the bell.
“Kelsey’s twenty-fifth birthday party,” she continues, answering her own question.
“Jason arrived an hour late and you left before the cake. And before that, her college graduation, where Kelsey tells me you two sat on opposite ends of the auditorium.” She ticks these off like evidence.
“When we announced our engagement, you called. Jason came to dinner. I’ve been with Kelsey for three years and I’ve never once seen the two of you actually talk to each other. ”
“We talk,” I protest.
“Do you?”
Okay, the last time we were in the same room together for something unrelated to Kelsey, we didn’t do much talking. Our mouths were otherwise occupied.
I wrap my hands around my coffee cup and resist the urge to say something that’s both completely true and completely stupid, like it’s complicated.
“Seriously, Victor, what happened between you and Jason?”
The lie leaps to my lips. “Nothing hap—”
“Victor.” Just my name, quiet, but with authority that stops me mid-sentence.
The apartment feels even smaller than usual and too warm.
I focus on my breath. In for two, hold, out for four.
How do I tell her that on the worst night of my life—the night we buried my best friend, the girl I accidentally got pregnant when we were far too young, the woman I’d loved like a sister ever since—I looked at her widower sitting alone on his sofa after the funeral and wanted him?
Not in the detached, virtuous, never-gonna-happen way I’d been wanting him from an enormous distance for years.
Actually.
Urgently.
In a way that should have been wrong—that was wrong—but somehow didn’t feel wrong, then or now.
How do I tell her that he’d reached for me first? But that I crept out of his house an hour later without either of us saying a word, re-dressed in the suit I’d worn to Leah’s funeral, and that I’ve been paying for it ever since.
I can’t say anything about this, so I say nothing and stare at my now lukewarm latte. Out of the corner of my eye, I see Adrienne’s fingers tap the side of her insulated mug. “All right. I don’t need the details.”
She stretches a hand across the table toward me. “But I need to know that the two of you can be in the same place for a week without making our wedding about your unresolved…” she waves that hand in the air. “Whatever it is.”
“We can handle it,” I say. We’re grown men. And it was fifteen years ago. Far too long to be holding out for a man I’ve never had a prayer of being with.
“Good.” She starts gathering her things.
“One more thing.” She pauses with her coat half on.
“That spreadsheet I mentioned? I’m already worried that Kelsey is going to enjoy planning this wedding more than the actual wedding itself.
Don’t make her spend any more time trying to figure out how to have both of you at this event without it being awkward. She deserves better from both of you.”
Jeez, Adrienne, don’t hold back. Tell me how you really feel.
I sigh and stand to kiss her cheek. “I know. We won’t.”
She slings her bag over her shoulder and heads for the door. She pauses with her hand on the doorknob and glances over her shoulder at me. “Jason’s very good at not looking at things, you know.”
And then she’s gone, heels clicking back down the stairs.
I take a last sip of my golden milk latte and grimace at the lukewarm sludge that’s settled in the bottom of the cup.
I need to finish recording that yoga session.
I have a spin session to film this afternoon, a live stream tomorrow morning, and approximately forty-seven other things to do before I leave for Costa Rica in four days.
The hell did Adrienne mean by that? All I've seen, in the rare moments when Jason and I have been in the same room, is a careful, considered, practiced avoidance.
Which I've matched, exactly, because the alternative is standing in the middle of a room with that man and trying to look like I'm not the one doing the looking. Like I’m not doing what I've been doing for fifteen years: cataloguing every detail of his face for the next long stretch of time before I see him again.
I've convinced myself, over and over, that the night of Leah's funeral was exactly what it looked like from Jason's side: a moment of desperation, an implosion of grief, the kind of thing that happens in extremis and means nothing on the other side of it. And now I’m facing a week in which I’ve promised Adrienne, not to mention myself—again—that I will keep my distance, respect Jason's choices, focus on Kelsey's happiness, and not do anything that would make this harder for anyone.
I've made this promise before. In the parking lot of Kelsey's college auditorium. Outside the venue at her twenty-fifth birthday. In my own head, quietly, every time I've watched one of Jason’s sextet’s concerts on their YouTube channel at midnight because I miss the sound of his voice. At two of the Saint Sebastian Six’s concerts in person, sitting in the back where Jason wouldn't see me. I told myself it was to hear the music.
Never mind that I would never listen to the kind of music the Saint Sebastian Six sings—sacred classical music, in Latin, no less—on my own.
One week in Costa Rica, spending every day near Jason, and then Kelsey and Adrienne are married and everything goes back to the way it's been for the last fifteen years.
I toss the paper coffee cup in the trash, go back to the studio, press record, and finish filming my classes as if my life is entirely in order.