Chapter Nine #2
“Babe, it doesn’t mean anything,” he’s reassuring her.
“Of course it means something. She’s your ex.”
“Right, exactly. Thank you for making my point for me.” He’s charming and foppish, bending at the knee to catch her eye.
“What point?” She’s catlike and fierce, her hair is slicked back in a perfect ponytail, and her top is shiny black leather.
“That she’s my ex,” he says triumphantly. “Not my girlfriend.”
“And if I were your ex and slid into your DMs, would that be meaningless too?” Now, she’s the one who’s triumphant. Her logic’s got him on the ropes.
He looks momentarily stymied. If he admits that some exes are meaningful, he’s in trouble again. If he says that all exes are meaningless, including her, if she ever becomes one, he’s in trouble again.
His confidence is restored and he goes for broke. “If you were my ex, I’d be the one sliding into your DMs. I’d be a lonely loser and I’d probably spend a week trying to figure out the perfect way to say what’s up?”
She’s trying to maintain annoyance but her face is looking mighty pleased. She can’t think of a reply that doesn’t undermine her previous stance on the matter, so instead, she just stomps off and he jogs happily after her, clearly forgiven.
There’s a lot going on there, and frankly, I give them about three more months, tops, before the writing’s on the wall, but oh, I remember those days.
When you’ve gone absolutely loopy over someone and it’s time to start figuring out if they have a secret shoebox filled with love letters from the one who got away.
A memory blossoms up before me. It’s me and Vin, in a hammock, at his mother’s house, about eight months after we started dating:
“Do you miss Yvette?” I ask, faux-casually. Yvette was his last girlfriend. They broke up about a year and a half before and we recently ran into her at the Union Square farmer’s market. She’s been stuck in my head since then.
“Miss? No.” He’s tucking my hair behind my ear. He’s obsessed with tucking my hair behind my ear. He says I have ears like a fairy and the acoustics must be terrible.
“Well,” I press. “You were together for six months…do you ever miss anything about your relationship with Yvette?”
“Um…” He thinks, his eyes on the stars and his thumb moving down to draw a circle under the sleeve of my T-shirt. “She was the only person who’d ever said they wanted to marry me. That was nice.”
“Oh.” I stiffen.
He stiffens too. “I mean—I wasn’t—”
“Okay,” I say. “We could do that. The getting married thing.”
Silence. His thumb’s gone still. The crickets are deafening. Even the breeze has fled.
And then, “Okay.” And his thumb starts up that circle again.
“Wait. Really?” I prop up on one elbow, which is extremely difficult in a hammock. His eyes are too shadowed for me to see but he lifts his head and kisses me softly, meltingly, drawing me back against him and then settling me in the crook of his neck.
“I’ll marry you,” he says…
I stand up off the bench and board the train that’s just pulled into the station.
I hold the bar and sway, staring into nothing.
A realization is hitting me in slow-speed stages.
I’m thinking of Vin. Of how he phrased that.
He didn’t say Let’s get married. Or Will you marry me?
(which would have been odd, considering I had pretty much just proposed to him). He’d said, I’ll marry you.
The phrasing of that reminds me of something. It’s catching at the edge of my brain. I can’t fit the puzzle piece into the puzzle.
I’d wondered for years if I’d sort of cornered him into agreeing to marriage. Like I’d made it too awkward for him to say no…
But on our fifth anniversary I finally cracked and told him I’d been worrying about that.
And I’ll never forget what he said. That those eight months had been the longest of his life.
That he was waiting to get to a year before he proposed because he worried I’d be freaked-out if he brought it up earlier.
What was it that Deb said about Italian American men? They’ll die for you but won’t talk about their feelings?
Vin never would have brought that up about our proposal if I hadn’t come to him with tears in my eyes.
That’s the way he is. And he always has been. And I never used to mind it. He doesn’t say a lot…but maybe he says it all.
We pull into Grand Central, I get service, and my phone ding-a-lings. It’s a text from Vin blinking up at me. A photo he’s taken in the condiments aisle at the grocery store. A blurry close-up of jars of miso.
Did you need red or white? his text reads.
A warm confusion starts to spread over me, like waking up from a nap in a puddle of sunshine.
He doesn’t say a lot but he says it all…And suddenly that puzzle piece clicks into place. I recognize the phrasing of I’ll marry you.
I’ll marry you. Said to me in a hammock a decade ago.
I’ll go. Said to me outside Raff’s door just weeks ago.
They should feel like bookends, but they don’t. I can’t explain it, but these two sentences, said by the same man, in completely opposite circumstances, feel like they mean the same thing.
I try a door inside my heart. I expect it to be locked, but the doorknob circles freely under my trembling grip. The nameplate on that door? It reads: You’re Missing a Crucial Piece of Information, Roz.
I thought I’d understood it all and that there was only one possible reason for that lease.
That my version of the story was certainly his version of the story because there could only possibly be one version of the story.
But he’s texting me from the condiments aisle because he…
gives a shit about me getting what I need.
Which, even though everything else is different, is Vin in a nutshell… And always has been.
I try the door again.
Still open.
Still free.
Still mine to step through.
So, what is Topic Roulette?
(Pick a topic out of the hat and then tell the first story that comes to mind!)
With no preparation? Jeez. You are hardcore people. Okay, then. My topic is—Oh, for the love of God.
(What is it?)
“Talk about losing your virginity.”
(YES.) (Roz!) (Roooozzzzzz.) (ROZ!)
Oh, come on. I did not lose my virginity to Roz! We met when I was thirty-two! Although…I might have been more nervous sleeping with her for the first time than when I actually did lose my virginity. Which was when I was sixteen. At a movie theater. By the way.
(Vin!)
(Big Vin!)
(Vinny gets it done!)
Yeah. Yeah. So, did I do it? My turn is over?
(Pick a different one!)
(Yeah, that one was stupid, who put it in there? Bill? Did you put it in there?)
(It’s a topic with potential for tension, intrigue, embarrassment, triumph. What more could you want, Irene?)
(New topic!)
Okay, new topic. This one is…wow. Okay. It says, “The end is the beginning.” Right…I’ll try.
A story where the end is the beginning…Let me think…
So…No one ever actually gets what they want. Let’s just start with the fact that I understand that.
Now, here’s the story of how I thought I was actually about to get everything I’d ever wanted.
(Yes!)
(He’s finding his rhythm, people!)
(Tell ’em, Vin!)
And how, for seven years, I had it.
I asked someone to marry me. And she said yes.
And I don’t know about anyone else. But for me, asking someone to marry me made me think a lot about death.
And I don’t mean that in a, like, oh-I-secretly-hated-my-wife sort of way, like I couldn’t wait for the sweet relief of death. I mean that in a, you know, till-death-do-us-part sort of way.
I…I am not someone who…
I…have always known that I needed to live for a very long time.
In fact, I needed to live long enough to…
Does anyone else have a complete dumbass for a little brother? Yes, okay, based on the laugh that got, I guess I can see that almost everyone who has a little brother thinks he’s a complete and utter dumbass.
Well, mine is a dumbass but he’s also…like Bambi? Like a butterfly? He’s…he’s a colorful and precious soul and needs to be protected. He’d hate that if he heard it. I’d hate that if someone said it about me. It probably says more about me than it does about him that I’d classify him that way.
But here we are.
He once got severe pancreatitis from eating too much fruit. As a twenty-eight-year-old man, he almost fruited himself to death.
This is what I’m saying.
I have always known that I needed to live a very long time so that I could outlive him.
Because what would he do without me? It was my job, as his older brother…
I was there the day he was born. There are Polaroids to prove it, and I would be there to help him to the other side someday, I just always sort of knew this…
without thinking too hard about it…I knew it.
But then I met a woman.
(Roz!)
(Roz!)
Oh, fine. Yes. I obviously talk too much about my wife. You’ve heard the stories. I get it. Get a life, Vin. Well, yeah. You should be so lucky to love someone as much as I love her.
ANYWAYS. I met a woman. And she has this way about her. For the first time in my life, I wasn’t the only one changing the pillowcases. She was choosing the soap she thought smelled best. Someone else was thinking about tax season. Someone else…
So, for me, marrying someone, it felt a little bit like infinity?
Like, yes, obviously forever just means until you die.
But I took her hand and it occurred to me that I might get hit by a bus.
I might…get cancer. I might have a heart attack.
I might die tomorrow. And it would be all right, because she would be there for my brother.
Loving her meant loving him. Meant putting my heart into someone else’s body because she loves him too.
She’s not going to let my brother be alone even if I’m dead…
Even if we get divorced. Loving her has felt…
like immortality? I was giving myself, extending beyond my, whatever, my body, my, my, my mortal confines!
That’s what it’s called. My mortal confines.
And here’s the thing. Because I stopped thinking, for the first time, that I’d have to outlive my brother just as a matter of course, because I was suddenly able to just die whenever I’m gonna die, suddenly…I realized that I might not die alone.
Look, I haven’t spent a ton of time picturing this. And I know this makes me sound so sad and like Beetlejuice or whatever, I’m just saying that in the back of my mind, I always thought I’d die alone.
But I asked Roz to marry me and it suddenly seemed like I probably wouldn’t.
That there would be somebody to make sure there were flowers on the grave. And I just…I just got used to that really fast.
I put my heart in her chest and she carries it around. And she’ll put flowers on my grave.
And from the moment I realized that I wanted to marry her, I was already thinking about the end. Not the end of our relationship, but the end…of it all.
Loving her made me think about death. In a good way. It was a gift. It was because I wasn’t scared to go. Not when I had her.
So, that’s…Yeah. It’s not a story, really. It’s my thought. She’s my “the end is the beginning.”