3. Ruby #2
"He doesn't hear you anymore," I said. "You talk, and it goes right past him. You can watch it float right by."
"Yes." Nicole's eyes came up and held mine, and there was something almost grateful in them, the look of a person who's been told for years that they're imagining a thing, finally hearing someone else describe it from the inside.
"That's it exactly. Sometimes I say something insane just to see if he's listening.
The other day I told him I was thinking of getting a python.
A snake. In the house. I hate snakes." She shook her head.
"He said mmm-hmm. Mmm-hmm, Nicole. To a python. "
Something cold went down the back of my neck.
Mmm-hmm. I'd been collecting mmm-hmms for an hour tonight in the back of a limousine, about Fallingwater, about a road trip, about skydiving and robbing a bank, dropping more and more outrageous things into the silence just to see if any of them would land. None of them ever did.
"I'm getting to a place," Nicole went on, and her voice was very even now, the evenness of someone who'd thought about this in the dark more than once, "where I'm asking myself if this is it.
If this is what I want the rest of my life to look like.
And, sure, I could get a hobby. Everybody says that.
Find something to fill your time. Take up pottery, learn French.
" Her mouth twisted. "But that's not why I got married.
I didn't sign up to live with somebody who doesn't see me.
If I wanted that I'd get a roommate. At least I wouldn't have to do their laundry. "
Olivia leaned in and lowered her voice, the way you do when you're about to name the thing. "Nicole. Are you thinking about divorce?"
The word sat there on the white tablecloth between the three of us.
"I don't know," Nicole said. "I don't want a divorce.
I never wanted that; it's the last thing I ever wanted.
" She pressed her lips together. "But I look at my life right now, and I can't tell you I'm happy.
And I don't want to spend the rest of my life like this, feeling like this, next to him.
" She lifted one shoulder and let it drop.
"I think I'd rather be alone. At least then I’ll just be alone, and not lonely. "
I sat there, and I couldn't say anything at all.
Because she was describing my limo ride. My dressing room. My twenty years. The slow disappearance of a man into the middle distance, and my life trying to be content with being on the same level as cuff links.
And worse, underneath that, a question that had nothing to do with Oscar at all.
Because if I followed Nicole's logic all the way down, if I let myself stand back and look at my life the way she was looking at hers, I didn't only find a marriage I wasn't sure of.
I found a woman I wasn't sure of. I'd spent eighteen years pouring everything I had into Jeremy, and the years before that making myself into something that fit neatly into the corner of Oscar's life.
I genuinely did not know what was left when you took those two things away.
I didn't know who I was when I wasn't somebody's mother or somebody's wife.
I wasn't sure there was a person under there at all, or just the straight face and twenty years of stuffing down my feelings and wearing a mask.
"Well," Olivia said softly, "it’s a good thing we have all these desserts. I think we need them."
We laughed, not because what she said was funny, but because we needed that relief.
We needed to move on from the pain and the sadness.
Our conversation after that turned surface-level.
Me updating them on Jeremy at Pratt, Olivia doing some house renovations, but I didn’t entirely come back to the table or the party that night.
In the back of my mind, one question kept repeating—are you happy?
I thought about it, I went back in time and really thought about things.
When it came to my marriage, the answer was no.
* * *
The limo was quiet on the way home, the city sliding off behind us, the bridge lights stretching and snapping across the dark window.
Oscar sat beside me with his head back against the seat and his eyes half-closed, spent in the good way he always was after a night like this, the way a performer is spent.
His hand rested on his knee, inches from mine.
He was right there. I could have reached over and touched him without straightening my arm.
He had never been anywhere but right there.
That was the thing I kept circling. From the night I met him, I had never once pictured my life without Oscar in it.
He was simply a fact of the world, like weather, like gravity.
When I imagined the future, any future, he was there.
I never had to put him there, he just was, the way the sun is in the sky.
For twenty-three years the question had never been whether he'd be beside me. He always was.
But sitting beside someone and being there are not the same thing. It wasn’t that I was learning or even realizing the difference tonight, it was that I was allowing myself to accept my reality. He was beside me, but he wasn’t with me. He was a million miles away.
I thought about the very beginning, when there hadn't been any distance. When he made sure to let me know that with me was exactly where he wanted to be.
* * *
The day after our first date, dinner the night after we closed the bar, I came home from my internship to find a man sitting on my front steps.
I parked my car and started walking towards my apartment, unsure if I should get back into my car and run, or if this man was at the wrong door.
Oscar turned toward me and smiled, and I suddenly recognized him.
In one hand he had grocery store flowers, purple and white daisies wrapped in crinkling cellophane; in his other hand he held a DVD case.
He stood up too fast, nearly dropping the flowers.
“I hope you don’t mind,” he said. “You mentioned having a long day today, and I thought you might like relaxing with a movie after. If you’re busy I can go.”
“No, stay. I’m just surprised,” I said, unlocking the door. “I didn’t recognize you at first. I didn’t know you wore glasses.”
“Yeah, I wore contacts the night we met and at dinner last night. Wanted to give my eyes a break today.”
“I like them. They look good on you. What movie did you get?”
“I wasn’t sure what to get, but the girl at the store said this was good.” He held up the DVD case to Shakespeare in Love. “Have you seen it?”
“No, but I always wanted to.” I took the DVD and looked at the pictures. “I actually started out as an English major before I switched to Architecture. I love Shakespeare.”
My apartment was the size of a closet, and I was suddenly aware of every dish in the sink, but he didn't seem to see any of it. He looked at me like I was the only thing in the room worth noticing. We made dinner together in the tiny galley kitchen, reaching around each other like we had been cooking together forever. The result wasn’t anything gourmet.
I didn’t have much to make and wasn’t expecting visitors, but we ate as if the fish sticks, boxed rice mix, and Pillsbury biscuits were the best meal we’d ever eaten.
Then we sat on my terrible couch and watched the movie, and somewhere in the first twenty minutes he reached over and took my hand, and that was all.
He just held it. He held my hand through the entire movie like holding it was the point and the movie was the excuse, and every so often his thumb would move once across the back of my hand, and I remember thinking, with a clarity that frightened me, oh.
There you are. I've been waiting for you.
* * *
The bridge lights swung across the window and went dark.
I looked down. At some point on the ride home, without noticing I was doing it, I had folded my own two hands together in my lap, one holding the other, my thumb gently moving across the back of my hand.
I looked at them for a long moment. Then I looked over at Oscar, at his hand on his knee, inches away. I didn’t reach for it. And I knew he wouldn’t reach for mine.