Chapter 21
Nora: I can’t believe this trip is coming up so soon. Are you looking forward to the party? Or do you do stuff with colleagues all the time so this isn’t as big of a deal to you as it is for me? I’ve never met anyone!
J: I used to see people more, so yeah, this will be a good event.
Nora: Oh like, you used to go into the office more? Pre-Covid and all that?
J: Yeah.
Nora: I wish I could work from home.
J: Yes, no, that’s true. I’m grateful I can work from wherever.
Nora: It’s nice to have control over your schedule. Mine is so dictated by appointments and client consistency.
J: You have real people to deal with, and I just have people’s words.
Nora: good point!
Nora: So would you like to grab coffee while I’m there? I totally understand if you’re too busy.
J: No not at all!
J: I mean, no to being too busy. Not no to coffee.
J: Yes to coffee.
J: I’d really like that.
J: Can we decide on the time the day before? Just have to figure out my schedule for next week.
Nora: Oh sure, of course. I’m just going to the party and doing some sightseeing, so I can meet whenever.
J: Great. That’s really great. We’ll definitely do that.
The trip to London is less than a week away, so the prospect of seeing J has been looming, and my texts with J have been more normal and yet more abnormal. I know most people wouldn’t think of topics like the intricacies of being picked as normal, but that’s the part with him I’m used to. The logistics piece is a foreign object, a tool I’m clumsy with when I wield it.
This was the only time I’ve brought it up, and maybe I’m interpreting him as skittish because I’m skittish. But his whole response just feels odd. It’s as though I’m on the precipice of an important moment, and his reply is too vague to even get a grip on.
I should just try not to think about it. It’s going to be whatever it’s going to be, but I can’t stop myself from the extremely cringeworthy mental exercise of imagining every multiverse of scenarios, from extremely awkward to happily ever after. Neither is reducing the pressure I’m putting on myself.
And that jumpy feeling also hasn’t been helped by things with Eli. Whatever is sitting between us has me more on edge than ever before, even if he has shown up for our last few walks and managed to act excessively normal, much to my relief. But still.
I’ve got two hovering, imminent knocks at my door, and they both only get louder as time goes on.
So a nice quiet evening with my best friend was supposed to help with that.
Too bad Dane dragged me to her pool hall, and now both Kwan and Tom are standing giddily next to me. Apparently this is how my Sunday night is going to go. My best friend mostly ignoring me, and my elderly neighbors trying to peer pressure me into practicing a sport I’m indifferent to.
And ... is that our building president?
“Who invited Hearn?” I ask Kwan as I see Hearn waving to all of us.
Tom gives me a small shove. “Don’t be unkind,” he says, and I stop myself from pointing out that he’s sounding more and more like Mr. Rogers every day in his retirement.
I take a large sip of my beer as Hearn walks over. “Well, look at this trio!” he says, ignoring Dane because, frankly, she’s not exactly hanging out with us anymore while she gets in some solitary practice. “We should do a building party here sometime!”
“Oh that would be fun when it’s cold outside,” Tom encourages.
“I loved that little mixer Eli had,” Hearn says. “He’s such a good boy, isn’t he? Esther would be so proud.”
I wish I could ignore how much it tugs on my heartstrings to hear someone say the one thing about Esther that I know Eli would want to hear. Even if it’s coming in a patronizing way from Hearn. But Tom and Kwan are nodding along, so maybe that consensus would be the best thing of all.
“ And it’s so nice how he’s scaled back his roof plans a little bit. He said he talked to a landscaper and didn’t want to cause any potential drainage issues with his planters, so he readjusted without us even having to ask.” Well, that part stuns me. Eli changed his roof plans? But before I can ask anything, Hearn changes the subject. “Anyway, I’m meeting up with my team.”
“Your team?” I ask, not having quite noticed before that he’s wearing a shirt with a logo that has two pool cues crossing.
“Oh yeah, big invitational coming up soon. We’ve gotta crush everyone.”
I try to school my surprised expression. I wouldn’t have pegged Hearn for having any friends or hobbies beyond nitpicking at our building.
Dane walks over, and suddenly Hearn’s face turns serious. “ Dane ,” he says, with mock formality.
“Your honor,” she says with the same competitive bite, tipping her baseball cap in his direction.
At that, Hearn walks away, and I turn to Dane, bewildered by the whole exchange.
“He’s a retired judge. And his team is our biggest competition,” she shrugs.
“ Hearn is good at pool?”
“Not as good as me,” she says, swiping my beer and taking a large chug. With a wink she wanders back over to the table next to us and reracks. Kwan joins her while Tom and I stand and watch.
“So what’s going on with your stranger?” Dane asks, never taking her eye off the balls.
“Oooh, what stranger?” Tom asks, looking delighted.
“It’s nothing—” I start to say, but Dane cuts me off.
“She’s in love with a dude she’s never met,” she explains, as though I’m not standing right here. “He edits an advice column that she writes. At first it was love notes in the margin, and now it’s a full-scale texting relationship.”
“I’m not sure I’d call texting a relationship,” Kwan says, taking his time making his next shot after Dane’s went flawlessly.
“I think that’s very romantic,” Tom interjects.
“Thanks for the extra-special glimpse into your insights about my life,” I grumble, not loving all this attention suddenly on me, even if I know Dane’s doing it to try and move me forward through sheer will. “It’s not a big deal.”
“Well, it’s relevant!” Dane says to me and then turns back to Kwan and Tom. “She’s going to London for work in a few days, and they’re going to meet up for the first time.”
“If I didn’t know any better,” Kwan says, trying to rile Dane up now that she’s clearly beating him, “I’d say you’re going soft and gooey.”
“I’m not gooey; I’m just Team Nora,” she responds matter-of-factly, and I can’t help but feel a little fuzzy inside. But Dane clocks my reaction and rolls her eyes.
“I know you didn’t necessarily want to bring this up with us,” Tom says in a statement so obvious that it probably didn’t need to be articulated, “but I am curious. Do you really think you can know someone without meeting them? Is this generational?”
“Definitely not all of us,” Dane mutters.
I finish my beer and try to think of how to explain something that seems so unfathomable.
“I know him,” I finally say. “I don’t know a lot of the surface things. I don’t know what color his eyes are or even what he looks like, that’s true. But I think you can fall in love with a person through words. I think in some ways, that’s more powerful than all the other external things.”
“But if he walked in here right now,” Kwan points out, “he’d still be a stranger.”
“Yes, but he’s a sort of intimate stranger,” Tom says, and I give his arm a squeeze of thanks. Tom is so straightlaced and by the book, but I like to think being married to a free spirit like Meryl has made him perennially open minded.
“I think that’s a good way to describe it.” I pick at the label on my beer bottle, considering. “There’s so much I don’t know about him, so in those ways he is a stranger. I don’t know his contours. But I know his mind. So I don’t know how to explain it, but I just feel in my gut that this person is my person.”
“Are you nervous, then?” Tom asks. “For your meeting?”
I laugh. “Uh, yeah,” I scoff. “What if he’s different in person? What if he doesn’t like me? There’s a million what-ifs that are all just as realistic as the next.”
“But I think when you know, you know,” Tom says, giving me a reassuring pat on my hands. I smile, imagining whatever Meryl is up to tonight—probably getting into trouble but still speaking about Tom just as lovingly.
“How do you know he’s not married or like ... a troll?” Kwan interjects, still skeptical.
He’s been a widower for the better part of twenty years, so I imagine that’s hardened him. I wonder if Kwan and Tom—men of the same generation—started with the same level of optimism, and then their disparate experiences moved them into opposite mindsets. Evidence will change us, after all.
“He’s not married,” I say, brushing the thought away. “I write a therapy advice column, so we talk about relationship stuff pretty openly. I’ve been writing it for years, and we’ve always sort of written notes to each other. So when we were both in relationships, at various times, that came up in the conversations. He broke up with a girlfriend a little while ago. It’s kind of the thing that made me start to admit to myself I might even have these feelings—that his breakup made me feel a certain way.”
“And you suspect he feels the same?” Tom asks.
I hesitate, thinking about all our texting lately. “Intimate stranger” really is a perfect way to describe it. The freedom to be intimate with someone you don’t know, who you’ve realized understands you better than some of your closest people, has been a gift. And I know that’s been the same for him, because he doesn’t hesitate to point it out. But romantic feelings? “I have no idea, honestly,” I admit. “We are close; there’s no doubt about that to me. But it feels so absurd to claim romantic feelings for a person you don’t know that I sort of hesitate to imagine he could feel the same way.”
“Well, I hope it goes the way you want it to,” Tom says.
“Just for the record, I do, too, even if I’m an old grump,” Kwan concurs, wincing as Dane handily beats him.
“Obviously me too,” Dane says, before flagging the waitress and ordering another round of drinks. As Kwan reracks again, she turns back to me. “So what’s this thing with Eli?”
At that I nearly spit out my drink. “There’s no thing .”
“Eli from the building?” Tom asks, and now I can feel the color of my face deepening a shade.
“Nothing is happening with Eli from our building,” I say to him just as Dane interjects, “They hang out all the time, and he goes with her on her dog walks.”
At that Kwan perks up. “I thought he was a cat person!” Man, nothing like a small building to spread useless gossip.
“He is a cat person,” I say in a sad tone, knowing that Kwan, as a fellow dog person, will feel my pain.
“But then that just means he likes spending time with you,” Tom points out.
“Yes, absolutely,” Kwan agrees. “No cat person willingly goes on walks with a dog. It’s diametrically opposed to their entire viewpoint on animals. And no offense, but it really must be about you, because if a cat person was going to pick a dog to hang out with, it wouldn’t be George.”
Dane chokes a little on her beer from that assessment, and Tom thwacks her on the back to help her.
“ Hey ,” I say, morally obligated to stick up for my beloved but strange dog.
“George aside,” Tom says kindly, “what gives?”
Being a couple beers in makes me feel looser. I guess there’s no harm talking this out, even if Kwan and Tom are unlikely romantic-advice givers.
“I don’t know,” I sigh. “I mean ... look, I guess I’m attracted to him. He’s a good-looking guy.”
“Ah Ha !” Dane says, triumph in her gait as she takes the break shot.
“But it doesn’t matter,” I say, waving it off.
I want to point out that Eli was sort of a patient, but no one knows that other than Dane, and I’m definitely not allowed to share that information with people who know him. But even without that fact (and even without everything Ari said the other day staring me in the face), there’s so much more to it than just the increasingly less relevant former-sort-of-patient thing.
“Why wouldn’t it matter?” Tom asks. His curiosity is clearly piqued—I wonder if living with Meryl makes him more interested in gossip or if he’d always been and Meryl just seems like the more likely busybody.
“It doesn’t matter because it’s physical,” I say, brushing it off. Although, the sense of selling Eli short rears its head, and I know I need to clarify. “It’s not that I don’t like him as a person ... I actually like him a lot more than I thought I would. But he’s too guarded and emotionally unavailable. I get pieces of him, but he’s hidden behind a wall.”
“And with your writer man, it’s different,” Tom says, understanding.
“Exactly.” I’m grateful he’s seeing the difference. “I don’t know how to explain it other than ... we’re both free. I’m free to be me.”
“What are you, Marlo Thomas now?” Dane says.
I snort. “It’s insane. I know it’s insane. But I can say anything to J, and he to me.”
“So even though you want to get it on with Eli, you’re not in that headspace since you’re about to meet this other man?” Kwan summarizes.
“ Get. It. On? ” Dane laughs. “Kwan, come on, I know you’re a geezer, but that’s a lot even for you.”
“I’m trying to think of a polite way to describe whatever casual mores your set has.” He pockets the ball he was aiming for and gleefully turns to smirk at Dane.
“You’ll figure it out,” Tom says, patting me again to the point where I’m starting to feel like a puppy whose owner wants them to feel like it’s okay that they’ve made everything a mess. “Just follow your heart.”
“And not your loins,” Kwan snickers.
“‘Loins’? Now you’re just fucking with me,” Dane says.
Kwan shrugs, clearly enjoying getting Dane agitated. Maybe there’s something to it, since he’s ahead in this game.
“Nothing is happening with Eli,” I say. “I know what I want. Just dealing with what’s ahead when I go to London is enough drama for me. Eli is my friend, and you don’t have to read anything else into it.”
The waitress comes back and hands us all new beers. I take mine and lean up against the wall, my stomach churning and probably not in need of more alcohol, but that’s what it’s going to get.
It’s confusing, conflating Eli and J like this. I should be entirely focused on seeing J in just a few days. Why does it stir something up in me every time I think about Eli? How can I feel this strongly about two different people?
It’s all swimming and swirling in my mind, and I wish I wasn’t heading into this trip feeling so confused. I shouldn’t be confused. I know what’s real with J. Eli is a friend who acts irrationally, for both good and bad—creating this mess about the roof and then apparently paring it back is just the perfect example. What’s he playing at?
But as I take another sip of my beer, I refocus on my friends. I’m here to have a relaxing evening, and in a few days I’m going to meet J. That’s what I’m focusing on.
That’s what I should be focusing on.