24. Abbot #2
The ring has two sets of initials inside, Ned’s EDC and another set that starts with J. A date too, in mid-April, and Abbot pictures the trees blooming and the sharp blue of a spring sky.
“Does it bother you I still have it?” Ned asks.
Does it? Abbot turns it over. “No,” he decides.
“I didn’t know what to do with it. I guess I’ll give it to Peggy someday.”
Yes, she’s apparently to be the recipient of a lot of items. That watch among them, sitting on Ned’s quilt in its box, too close to Abbot’s leg.
Abbot hands the ring back. “I’m sure she’d like that.”
“Yeah? Or is it an awful symbol of her parents breaking up?” Ned draws in a breath. “It’s different, too, giving her something of mine. But from your family—”
“There’s no issue with it. And my father already clearly decided.”
“And I want to know what you think about that,” Ned says.
“Because this has a lot of layers, so it’s your decision too.
Do you want her to have this now? Do you want me to give it to her, or do you want to?
Or both of us? Do you want to wait until she’s older and can understand better?
If she does have it now, she shouldn’t hang on to it. Chances are she’ll lose it.”
“It’s not important. Whatever you’d like. And she can do with it what she wants to.”
“Okay, but no. If you want to pretend it’s not sentimental, that’s one thing, but the cost alone—”
“The value doesn’t matter.”
“To you. I don’t go around handing Peggy something that could help pay for college.”
“If that’s what you’d like to do with it, I’m sure you could sell it and—”
“Abbot! Are you listening to yourself? Can we please talk about this, for real?”
“We are.”
Ned lets out a breath. “This is not talking. I want to know what you think.”
“Then just ask.”
“What do you think I’m trying to do? How can we be engaged and not able to discuss this?”
“We aren’t.”
“Talking, I know.”
“Engaged.”
“Aren’t we?” Ned asks. “We didn’t get engaged. Nobody proposed. This wasn’t the plan. But we’ve told everyone, so doesn’t that make this real?”
“You said you don’t want anything to change.”
“I don’t want to do anything to mess up our relationship. Talking about how we feel isn’t that.”
Fine, Abbot thinks. “So how do you feel?”
Ned throws his hands up. “Confused? Uncomfortable? Frustrated, for sure. There, now you go. Your turn.”
Abbot touches the soft fur of Baxter’s ear. No. He doesn’t want to. And he can’t, not like Ned just did, simply offer up a bevy of words so Ned will understand.
Although understanding isn’t the issue. Ned is understanding. That’s perhaps the root of the problem—or the root of a problem, at least. Abbot has plenty of them, too many to hold in his mind, and none he wishes to share, not in the face of Ned’s pushing and pushing.
“We have to be able to talk,” Ned says softly. “I just feel stuck with you right now.”
Stuck. Yes. Suddenly, achingly, Abbot wishes for the normal pace of their last year together, the scant time they’ve had together, the lack of momentum to their relationship.
Nothing moving them forward, because they were always arrested by the workweek, the distance between them, their time a constant cycle of saying hello and goodbye.
He checks his phone, knowing it’s a prevarication. There’s surprise, then, in finding a new email. From Beverly, he sees, sent late enough in the workday that Abbot had already gone to meet his father and Liesl at their hotel.
Final steps, the subject line reads. Abbot quickly taps it. “Ned. Check your email. This came to both of us.”
Ned pulls his phone out as Abbot scans the message and then reads it again slower.
“Oh damn,” Ned says. “This is what I’m really reading, right?”
“It is.” Abbot looks over it once more to make sure. “She needs us to call her first thing in the morning, but there’s a budget for a position for you, and support from the department.”
Ned points at his phone. “So we just call her tomorrow and that’s it?”
“It seems so. She says she’s putting together the formal offer letters.”
“Okay,” Ned says and then again. “Okay.”
“Well done on your job talk, apparently.”
“No kidding. This is happening? Newbury? And they’re actually paying me a reasonable amount?”
“Congratulations.”
Ned lets out a laugh. “Oh shit, we gotta get this signed before they can think about this any harder.”
“It seems rather too official for them to back out now.”
“Yeah, but…” Ned says and waves to himself.
“But what?”
“Beverly must really like you.”
Can they not have this conversation? Or any of the ones Ned has tried to start tonight? Wasn’t dinner enough to bear? And now when Abbot just wants some peace, Ned keeps going.
“An entire job for me?” Ned asks. “This is wild. Newbury University. Completely out of my league.”
“It clearly isn’t.”
“Oh, trust me, it is. You’ll have to help me with all the faculty. Hell, the students too.”
“They’re just people.”
“They’re not, because they’re Newbury people.”
“Versus what? Adams? Callahan? I’m not sure there’s as much difference as you’re expecting.”
“Well, you’re you.”
“Ned, if you’re so impressed by Newbury, be impressed that they’re hiring you, and what that says about your work.”
“Yeah, that I’ve got you,” Ned says. “And no offense to either of us, but you’ve got Beverly.”
“Please,” Abbot says. He’s so very tired. And wound far, far too tight. “Don’t.”
“This is what I’m talking about. You live in an entirely different world than the one I grew up in. You know people like her, who can get you a job like this. I’m just me.”
“It’s not like that,” Abbot says.
“Isn’t it?”
“You’re not ‘just’ anything. Do you really think that?”
“I think the gulf between us feels really, really big sometimes.”
“What gulf?”
Ned picks up the watch like an example.
Can’t he put that down? No, apparently, because he just holds it, looking at Abbot like he’s supposed to understand.
Abbot can’t bear the sight of it. The delicate shape of the band, the shine of the face and the hands.
But Ned keeps talking, waving the watch in emphasis. “I keep thinking, one of these days you’ll wake up and realize how different I am from you.”
Stop, he thinks. Please. Please.
“You’re not like anyone I’ve ever been with,” Abbot manages, and the watch catches the light, shining too bright in his eyes.
“Well,” Ned says and laughs. “Not that I’d know.”
He stills, at least, having said that. Must hear the way the words sound, rife with annoyance.
He doesn’t tuck the watch away though, just holds it in his lap.
Certainly nobody else has held that watch. Why? Abbot wants to demand of his father, but he’s not here, and Ned is, frustration on his face.
Yes, Abbot feels that too, discontent layering the air between them. But what’s the way out of this? Back to the way he and Ned normally are? Harmonious and uncomplicated, like this last year together has been?
It’s Beverly, he’s sure. Walking into his life with the troubles she’s always portended.
And Adams closing, and the hope of moving and the specter of a new phase of their relationship. Good, Abbot had thought, so very ready for the evolution ahead of him and Ned.
Now, that progress feels like teetering on the edge of an unknown future. Uncontrollable too, as everyone around them pushes and pulls, layering their assumptions and excitement and expectations over his and Ned’s own.
Still, though. Ned remains Ned, and how Abbot feels about him can’t—and won’t—change.
“My exes aren’t worth talking about,” Abbot insists.
Ned hardly looks convinced. Does he really think—what? That he’s not good enough for Newbury? Or for Abbot himself?
Because Ned is the special one. Nobody Abbot has met can hold a candle to him. Not even close.
Carefully, Abbot doesn’t look at the watch in Ned’s hands as he tries to find the right words to set them back on track. “Ned, you—you came up to Portland to see me.”
“Well yeah.”
“The beginning of the semester. As a surprise.”
Ned lifts a shoulder in a shrug. “Course I did.”
“No, not of course,” Abbot says. “If I wanted to see Louis, I took the train to Paris.”
“From Maine?”
Abbot offers a smile at Ned’s joke. “From Geneva.”
But Ned doesn’t smile back. “You were with Louis when you lived in Geneva? When was this?”
“That’s not what I’m trying to say,” Abbot says.
“Were you two together since what, high school?”
“High school? No, of course not.”
“But you moved to Zürich, right? And then—wait, where did you go from there?”
“I went to university in Zürich,” Abbot says. “But Ned, what I’m saying is—”
“You and Steve did your doctorates in Chicago, right?”
“Yes.”
“So when did you move back to Geneva, then?”
“Before I came to Callahan,” Abbot says and this is beside the matter entirely. “Ned, you are everything I could want.”
“Paris, Abbot. Your boyfriend lived in Paris, and I live here.”
“Why does that matter?”
“Why?” Ned asks.
“I didn’t like Paris. I like you.”
“Thanks, but I hear Paris is pretty great.”
“It’s…” Dirty. Crowded. Full of tourists.
Full of the French.
“It’s a city. Ned, I love you. You’re worth Newbury over and over again.”
“Am I worth talking to?”
“Ned—”
“What were you doing in Geneva?”
“Working.”
“And then you went to Callahan?”
“Do you hear what I’m trying to tell you?”
“Do you?” Ned asks. “Why have we been together since last year and I never knew you moved home between your doctorate and Maine? I think—Abbot, these other men you’re not talking about? I think that worked really well for you, actually. I think you hate that I want to know about you.”
“No, I don’t, I…” Abbot has an end to that sentence, he’s sure, but has no idea at all what it might be.
“It feels like shit that you won’t talk to me,” Ned finally says. “It’s terrifying. I don’t feel like I belong at Newbury, or in Paris, or wearing a watch like that one, or letting Peggy even hold this one, or that you even really want a deeper relationship with me.”
“Of course I do, Ned. That’s not—”
“Then talk.”