Chapter 16 Then
“Were you not just telling me the other week,” I say to Alex, “that you hate street biking?”
We’re walking down the sidewalk leading to my apartment, under the cool comfort of shade cast by the tree tunnel overhead.
I have Argos on his extendable leash, ten feet ahead of me, with Mia half riding her balance bike, half clutching his leash.
She wanted to hold his leash herself, but Argos gets too excited about birds to be trusted not to take off if one shows up and send Mia and her balance bike flying off with him.
“I hate street biking because of the cars,” Alex says, “which tend to drive not around cyclists but at them.”
“Right,” I say slowly, then sip my coffee. “And this cycling event you’re talking about in city streets… doesn’t involve cars?”
“Nope. That’s the beauty of it, Ted.” He peers over at me, his eyes shadowed by his ball cap’s brim. “There are no cars. They close down parts of the city for a four-hour stretch to form a route, and anybody can bike through the streets.”
“Huh.” I smile. “That sounds fun.”
“It is,” he says. He has as swig of coffee from his cup. “I’ve been doing it with Mia since she was a toddler. You should come.”
“If I have off work, or if I can get off, I’m in. When is it?”
“In an hour.”
I balk. “An hour? Why are you just mentioning it?”
Alex tugs at his ball cap brim, then lifts it off, scraping back his hair with that hand, before he tugs it back on.
“I forgot about it until this morning. Jen texted to ask if she could take Mia so they could do it.” His jaw works.
“Even though it’s always been my thing with Mia.
I asked Jen why she wanted that, when it’s my weekend, and historically my thing, and she said, ‘Ethan and I are going to ride. I thought it would be a good bonding opportunity for him to hook up her buggy to his bike and get a ride together.’ ”
“Oh, hell no.”
“Right. First, because that’s our thing, and second, she now rides a tag-along bike attached to mine, not a buggy.”
He reaches into the bag he’s holding in the same hand as his coffee cup and unearths a very wonderful-smelling pastry.
“So,” he says, “I asked you if you wanted to take a walk, picked up blackberry streusels, and decided I’d try to butter you up into going with us.
Because… they’re going to be there. Jen wants to get to ride along with Mia for part of it, at least, she said. ”
I lean in and bite off half the streusel he holds out, then say around my mouthful, “The pastry’s great but superfluous. I was in the moment you suggested it involved outbiking our exes.”
Alex frowns. “Did I suggest that?”
“No. But I have a hunch it’s going to get competitive between us.”
Alex pops the other half of the pastry in his mouth. “Nah, I don’t think so.”
We spot Ethan and Jen a block away, straddling their bikes, and suddenly, I have no idea why I said I’d do this.
It’s one thing to logically understand that my ex is a self-preoccupied, self-absorbed manchild, and that he did me a favor in showing me that. It’s another thing to truly feel that, down in my bones. In my heart. Looking at Ethan, I know I’m not there yet.
I don’t miss him. I don’t want him back.
I’m not even jealous of Jen, that he wants her.
I just… ache. This is the man that I spent a decade and a half of my life with, and I’ll never get that time back.
This is the man I grew up with, built a life with.
And now, looking at him, he feels like a stranger.
It isn’t, I realize, Ethan whom I’ve been missing, whom I’m aching for, as we draw closer, walking our bikes toward them.
It’s the peace, the confidence that I was where I was supposed to be, with the person I was meant for.
I miss believing in that, trusting in it.
It feels like there’s a crater in my chest, still smoking from the impact of learning that lesson, a crater that, even when it cools, will leave me marked, changed forever.
I will never look at love the way I used to.
And maybe that’s a good thing; but all I can think about is how scary that is, what that leaves me with—no confidence in recognizing what love is, only a handful of pain-riddled takeaways on what it isn’t.
Alex snorts beside me, jolting me from my thoughts. I glance his way. “What is it?”
“Ethan. He looks like he’s vacuum sealed himself into that getup.”
I follow his line of sight to my ex, who’s wearing one of his black cycling bib shorts over a gray sleeveless sweat-wicking crewneck. The ensemble, unpleasantly, leaves nothing to the imagination.
My stomach feels like lead. “I hated those bibs.”
Alex peers my way, his amusement dissolving as he looks at me. I must be wearing everything I’m feeling on my face, because he clasps my fingertips, squeezing briefly. “Go ahead,” he says.
I tear my gaze away from Ethan, meeting his eyes. “Go ahead and what?”
“Roast him,” Alex says. “It’ll feel good.
You’re too nice about him, Ted. And nobody can actually be that nice toward a tool bag like him, which means you’re just burying it, and that is not good for you.
So get it out.” He leans in, drops his voice, his breath warm against my ear. “Fucking roast him.”
“He looks like a Barnum and Bailey strongman who forgot his handlebar mustache,” I blurt. “And his muscles.”
Alex chuckles. “Good start. Keep going.”
“Guys like him are the reason for evolution deniers—‘two billion years, and this is all the further we got?’ ”
“Oh!” Alex nudges my shoulder with his, making me crack a smile. “On a roll now!”
“He,” I say through gritted teeth, “is the human equivalent of menstrual cramps.”
Alex whistles appreciatively. “As a brother to three sisters, I just want to say I recognize that roast for what is.” He offers his hand for a high five. I meet it with a slap.
“What about you?” I ask Alex. “How you doing?”
Alex slants a glance at Jen, then back to me. He clears his throat, then says quietly, mindful of Mia, who’s happily pedaling along, on her tag-along bike connected to the back of his. “It’s different between us. I’m the one who fucked up.”
I tip my head. We haven’t talked about this—what exactly went wrong in our marriages. It’s been nice, avoiding it. But maybe it would feel even nicer, having gotten it out there.
“I was a workaholic,” Alex says. “I acted like my first love was my kitchen, my restaurant, my career, rather than her.
I hid why that was—because my pristine, perfectly run kitchen, my rising-star status, made me feel like I was in control, and I was desperate for that, because inside, I was spiraling out.
“When Jen told me that she was unhappy, that she didn’t feel like I loved her, instead of telling her how much I was struggling, how poorly I was handling it, that it wasn’t that I didn’t want to love her, it was that loving her didn’t give me the relief that being in the kitchen did, I pointed to every reason she should feel loved. ”
My chest aches.
“I fucked up,” he says quietly. “And by the time I understood that, it was too late.”
“Why?” I ask him. “Why too late?”
“Because,” he says steadily, “she couldn’t forgive me when I tried to fix it.”
I can barely wrap my head around the concept of a husband who actually tries to fix your broken marriage. Ethan tapped out the second I raised the possibility that there might be something broken between us. And yet, when Jen’s husband tried to fix it, that wasn’t enough.
“I’m sorry,” I say quietly.
He shrugs. This story is older to him than mine is. Less shocking, more familiar. I can tell there’s pain he still carries, but the wound isn’t raw like mine, doesn’t sting how mine does every time I encounter Ethan or anyone whose story brushes against the pain of mine.
I stare at Jen, as that wound stings sharply. Unlike her, my husband quit. Didn’t care enough even to try. And when hers did, it wasn’t enough. It’s hard not to judge that, to not want to grab her shoulders and shake her, and say, “At least he gave a shit!”
But maybe Jen’s judging me the same way. Maybe, after hearing how Ethan tells it, she sees me as a hypercritical, ungrateful woman who couldn’t be happy no matter what, who had to find something wrong, and Ethan had to save himself from my toxic negativity.
Maybe, in some way, Ethan was right; I could have been more grateful, made peace with what we had, rather than grieve and long for all that we didn’t. Maybe Jen wasn’t completely wrong to feel that her hurt ran so deep, her unwillingness to forgive was justified.
But maybe I was right, too, to want something other than a marriage that was disconnected and often hurtful, and a different man would have heard that for the plea it was to become close, been grateful for the chance for better—really, any—intimacy.
Maybe Alex did everything he could to make it right when he could, poured all his heart into his work on healing, being vulnerable, repairing what was broken, and to someone else, that would have been more than enough to heal together.
Maybe, when it comes to telling the stories of our failed relationships, the wounds they inflicted, there are only unreliable narrators, too much hurt warping our perspectives, thwarting any chance to land on the truth of what went wrong.
Maybe, instead of asking, What went wrong?
we should ask, When did we stop telling the same story?
Maybe if we could try to figure out when the tugs of our experiences became so distanced, they tore that shared story apart into two stories whose plots couldn’t be reconciled, conflicting characters as perpetrator and victim, irreconcilable portrayals of what hurt was premeditated and what was incidental, we’d actually get somewhere.