Chapter 15
Elena
Sunday morning, I wake up on the couch at seven-fourteen and my first thought is: he kissed me.
My second thought is: he sent me home in his car.
My third thought, arriving with the specific efficiency of a brain that has had about thirty-two hours to marinate in its own worst instincts, is that obviously he regrets it.
Obviously the man who has been professionally cold toward me for three weeks, who has a dead wife and a four-year-old and the emotional availability of a well-designed vault, kissed me once on a public street and has already catalogued it under: critical error, do not repeat.
The part where he had to step in didn’t help.
Let’s address that directly. Let’s go ahead and add that to the list of Elena Brown’s Greatest Moments: first the couch incident, then the vendor disaster, then a man at a bar wouldn’t take his hand off me and Patrick had to cross the room and make him, in front of his friend.
I’m a grown woman who has been handling men like that since I was eight but I stood there and let my boss rescue me.
He has now had to step in for me twice.
Twice.
What strikes me is the incredible improbability of it. If I believe in signs, and some unguarded part of me is starting to, I would say this is God. This is God sending him to save her. This is God saying: here, this one, be with her.
I am filing this away carefully. This is chapter fifteen material, maybe sixteen. This is the moment the reader understands that he was always going to catch her.
I stare at the ceiling.
We are not catastrophizing. We are simply doing an evidence-based assessment of the situation and the evidence is that this man has a very clear pattern: want, resist, crack, retreat.
I am beginning to suspect I am caught in a loop.
The loop goes: he gets closer, something breaks his control, he decides it was a mistake, he goes cold again, and then I spend two weeks trying to pretend I am professionally fine while watching his hands move and thinking about things that are not vendor protocols.
I have been here before. Twice now. And both times I adapted by making myself smaller, more professional, more quietly competent, as though if I just performed the correct version of myself he would stop being confused and decide I was worth the complication.
That strategy has not produced results.
I roll off the couch and go to the kitchen and make coffee.
He said that he knew what pricks were.
I’d bet he’d never met one like the boy in the second foster home.
The family’s oldest son. Sixteen to my nine. He decided one afternoon that I was his to touch. I grabbed the first thing within reach, which was a casserole dish from the dinner table, and I used it the way my body understood I had to use it.
They came for me that night because of that.
The father and the son, when the house was quiet.
They took me to the backyard and they made sure I understood that I did not get to do what I had done and walk away from it.
I woke up broken and with a certainty, deep and permanent, that the world contains people who will put their hands on you because they can and there is no casserole dish big enough to fix it.
The files are old. They are also, apparently, still very much accessible.
I drink my coffee and stare out Nadia’s kitchen window at the slice of New York visible between the buildings and think about the way I used to escape when I was in those places, I used to think of true love and big adventures.
Even then they did not break me. I never stopped wanting to be loved. I don’t think about that night like something that defined me, more like something that happened.
And yes, maybe I’m totally naive to think that a man like Patrick could want me. But maybe also I want to keep dreaming just a little longer.
By Sunday evening I have done the following: nothing. I have eaten cereal for two meals, watched two episodes of something I can’t remember the plot of, and had approximately eleven internal arguments with myself about whether the kiss meant what I want it to mean or what I’m afraid it means.
The answer is probably both.
Nadia finds me at six-thirty in the exact position she left me at nine a.m., which is horizontal. She clocks it immediately.
“How long has this been happening?” she says.
“Define this.”
She gestures at me.
“Since Friday,” I say. “Maybe Saturday. Possibly birth.”
She sits on the opposite end of the couch and looks at me with the specific expression she uses when she is deciding how honest to be.
Nadia’s honesty comes in calibrated doses.
She has learned from experience that hitting me with the full force of what she actually thinks tends to produce defensive spiraling, so she builds to it.
“How are you?” she says.
“A man at the bar put his hand on me and wouldn’t let go.” I pull the blanket up. “Patrick had to step in.”
“I figured something happened.” She is quiet. “You okay?”
“I’m fine. I handled it.” I say it to the ceiling, which is only partially true. “He got me out of there. Then kissed me on the street.”
Nadia says nothing for a moment. Then: “And now?”
“And now I’m on this couch wondering if he’s decided it was a mistake.”
“Has he said that?”
“He hasn’t said anything. He sent me home in his car and said I think about you constantly and that was it.”
She absorbs this. “That is not nothing.”
“I know it’s not nothing.” I turn to look at her.
“The problem is I keep doing the same thing. He gets close, I get hopeful, something happens, he goes cold, I spend two weeks being very professionally competent and quietly dying inside. I have run this cycle twice now and I am starting to think the common denominator is me performing the wrong version of myself.”
Nadia looks at me. “What does the right version do differently?”
“Honestly?” I sit up. “Stops apologizing for wanting his hands on her.”
There is a beat of silence.
“Okay,” Nadia says.
“I keep making myself smaller. More manageable. Like if I’m just professional enough and competent enough and unbothered enough, he’ll stop being confused and just, decide. But he doesn’t decide. He just holds the line and I respect the line and nothing changes.”
“So stop respecting the line.”
“It’s not that simple. He’s my boss. There’s…”
“Elena.” She says my name with the specific weight she uses when she wants me to hear it.
“You already slept with him. You already kissed him on a public street. The line has been crossed so many times it is more of a suggestion than a structure.” She pauses.
“The question is not whether you want him. You clearly want him. The question is whether you’re going to keep waiting for him to give you permission to act like it. ”
I stare at her.
“Do you think I should get therapy?” I say, because I need to change the subject before I do something rash.
She considers this. “I think therapy could help. I also think it won’t fix the actual problem.”
“Which is?”
“You’re exhausted and you’re stressed and you’re going every day to a job where you spend half your energy waiting to get fired and the other half trying not to look at your boss like you know what he sounds like.” She tilts her head. “That is not a life. That is a holding pattern.”
“I need the money.”
“I know you need the money. I told you to get the job. But I told you to get it so you’d have breathing room to keep going to auditions. You’ve been there how long now?” She raises an eyebrow. “How many auditions?”
“None,” I say quietly.
“None.” She lets that sit. “You went for the money and you stayed for him and you haven’t been to a single audition in two months because going to auditions means possibly getting something and possibly leaving and you don’t want to leave because of him.”
I open my mouth.
“Am I wrong?” she says.
I close my mouth.
The truth is she is not wrong. The truth is that I have been using the job as a reason to be in the same room as Patrick Aldera and calling it financial necessity and telling myself the acting thing is just on pause and the acting thing has always just been on pause and that particular file is also neatly labeled dealt with, do not open.
“I don’t know what I want,” I say.
“Yes you do.” She stands up, goes to the kitchen, and comes back with her own coffee. She sits. “You want him and you want the acting and you’ve been telling yourself you can only have one, so you’ve been doing the thing you always do when you can’t have everything.”
“What thing?”
“Standing very still and hoping someone else makes the decision for you.”
I look at the ceiling.
“I hate you,” I say.
“I know.” She sips her coffee. “You’re welcome.”
The weekend ends without resolution. Monday comes the way Mondays do, impersonally, without asking what I’ve decided.
I ride the elevator up to forty knowing two things with equal certainty: I have no idea what to do about Patrick Aldera, and I am done being apologetic about wanting to figure it out.
The door opens. The floor is quiet. In a little while, my boss, will step off that elevator, and I can still feel his lips on my mouth.
I sit down.
I open my email.
There is a message from an audition notice I subscribed to three months ago and have been ignoring. Small theatre, downtown, one-week run, callbacks next Saturday.
I look at it for a long moment.
Then I mark it as unread, because I am not ready, and I open the Milan correspondence, because I am here and I am competent and if Patrick Aldera is going to keep saying complicated things on public streets then I am at least going to be too necessary to fire.