Chapter 5 A Good Frame #3
“Well, that was the theory. I’m not sure how much of a life I have at the moment.”
I nod. That is one thing we have in common. “So why did you stop competing?”
“I never officially stopped, but Eliana and I never did especially well. We weren’t winning any big competitions, which I didn’t care about, but it bothered her.
She wanted to become better known, get teaching jobs.
And there was this guy, Connor Yung. Amazing dancer based in L.A.
We used to love watching him. And one time, he and Ellie were picked to do a Jack & Jill together. ”
“That’s the improvised dance where you get a random song and a random partner?”
He nods. “Right. They’d never danced together before, but they won the whole thing.
And I guess Connor decided they had chemistry, because he asked her if she’d move to California to train as his partner and teach at his studio.
He has his own dance school out there, working with movie stars as a private trainer, teaching classes.
I guess he wanted to move on from his old partner Sarah. So Eliana went out there to do that.”
“And that’s when you broke up?”
“No, we tried doing the long-distance thing. But she was always talking about Connor or texting him when I came for the weekend. It was clear that she was falling for him. I confronted her and she said that nothing had happened, but she wasn’t in love with me anymore.”
The very calmness of his demeanor makes me sense that it was brutal. There are few things worse than realizing that the person you love is slowly pulling away.
“Are they a couple now?” I ask.
“They’re still partners. They dated for a while, but I’m not sure what they are now.” He shrugs, his rueful smile creeping back.
I do the math in my head. “You must have been with her a long time.”
“Eight years. We talked about marriage, but she kept saying she wanted time, and then…” He shakes his head.
“I’m not angry with her. She was twenty-one when we started dating, and I was her first serious boyfriend, and I think it was hard for her to commit to me without knowing what else was out there.
And the one thing I couldn’t be for her was what else is out there.
We’re still friends. We chat sometimes. She’s a good person. ”
I consider this. It’s usually a good sign when men are friends with their exes, but it makes me nervous. Why is he so emphatic about her being a good person?
“It must have been frustrating for you, though,” I say. “You gave up so much to help her with her dream, and then she moved on when things started to take off for her.”
“I try not to think about it that way. I really like my job. I’m glad I didn’t end up on the partner track at some huge law firm. I landed in the right place for me. But it hurt. Not just losing her but feeling like she traded up.”
“Sounds like the music scene. I always worried that would happen with Nick. Like if he ever did succeed as a musician, he would dump me for someone younger and hotter.” I pause. “Not that that’s what happened to you.”
Ollie smiles. “Connor is only two years younger than I am, but he probably is hotter.”
The whole conversation seems full of landmines, and I’m not sure whether I’m planting them or setting them off. “And after that you met your wife?” Another landmine.
“I already knew her. She had dated my brother for a while. Then he dumped her when he dropped out of college and went on the road. I reconnected with her again in the swing dance scene. She seemed fun, low drama. The irony is that I thought…I thought if she’d already dated my brother, then she had that out of her system.
Eliana had needed to explore the world, but I figured Phoebe had already done that.
She had dated a bit, had some wild experiences, and was ready to settle down. ”
“And then?”
“And then it didn’t work out.” He shrugs, his eyes sliding from mine. “At first, I thought it was great that Phoebe could also swing dance. But now it means she could appear anywhere I go dancing.”
“The whole dance scene seems a little incestuous.”
He shrugs. “Not completely. It’s a great place to meet new people.
The problem is that if you have a history with someone, you’ll keep seeing them.
If I were ever in a Jack & Jill competition with Eliana, and our names were picked out of a hat, I would have to dance with her, and I’m not sure I want to go through that.
Not that it’s her fault. She feels really guilty about what happened between us.
But I only do competitions if I’m sure she’s not going to be there. ”
I nod. “But you love it. Dancing.”
“It’s a nice break from tax law.” Then he grins at me. “So where did you grow up? Don’t think I didn’t notice you dodged that question.”
How do you talk about your poverty-stricken, broken childhood on a first date? You make it sound boring.
“My story is way less exciting. We grew up in Troy. Near Albany. Working class city.” I shrug.
“And you liked to dance, you said?”
“I wanted to be Ginger Rogers as a kid. My mom watched a lot of old movies. And in college I liked to drink and dance. It took me a while to learn to separate the two. My childhood was not always fun. I was helping raise my sister. So when I went away to college, I wanted the carefree childhood I’d never had.
Turns out that trying to make up for lost time can be dangerous if you inherited addictive tendencies. ”
“I bet your sister appreciated that you helped raise her, though.”
“I think so. But she moved to Newfoundland recently because she fell in love with someone up there, so I’m dealing with that, right now.
Abby once said it was like we were married.
We raised Hannah together, you know? But she needed to move on, and I’m happy for her, but…
” My voice sounds emotional, and I pull myself back together.
“Anyway, all that stuff is why I became an accountant. I wanted to give Hannah the opposite of my childhood.”
“Because your mother wasn’t an accountant?” His eyes are sharp. He has missed nothing about the little omissions in my story.
“My father left early and then we moved a lot because my mom kept switching jobs and boyfriends. She was a drinker, too. So I wanted to do better for Hannah. Steady income. Two parents. And then of course I picked a husband who was completely unreliable.”
“It’s hard to know who to trust,” Ollie says quietly.
“Or we keep repeating our parents’ mistakes.”
He grimaces. “Or that. My parents have one of those marriages where they overlook casual infidelities, which is a different kind of toxic. Because they never actually overlook anything, they just needle each other. My brother became like my dad, and I became like my mom. My brother cheats, and I pick women who cheat on me. That was a fun day in therapy when I worked that out.”
“So is your brother still in New York?” I ask.
“They have a house up in Dobbs Ferry.”
I don’t ask who ‘they’ is. I watch something close up behind his eyes, and he looks away from me again. He has the chance to tell me the whole story, and he doesn’t. The jazz band keeps playing, but there is no room to dance.
After dinner, he offers to walk me home as we’re only about fifteen minutes from my apartment. It’s a warm night, the sky still violet-green from the summer sunset.
“I feel like…” he begins as we wander down the street past shops and restaurants.
“Yes?”
He looks into the distance. “I feel like I’m about to walk you home, and maybe I’ll give you a kiss goodnight. And someone will ask you how your date went, and you’ll say, ‘It was fine.’”
I smile and shake my head. “I’ll say, ‘It was nice.’”
“Nice. Okay.” He looks away, a distant smile on his face.
“Nice is good. Believe me. Nice is much better than I’ve been experiencing on dates recently.”
“That sounds like a low bar.”
I catch his eyes, thinking of that casual remark I made about us having no chemistry. Now I think about his stories, his worry about being cheated on. “Would you like me to tell you you’re sexy, Oliver?”
He laughs. “See, now you’re being patronizing.”
I consider this for a moment. “You know what it is? It’s that I don’t know how to do this.
Last time I was dating, I was still drinking.
And there isn’t much I miss about drinking, but I miss how easy it was to get to know people.
Like, if you and I were in a bar, and we were a few beers in, we would be telling the real story of our divorces.
I would go on a whole rant about Nick, and you would tell me about your ex-wife, and we would get out all the messy stuff.
But when I’m sober, the messy stuff stays in.
And most of the time that’s good, it’s really good, but when I want to get to know someone, I want to hear about their messy stuff, and I don’t know how to get there anymore. ”
“You want to hear my messy stuff?” His hazel-green eyes are lit up in the fading light.
I feel vulnerable. “I want to know you.”
I wonder if he’s going to dodge the question. He takes a breath. “Alright,” he says. “We can try it.”
“Try what?”
He takes off his suit jacket and points to a large public library a few steps ahead of us. He gestures to the stone wall wrapped around the building at knee-height and spreads the jacket on the wall. “Sit down, and pretend this is a bar, and give me your drunken rant about your ex.”
I am startled into a laugh. “It doesn’t work that way. I’d have to be drunk. Or at least sit in a bar for an hour, drinking ginger ale and working up to it.”