Chapter 20. Seth
I am a creature of movement.
I relish getting up at five in the morning to work out at my gym, and enjoy walking the two miles to my office, even in the frigid Chicago winters. (Except in the snow. I’m high energy, not insane.) I like to meet colleagues and clients for lunch at fashionable new restaurants (my treat), and to meet friends for drinks after work at the brass-bar, old-school pub around the block from my building. I like to go to the theater, the opera, the symphony, films. On the weekends, I like to hike and cycle and run long distances with Sarah Louise. I like to golf with my buddies. (I love dad sports.) I like to shop at the gourmet market and make elaborate meals, then vigorously clean the kitchen.
I like vigorous cleaning in general.
And I am a people person. An extrovert. I shoot the shit in the line at the grocery store and chat up strangers on airplanes. (I know. I can’t help it.) I love to argue in court. I’m the life of the party, and if there is not a party happening soon, I throw one. My calendar is completely booked every day from morning ’til night, and if I happen to have a free spot, I fill it as quickly as possible.
I love this life, and I thrive on it, even if I’m antsy to replace all the karaoke bars and legal conferences with dad groups and playdates. But to manage the chaos, I need rigorous stillness when I’m not moving. Silence when I’m not socializing. A refuge of calm.
I keep my condo immaculate—all unobstructed views of the lake from the twenty-ninth floor, with clean marble countertops and sparse white furniture and dark, polished floors. I keep my office so organized that my paralegals are afraid to touch anything, and they should be, because a single stray paper destroys my focus and ruins my mood. My emails are sorted to such a degree of perfection that my assistant and I are almost in love, platonically. I keep my inbox at zero and my contacts relentlessly updated. When I’m not in meetings I work in silence, alone.
Movement and people, or silence and solitude. These are my modes.
A quarantine is thus custom-designed to make me psychologically implode.
I know that I am absolutely, magically blessed. I haven’t lost anyone to Covid-19. My job is secure and I am able to work remotely in my home office. I am isolating with my fiancée, rather than alone. I do not have to homeschool children while trying to work.
But things are not ideal.
Sarah Louise sublet her apartment and moved in with me as soon as we got engaged. It would be odd not to live together before getting married. It made sense. I was excited.
I expected having to adjust to sharing my space, but I didn’t expect it to give me claustrophobia. Sarah is a big personality—exuberant and chatty. She likes cozy spaces and has filled my apartment with photographs and knickknacks and throw blankets and pillows she embroiders while listening to podcasts because she has to be doing at least two things at once. She turns on the TV while working, because background noise helps her concentrate.
Shudder.
None of this is damning. In other circumstances, it would be endearing.
But without the hustle and bustle of our previously busy lives, we’re on top of each other. We eat breakfast, lunch, and dinner together. She works from the guest bedroom and I work from my office. We Zoom, Zoom, Zoom. We watch television together in the evenings. We take turns on the Peloton. We talk until we run out of things to talk about.
We have run out of things to talk about.
I used to think we had everything in common. The law. Values. Exercise.
And we do.
But I also used to think we had a special spark. And for the life of me I can’t figure out what it was, or where it’s gone.
It’s not that we fight. We’re kind to each other. But we’ve stopped talking about anything that matters, except the grim, relentless statistics about Covid. We haven’t had sex in a month. We don’t make each other laugh.
And then last night, as we were both reading our his-and-hers copies of The New Yorker in bed, she turned over and gently took mine out of my hands.
At first, I thought she wanted to make love, and I felt a sense of dread wash over me, and then a sense of despair that this is how I felt about the possibility of touching my beautiful, sexy future wife.
“Honey, I’m tired—” I began.
“I need to tell you something,” she said. “Rebecca is moving out of my apartment.”
Rebecca is the tenant subleasing Sarah’s old place until the lease is up.
“Oh yeah?” I asked. “Why?”
“She’s tired of being alone in the city and she’s going to move out to her sister’s farmhouse in Wisconsin. Help with her kids.”
“Ah, wow. That sounds nice.”
It dawned on me that maybe Sarah Louise wanted to leave the city for a while, and I began rapidly calculating whether this would make things better or worse between us.
“So I was thinking I would move back into my place,” she said, so quietly it was almost a whisper.
“What?”
She took my hand and squeezed it. “I know it must sound crazy, but I think we could both use more space. And, I mean, we’re only twenty minutes apart, so it’s not like we couldn’t still spend time together.”
Twenty minutes apart! The words were at once shocking and… strangely appealing. Perversely appealing. Treacherously appealing.
“What about, um… the whole living-together-before-we-get-married thing?”
“Well it’s not like we can have a wedding anytime soon.” She laughed weakly, and my hands began to shake.
“Sorry if I’m reading into this too much,” I said. “But… Do you want to break up?”
She was quiet for a long time. “I don’t know, Seth. Things have been off for a while. I know you’ve felt it too.”
My instinct was to preserve her feelings by lying, to insist things are amazing and we are madly in love. But that wouldn’t have been fair.
We’ve been overdue for a difficult conversation.
It was brave of her to start it. I’m not sure I ever would have.
“I know,” I admitted quietly. “I’m not sure if it’s the pandemic, or if it’s us.”
“I do love you,” she said, her voice closer to her normal register. “But we might have rushed into all this too quickly. It’s only been ten months since we met.”
She’s right. I was so excited to have the bachelor phase of my life be over. I was so eager to settle down.
I still want all of that. A marriage, a family. But I can’t shake the feeling that this relationship is wrong.
That she’s not my soul mate.
“I get it,” I said, squeezing her hand. “It’s been fast, and the circumstances took a turn. It’s been really hard on us both.”
“In a way the pandemic might be a blessing,” she said. “If it weren’t for Covid, we’d have rushed into planning a wedding, and gotten swept up in the excitement, and maybe wouldn’t have had time to really be together.”
It hurts me that being together is what made her feelings for me cool. Even if it’s mutual, it’s heartbreaking.
“Let’s take some time,” I said. “You’ll go back to your place, we’ll get some space. See what happens.”
She was quiet for a while, gathering her thoughts. “Will that just drag out a breakup?”
I sighed. “Maybe.”
“I just… God this is so hard. I wish this wasn’t happening.” She wiped away a tear.
I pulled her into my arms.
“Me too.”
And then we made love—more tenderly than we have since we got engaged.
I think we both knew—know—that it’s the last time.
That was last night.
I’m still processing as I wake up to the smell of her vegan, gluten-free banana muffins. She’s in the kitchen, in her workout clothes, making fresh green juice.
“Hi, handsome,” she says.
For a moment, I wonder if I hallucinated last night. If it was just my subconscious working through a problem my conscious mind refused to acknowledge was real.
Then I notice the suitcases by the door.
Jesus. She’s leaving today?
“I reserved a U-Haul to pick up at nine,” she says. She holds out a juice. It smells like cucumber and parsley.
I gape at her.
“You reserved a U-Haul in the middle of the night?”
“Yesterday,” she says, looking at the juicer rather than at me. “Before we talked.”
What do you say to that?
“Ah,” is all I manage.
“I should be able to get everything packed up by the end of the day,” she says. “Get out of your hair.”
I go very still. “You’re not in my hair, Sarah.”
“That’s not what I meant. Sorry, I just don’t know how to act.” She puts both of her palms on the kitchen island, leans forward. “Are you mad?”
“No. This is all just very sudden.”
She nods. “I want to rip off the Band-Aid, you know?”
I suppose she’s right. A few more days of cohabitation is not going to change the fact that another one of my relationships has failed.
“Okay,” I say, “I get that. Why don’t I go pick up the U-Haul while you start packing. I’ll help you move back into your apartment, and then we can get Vinioso’s takeout.”
Vinioso’s is an incredible red sauce joint by her place. Back when we were first dating, we spent many a night slurping up their spaghetti pomodoro over wine and delightful conversation. It seems like a fitting place to say goodbye.
“That sounds perfect,” she says.
When I get back with the U-Haul, we spend the afternoon packing. Oddly, it’s one of the happiest days we’ve had together in months. We laugh and make jokes and when she tries to pack up a pillow embroidered with a golden retriever, I demand she let me keep it.
“You despise it!” she protests.
“Stockholm syndrome. I can’t live without it.”
“Well in that case, she’s yours.”
By five, we’ve loaded the truck and driven to her apartment. Carrying up her bags and the handful of boxes with her stuff—mostly workout gear, photos, and books—takes less than twenty minutes.
We call in our order to Vinioso’s and I don my mask to walk the few blocks to pick it up. I get a small pitcher of grab-and-go Manhattans as well—Sarah doesn’t drink that much, and I have to drive the U-Haul back, but I figure one parting cocktail is a festive way to say goodbye.
When I return to her apartment, Frank Sinatra is playing—Frank was always playing at Vin’s, back when it was safe to eat inside—and the table is set with a tablecloth and candles.
We exchange our favorite memories of our time together while we eat. We speculate on how our friends and families will react to the news—and hope they won’t be sad for us, because we know we’re making the right decision. As I eat tiramisu and she eats limoncello sorbetto, she takes the ring off her finger and slides it across the table.
“You should take this back,” she says. “You can probably return it. I still have the box.”
I can’t imagine the sadness of going back to Tiffany and trying to return an engagement ring any more than I can imagine giving it to another woman. I bought it because I knew it would make her—specifically her, my Sarah Louise—happy. And it did.
The ring was never the problem.
“Please keep it. I want you to have it.”
She smiles sadly and slips it over her right ring finger. “Thank you.”
We both stand, and an awkward moment passes.
“Sarah Louise Taylor,” I finally say, “I wish you the happiest imaginable life.”
She squeezes me in a tight hug. “You too, Seth.”
When I finally get home it’s 10:00 p.m. and I’m emotionally exhausted. I put on cashmere sweats Sarah bought me and open my laptop. I figure I should start drafting an email to my family explaining what happened, even if it takes me a few days to send it.
I know if I try to call them, I’ll break down, and they’ll worry.
I know my brother, in particular, will be thinking I told you so. He never believed that Sarah was right for me, and warned me I was, once again, plunging into a serious relationship more out of a desire to be partnered than out of actual attraction to the specific person. We had a huge fight about it and didn’t speak for three weeks. But he was correct. As always.
Instead of drafting my sad announcement, I scroll through a couple of work emails I don’t have the emotional capacity to deal with and notice a message from my old college friend Mike Anatolian.
From: [email protected]
Date: Sun, June 21, 2020 at 4:06pm
Subject: Favor?
Hey there bud!
How are you faring with the pandy? Hope to God all is well with you and Sarah and the fam.
Wondering if you can do me a favor… my little sister is going to be a senior at NYU next year and she’s freaking out about summer internships. She’s a film major and had an internship lined up at a production company for the summer, but they’ve shut down due to Covid, and she’s panicking. Long shot, but are you still in touch with that girl you hooked up with at your reunion? Becks is trying to find something she can do remotely in the film industry and I thought a screenwriter would have some intern tasks she could do from New York.
No worries if that’s awkward, just thought I’d ask since I don’t run into too many artistes in finance.
Anyway, how the hell are you?
Suddenly, at the thought of emailing Molly, I am a lot the fuck better.