3. Art Gallery of Ontario, May 2011 #3
She nodded, then followed his gaze around the café.
It was filled with young people adorned with nose piercings and corduroy jackets.
University students, she thought, like she and Ren had once been.
They looked so young to her now. It occurred to her that she and Ren had never hung out like this at school, just the two of them meeting over coffee.
Instead, all their meetings had been incidental: chatting after class or when they ran into each other at a coffee shop or party.
She wondered if he had never invited her on solo outings because it might have felt too much like a date.
He had carefully made it clear that he had no interest in dating her.
It was a briefly mortifying thought, especially in the context of his gorgeous wife, but Sarah let it go. At least now she could hang out with him. Now that there was no risk of getting romantically involved, they could finally talk.
“So speaking of that night,” he said. She had the rare experience of watching him struggling to find the right words. “My parents got divorced,” he continued after a moment, surprising her. “I don’t know if you knew that. Right around the time we stopped hanging out.”
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I didn’t know that. I know you idealized them. Or maybe you didn’t, but that was how it looked from the outside.”
“No, I did,” he said quietly. “They’re both brilliant people.
My mother seemed disappointed with me a lot of the time, but I wanted to impress her.
And my father was incredibly intellectual and not always good at expressing his feelings.
Anyway, right after they split, a lot came out about their marriage.
Mostly from my mother. She told me they’d had an open marriage, which I didn’t know.
I mean, in theory, I knew they were in favor of that, because they were left-wing intellectuals who wrote about gender and so on, but I hadn’t realized they were doing it themselves.
But apparently my father was sleeping with former students who were twenty-two, twenty-three. ”
It struck Sarah that at the time Ren was learning that, his father was sleeping with people his own age.
“My mother said that after a while, it felt like they weren’t married at all. Anyway, I think…” He shrugged. “I know you thought I was kind of an asshole back then. But before I found that out about my father, I used to see things differently.”
“You thought sex was harmless,” she offered.
He nodded. “You were the first person who told me I was being unhealthy who I actually believed. And after I found that out about my parents, I changed the way I was behaving.”
“Because you didn’t want to be like your father?”
He considered. “Yes. I think I didn’t ever want to…I realized you can hurt people even if you’re telling yourself that you’re not.”
She took a breath. “You know, that night…” Now it was her turn to struggle for the right words.
“I didn’t mean for us to stop being friends, I mean, if that’s what happened, and you didn’t just get too busy to come hang out.
I don’t regret not sleeping with you. But I do regret losing you as a friend. ”
He nodded, a wry smile on his lips. “You were just so brutally honest with me.”
“Not my best trait.”
“Not your easiest trait,” Ren said. “But one of your best.”
She watched him pick up a spoon and stir a coffee that didn’t need stirring.
He had the same restless quality he’d always had, and her old love for him woke in her chest like a sleeping giant, lumbering to awareness.
She had to be careful to protect this friendship, if that’s what this was.
She had to protect herself, too…to not let herself feel too much.
“I’m glad we got to meet up,” he said at last. That sounded like they wouldn’t meet up again. She watched him put down the spoon and adjust his watch around his wrist, an old habit she remembered from school.
“Me, too,” she said. “Maybe we can do this again next time there’s a good art show.”
“I’d like that.”
When it came time to say goodbye, he kissed her on the cheek, looking serious for a moment. “You’ll find something to say in your photography. You always do.”
She watched him walk away and realized that he hadn’t asked about Liam at all. That was fine. Better, maybe. She wasn’t ready to talk about Liam. She wasn’t sure what she wanted to do.
She went home and watched television alone, slipping an old 1940s movie into Paul’s DVD player. Paul was staying at Trish’s, though he hadn’t moved his stuff out yet, and she realized she’d have to watch DVDs on her laptop soon.
When Liam texted her to ask if he could come over that night, she told him she was busy. But she wasn’t. Not really.
No, she realized. Being alone wasn’t so bad after all. She would just have to find a new roommate.
She broke up with Liam the next day. He was stunned by her announcement, which surprised her; she had convinced herself that he was disengaging as a way to push her away, to force her to break up with him so that he wouldn’t have to.
But that apparently hadn’t been what was going on, because he started crying.
“What did I do wrong?”
“You just didn’t seem excited about me,” she said.
“I am excited. I’ve just been really busy.”
“I know,” she said quietly. “I’m sorry.”
“I don’t know what I’m going to do without you,” he said, his voice breaking.
Three weeks later, she heard through a mutual friend that he was dating someone else.