Chapter 2 #2
TJ has boyfriends, but they are never serious and always shitty.
Georgia thinks that TJ has no idea how good romantic love can feel and doesn’t aim high enough.
Then again, maybe Georgia doesn’t know enough to aim sufficiently high, either.
Georgia never would’ve known to ask for a friendship like the one she has with TJ if she hadn’t experienced it for herself.
Sometimes, you just get lucky, and then you want to spend the rest of your life telling people, “No, no, the sitcom friendship, the Frodo-Sam friendship, the Nancy-Bess-George friendship—those are all real! Don’t settle for anything less!
” Your best friend should feel like your soulmate.
You should believe all the destiny shit just the same way you do when you fall in love.
And when you love someone, sometimes you have to watch them make really stupid decisions.
A few years into her new life in New York, Georgia has to watch as TJ falls in love with a man. One of her patients, actually. Worse still: one of her married patients, who is also, as it happens, something of a dick.
***
“Wait,” Danny says. “Wait wait wait. What does TJ stand for?”
“Theresa Jacinta,” Georgia says. “Very Catholic.”
“And she’s a doctor?” Danny asks.
“That is correct.”
“What’s her last name?”
“Swann,” Georgia says.
“Wait, wait—hang on, what are the chances that—”
***
What are the chances? Well—higher than you’d think.
Because when Danny is seventeen, he applies to a semiprestigious college that he thinks, on some level, might bring him closer to his mother—her alma mater.
And when Julian is seventeen, and Dr. Theresa Jacinta Swann is paying yet another house call to a sick Eve, she happens to catch Phillip lecturing Julian about AP classes and Harvard, and she says, “Honestly, Phillip, remove your pretentious head from your pretentious ass. I didn’t go to Harvard, and I’m the smartest person you know.
” How ballsy is that? Of course Julian applies to Dr. Swann’s college.
A few days after Julian gets accepted, Dr. Swann pays Eve her final house call. While there, she will congratulate Julian and give him a piece of wisdom she herself found useful in college: “Tell them you have an allergy to something stupid. Gets you out of everything.”
On the other side of the country, Danny and his dad eat Cheerios at their wooden kitchen table.
Cal cannot bear that his son reminds him so much of his ex-wife.
It seems to Cal there is every chance Danny won’t come back.
So it is with a remarkable deal of grace that Cal swallows his fear, puts on a smile, and says, “Hey, kid, did I ever tell you what your mom put on her roommate application?”
So the housing pairing person decides Danny and Julian, who have both in their applications lamented their blatantly fake allergies, will be annoying in exactly the same way. And they are so right.
It’s around this time that Georgia—now in possession of a thriving online ceramics shop and a healthy dose of regained confidence—decides to tell TJ that it is simply never going to happen with Phillip, even though she loves him, and even though it’s very possible he loves her, too.
But he’s not going to cheat on his wife, and she’s not going to break up a marriage, and so they both need to cut ties, end their flirtatious friendship, and move on with their lives. It ends here.
And just as TJ put Georgia’s life together after Cal, Georgia puts TJ’s life together after Phillip.
But there’s a catch.
Phillip has met Georgia. He doesn’t know Danny is her son, but he does know that she threw her life away for a career in the arts and a man with no prospects.
So when Eve starts talking about a career in music, Phillip thinks, God, not like TJ’s tragic friend Georgia, I hope.
And then, on Thanksgiving, when Julian brings Danny home, Danny overhears Phillip on the tail end of a phone call with TJ, with whom he never did anything but still feels guilty for so admiring, and he makes Danny feel small because he is afraid he has been caught speaking to her, this woman he secretly loves.
Danny, meanwhile, is distracted by the sight of a vase: which is lovely, like something his mother might have made, and, in fact, did make—and which TJ gave Phillip as a birthday gift with the faux-casual excuse of, “Oh, it’s nothing, our apartment is too fucking full of vases.
” And then, much later, when Danny and Eve start dating, Phillip finds himself again reminded of TJ, and tragic Georgia, and thinks that he would much rather Eve hate him than end up with a dead-end career, married to a man who will move her away from her support systems, and subject her to a life of small-town mediocrity.
So he’s a dick to Danny and Eve. C’est la vie. She’ll thank him someday.
Which brings us nearly up to the present: when, six months ago, Phillip and his wife, Cecilia, download an app that purports to help them have a better relationship.
It tells them their relationship is a thirty-seven out of one hundred, and, frankly, they’d be better off cutting ties.
Do Not Resuscitate. Phillip tells Cecilia that maybe they should get a divorce, and Cecilia says, “Okay, if that’s what you want,” and Phillip asks what she wants, and Cecilia says, “Whatever you want,” and Phillip says, “For god’s sake, I want to know what you want for once,” and she says, “You have made it impossible for me to want anything.”
Phillip is tired of this. He knows for a fact that though he has made mistakes with Cecilia, it’s not necessarily true that he would turn any woman on earth cold.
He has proof! Which is how he finds himself walking twenty streets north through the pouring rain to the most opinionated woman he knows, knocking on TJ’s door and saying, “Please, I am afraid you’re the love of my life. ”
So Phillip and Cecilia separate, and Phillip finally goes on his first date with TJ.
Georgia does not approve. Supposedly, Cecilia and Phillip are getting a divorce, but that’s the oldest story in the book.
They’re still living together, for god’s sake!
But she also gave TJ an ultimatum once, and TJ listened, and, to be honest, Georgia has never seen TJ love anyone the way she loved, and again loves, Phillip.
So Georgia is trying to sit with the unease of it all. You can’t control other people.
So that’s the moral of this story. Sometimes people are so, so stupid. Alas! We love them anyway.
***
“The greatest love story ever told,” Danny says, “is my girlfriend’s father having an affair with his family physician?”
“It’s like you haven’t been listening at all.”
***
How do you love someone even when they’re making the worst possible decisions?
Simple. You just do. We can try as hard as we want to show people how to make better choices, live a better life, fall in love in better and more reliable ways.
But life is for living. Sometimes, you just have to make your own mistakes, and let everyone else make their mistakes, too.
***
“Do you have a best friend?” Georgia asks.
“Yeah,” Danny says. “I do.”
“Maybe someday,” Georgia says, “you can tell me the story.”