16. Raven
— ? —
Raven
Three hours before I did something catastrophically stupid with a telephone, I was on a date.
Tom had gotten us into a restaurant with a two-month waitlist, where the menu didn’t list prices because it assumed you weren’t the type to ask.
He’d pulled out my chair, asked thoughtful follow-up questions, ordered a wine he clearly knew things about and hadn’t been insufferable explaining it, which in this city qualified him for sainthood.
Everything about him was correct. That was the problem, and I couldn’t say it out loud because saying it out loud made me sound insane. He’s kind and successful and he listens and I feel absolutely nothing, please pass the bread.
I kept waiting for the nothing to turn into something.
Surely, I kept thinking, if I sat across from enough good wine and enough good manners, the machinery would eventually turn over.
It never did. And the not-turning-over was starting to feel less like Tom’s failure and more like a diagnosis I’d been refusing to read.
“You’re somewhere else tonight,” he said over a dessert I’d been architecturally rearranging instead of eating.
“Sorry. Work stuff.”
“Or Josh stuff?”
I looked up sharply enough to give myself whiplash. “What?”
“Paige mentioned you two were married.” He said it gently, no ambush in it. “So I did the thing everyone does. I Googled it.” A beat. “That interview was brutal, Raven.”
“It was a long time ago.”
“Two years isn’t that long when you were together for ten.” He set down his fork like a man closing a folder. “It’s not a criticism. It’s an observation.”
“What’s your point, Tom?”
“My point is that you’ve checked your phone twelve times since we sat down - I counted, which I recognize makes me sound unhinged, but I counted - and every time your face does the same thing.
Little flicker of hope, little flicker of disappointment, back to normal.
” He tilted his head. “You keep touching that necklace, too. The constellation one. You’ve done it maybe thirty times. ”
My hand was, in fact, at my throat when he said it. I made it stop.
“And when I said his name just now,” Tom went on, “your whole body changed. Not a lot. But I design buildings for a living. I notice load-bearing structures.” He smiled, and there was no cruelty in it, which made it worse.
“You’re still in love with him. And I like you too much to spend the next three months being the guy you take to dinner to prove to yourself that you’re not. ”
He was right, and being right about it didn’t make it simple.
Loving Josh had never been the hard part.
The hard part was the stack of things I’d never gotten answered before I ran, and still sitting on top of it, after all this time, was a kitchen at four in the morning, a laptop, and my sister’s too-quick face.
I opened my mouth to argue and discovered I had nothing to put in it.
“I’m sorry,” I said instead, and meant it.
“Don’t be.” He signaled for the check with the ease of never once having waited for it. “Some people leave marks. My ex-wife left a few on me. I’m just saying - figure out what you actually want before you drag someone nice into the crossfire. And I am, objectively, extremely nice.”
“You’re a little smug about it.”
“It’s the only vice I’ve got left. Let me enjoy it.” He walked me to my car, kissed my cheek, and left me standing in a valet lot, diagnosed by a man I’d known for one dinner.
I didn’t touch the necklace once on the drive home. I was very aware of not touching it, which is its own kind of touching.
At home, I sat on my couch with my phone in my lap and didn’t turn on any lights, because darkness felt appropriate for what I was clearly about to do.
The interview had been everywhere all day.
Not the old kind, not the Grant Levy carnage: this was the fund interview, Josh in a plain sweater talking to a female journalist about female filmmakers, saying my name only after the journalist said it first, refusing to make it about my forgiveness.
This isn’t about her. It’s about doing what’s right.
Women in the industry had been reposting it all afternoon with paragraphs about their own erasures.
My publicist had sent me a link with three exclamation points and no context, which for her constituted a novel.
I’d read it four times. I wasn’t going to admit that to anyone, least of all myself, but I’d read it four times.
The part of me that kept arguing his side hadn’t shut up since Nantucket. And it had gotten persuasive enough, God help me, that I’d started wanting to let it finish-
I dialed before I could finish lying to myself about why.
He picked up on the second ring, and I heard him stop breathing. Actually stop. A little suspended silence on the line where a person’s breath is supposed to be.
“Thank you for the cottage,” I said. First words I’d spoken directly to him since the wedding.
A long pause. When he answered, he was careful, gentling his voice the way you would for a bird on your windowsill, one sudden move from bolting. “It always should have been in both our names. I’m just correcting an old wrong.”
“You can’t correct everything with property transfers, Josh.”
“I know. But I can correct that one thing.”
Silence stretched, filling up with a decade of things neither of us was going to say tonight. I should have hung up. There was a version of me, a healthier and considerably more boring version, who hung up right there and went to bed.
“How are you?” I asked instead, because apparently I’d left that woman at the restaurant with Tom.
He let out a laugh, quiet and a little wrecked. “Better than I was. Not as good as I could be. You?”
“Same.”
So we talked. Not about anything in particular, and that was the dangerous part, that it wasn’t about anything.
He told me about the fund launch, about a sixteen-year-old named Maria who’d surveyed the venue and pronounced it “apology with catering,” which made me laugh so hard I had to put the phone against my chest for a second.
I told him about the HBO show, about network notes that read like they’d been generated by a random word engine, about a costar who chewed gum straight through his emotional close-ups, jaw working the whole time.
“How do you even play a death scene next to that,” Josh said.
“You don’t. You play it at the gum. You make the gum your enemy. Some of my best work has been rage directed at Nicorette.”
It was scratching a bite I’d been told to leave alone. Enormous, immediate relief, and the certain knowledge that I was making it much, much worse.
That was the treacherous thing about talking to Josh.
It didn’t read as a relapse. It was air after months underwater, the first full breath I’d taken since cutting him off.
Every rule I’d built to survive him had quietly assumed he’d stay the man who made the rules necessary, and this careful, funny, listening person on the other end of the line kept declining to be that man, and my whole defensive architecture was standing guard against a threat that had, infuriatingly, stopped attacking.
At one point I laughed (really laughed, the ugly one, the one I don’t do in public) and the line went quiet on his end. Not gone. Just quiet, deliberately. He’d gone silent on purpose. To listen to it. To sit inside the sound of me laughing, a thing he’d been rationed off of.
“What?” I said.
“Nothing.” A pause. “I just missed that. That’s all.”
I let it pass, because acknowledging it meant acknowledging a lot of things, and I was already one phone call past my own boundaries.
An hour in, an entire hour simply gone, I said, “This is probably a bad idea.”
“Talking?”
“Being friends. We were never any good at that.”
“We were great at it,” he said. “We just stopped trying.”
“Why did we stop?” I asked, and hated how badly I wanted the answer.
And there it was, the pause where I could hear him deciding whether to lie. I’d have known the sound of that pause anywhere. It’s the same pause he’d used for a decade to tell me the premiere would be boring, that everything was fine.
“I got scared,” he said finally, and it wasn’t the lie.
“You were becoming more yourself, and I was becoming less. And instead of growing with you, I tried to shrink you down to a size I could still feel bigger than. It’s the biggest regret of my life, and I’ve built a real competitive field of regrets to choose from. ”
He didn’t reach for the softer version, and it kept quietly dismantling me all night.
The old Josh would have found the phrasing that made him look wounded instead of culpable, would have handed me a regret shaped to earn sympathy.
This one just named the ugly mechanism of exactly what he’d done, flatly, and left it lying there between us with no bow on it.
I didn’t know what to do with a Josh who’d stopped performing his own remorse.
I didn’t answer that. Couldn’t, without giving away more than I was ready to hand over.
“I should go,” I said.
“Yeah. Thank you for calling, Raven. Really.”
“Goodnight, Josh.”
Hanging up, I sat in the dark looking at the call log. One hour, forty-seven minutes. A specific number, the way I need everything to be specific. I hovered my thumb over delete the way you’re supposed to, the way the healthier and more boring Raven absolutely would have.
I didn’t delete it.
I told myself I was keeping it for my records. Documentation for the emotional tax return I’d file at year’s end. Deductions for pain and suffering. An itemized list of every minute I’d spent letting my ex-husband make me laugh in the dark, a teenager whose parents were asleep down the hall.
My phone buzzed. Mia: Tom called me. Said the date ended early. You okay?
Fine, I typed back. He was nice. No spark.
The three dots appeared immediately, because Mia had clearly also been sitting on her phone, ready to detonate. Because you’re still hung up on Josh.
I’m not hung up. I’m processing.
For two years???
It was a ten-year relationship, I wrote. I get at least three years of processing. It’s in the bylaws.
There are no bylaws for divorce.
There should be. I’d have written excellent bylaws.
I put the phone down before she could get the last word, which she’d have, and touched the necklace at my throat, the replacement one, the one I’d bought myself because my collarbone had felt wrong without stars against it and I’d decided not to examine why.
The original was still on my sister’s neck somewhere, or in a drawer, or sold, for all I knew.
Tomorrow I’d go back to not talking to him, and I’d remember, in exhaustive and well-organized detail, exactly why we didn’t work.
Tonight I fell asleep with his voice still in my ear, telling me about a teenager who thought his second superhero movie was mid, sounding for all the world like the man I’d married before the fame got into the water supply and poisoned everything downstream.