36
I CALL MAC that night at 2 am. I can’t sleep, I’m still mad at Hayley, and my mind is spinning. Hayley’s words won’t leave my head. It’s midday his time.
‘Anna?’ he answers, sounding worried. ‘Are you okay? You’ve never called me this late before.’
‘Well I’m doing it tonight.’
‘Are you drunk?’
‘Do I sound drunk?’
‘A little?’
‘I’m not. Just tired.’
I’m actually wired and jittery, not tired.
‘Okay. Are you okay?’
‘Yes. I just need to talk to you.’
‘About what?’
I don’t know what to say, how to even start the conversation I think I want to have, so I just plough in. ‘Where do you see yourself in five years?’
‘Where do I…What are we talking about?’
‘We’re talking about the future. Where do you see yourself?’
‘Um. I don’t know. Probably back in LA. Working on an Emmy-award winning TV show for HBO. Or trying out for a background scene in a streamer movie no one will see. One of those two.’
‘And that’s it.’
‘That’s it.’
‘Okay. Great.’
‘What’s going on?’ he says.
‘Bobbi wants to open a second shop. She wants me to manage it.’
‘Hey, that’s great.’
‘It is.’
‘Are you going to do it?’
‘I am,’ I say.
And it feels like a relief to say it out loud. And also a sadness.
‘That’s exciting,’ he says.
‘You think so?’
‘I mean, yeah. You’ve got a promotion. You’ve got a book coming out. This is everything you wanted.’
‘I guess it is.’
‘You don’t sound happy.’
‘I’m happy. But…’ I chew on my fingernail.
‘But what?’
‘But it means I’m here long-term. For a year at least. Probably longer.’
‘Okay. I kind of thought you were anyway.’
‘Then what are we doing here? You and me.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Is this really just friendship to you?’
There’s a long silence on his end. I can hear traffic, his breathing, a door closing, and then the sound of footsteps. He’s walking up the stairs to his apartment. Has he been out to get coffee, or is he just arriving home from some woman’s place? Rebecca’s apartment?
I hate that I am immediately thinking about that.
‘No, it’s not just friendship to me,’ he says.
We shouldn’t be having this conversation while he’s in his stairwell and I’m overtired and still upset from my fight with Hayley and alone in the dark. But I don’t care.
‘Then what is it?’ I ask.
‘I don’t know.’
‘Well, that’s not good enough. I need an answer.’
‘I don’t have any answers,’ he says.
And that’s the crux of it. He has no answers for me, and I have been waiting all this time for him to give me one. I have held this belief he’s got a secret golden key that will unlock our problems. But he’s happy just going on like this, probably forever. Or until something better comes along. This is enough for him. This small piece of me is all that he wants. And it’s killing me.
‘I can’t keep doing this,’ I say.
‘Doing what?’
I don’t even know how to explain it. Squishing my feelings into a tiny little ball so I can push them deep down and not worry about what it’s doing to me. Living a half-life in the hope of a whole one. Holding on to stupid hope .
‘Spending all this time talking to you, thinking about you, not being with you, having no plan to be with you.’
‘Do you want to make a plan?’
‘What kind of plan would that be?’
‘I don’t know. You could come and visit again this December? I could come out next year maybe?’
‘And that’s it? That’s enough for you? Vague plans to see each other once a year?’
‘Do you want to…be together, to try a long-distance relationship?’ he says. He sounds puffed now, like he’s skipping steps, trying to get into his apartment where he can sit and think and calm this conversation down.
‘Yes. No. I don’t know. Do you?’
‘I’m scared.’
‘Of what?’
‘Letting you down,’ he says, his voice quiet.
What we have now asks nothing of him, really. A relationship has expectations, around fidelity, emotional support, honesty, feelings, factoring the other person into everything, the future. He doesn’t want to give me that.
‘It wouldn’t even solve anything because there’s still no plan to see each other again for any longer than a visit. And everything else,’ I say.
Everything else being kids, and a home, and life together. All the things he doesn’t want.
I can hear him unlocking his door, opening and shutting it, throwing his keys on the table, and then it sounds like he’s pacing.
‘What do you want?’ he asks.
‘I want you to…I don’t know. Fix this for me. For us.’
The words I really want to say aren’t coming out properly. I’m a writer. I wish I could put this in an email, spend a week writing and rewriting and finding the perfect tone and the perfect way to say it all. No, I wish I was a person who didn’t even need to have this conversation. Or a person who was brave enough to say, ‘I love you and I want you to love me the same way’.
‘I want to be with you,’ I say finally, tears burning my eyes.
It’s bad enough I’m the one putting myself out there with this conversation, I can’t also cry down the phone. My lips are trembling and a tear runs from my eye into the pillow, but he can’t see that, and if I control my breathing he won’t know.
‘Anna, Anna I…’ he lets out a jagged breath. His voice is cracking. ‘I don’t have anything to offer you. I want us to be together, I do, but I can’t ask you to come here. I’ve thought about it, I’ve thought about it a million times. I have been on the verge of begging you to come so many times. But I have no certainty. I never know when and where my next job might be. I don’t know if I’m going to stay in New York or move back to LA or end up somewhere else. Right now I’m auditioning for that role in a law show based in Chicago, and after that for a cave-diving movie set in Utah. My life is all over the place. I can’t even offer you one stable place to live. Let alone everything else I know you want. Kids, all of that. I’m not going to be enough for you.’
‘Mac.’ My voice wavers a little.
‘Anna, I’m not going to ask you to come here and give up everything, all your dreams, your friends, your family, the bookshop, for nothing.’
‘You’re not nothing.’
‘But you know what I’m saying is true. You know what you want out of a relationship, what you want out of life, and you know this isn’t it.’
Now I’m angry. Because all this time we were dancing around it, I could still believe we had a chance, but he’s ruined everything with the truth.
‘Then why did you message me, why didn’t you cut things off after I was in New York?’
There’s silence for a moment.
‘I should have,’ he says. ‘We said it, back then, didn’t we? That we should just live in the moment and not speak again.’
‘Is that what you want? To never talk again?’ I ask.
‘Is it what you want?’ he says.
‘I think if we’re not going to be properly together, we should be properly apart. So I think we should stop talking, yes.’
‘Good. Great.’ He sounds like maybe he’s going to cry, or maybe that wavering in his throat is anger. I’ve never heard him angry before.
We don’t talk for a minute, we just sit on the phone in silence, breathing, and then I say, ‘I’m going to go now.’
And he says, ‘Goodbye.’
And that’s that. It’s over.