had been our friend since the three of us met at college upstate freshman year. He moved to New York after graduation, same as we did. He was the ultimate cliché: an aspiring actor/waiter who came out of the closet only after his staunchly Roman Catholic parents finished putting him through college. They promptly disowned him, leaving me and Valerie as his only “family.” He had a studio apartment in Hell’s Kitchen, a scary neighborhood we ventured into only in pairs, and only in broad daylight.
“You don’t have to stay there,” I said around the cigarette in my mouth as I held a lighter to it. I took a deep drag, then told Valerie, “I mean, it’s a work night and everything.”
Naturally, I was hoping she would protest.
She did. Sort of. “Well, don’t you want to be alone with Mike on his first night here?”
“Yeah, I do, but…”
I waited for her to say that it was no problem; that she was absolutely going to Gordy’s. She didn’t say it. She just blew a smoke ring and shrugged.
Dammit.
Don’t get me wrong. Valerie was a great roommate. She didn’t snore, she washed her own dishes, she ogled Officer Tom Hanson aka Johnny Depp on 21 Jump Street with me religiously every Sunday night.
But she didn’t have much of a social life, which meant that unless she was at work—currently a temp job at a textbook publishing house—she was pretty much always home.
That wasn’t a problem when my boyfriend wasn’t coming to visit me for the first time since he’d finished grad school in Los Angeles in May.
Mike, who now had a master’s degree in computer science, had set up a bunch of interviews in Manhattan. I was praying he’d land a job and move back East, because I was starting to realize that the alternative was me giving up my dream job as a production assistant on a television talk show and moving out West. I had been born and bred in New York State, and I had no desire to move to southern California.
I sensed that Mike was going to try to convince me that I should, though. He was from Long Island, but he had fallen in love with California. When I visited him there in April, he kept talking about how I could get a great job in the television industry. When I pointed out that I already had a great job in the television industry, he pointed out that the quality of life on the West Coast was so much better than in New York.
“See, Beau? You don’t have to step over homeless people every time you walk out the door,” he said as we crawled along in his convertible on the 405 one sunny afternoon. He gestured at the blue skies and palm trees overhead. “Everything’s clean, there’s no snow and you don’t have to be jammed on the subway with a million strangers.”
“No, you just have to be jammed on the freeway with a million strangers in a million cars.”
That he so obviously preferred the L.A. traffic to the N.Y.C. crowds scared me then, and it scared me now.
He was really excited about some independent computer research project he and a couple of other grad students had been working on. The project was supposed to end when school did, but it had apparently morphed into something bigger, which was why he was still in California.
He hadn’t actually come out and said that he was considering staying on the West Coast for good, but I got the hint.
But thanks to my pushing, he had arranged these interviews in Manhattan. I had my heart set on living happily ever after with Mike, à la Michael and Hope on my favorite show, thirtysomething, and I was determined to do it right here in New York.
I figured that while he was in town this week, when he wasn’t busy interviewing or spending time with his parents, he and I could do some preliminary apartment hunting. He’d have a job lined up before he flew back West; I’d go with him; we’d load up his car with all his belongings and drive back here together. He could stay with his parents—or, better yet, with me—until our new place was ready. I was sure Valerie wouldn’t protest.
Never mind that our place was almost too small for us two women, and I hadn’t actually checked with her. Never mind that I had already used up my first year’s allotment of one week’s vacation. And never mind that Mike and I hadn’t yet discussed the prospect of living together.
I figured everything would fall into place the second I fell into Mike’s arms. Which, I saw, glancing at my new Keith Haring Swatch—was less than twenty-four hours from now. If the plane was on time.
I felt a ripple of anticipation. After all, Mike was the love of my life. We had met at summer camp in the Catskills during high school and fallen madly in love over roasted marshmallows and color war. We reconnected every summer, first as campers, then as CITs, and finally as counselors. We went to separate state universities but managed to keep up a long-distance relationship all through college.
This last year had been the hardest, though, by far. Instead of sixty-some miles of New York State Thruway between us, there was an entire continent.
Absence makes the heart grow fonder.
That was what my cliché-spouting Grandma Alice always said. She was—and still is—a big believer in true love triumphing over the odds. After all, she and Grandpa Herman started dating before he was shipped overseas to the Battle of the Bulge. Their relationship survived a world war.
My parents’ relationship survived the Vietnam War—not that my dad was sent to Southeast Asia or anything. But he did serve in the military back then, stationed in Alabama for more than a year when my sister and I were really young.
I couldn’t imagine that Mike and I would ever live through a war in this day and age, but I honestly believed, in my young and foolish heart, that we could make it through anything the future was going to throw at us.
three
The present
Splat.
“Shit!”
No, not literally shit. That would have been even more disgusting, but this is pretty vile. I have just been sprayed with Earth’s Best Organic First Sweet Potatoes.
“Beau! Watch your mouth!”
Startled by the voice, I turn to glower at my husband, who is standing in the kitchen doorway, fresh from his shower and wearing a crisp white button-down and maroon tie unmarred by pureed orange root vegetables.
“Well, I wish he’d watch his mouth,” I snap, gesturing at my squirming five-month-old, whose chubby cheeks are ominously puffed again. “He does this spitting thing because you taught him.”
“I didn’t teach him to spit food. I taught him to do this. Didn’t I, Tyler?” Mike leans over the high chair and blows a vibrating raspberry into our son’s face.
Tyler squeals with glee.
“Stop it, Mike. You think it’s cute, but lately he does that whenever he has a mouthful, and I’m the one who ends up wearing his breakfast, not you.” I reach for a cloth diaper from the basket of clean, unfolded laundry on the table and mop the mess from my face.
“Yeah, well, I’d trade feeding him his breakfast for getting on the train,” Mike says darkly.
