“I have to.”
“I left my children. I left them, too.”
Janice squeezed her hand. “Then you have to believe it, too.”
64
From: [email protected]
Subject:
Don’t ask me why I left.
Ask me why I came back.
From:[email protected]
Subject:
What do you mean?
From: [email protected]
Subject:
Ask me why I came back, Maribeth. Ask me why I came back to New York.
From: [email protected]
Subject:
I know why you came back. For your job. Your dream job.
From: [email protected]
Subject:
It’s not my dream job. It’s not why I came back.
From: [email protected]
Subject:
What are you talking about?
From: [email protected]
Subject:
I got a job in New York City so I could come back for you.
From: [email protected]
Subject:
That doesn’t make any sense.
From: [email protected]
Subject:
Think about it, Maribeth. And if you don’t believe me, ask my dad. I was unhappy in San Francisco, had been for years, wondering how my life had gone so off the rails. And my dad said it was because I’d let you go. He was right. But I knew I couldn’t just e-mail you or Facebook you to get you back. I had to undo the damage. I had to come back and win you.
From:[email protected]
Subject:
That doesn’t make any sense.
From: [email protected]
Subject:
Think about it. It does.
65
She thought about it.
She thought about so many things.
So many things that had never quite made sense.
For one there was the way Jason had gotten in touch with her, via a Facebook message. A few months before he’d written her, Jason hadn’t been on Facebook. Maribeth knew this because she had been an early adopter of the technology and had checked periodically to see if Jason had posted a profile. Three months before he’d contacted her, he hadn’t. But then there was this message, something about him being offered his dream job in New York City, “an offer he couldn’t refuse,” he’d said. So he was relocating. Did she want to meet for a drink?
She’d always assumed he was being relocated for the dream job, that this was the offer he couldn’t refuse. It was why she’d resented his company for going to all that trouble to bring him to New York City and then not pay him well enough to live here comfortably.
But of course, they hadn’t moved him to New York City. Why would they have? Jason worked for a nonprofit, not a huge corporation. And there were probably any number of musicology or MLS grads in New York City who could’ve filled his position.
And then there was the first meeting. A disaster. The two of them got together for after-work drinks in some dreary midtown bar. It felt less like a date than a wake, mourning people who no longer existed. They spoke vaguely about their lives over the past decade. It was stiff, formal, and an hour later, she was on a subway heading back downtown. Elizabeth was waiting for her on the couch, a bottle of wine already open. “Well, I won’t be seeing him again,” she’d told Elizabeth, though that was pretty obvious by her early return. Elizabeth, who had emphatically, and uncharacteristically, discouraged Maribeth from going in the first place, didn’t try to hide her relief. “Good riddance,” Elizabeth said.
But then Jason had called the next day. Maribeth had been shocked when she heard the voicemail message. Not simply because it violated the Rules—that Rules book had been very big in Magazineland and years later, in spite of herself, Maribeth had internalized them—but because that first meeting had been so excruciating. But he asked her out again. For Friday night. Which was two days later.
This wasn’t what men did. Not attractive eligible men. And let it be said that Jason Brinkley was still attractive, maybe more so; his hairline was a little less robust, and he had the beginnings of etched lines around his eyes, but the eyes themselves still looked like they were in on some delicious joke, and his lips still looked genetically designed for kissing. He’d stopped smoking pot and started running, so his lanky body had become chiseled. No, Jason, by anyone’s standards, was a catch.
He’d taken her to see some singer-songwriter she’d never heard of at Joe’s Pub. It was otherworldly, a guitar, and string-sounding synthesizers, and as she listened to the music, and to Jason talking about the music, she felt herself thawing. Which was how she understood that, for some time, she’d been frozen.
After the show, they’d gone out to a diner and split a pitcher of beer and platters of comfort food and talked about everything and anything: working in magazines after 9/11, and how she’d thought that things would get smarter, grow deeper, but it seemed to be going in the opposite direction. About how his mother had married some wealthy Southern California real estate developer and bloomed into the person she was meant to be, and how it had sent Jason’s father into a deep existential funk, not because he missed Nora but because it was such a confirmation of his failure as her husband. They talked about New York and how it had changed. Of San Francisco and how it had changed. Of where they wanted to live and what they wanted to do and who they wanted to be. They talked about politics and books and plays and music. The conversation was fast, breathless, greedy, as if over the last decade there had been so many things they had stored up to tell each other.