Maybe You Should Talk to Someon - Lori Gottlieb Page 0,99

to which Rita clicked Delete.) It was before Myron—who, she noted when face-to-face with him in the sunlit parking lot yesterday, “looked like he’d aged a bit”—told her the things he had wanted to tell her for a long time, things he didn’t realize, he explained, until three months into his relationship with Randie. (So that was her name!)

Here’s what Myron realized: He missed Rita. Deeply. He wanted to tell her things—all the time, every day—the way he had wanted to tell his wife Myrna things throughout their marriage. Rita made him laugh and think, and when photos of his grandchildren popped up on his phone, he wanted to show them to Rita. He didn’t want to do any of this with Randie in the same way. He loved Rita’s sharp intellect and sharper wit, her creativity, her kindness. How she picked up his favorite cheese if she was at the grocery store.

He liked Rita’s worldliness and wry observations and wise counsel whenever he asked her advice. He adored her throaty laugh and her eyes that were green in the sunlight and brown indoors and her bright red hair and her values. He loved that if they started a conversation on one topic, it would segue into two or three others before it would loop back around or that sometimes they’d get so immersed in their tangents that they’d forget what they’d been talking about in the first place. Her paintings and sculptures made his heart thrill. He was curious about her, wanted to know more about her kids, her family, her life, her. He wanted her to feel comfortable telling him and wondered why she had been like a cipher, revealing so little of her past.

Oh, and he thought she was beautiful. Absolutely stunning. But would she please stop wearing T-shirts that looked like rags?

Myron and Rita stood there in the parking lot of the Y, Myron catching his breath after pouring his heart out and Rita feeling dizzy, unsteady—and angry.

“I’m not interested in staving off your loneliness,” she said. “Just because you broke up with gold-digger-what’s-her-name. Just because you miss your wife and can’t stand to be alone.”

“Is that what you think is going on?” Myron asked.

“Obviously,” Rita said imperiously. “Yes.”

And then he kissed her. An intense, soft, urgent, movie-worthy kiss, a kiss that seemed to go on forever. It finally ended with Rita slapping Myron on the cheek and running to her car, then calling me for an emergency session.

“That’s exciting!” I say when Rita finishes telling me the story. I hadn’t expected this twist at all, and I’m genuinely thrilled for her. But Rita just makes a snorting sound, and I realize she’s missed the forest for the trees.

“What he said was beautiful,” I say. “And that kiss—” I see the beginning of a smile before she suppresses it and her expression turns hard, cold.

“Well, that’s all fine and good,” she says, “but I’m never speaking to Myron again.” She unzips her purse, pulls out a wadded-up tissue, and adds resolutely, “I’m completely done with love.”

I remember Rita’s earlier proclamation: Love is pain. The Myron situation has upended her so because when her heart that had been in a decades-long deep freeze finally began to thaw with Myron in her life, she had tasted hope and then lost it. It occurs to me now that when Rita first came to see me, she was desperate not just because she would be turning seventy in a year, as she reported then, but because Myron’s disappearance had made her wonder the same thing I was wondering when I first saw Wendell: Had the man who’d just left been the “end of the line,” as I’d put it—the last chance at love? Rita, too, has been grieving something bigger.

But now the kiss has presented another crisis for Rita—possibility. And that may feel even more intolerable to her than her pain.

33

Karma

Charlotte is late for today’s appointment because somebody hit her car as she was pulling out of the parking lot at work. She’s fine, she says, it was a minor fender-bender, but it caused the steaming coffee in her cup holder to spill onto her laptop on which she’d composed her presentation for tomorrow and which she hadn’t backed up.

“Do you think I should tell them what happened or just pull an all-nighter?” she asks. “I want it to be good, but I don’t want to seem flaky.”

The prior week, at the gym, she’d accidentally dropped a weight on her