has always been the love of my life.
They dated in high school, she tells the group. Well. It was more than dating. They were lovers in high school. They were in true love in high school. He wrote her a note once, it was a note to end all notes, she kept it for years until one day her mother found it and threw it away. Their love was fathomless. But also, they were star-crossed. It’s a Romeo and Juliet story. It’s awful and beautiful because of the way they came to their end. And she has thought of him ever since.
The women pass around the bottle of chardonnay. They sip their wine and don’t worry about the dinners they’re late to making. They lean forward into the guilty attraction of Lina’s story.
Let me tell y’all, she says, about this man.
Aidan is tall with a square jaw and cobalt-blue eyes. He has the black-and-white face of someone who has gone to war. Lina tells the room that when he’s not with her he is thinking of her. When he’s not with Lina he’s hacksawing and building onto his place so he can raise the value of his home, so he can sell it, so he can leave behind his mistaken life. The woman he married doesn’t love him. She semicheats on him. She makes out with guys, she texts with her ex. But she holds Aidan tethered, because the hours he spends working on the construction site pay for her Downtown Brown manicures, her Forever 21 terry dresses, and she jokes with her friends that the store is called Forever 34 when they’re out at local bars wearing the dresses and sidling up against strangers and having blue island drinks in the middle of maroon Indiana winters.
Sometimes he will be in the double-wide on the job site and the music from the nearest modern country station will be sort of crackly but he will hear it and it’s funny when you’re in love or about to fall back in love, it’s funny how every single song is about that person. It’s funny how that works.
He is a good man, Lina says. He has made mistakes but all good men do. Good men are flawed but even. There is a shortage of real men in America and Lina is not talking about Marlboro Men with mustaches who pound raw burger meat. She is talking about actual men, who stand up straight and hold doors open and go down for hours and make money and whether it’s honest or dishonest they are honest about how it’s made. And they’re interesting, doesn’t matter what they do or where they live, they’re just interesting, they have some stories you’ll hear after you’ve known them for a few months and some stories you’ll never hear even if you’re their brother. When men like Aidan tell a story, it isn’t so you’ll think they’re cool, it’s because this is a story that wants to get heard, and usually you need to coax it out of them, or maybe there’s a woman at the table and she begs a little for it, because one thing that really separates good men from everybody else is this: real men, guys from backwoods Maine and the tough zones of Philly and the rusty thickets of southern Indiana, they love women, and sex, and as strong as they are, they can be swayed a centimeter or two by pussy, and Lina doesn’t like using that word because it’s more than that, but the word also stands for so much more than it sounds like. Anyway, the other kind of men, the men who make up most of the world, they’ll be dirtier once they get a woman in a bedroom, they’ll ask for things they shouldn’t ask for and they’ll leave in the morning without class, but they won’t be swayed in a bar, or at dinner, they won’t do something they don’t want to do for a woman, because they don’t have the intrinsic manly love for a woman that exists in abundance in a man like Aidan Hart.
Aidan.
The women are pitched forward, like soup tureens in an earthquake. Their chins are on the heels of their hands, and they are eating mixed nuts nervously.
Oh my, says Cathy. That sounds like quite a man, and a real love affair.
How did it end? someone asks, because women are often better at handling the endings than the beginnings. Lina understands that some