He shakes his head with enthusiasm and leans forward. “You know, it’s like the worst of everything, meeting online. If you go out with someone you know from work or someplace, there’s a starting point. A familiarity. And if you meet someone in a bar, then it’s just like flirting and all of that—there’s a rule book for it. Or a handbook—you know what I mean, right?”
“Yes!” I say. “This is my first time doing this. And it’s awful! I mean, not you … That didn’t come out right. You’re not awful. It’s just hard to find a place to start.” It’s just like you said, Jonathan Fields. Only not exactly, because I have never known any of this to be easy. Not. Ever. Not even with Asshole.
I kept the last text message he sent me. The one saying it was over and to never contact him again. I read it sometimes to remind myself about the mountains.
“Okay,” he says again. He likes that word a lot. “So just ask me anything. What do you want to know?”
“Honestly?” I ask.
“Yes. Anything!” He leans back again. He reaches for his beer, and this time his eyes do a quick scan of the room. It’s perfectly normal, I remind myself. He’s facing out. He’s protecting me from wild animals that could pounce at any moment. His eyes do not stop and linger on anyone, but return to me and my question.
“Okay,” I begin, because if Jonathan likes that word, new me likes it too. People are always more comfortable when you acclimate to them, to their style and their language. It’s why people often look like their dogs. I learned this in a psychology class.
“What I really want to know about is your divorce. How you met your wife. Why you got married. What went wrong. Is that too personal? It’s fine if it is. But that is, honestly, what I most want to know.”
This is a lie, of course. What I most want to know is what happened to his BMW, or why he told me he had one when he doesn’t. And even if he did lie to impress me and lure me out, there’s just no way he chose that car without a gun to his head.
And that woman from the first bar calling out his name … and the way we got here, to the harbor …
“Okay.” He begins his answer with his favorite word. “We met in college. Swarthmore. Senior year. But it’s not what you think. We didn’t just stay together and then get married. We actually broke up after graduation. I moved to Boston—that’s where I’m from. Sad to say, I lived with my parents for about a year while I was looking for a job. She came here, or to New York, rather. Then a few years later, when we were about twenty-eight, we reconnected on Facebook!”
He says this like it’s a miracle, so I light up my whole face.
“No way!” I say. It’s a miracle!!!!!
“Yup. And we started talking and then I came to see her and she came up to see me, and then we lived in Boston for a while and then back here. We really thought we would start a family.”
Now he seems sad, so I become a gray sky. “I’m sorry,” I say. “Can I ask what happened?”
He goes on for a solid ten minutes, talking about all of their fertility treatments and how his wife has endometriosis, etc., etc., and TMI. I remind myself that we are trying to travel a long distance at the speed of light. I am sympathetic. I am. I truly am.
But I want to know about that car. And why he didn’t move back to New York.
It’s not fair to Jonathan Fields that I feel annoyed. He’s just answering the question I asked.
He finally stops. He gets us another round. I watch him walk away and think that I like the way he walks and that he is a nice man. He loved his wife. He wanted to have children. He has parents who loved him enough to let him live in their basement after college. He is a good man, and I will try to find a way to let him in.
Then I think this. I think about my sister and how if I met her today, I would not make her a friend. I wouldn’t dislike her, but we are too different and we would annoy each other. She would judge