Brunch did not go as planned. I barely know where to begin. I couldn’t speak of it to Alex at first, and then it all came out in a tumble on Tuesday night, with him clenching his fists and rattling off increasingly baroque and violent curses. I want to kill Rachel — if she hadn’t blown me off at the last possible moment, none of this would have happened. And I’m definitely off social media until further notice, except to maintain the work Instagram account.
I remind myself that I’m safe up here tonight in Cow Hollow, in the clinical apartment with the candles and the probably fake Danish Modern couch and the little succulents I will eventually have to bring home to Berkeley. I’m safe with Alex in the other room, working on some data model I’ll never understand, muttering to himself about some guy named Dave who’s “cocked it all up again.” I’m safe because I choose to be safe, because I won’t let myself feel that I’m in any danger.
(back it up, Melissa)
It shouldn’t have come as any particular surprise that Rachel flaked on me for brunch — it’s a scenario that has played out so many times in my 34 years on the surface of this planet that her timely appearance at any planned event is more remarkable than her simple absence. Everything from neglecting to pick me up from the Burbank AMC (I’d gone to watch Legally Blonde with Jen — she forgot) to my parents’ 30th wedding anniversary party (partying with one of her sugar daddies in Vegas on the spur of the moment — she forgot) to nearly missing my wedding even though she was my maid of honor (she didn’t forget, but she was pissy with Alex after the rehearsal dinner when he wouldn’t take her back to his hotel room). I’d been waiting in the lobby on one of the purple-pink couches, continuing to scroll through Greta’s feed and groaning at each successive artifact of my descent into intoxication. (At least my hair looked good — I was very grateful that I’d asked the stylist to use maximum hold Elnett on Friday afternoon.)
1:30 became 2, and still no Rachel, despite several texts and a voicemail. I tried Matt as a last resort. To my astonishment, my father picked up Matt’s phone — Rachel and Matt had driven up to Santa Barbara to surprise him for Father’s Day. And Rachel had forgotten about me. Again. (My dad sounded happy though.) He put her on the phone with me after a fairly stilted “Happy Father’s Day” conversation — it wasn’t his fault one daughter showed up unannounced, but I was miffed at him anyway, even if a little illogically.
“Hey doll,” she said breezily, and completely for Matt and my dad’s benefit because again, not a name on her list of epithets for me, but she wasn’t about to greet me with “Hey whore,” like she usually does, in front of either of them. (Though she might in front of my mom.) “Sorry about this, totally forgot when Matt proposed coming up here today. For some reason I thought you were in LA next weekend. Can you come down next weekend? Dad, doesn’t that sound good, next weekend, all of us together?” (I heard my father in the background making noises of encouragement.)
“Rachel, I can’t. I work on Saturdays, and I can’t take two off in a row. I mean, you knew on Friday I was coming down. You commented on my Instagram post about my summer body!” This was totally ridiculous. Rachel’s no idiot — it was more likely that she saw some greater benefit in being with my parents on Sunday than with me. It sounds messed up to even think about it, but I expect it has to do with Rachel’s wish to cement herself in the position of favorite daughter now that my parents are starting to think about setting up a living trust and writing their wills. I hope I’m wrong, but as I said in my old blog (I re-read a lot of it this week, trying to find more clues in my past to my present disasters), there’s not a lot I would put past Rachel.
“Oh gosh, I did, didn’t I? Mel, it’s been such a hard week, my brain’s been all over the place. Owe you one?” I could hear my parents and Matt laughing in the background, having the Father’s Day brunch I wanted to have with my dad.
“Sure,” I replied. Just add it to the list of ones you owe me that have been accumulating like ducats in the Bank of Sisterly Disappointments since I was a toddler.
I’d already been turfed out of the room by this point (I could only squeeze a late checkout to 1:30 pm), and my flight wasn’t until 7:30, so I had some time to kill. I thought about maybe going to see the Barbara Kruger exhibition at MOCA, or up to the Arclight to watch Booksmart. I settled on walking over to Bottega Louie for brunch on my own — Eggs Benedict and a couple of mimosas — with the plan to spend a couple of hours after that reading Milkman and drinking tea. It wasn’t like I could will Rachel down here, and the idea of a few snatched hours on my own, doing not much of anything sounded pretty great.
I was on the second mimosa when I felt… something. Something off-kilter. They weren’t particularly strong mimosas, so I wasn’t drunk or anything. No, I felt a shift in the atmosphere around me. I looked behind me — it felt much like someone was looming over my shoulder — but I saw nothing but the cavernous, white room and diners grazing on late brunches. I continued to scroll through Instagram, my book forgotten, and shook the ominous sensation off, focusing instead on looking at @cheapoldhouses and fantasizing about buying an old home in Wisconsin or Nebraska and doing it up with Alex. (I decided not to think about what he could actually do for a living in Wisconsin or Nebraska.) Occasionally I’d get a like on the picture of the Eggs Benedict I posted earlier, but mostly I was doing what Julian used to call “woolgathering” — spacing out, daydreaming, wondering, hoping for the future. What would it be like to finally live with Alex after so many years of being apart? What if getting married destroyed what we had only just managed to build? And what if the very things that drove Alex and Minty apart caused our relationship to cave in?
I looked up from my phone only when I heard the other seat at my table scrape across the floor.
Julian.
“Hullo, Mel. Figured if I couldn’t get you by text, I might as well find you in person.” Julian slid deftly into the wooden chair before me. “You know, you do make it rather easy to find you when you post pictures on Instagram.”
Talk about feeling like I was in a dream, a bad one at that. Julian, Julian, was so close to me I could touch him if I only reached out a hand. I hadn’t seen him since… December? Hard to recall now. His sandy hair no longer flopped over to one side, as it had for years; now it was more closely cropped on the sides, though a little longer on top. He still had the beard, not nearly so bushy on the sides as when he had come back from Bali, but remained full at the bottom. Immaculate white broadcloth shirt, French cuffs (as always) with jade cufflinks (not too flashy), only two buttons open at the neck. And his face, oh, his face was the one that first started to charm me that night at Charlie and Will’s — eager to please, open, kind, just a few more creases at his eyes than that night. Careful, Melissa, some part of my conscious brain sprung into action. You don’t know him now, did you ever know him?
“You look beautiful as ever, Melissa, if a little surprised,” he chuckled. “Much better than you did on Instagram the other night with that dreadful Greta girl. I think she was getting you drunk on purpose, just to dim your loveliness. Did you know you were around the corner from me? I would have stopped by but –”
“You were in Seattle?” I offered. My knee was bouncing up and down now, tiktiktiktiktik; my therapist always told me it was a hallmark of my anxiety.
“Seattle? Oh, that fell through in the end. No, I’ve been here all weekend. I thought it best not to interrupt when Jenn and Sean were around, the gruesome twosome. Never could trust either of them not to fill you up with some nonsense story about me. Jesus, Jenn hated me so much she was inspired to become a divorce attorney!” Julian barked out a laugh. (It was kind of funny when he put it like that.)
“Julian…” I started. “I don’t think this is a good idea to meet like this.” I pulled my hair through my hands, gathered it in a knot on top of my head. I hadn’t washed it since Friday, so it stayed just-so without any pins (especially after all that Elnett). I looked around at the other diners, as if I expected to see Alex or Jenn or anyone come and accuse me of being untrue to myself by sitting here and not walking out. Nothing.
“We’re two old friends, Melissa. We were married, and not for an inconsequential amount of time, mind you. We’ve known each other, how many years now? 13? 14?” He reached forward for my hands, flattened before me on the small table. I withdrew one but he caught the left one before I could tuck it under the table. He gave it a light squeeze.
“14 years in September,” I told him. “We met on September 23rd at Charlie and Will’s party. You said some mean things about America, and then you were very sweet to me after you found me flirting with Alex.”
He looked in my eyes — once more, my gaze returned upon myself. “You remember the date? Even I couldn’t recall. But I remember you that night. You looked like a startled doe, all big eyes and sleek limbs. I knew Miranda would have your guts for garters if she found you with him. I was just saving you from a sorry fate.” He mock-dramatically threw his free hand against his forehead.
“She was pretty rude to me after then, and Al and I hadn’t even done anything yet,” I recalled. After that evening, Miranda would hole herself up in Minty’s room if she deigned to visit the Palace on the Hill. She couldn’t bear to look at me. Minty told me that it was because I was a reminder of what Miranda said she was not — “sweet and natural and sexy for all that.” It destroyed her to think that Alex, previously her partner in doleful and cynical romance, would want to break away for something so “fresh.” Later, Miranda told me that when Alex accepted my friendship, and I tore him out of his room and into the daylight, she detested me for opening him up to the world. (“He was supposed to be my secret, kept safe in the dark. He’d been so sad and solitary for so long, and I suppose I exploited that for my own selfish needs.”)
“So long ago.” Julian stroked my knuckles with his thumb. “We really made a total shambles of it, didn’t we? Pity.”
I felt danger in his words, in his familiar touch on my skin. And yet… there was also comfort, like he was giving voice at last to the sorrow I felt at the demise of our love. When people divorce, it’s like no one expects or even wants you to mourn the good that once existed in your marriage. You are expected only to recognize the bad and the sad and the angry and the thoughtless. You cannot reflect on the bonds that tied you so close, or the intimate language you once shared. No, that was supposed to have been buried long before you got to this red hot moment of excision. And yet… the thoughts are there, the emotions are still there at times, to be stoked or examined or dismissed as you see fit (and that fitness should be yours alone, though interlopers may wish to intrude).
It truly was a pity that we could not make it work. I won’t say that Julian wasn’t frequently careless about my heart, that he didn’t forge my reluctance and then inability to be the mother of his child into a cudgel, that he didn’t make me think that I was more witless than I am. But I too had my flaws in the marriage — he was right that I barely thought to ask him about how he was faring from day to day. He was always so… competent that it didn’t occur to me that he might be plagued by his own demons. And after Alex’s life started unspooling, well, I applied pressure where my old friend’s wound was gushing blood, not where my husband’s was silently weeping.
“Yes, I suppose it was,” I sighed. “What do you want, Jules?”
He dropped my hand, shifted a little in his chair. “I want an answer, Mel. You can’t dodge me forever.” That winsome, disarming smile again. “I don’t bite.”
Much, I thought.
“Come, why don’t you finish up and I’ll show you my flat? You’ve never been to see me since I moved to the new one. You’ll love it, fantastic views over the city and the San Gabriels.” Julian nodded his head to a white-shirted waiter. “Let me take care of this for you. It’s all my money anyway, right?” He smiled and handed his card over.
“I have a flight at 7:30, Julian, I don’t know if I can.” All I could see in my head was a blinking, red neon sign blasting one word: DANGER.
“Good thing it’s only 3. You don’t need to be where — Burbank? — until 6 at the latest. I can get you on a private jet tonight if you prefer, it truly wouldn’t be an inconvenience.” His expression was so genuinely warm, like our very earliest days, and it put me off-guard, like I hadn’t spent nearly 14 years familiar with his arsenal of charm. “Spend an hour with me, if you must fly commercial. Have a coffee. I have some of the Bottega macarons in the larder, if you wanted one of those.” (I did. I was planning on having two.)
I ducked my head a little, his gaze was too much. “I don’t think Alex would want me to, Julian. He’s… not very happy about how you’ve put me in the middle of your problem with him.”
“Mel, look at me. Look at me.” He tilted my chin up with his index finger, smoothed a tendril of hair that had fallen out of my makeshift bun with his other hand. “It’s just coffee, and a little information from you, information you promised me. Why does he even have to know, as long as you get home tonight?”
It would be a terrible secret to keep, of that I was sure. I’ve never been good at secret-keeping — one Christmas, I accidentally found out that my parents were not getting Rachel the Vespa she wanted but a used Volvo 240 instead. I told my parents that I knew, and they asked me to keep it a surprise. I lasted all of three days. Rachel intuited that I was hiding something on the very first day (“Why are you acting so weird, you little slut? Tell me or I’ll tell Sean you masturbate to his picture”) and kept pushing and pushing until I finally gave in. It was not a very merry Christmas.
But surely there was some benefit in telling him now, rather than maintaining silence for four months. At least I wouldn’t have to keep deleting his texts, which arrived at least three times a day. He wasn’t going to be happy with what I had to tell him, but at least he would have time to get prepared before finding Alex at the rehearsal. Four months would be enough time to make some peace with himself, get accustomed to the idea, even if he and Al would never go back to being best friends. All they have to do is accommodate each other, just for a couple of days.
Julian collected the card and receipt from the waiter, drew a fountain pen from his trousers pocket and signed with a flourish. Blue ink, glossy blue, Waterman if I recall, a hangover from his school days. The pen was a Pelikan Souverän, a lovely striped green. I’d given it to him that very last Christmas we shared. He had tried to interest me in fountain pens, but I could never make them work properly for me, it always ended in blots and tears and Julian’s exasperation. (“I suppose you can only work a biro, then.”)
“Fine,” I said, my voice so light I wondered if I had even said it. A little louder: “Fine. Just for an hour. And a coffee.”
Julian’s face broke into a wide grin, his eyes lit up with something that looked like relief. “And a macaron,” he added.
“Two,” I corrected, and echoed him back with a smile of my own. “The price is two macarons.”
***
Julian’s flat was indeed around the corner from both Seven Grand, where I’d starred on Friday night in Greta’s snaps, and Bottega Louie. It barely took five minutes to walk there, even with waiting for the crosswalk signal to change. Julian had snatched up my weekend bag, and refused to let me carry it. (“Of course I’ll carry it. Can you imagine how ridiculous it would look if I let you?”) The building’s foyer was overwhelming to me — I felt a fool swivelling my head around to take in the Rauschenbergs and Rothkos on the walls of the lobby, the fireplace (lit, even in June), the yards and yards of pristine marble. It was so deliciously clean, especially compared to Alex’s building and my own studio. If I lived here, I thought, I wouldn’t have to worry about much of anything. As Julian led the way to the elevators, he told me about the rooftop pool with its private cabanas, the yoga terrace (“just your thing, Mel”), the screening room and the pet spa (“quite insane to have one, but I think it’s hilarious that I could access one had I the need”). There were private dining terraces and a demonstration kitchen for chefs to teach cookery skills to residents. It was over the top, even for Julian, but I could see that its excess was amusing to him rather than (necessarily) a point of pride.
His apartment was on the 31st floor (“I looked at a penthouse, but it hardly seemed worth the extra four grand or so a month”), and as I entered all I could see was the city before me and the mountains behind through the floor to ceiling windows. The effect left me light-headed — it felt like floating, feather-light, over Los Angeles, cocooned and safe in a glass bauble dangling over the city. I ran my hand over his sofa — Danish Modern too, cognac leather, so soft, no doubt that his was genuine, even if I couldn’t say the same about Alex’s — before taking a seat to further admire the view. Julian put the kettle on in the kitchen, all white marble and dark, clean wood, and pulled a French press out of a cupboard.
“Well, what do you think?” he yelled over the coffee grinder’s buzz. “I can’t get enough of the view. Takes on a totally different feel at night when the city’s lit up, too. You should stop by in the evening next time you’re down here.”
“If I lived here, I would never want to leave,” I confessed. “I’d just get Postmates to drop stuff off for me at the door and hire someone to do my laundry.”
“No need, there’s a concierge for such stuff. Just make a request, it’s all handled promptly and discreetly. I felt a prat the first time I asked for them to book a restaurant for me, like I lived in a hotel. I’ve gotten over it.” I heard the kettle click off, and Julian filled the press with water.
Though mundane, this simple act revealed to me how much had changed in the past two years for us. “Julian,” I said, “I don’t think I’ve ever seen you make yourself a coffee, or a cup of tea for that matter.” No, that had always been my job, though I suspect he had made himself a few at Bristol.
“I don’t know if you’ve noticed, Melissa, but a lot of things have changed since we stopped living together,” he teased as he pulled down two unadorned white mugs from a shelf. “I know how to make a cup of coffee, always have. But I always liked the ones you made for me the best, so why should I have made my own when I could have the best? Let me find those macarons for you. Here, I have raspberry and Earl Grey. If you prefer something else, I can get some brought up here right away.” I protested, assured him that both were delicious (and they are).
Julian ducked behind the island in the kitchen and emerged with a tea tray, looking triumphant. “Mum made sure that I had a tray, in case I had company. I remember you don’t take sugar, but I have some cream for you.” (Julian takes it black.) He bustled industriously, folding linen napkins, pouring cream into the little Wedgwood creamer from our wedding china, placing the macarons — one of each flavor — onto the matching plates from that set. I saw a Julian I might have had as my husband, one who shared the domestic load from time to time, who didn’t see the home as my exclusive purview. One who showed his affection in the small kindnesses of domestic life, rather than through sex or objects. Too little, too late, Melissa, Jen’s voice rang in my head.
He placed the tray on the burl wood coffee table. “Is this a Milo Baughman?” I asked. (I’d taken a course on the history of 20th century interior design at Pasadena Community College, after Rachel called my lack of knowledge in this area “a huge fucking hole in your so-called education.”)
“Yes, lovely, isn’t it? I honed my taste quite a bit being around you, Mel, though I did think that the pieces you chose didn’t always quite fit the aesthetic of the house.” He shook his head a little, as if disagreeing with what he just said. “On the other hand, the modernity was a unexpected contrast with how traditional our home was. Cream?”
I poured a little cream in my mug as he arranged himself next to me on the sofa. “So tell me, Mel, how are things really up there for you? I never would have reckoned my sunny little princess would be happy as a dirty Berkeley hippie.” He held his mug in both hands, sipped his coffee which was, to be fair, quite good, though not as good as mine. The sun caught the blond in his hair, illuminated him from the side. He looked at peace here in the glass and the wood and the steel in a way I never saw him in Pasadena.
“All right, I suppose.” I peered in my mug, as if I might find some map there to navigate the course of this conversation. “Berkeley’s pretty cool, if sometimes deliberately weird. I love getting to walk everywhere. I like working with Ben. I like working. I feel a little lost when I’m not being productive.”
“You don’t have to work, Melissa, if you don’t want to. Say the word, I can increase your payments. And why are you walking everywhere? Surely I give you enough for a car payment.” His pleasant expression tightened, grew a little dark. “Melissa, you’re not propping him up, are you? That money is for you. His ship sailed long ago.”
I leaned back a little, and stared at the high, high ceiling. “No, Julian. I’m not giving Alex any money. He stays over at my place on Saturdays, and I make him dinner. Sometimes I pay for dinner when we go out. That’s the extent of it. You can’t make demands of me that I can’t have him over, I can’t make him dinner or buy him a burrito.”
“Well, even I’m not that unreasonable, Mel,” he replied. I turned to him and giggled, and he laughed as well, full-throated and deep. I felt so calm with Julian, in a way I could honestly never recall. Maybe we could be friends after all, I thought.
“Oh Mel, I miss you sometimes.” He was staring out the window now. “I wish… I wish we hadn’t been so… intense all the time, as we were at the end. I wish I had paid more attention to you, had listened to you more, respected your opinion.” He dipped his head, as if in veneration.
“But you didn’t, Julian.” I touched his knee lightly. “And maybe you were right, maybe it really was Alex all along, and I was making a fool of you.”
“I said those things, didn’t I?” He took my hand in his and turned it over, palm up, traced the lines that crossed the skin. “Are they true?”
“Jules… I did love you. Please don’t ever think that I didn’t. I thought I knew how to love you the way you wanted, but I just couldn’t. I probably never could have. It’s just… less complicated with Alex. Less loud. We don’t get angry with each other much, and we talk about our problems and solve them together. He’s a good man, Julian, you know that. He takes care of me, I know you were worried about that.”
Julian shook his head. “Oh Liss, you think you know him. He only shows you parts of himself, the parts he thinks appeal to you — his brooding dark little soul, in need of saving by your sweet, tender heart. He’s too broken for you to ever fix.” He placed my hand in my lap and patted it. “You’ll not have the comfort you always wanted if you stay hitched to his star, if you could ever call his tarnished spirit a star. I don’t think there’s anything or anyone that will ever make him happy, ever stop him from making foolish choices at every fork in the road.”
I should have protested, defended Alex, brought up his professional successes, how he celebrates my strangeness, encourages me to embrace my desires and hopes and not tamp them down as “unnecessary feelings.” I should have talked about how we sometimes rent a car on a Saturday, just to drive around and listen to music as we meander through Marin County, and how deliciously free and unfettered I feel in those moments. I should have mentioned how I feel more in control of my own fate than I had since I was a child, how I felt able to make mistakes again and not expect the world to come crashing down.
But I didn’t. I just sat there and watched the sun dip a little lower through the window.
Julian touched my shoulder. “I know the answer to the question I’ve been asking you for days, Melissa. I just want to hear you say it.”
“If you know, why am I here?” Our knees were touching now, and at that point of contact warmth pooled and spread through me. Careful. Then, DANGER.
“Just tell me. You promised. Tell me exactly what he said.”
I exhaled, moved my knee from his. “Alex is coming to the wedding and says that he and I are not chess pieces to be moved around a board by you at your wish. He said you’re a pompous c–” I broke off for a moment, decided to press on. “– a pompous cunt. That Jamie was there for him when you refused to be, so why would he turn down Jamie for you? He also called you a fucking asshole, several times. I think that’s about it, in a nutshell.”
Julian slapped the table with his palm. “I thought you said you’d try for me, Liss. Did you just stand there and let him insult me like that, insult our marriage like that? He had NO right to insert himself between us, NO right to break us up. Did you just let him roll over you again, convince you that his is the only solution?”
“I did ask him what he thought other people might think to see you together. He said he didn’t give a toss what other people think.” My nape bristled a little as I realized no one knew I was up in this flat but Julian. I was trapped, at his mercy. While I had no reason to believe he’d ever be physical with me — he’d only ever treated my body with reverence — he was not the boy I’d known in Bristol anymore. He was strong and lean, his runner’s body more than a match for mine.
Julian slid his palm from the coffee table and sighed. “Melissa, I can’t say I’m not disappointed, but I’m not surprised. He’s got nothing left to give, so what does he have to lose? No, I’m sorry, he still has you. He could still lose you and ha! Oh, Mel, he knows it.” Julian rose from the sofa and began to pace, back and forth on the warm brown floorboards. “Want to talk about chessboards, Mel? You’re not the queen in his game. He’s using you as a pawn in a match he and I have been playing for a long time, quite apart from you. I want you to tell him this, Mel. Tell him: game on.”
I picked at my Earl Grey macaron, staring at the flecks of gold on the shell. I’d lost my appetite completely. I shouldn’t be here I shouldn’t be here I shouldn’t be here.
“Julian, I think I should go. It’s… not right. Alex will be furious and I don’t know how I can tell him any of this without…” I trailed off.
“Oh, I know. Without one of his ‘little moods,’ eh Mel? One of those times he rants and curses and slanders the world and drinks ‘a wee dram’ too many, when you can finally hear that tint of Scots he keeps hidden from his voice leak out? And he’ll cry and tell you how it’s never been fair for him, how many expectations there have always been for him, and how he can’t keep up, how he can never catch a break. And you’ll look at him, crumpled on the bed or the floor or the chair and wish it could all just stop for poor, poor Alexander.” (He said his name!) “I know because I wanted it to stop for him too, once.”
“You’re right, Julian, I’m not in your match with him.” I stood up, collected my overnight bag, started for the door. “It’s time for me to leave. I’ll give Alex your message. Thank you for the coffee, it was lovely.”
Julian cut the distance between us quickly. “I’m so sorry, Mel. I got carried away. It’s barely 4:30. Spend a little more time with me. I can show you the rooftop pool, we can bring up a bottle of Pol Roger and a couple of glasses. Don’t let’s end today this way.”
Placing my bag on the floor, I pulled Julian towards me for a hug. I still miss him, sometimes, and in his embrace I felt the protection he always offered me, and which was still on offer, should I wish. I broke away for a moment, looked up his face, the face I’d known for so long, a face that tormented me and cherished me in equal measures.
“Melissa,” he groaned. “I’m so lonely.” He lowered his head towards mine, put his mouth on mine, kissed me deeply, would not break away until I gave him a light shove. Even then, he reached for me again but I dodged his arms. “I’m sorry, when you’re around… I forget myself. Please stay.”
I picked up my bag, opened the front door and walked out. I didn’t look back, booked a Lyft even as I walked down the hallway to the elevator to go down those 31 stories. By the time I reached the front door, a Jetta bound for Burbank Airport was waiting for me. I read Milkman for the remaining hours until my flight. I stayed away from Instagram and didn’t respond to a single one of the texts Julian sent me, apologizing for his behavior. I sent a text to Alex, to tell him my flight was on time, but he didn’t need to bother coming to meet me, I just wanted to go home and sleep. He wrote back: “is everything ok – i had the strangest dream while i was napping today about you falling from a building and i worried about you being safe”
“I am safe,” I wrote back. “And I love you.” Only one of those statements is true.
meandering again 