Sometimes, when I’m with Glenn, waiting for a doctor to see her or for a drip to start, and I tell her the latest with Gary—a new anxiety trigger or symptom, the possibility of an untried therapy, even more pot—she shakes her head.
“I told you,” she says. “But you didn’t listen. And now you’re stuck.”
She means “stuck” in the best possible way, though. She means: stuck together, like birds of a feather. She means: “You’re not just married. You’re family now. Because that’s what happens.”
That is what’s happened. It’s why we stay. I look away from whatever nurse or needle is closing in on her, out a window if there is one, at the patterns on floor and ceiling tiles, and think back to the early days, when I first met Gary. He’s temping in the publicity and marketing departments of Black Bear Books, coming and going for weeks at a time, during our busy periods—opening boxes, packing up Jiffy bags, collating binders for sales meetings, organizing shipments for trade shows. I notice him—who didn’t?—because he’s tall and funny and straight—a unicorn in New York publishing.
“I love the guy, but no,” Glenn says when I ask about him.
“I don’t care that he’s still a temp at his age.”
“I don’t care either. I meant that he’s too complicated.”
“Everyone still single is ‘too complicated.’ That’s why we’re still single.” I roll my eyes for good measure, but in truth I’m concerned. Glenn’s warning reminds me of the time a friend wanted to fix me up with someone she’d met at a wedding. “You should meet him,” she said, “but he has glasses.” I stared at her. “How big are the glasses?” The friend had cleared her throat. “Very, very big.” Which they were, when I finally met him because I didn’t believe her. I’m not sure I believe Glenn now, either, even though I know I probably should. “How complicated?”
“He’s divorced. Brief marriage, right after college, no kids, but still. Who needs that? Better to start fresh with a first-timer. Someone with no history of failure.”
I shrug. It doesn’t feel like a deal breaker to me. In fact, the idea that he was married once means he might marry again. That he can commit. So this is actually good news. “What else.”
“He used to drink. And there may have even been a few visits to rehab in between temp-stints here. But to be fair, it’s because of his anxiety and the musician lifestyle: you stress about money, whether you’re any good, whether anyone’s going to show up to hear you play, what the reviews will say. And you drink. Self-medication as opposed to simple degenerate behavior. There’s a difference, of course.” She is only half-kidding.
Addiction doesn’t run in my family and I have never dated an alcoholic. But I’ve seen some on TV and in the movies who have successfully quit, like Paul Newman in The Verdict, and I believe strongly in the power of change. I’m undaunted. “And?”
“And, he’s Catholic. And you need a Jew. I’ve met your parents. You’re their only child; their parents were survivors. You have one job in life and that is to marry within the tribe and perpetuate your people.”
That may have been true at one time, but it isn’t true anymore. All they want now is for me to bring home someone decent and kind, someone good-looking, and someone taller than me because they’re of that generation that does not go for a nontraditional differential in height. Gary would fit that bill on all counts.
“Look,” Glenn says. “I love Gary—you will not find a kinder more hilarious guy on the planet. But, he struggles. Which means you’ll struggle. I just want you to have an easier time than I did.”
She has been married twice—the first time to an alcoholic she’d met in graduate school who died a drinker long after their divorce—he simply could not stop drinking—and the second time to an editor who died young of Parkinson’s ten years into their marriage. By the time I meet her she is single and living alone, like me. “Both times I thought I could handle it, and both times I underestimated what I was taking on. I’m not saying I regret either husband, but they each took a lot out of me. Sometimes I wonder what my life would have been like if I had chosen differently.”
I get it but I don’t get it. I’m still young enough to believe that we don’t choose who to love—love chooses us. I’m drawn to Gary’s troubled past, attracted to it even. I want to save him. I’m a giant cliché, but I don’t care. I’m also reading the tea leaves of his past and future differently: that as someone who’s struggled, he’s resilient, a fighter, a survivor. Couldn’t that be the story that will eventually unfold?
And so against Glenn’s advice, when I run into Gary a year or two after his last temping stint, I say yes when he asks me to go bowling. We meet on a snowy night after Thanksgiving when almost no one is back in the city after the holiday. He teaches me how to bowl with the big balls and big pins, even though he grew up in New England, like me, candlepin bowling, with small balls and tall narrow pins. He stands behind me, almost a whole foot taller, shows me how to put my three fingers into the three holes and swing my arm back and then forward and up. He models it for me, vamping up and down the lane like a pro bowler on TV. He looks ridiculous, but he hits strike after strike, while I throw mostly gutter balls. In between strings we talk about people we used to know at work and we die laughing. We close the place down. With our coats on, heading down the stairs to the street, I congratulate him on his victory.
“We’re tied. Because you won, too.”
“What did I win?”
We are out on the street now, on University Place, and it is cold and dark and quiet. For a few seconds, the only footprints on the sidewalk are ours. He looks up at the sky, takes my hand, and kisses it. “This.”
Within a month we will practically be living together at my place, a block away from the bowling alley. I will have no regrets. He’ll be nothing but loving, and kind, and honest—dependable and present in ways no previous boyfriend has been before.
When I call to tell Glenn the news, she laughs through the phone. “I am so happy to be wrong!”
* * *
But she is not wrong. He has his first panic attack on what seems like a perfect Sunday afternoon. We’ve seen Harold and Maude at the Cinema Village on Twelfth Street and afterward walk a few blocks down to a diner for an early dinner. It is late December. Dusk had fallen while were inside the theater and Christmas tree lights twinkle in almost every window. I slip my arm inside Gary’s and lean into him. Despite the gloaming, the movie has left me in an unfamiliar state of being: squishy and warm; full of love and hope; open to possibility. If Maude, a Holocaust survivor, can embrace life, then I can embrace it, too.
My life is already improving. Though Glenn doesn’t live in New York anymore, we still talk and email daily. I’m finishing a first draft of Bird and hoping to show it to her soon. And after years of living alone in between failed relationships, enviously staring at couples walking around the Village on the weekends, I am finally one of them. I gaze up at Gary in his dark blue peacoat with his big shoulders and his giant green eyes and am just about to tell him how happy I am, how great this is—how being with him on the street in my neighborhood after a movie feels like a tiny miracle—when he suddenly stops moving.