“I didn’t say I’ve given up. I believe in you. I’m not trying to be the bad guy here. But I’m just saying—think about it, all right? If not this year, maybe the next, when things are more stable with Talia?”
“Sure,” I say, hoping my eyes communicate how pissed I am, because I don’t want to make a scene. “I’ll think about it.”
He gets up to go to the bathroom, knowing I need to be left alone for a minute, and I really do, I need to remember why I’m on this fucking date to begin with, remember why Yuri is the love of my life, instead of just someone who seems to want to bring me down, to turn me into some boring person I didn’t sign up to be. How did this happen?
Yuri had been about as far from my life of acting and bartending as you could get, a physicist, a former student of my father’s and his favorite companion. They went fishing together on Lake George during the summers, fucking fishing, a weird, boring-seeming activity I didn’t criticize because it gave my depressed father a kind of peace, because he would come home after these trips looking a bit lovesick, so why make fun of him? Papa made courtship-related hints about Yuri, though he was aware he was not exactly my type; it was obvious Yuri had a crush on me, that anytime we made eye contact, he would blush and stutter and once, when Papa invited him to dinner and even made an elaborate lasagna to try to stimulate romantic feelings between us, Yuri clinked his wineglass so hard with mine that it shattered, shards scattering into the meal and dispelling any potential love feelings on my end, though I did feel plenty of pity. But on the afternoon of Papa’s funeral reception, when I saw this actually quite handsome man in his ill-fitting suit approaching me with love and pity in his sweet eyes, it was like stepping into a warm lake after spending decades getting manhandled by tidal waves.
“I’m so sorry for your loss,” he had said, extending a bouquet toward me. “Your father was an incredible man. I wouldn’t have survived graduate school without him.”
“I wouldn’t have survived—well, anything, without him. Though I guess I have to now,” I said, feeling awkward for some reason, though I never felt awkward around Yuri before, I always saw him as a cousin, someone I could go braless around. Maybe it was because he was dressed up, I don’t know. Maybe because I was at the beginning of a life without my dear father. My poor bumbling father, whose hand I could still feel at the top of my head, sometimes.
“I can help you, you know. If you need someone to—take you back to your place at the end of this,” he said.
I paused, impressed by his boldness. Finally, some life! Was he really hitting on me at this moment? But he tried to walk it back.
“Only to help with the flowers, of course,” he said. “I don’t mean to say that I was trying to, well—look, I know what you think of me, of course I’m not attempting anything, what I mean is, you have a lot of flowers here and I know you don’t drive and I’m sure you’ve had a very long day….”
“Don’t be so sure,” I said, “you know what I think of you. I myself may not be so sure.”
He looked stricken for a hot second, but then he smiled and said he’d find me later. It had been a year or two since I saw him. Now he was a real professor at a community college in the Bronx. He just got a tenure-track job, which was impressive, according to my dad, who never got tenure, in the end, and maybe this made old Yuri more self-assured. Hours later, he did drive me home, all those flowers in the backseat of his little Buick, which was not fancy but clean and respectable. And he stayed for a while, we even drank some wine. I knew he was a proper man, that he would not come on to me after my father’s funeral, so I had to do all the fucking work. So when we drained the bottle, actually a very nice bottle I had been given by the unfunny comedian as an attempt to patch things up after I complained he never spent any money on me, I forced myself on him, kiss-wise, and he gave in to it, and it was a nice, chaste but not unpleasant kiss—if his Buick could kiss, that’s what it would have felt like.
He said good night after that like a proper boy, but he asked if he could take me out when I was ready. I remembered something Papa said about Yuri dating a nice Jewish girl, though I might have imagined it, but when I asked if he was seeing someone he said he was not. I called him a week later, and he continued to surprise me with his wit and sexual competence and sweetness throughout the impressively long—for me—one-year courtship that led me to move in with him, the longest I had ever dated anyone before moving in. A year after that, we were married, and then three years later, which was the longest I could stave Yuri off, I got pregnant with Talia at thirty-six. So after all the fighting with Mama and the drummers and musicians and older men I would torture her with in high school and the binge drinking and everything else, I was married to a respectable university professor and had a daughter on the way, living the life she would have wanted for me, and it was too bad she wasn’t there to say I told you so.
But now, sitting at the bar of the Lair as my cranky husband returns to me, I feel like I’m the one who should say I told you so to Mama, that I knew what I wanted all along, and it was not this, not at all.
Does Yuri even fucking remember who I was when he met me? I was hot, I wore heels, I was a regular on CBS prime time and drank like a fish. Who was the person he fell in love with, if not her? I can’t get started with all that, so I open my phone and scroll through Instagram, looking at all the likes and comments on my post about my audition—and it’s kind of nice, having dozens of people I don’t care about cheering me on while my husband basically told me I was washed up.
I check my more recent post—baby Tally smiling up at me from her crib, where I wrote We smile now! #HeartfullAF #tanksoempty #ActressMama #nailedit #shesnotacting, which I can’t help but notice got three times as many likes as my post about my audition. People don’t really give a shit about the almost two decades of blood and bullshit I’ve given to make it as far as I have, but as soon as I got knocked up and pushed a kid out, everyone acted like I solved global warming.
Still, I think as I look at my audition post again, I would have been better off staying at home tonight, preparing for yet another audition in a few days, another bullshit part as an Uber-driver-slash-spy with five lines on a less-prestigious-but-still-not-bad TV show, instead of sitting here hating my clueless husband. I keep glaring back at the kitchen, though I know the score there. Frankie’s the only cook, and though he’s damn good, he’s always high and takes his time. My stomach feels like an enormous empty balloon that’s gonna pop if I don’t eat something ASAP.
“There you go, talking to your real friends,” Yuri says, shaking his head at my phone. He is of course above it all and does not use social media, not even Facebook.
“Maybe I am,” I say, kicking him under the bar.
Finally, Mel comes over with the cheese balls, wings, and nachos, but I have lost my appetite. Yuri and I have drained our glasses but we’re too defeated to ask for more.
“Smile,” I tell Yuri, taking a picture of him looking miserable over the food. It’s a terrible photo, but I post it anyway: #Datenight!
“Please don’t post that.”
“Too late.”
He reaches over for a cheese ball, and those things are way too hot, you have to wait at least five minutes before touching one, but I don’t warn him.
“Jesus,” he says, spitting the thing out. “I think I just burned my tongue off.”