She finally moved beyond the realm of verbalized politesse and said, “I heard you were getting married. I’ve been meaning to call and congratulate you. But you know, you violated our agreement. We’re supposed to inform each other of moves, deaths, marriages, and births.”
I didn’t remember any such agreement, though I kind of liked the sentiment. I smiled a weary smile and thought about the number of times we’d sat on the couch together, or lain in bed, or faced each other on bar stools, sitting close, one of us telling of a recent failure, the other there to do the propping up, always successful until the day it wasn’t, and then the relationship wasn’t a relationship anymore.
I said, “But you didn’t read the follow-up story of me not getting married?” I shook my head self-consciously, expressing, or at least trying to, the full depths of my idiocy in male-female relationships.
She looked surprised without being particularly disappointed, though maybe I was reading too much into that. “Um, why not?” she asked.
Blunt now. She pulled her hair back with both arms in that way she always did, getting it out of her face, getting ready to have a serious talk.
I said, “You know. Life.”
“Or death?”
Clever, her referring to my wife’s death six years before, something that Elizabeth ended up believing would color me for the rest of my days, making it impossible to have a normal, healthy relationship with a normal, healthy woman.
I leaned forward now, my elbows on my knees, looking at her with a cocked head. I said, “No, I’m pretty sure it’s life. You know, sometimes two people aren’t meant to get married, even if they first thought they were, and it’s not because the guy’s wife died.”
She nodded. “Point taken. What went wrong?” Not dropping it, and unapologetic in her pursuit of facts.
“I’m not really sure. I haven’t talked with her.”
She looked at me with a flash of incredulity and bemusement.
“So how did you tell her you didn’t want to get married?”
“I didn’t.”
She guffawed, which probably wasn’t the most endearing or empathetic reaction to this revelation. Then she said, “She called it off, not you?”
“Long story, though I guess not really. I was sitting down at Caffe Vittoria that morning trying to figure a way out of things. I mean, the woman is terrific — for somebody else. I swear, someone’s going to marry her someday soon and think they’ve hit the fucking lottery.
“We were going to do a little justice-of-the-peace deal and then head to Hawaii, you know, everything very low-key. So I finally get up the guts to call her, and when I do, she tells me she’s in the Atlanta airport. It’s five hours before we’re due to be married, maybe less. I say, ‘What are you doing down there?’
“And she comes back with, ‘I’m so sorry, Jack. I was just about to call you.’
“She literally fled town. I haven’t seen her since.”
Elizabeth looked at me incredulously. “You’re sure you didn’t pull a Jack on her without realizing it? You didn’t send her signals? You didn’t drive her away? You didn’t do that thing where you kind of cut her off from everything you’re doing and thinking because you’re afraid to let someone else in?”
Pull a Jack. “That’s real nice,” I said. “Thank you for your heartfelt sympathy in this most trying time.”
I said that last part with intentional, mocking formality. She laughed and absently dropped her hand on the outside of my leg like she always used to do and said, “I’m sorry, but come on. You know how you can be.”
“And I know how you are, which is not very nice.”
Past the awkwardness, everything very familiar again, comfortable.
She asked, “And you really haven’t talked to her since?”
I shook my head.
“What are you doing out here? Don’t tell me you went on your honeymoon on your own.”
I smiled and said, “No. Story.” I didn’t tell her what, and she had obviously been too busy with her friend in LA to have read the Record online.
She said, “At least you picked a honeymoon destination that we’d never been to. I would’ve killed you if you went to Turks.”
The Turks and Caicos Islands, amid a stretch of too much arguing, near the end of a bitter winter. We were having yet another senseless fight over something we wouldn’t be able to remember the next day when she glared at me and said, “You know what the problem is with us? We don’t spend enough time together.” I mean, I always knew she could be counterintuitive, but this was the biggest bit of counterintuition that I had ever heard.
That’s when she flipped open the morning Record, pointed to an airline ad, and said, “We’re going here.”
“Where.”
“Providenciales.”
“Where’s that?”
“I don’t know. Um, says here, the Caribbean.”
“When.”
“Tomorrow morning.”
And sure enough, there we were at the airport the following morning, bags in hand, frequent-flier miles drained out of our accounts, with two round-trip tickets to the Turks and Caicos Islands and a reservation for three nights at a beachfront guesthouse named Jose’s Place. I had created a rule for myself about never staying at a place named for the owner, unless it was Donald Trump or Steve Wynn. But in this case, every decent resort on the island was booked. Jose’s, for every good reason, wasn’t.
After Jose himself proudly showed us to our room, with the torn shade covering the single window, the scraped tile floors, the refrigerator-size closet, the Third World bathroom, we looked at each other, wondering what the hell we were going to do.
Ends up, we decided pretty quickly: we had sex. We had it in the room, immediately and urgently, then later, constantly. We had it that evening on a blanket under a coconut tree on the pristine beach as insects the size of dairy cows chirped in the nearby brush. We had it in the handicapped restroom of a very swank resort before the dessert course of our dinner the following night. We had it in the middle of the afternoon under a blanket on a dock during a passing rainstorm.
Not that I’m proud of any of this. Well, okay, maybe I am a little.
We also talked. We talked about the past, mine and hers and ours. We talked about the present. And we talked about the future, always as a couple, the challenges we’d face, the marriage we would undoubtedly embrace, the babies that would someday pop into our lives. And then we had more sex.
She wore a flower in her hair. The tops of our feet got brown. We’d walk the beach and look at the silent, sullen couples sunning themselves on the expensive chairs at their luxury resorts, knowing that our little eighty-five-dollar-a-night prison cell of a guest room back at Jose’s was the most perfect thing we could ever have imagined.
“I wouldn’t have gone to Turks,” I told her, solemn now. “That’s off the list.”
She squeezed my thigh. “Good,” she said. “Same here.”
We fell silent for a minute. Finally, I looked her square in the eyes and asked, “What went wrong?”
When she looked back at me, her eyes were glistening like the top of a pond after a hard rain, like they might spill over in even the slightest breeze.
She swallowed and said, “Life went wrong, Jack. Life. We didn’t share enough of it. You spent too much time looking at the past — understandably so. I spent too much time worried about the future — maybe just as understandably. And the moment kind of passed us by. Before you knew it, you and I weren’t really you and I.”