“I’ll find you one.”
And we walked in.
Christina greeted us at the door. She was a woman somewhere around forty, I guessed, who looked like she spent a great deal of her life making sure she was beautiful. Even I, who wallowed comfortably most days in sweats, could tell how expensive her clothes and jewelry were and marvel at the amazing cut of her blond hair, which swung with every movement of her head and settled right back into place.
She embraced Owen briefly and then turned her considerable scrutiny on me. “Anna,” she said, “we must talk,” and grabbed my hand and led me through the crowded living room and out the enormous glass doors onto the terrace. Looking backward as we traversed the living room, I mouthed to Owen, “Safe harbor?” and he shrugged, as if to say, Maybe, maybe not.
“I’ve wanted to meet you for months,” she said as she led me to a corner of the terrace where the view was even more spectacular.
“Really?” I was genuinely surprised. Owen had talked about me at work?
“Well, we’re all mad about Owen, you know. I’ve known him for years and years. Did he tell you that?”
I shook my head. He hadn’t.
“From his days in New York. When I was single and he was single, of course, and we …” She trailed off.
“Had a relationship?”
“Oh no, no,” and she laughed. “I was going to say when we helped each other through, but that makes it sound like we were in trouble when really we were in that section of life when nothing makes sense. The beginning of your twenties — oh, so confusing.”
I nodded. I was in the beginning of my twenties and she was confusing me. My eyes sought out Owen through the open terrace doors, and as Christina continued on about how she had met Owen — at a gallery opening — and how coincidental it was that they lived within three blocks of each other, and how they’d meet at a restaurant halfway between their apartments at least twice a week, I saw him standing in front of a wall of bookshelves talking to a man who, even from this distance, seemed intense and brooding. The other man was doing all the talking, gesturing as he spoke, touching Owen’s chest to make a point. There was something about what I was witnessing that made me uncomfortable, but I couldn’t have named it then.
At a certain point Owen looked up and saw me watching, and the expression that flashed across his face made no sense to me. It looked like grief. I shook my head at him and instantly he smiled, said something to the man, and moved across the living room toward me.
Christina watched him come, stopped herself mid-story, and said quietly to me, “He’s crazy about you. Remember that.”
We left soon after and on the way home, I did all the talking. Owen answered if I asked a question, but that was all. We pulled into his driveway, got out of the car, and started walking to the back door.
“It’s still early,” I said. “Do you feel like dinner? I really didn’t eat anything there.”
He took my hand, shook his head, and led me into the house, into the bedroom. He kissed me with an urgency that felt like a test — did I feel the same way? He undressed me quickly and took me to bed with a single-mindedness that unnerved me. Afterward, he gathered me against his body, my head on his chest, and said nothing as he stroked my hair. His heartbeat raced beneath my ear. I listened for a long time till it gradually slowed enough for me to drift off to sleep.
THE NEXT MORNING I WOKE TO AN empty bed and a sense that something had shifted. Owen wasn’t in the house, but I found him sitting on the patio where we often had our morning coffee. Unlike the sparsely furnished house, someone had spent hours and hours in the garden making it lush and beautiful. Now, at the beginning of the summer, there were lavender and butterfly bushes in shades of purple, coral astromeria on long, thin stems, and one whole wall of iceberg roses against a side fence, cups of white petals splattered against the dark green foliage.
Owen sat at the glass-topped table, his gaze out over the lawn to the property-line fence, where scarlet bougainvillea made a waterfall of blossoms and a green-throated hummingbird pin-wheeled from flower to flower. His right thumb drummed against the handle of his coffee cup in a rhythm he wasn’t even aware of.
“Owen,” I said softly as I slipped into the chair next to him, “talk to me.”
And so he did. “Did you see the man I was talking to last night when you were with Christina?”
“Yes. He seemed so intense. Like he was trying to win an argument.”
Owen nodded. “Always.”
“You’ve known him for a while?”
“Not well, but yes, for years.”
I was sure I didn’t want to hear the answer to my next question, but I asked it anyway. “What was he trying to convince you of?”
“To go home with him.”
And I knew what he meant.
Finally, Owen looked at me. “If you hadn’t been there, I would have. Do you understand what I’m saying?”
And I did. In that moment I knew I had understood all along. It was what had kept me from asking too many questions. It was the worry tugging just outside my consciousness.
“You would have had sex with him.”
“Yes.”
“Then what are you doing with me?”
“I love you.”
I shook my head. None of this made any sense to me. I was still too young and too inexperienced to understand how a man could love me and our lovemaking but still have a more elemental pull within him that trumped it all.
“I thought …” Owen stopped and then began again. “Anna, I hoped … No,” he said more firmly, “I was starting to believe that all the rest of it would fall away.”
“But it hasn’t.”
There was a long moment of silence before Owen answered my question, which really wasn’t a question at all. “No.”
We didn’t look away from each other. We studied the other’s face and that made the whole conversation infinitely harder.
“Are you telling me this because you want to stop seeing me?”
“I’m telling you this because it happened.”
He waited for me to say something. The only thing I could manage was the truth. “I don’t know if I can simply get up and walk out of here.”
I saw relief flood his face and I grabbed onto it as validation that I should stay, that he wanted me to stay. But in the end what he wanted or I wanted didn’t matter. It took me a while to understand that, and so we continued on in a relationship that was vastly altered and yet, in its heart, remained unchanged.
For a while we were held aloft by our belief that transformation was possible, or that it might be. Then one or the other of us would falter and lose hope, but never at the same time. We went forward hobbled and hurting, and so we clung more desperately to each other. It was during one of those times, when the way forward seemed impossible and the way out seemed more so, that I finally understood Owen as I had to.
IT WAS AN ORDINARY MONDAY, the middle of the day, and I had come to pick up Bandit for our walk. As I let myself in through the front door, I heard voices in the backyard. Angry, yelling voices. One was Owen’s and it shocked me. Over all the months we had spent together I had never heard him raise his voice. But these voices were shouting over each other, not listening, spewing forth emotion without any censor.
I remember I had Bandit’s leash in my hand and that the dog was skating with anticipation in circles around me, but I didn’t snap on the leash and leave with him. Those desperate male voices pulled me through the house and out the back door to the patio, where just the day before Owen and I had had breakfast and talked about a weekend trip to Laguna to let Bandit run on the beach, to get away together.