“Do you ever hear from him?” she said.
“No,” I said. “He and Michael aren’t that close.”
A few weeks passed. Michael got very sick with the flu, and I played nursemaid. I made him soup, I trekked to the pharmacy for his prescriptions, I did his laundry. I spent seven nights in a row in Michael’s apartment, I bought all the groceries, I decorated with flowers.
Michael said, “I want you to move in.”
I said, “The fever has made you delirious.”
He grabbed me. “I’m serious.”
I knew he was serious because that was the direction things were heading in: moving in together, marriage. If I was going to get out, I had to get out now. I studied Michael. He was a handsome man and he was a good man, and in so many ways, he was the right man. I liked the way he dressed, I liked the way he smelled, we thought the same way, we liked the same things, we were wired the same way. We never fought, and when we disagreed, we did so respectfully. He was the man I had been groomed for. He was my friend. But I was not madly, hopelessly in love with Michael Morgan.
I said, “Let’s talk about it when you feel better.”
The next day, I called Nick from work. I had never called Nick before for any reason; he sounded surprised, and wary.
I said, “Tell me to leave him.”
“Excuse me?”
“Tell me to leave him.”
“Who is this?”
I said, “If you tell me to leave him, I will leave him. Otherwise, I’m going to move in.”
There was a long pause. I tried to imagine where he was: on the street, at a bar, in a soundproof recording studio, in his apartment, which I had never seen. I couldn’t imagine. I didn’t know him the way I knew Michael, and he didn’t know me. There were so many parts of my life I feared he wouldn’t understand: my love of food, my love of reading and writing, my adoration of creature comforts-taxis instead of the subway, good restaurants, spa treatments, the fifth floor of Bergdorf’s. Michael fit in everywhere in my life. But Nick? They had been raised by the same parents, but Nick had been raised by wolves; he had a hunger, and a single-minded devotion to that which was pure and true. He loved music, he loved rock climbing, he loved the sweet high of gambling. There was no balance in his life, only flat-out passion. I wanted to live that way. Could I live that way? I considered myself to be in love with Nick, but was I in love with him or was he just the bad boy I lusted after? I didn’t know if what I claimed to want was even real.
He said, “Meet me in the park in twenty minutes.”
“That’s not going to solve anything,” I said. I would kiss him and become intoxicated and stumble away high with desire, but I wouldn’t be any closer to an answer. “What are we going to do?” I asked him. “Meet in the park for the rest of our lives?”
“I am obsessed with you,” he said.
Hearing him say it, anytime, in any way, knocked the wind out of me.
“But it doesn’t matter,” he said.
“What?” I said.
“Move in with him,” he said.
I decided not to move in with Michael for reasons that had little to do with Nick. I wanted to keep my own space. The thought of giving up my apartment terrified me. I didn’t want to compromise my sense of self. Michael said he understood. He did understand; he was emotionally mature and incredibly secure. If keeping my apartment made me happy, he said, then I should keep my apartment.
I kept my apartment. I tried not to think about Nick. It was pointless! Nick was obsessed with me and I with him, but what was that? It was stupid stuff, kid stuff; it was language borrowed from the movies. Nick was a coward and I was a coward, too. Otherwise I would have broken up with Michael for reasons that had nothing to do with Nick. But I didn’t break up with him.
In October, Michael asked me to marry him. In retrospect, I should have seen it coming, and if I had seen it coming, I would have been prepared. It was our one-year anniversary and we were going for dinner to Town with Cy and Evelyn. Dinner was lovely; Cy and Evelyn were charming and fun. I loved them both with an ardor that should have unsettled me, but I didn’t plan on losing them. After all, they were Nick’s parents, too. After dinner, Michael said he had a surprise and he piled the four of us into a cab. We drove downtown to the Knitting Factory.
He said, “Diplomatic Immunity is playing.”
Evelyn squealed with delight; she’d had some wine at dinner. She said, “Oh, goody!”
I was both thrilled and terrified, which was par for the course when we went to one of Nick’s shows. Both of these emotions were heightened by the presence of Cy and Evelyn. What would they think if they knew?
We got drinks and muscled our way to the front row, where all of the groupies-most of them not of age-had coagulated. Michael seemed nervous, and I construed this as concern for his parents-not many sixty-year-olds frequented the Knitting Factory-but Cy and Evelyn were as hip and happening as movie stars. They were fine.
When Diplomatic Immunity came out onstage, the crowd went bonkers. Nick had the microphone in one hand, and with his other hand, he motioned for quiet. This was highly unusual; normally, he would have launched into “Been There” or “Kill Me Slow.” He waited patiently while a hush came over the audience. Then he said, “This is kind of a special night, and before we get started, I’d like to call my brother, Michael, on stage.”
I looked at Nick, not Michael. Nick, for all his rock-star bravado, looked green around the gills, like he was going to vomit, and I wondered if he was on something. Michael, like the natural athlete he was, leaped onto the stage using only one hand, and he took the microphone. There were the two brothers side by side-Michael in his blazer and Robert Graham shirt and Ferragamo loafers, and Nick in the Bar Harbor T-shirt we had brought him back that summer, and jeans, and a pair of black Sambas. Michael was clean shaven and professional looking; he might have been a motivational speaker. Nick slouched. He hadn’t liked school the way Michael had, he hadn’t been a team player like Michael, he didn’t have a killer instinct for doing deals and making money, and his people skills were practically nonexistent. Who walked out on a family dinner? Who canceled on Christmas? Nick was brooding and sullen and gifted and the sexiest man I had ever, ever laid eyes on. The two of them side by side was a lesson for me, and if I had only had more time to study, I might have aced the exam, but everything was moving way too fast for me to catch up. I had no idea what was going on; I thought maybe Michael was going to sing, which would have been a bad idea. Michael couldn’t carry a tune.
He said, “I’m going to be quick so that we can get to the real reason you’re all here, which is not to see me propose to my girlfriend, but to see Diplomatic Immunity…”
The crowd cheered. I thought, What? I’d heard him, but I didn’t get it.
Michael said, “I am in love with a woman named Chess Cousins.” Here, he pulled a velvet box out of his blazer pocket, opened it up, and showed the audience a whopper of a diamond ring. He said, “Chess, will you marry me?”