OH, THAT PETER PAN hit-and-run prick. Thoughtless asshole. Not that she was surprised. Marcus was a bolter, a runner; he always left in the dark. She used to tell friends it was like dating Houdini. Maggie could cuff him, straitjacket him, lock him in a steamer trunk, and at 3:00 a.m., the idiot commitment-phobe would still find a way to tiptoe out into the night, belt undone, shoes in hand.
“Yeah, I’m not big on good mornings,” he said early on, shorthand for I’m probably going to keep fucking other women.
So it wasn’t that she was surprised to wake up alone. She knew last night what she’d known when she met Marcus, that he was immature, a bartender self-described as “not that into relationships.” That was okay two years ago. In fact, after eighteen months of shotgun marriage to Dan and another year of separation, reconciliation and divorce, the last thing Maggie had wanted was another lousy husband. And so Marcus’s casualness had been the point: the ease, the lack of commitment. She had a kid, a career, college—no time for much else. Why shouldn’t sex be like ordering a pizza. Just send Marcus a text: How are you? or answer his: What up? For a while she’d even convinced herself that seeing Marcus kept her from making bigger mistakes.
But it got old after a year, Marcus’s nine-o’clock-one-knuckle knock, right after she’d put Dustin to bed. Or at least it got old for Maggie, who came to dread those mornings alone, waking up like this. Especially when her own feelings began rising, and she began noticing a certain grace in Marcus’s movements, a kindness in his eyes. Shit. You didn’t fall for someone like Marcus. Maggie knew better. She was a lab assistant getting her master’s degree in pharmacology. As she told her sister, it was like she kept going into a bar over and over, ordering dopamine shaken with norepinephrine and oxytocin while Marcus kept ordering straight testosterone.
No, honestly, what bothered her—this morning anyway—was that it bothered her. She’d known exactly what she was getting last night. A pizza. To feel his weight for a while, to lose herself after the sadness of the last few weeks. Once more with Marcus inside. So why did waking up alone now make her feel like such a failure . . . as a feminist, or an existentialist . . . or what? After a year apart, couldn’t it be enough to just get laid? To smell him in her bed, see the indentation in the other pillow, to think, Good. Right. Move on.
Instead, she felt on the verge of tears, certain she would spend the rest of her life alone, a pathetic, bitter single mother—such a bullshit cliché—her thoughts looping into a women’s magazine quiz she’d taken during the whole Marcus conundrum (“Will He Ever Commit?”) and then, worst of all—flashing on her mother’s pet word, used. Of all the stupid words.
Maybe it was just the time and place that had made everything feel so empty, the circumstances of last night, the shock of seeing Marcus for the first time in months, having him just show up at the wake like that. (“Your dad probably would’ve hated that I was here, huh?”) He looked great in a suit, my God, those cyclist’s shoulders and hips; and then the Jameson started flowing, and the toasts and stories, and it was nice to laugh and Marcus half-apologized for not calling when he saw the obituary and he muttered something about growing up a lot in the last year, and hell, even if it was bullshit, it was . . . nice bullshit, and when they were walking to their cars she practically willed him to say something, anything, so when he looked over in the parking lot and said, simply, “Well . . .” that was all it took; she was helpless, incapable of clearheaded action, because at that moment there were only two things in the universe: alone and Marcus. And last night she could not do alone. He followed her home. She paid the babysitter. And . . .
Maggie sat up in bed. Surely there was some lasting benefit from last night, some residue. Yesterday it had been a year since she’d had sex and now it had been six hours. That was something. But did being touched have any weight the next day, any value? It wasn’t like she could feel his hands anymore, like she could feel anything. Except sadness. A yawning sense of being alone. Maggie opened her nightstand for some Advil, and she noticed, in the corner, on the floor behind the bathroom door, in a heap, a gray suit jacket.
That’s when she heard faint voices coming from the kitchen. She got out of bed, pulled her robe on, and went downstairs.
In the kitchen, Dustin stood on a chair across from Marcus. They were eye to eye, each holding neckties. They were a foot apart, shirtless, and they had the ties looped around their bare necks. Marcus was in his boxer shorts, Dustin in his Transformer pajama pants.
“Do what I do,” Marcus said. “Like looking in a mirror.” Shoulder blades jutted from Dustin’s tiny pale back.
“Cross the woods,” Marcus said.
“Cross the woods,” Dustin said.
“Over the hill,” Marcus said.
“Over the hill,” Dustin said.
“Around.”
“Around.”
“Behind.”
“Behind.”
“And through.”
“Through.”
“Perfect. Now turn around and show your mom.”
Dustin turned. He beamed, surprised to see his mother in the doorway. “Look,” he said, “I’m wearing Grandpa’s tie.”
The tie was blue, with little red sailing flags. It hung past Dustin’s feet. He must’ve gotten it out of the box in the living room that Maggie’s stepmother sent home with her. It was looped in the sort of unmanageable knot that Dustin always got in his sneakers.
Maggie wondered then if there wasn’t just one ache in the world: sad, happy, horny, drunk, sorry, satisfied, grieving, lonely. If we believed these to be different feelings but they all came from the same sweet, unbearable spring.
Marcus had made coffee. He handed her a cup. She put it to her lips until she could speak again. Finally, she said to her son, in a half-whisper, “It looks so good on you, baby.”