“Ethan.”
He springs up to his feet. He’s sitting on the top step of my stoop and I’m standing at the bottom. He bounds down to be on the same level as me, wiping his cheeks.
“Eve.”
“Um. Hi?” I say. Because what else do you say to the father of your baby who has more or less ignored you for weeks?
“Hi. Sorry. I just…was out for a run and…”
He ran to my house.
I should probably invite him up to my apartment but…last night there were raindrops on the windowpane and Shep in my bed and I just…don’t want Ethan in there right now.
“Wanna go for a walk?” I offer hesitantly.
“Yes!” He’s clearly deeply enthusiastic about the fact that I haven’t tossed a (non-existent) martini in his face. “A walk sounds great.”
A bus is trundling up the block as we speak, so we take the six-minute bus ride to Prospect Park in relative quiet. We walk along the bike path and the clouds part. Big puddles of drippy sunlight dapple the blacktop as we wind our way through the park. Last night’s rain washed the winter away. There are a few tentative buds on the trees, and their mild green is accented by the gray clouds that are rolling off towards the ocean. Joggers bop past and a biker tugging a wagon full of helmeted children questions his life choices as he heaves one pedal and then the next.
“So,” Ethan says, his voice gravelly. “Can I explain?”
“Your radio silence?”
He nods and looks slightly ill.
“Sure, I guess.”
He puts his hands on his hips and his chin almost down to his chest as he walks. “Eleni found the twenty-week ultrasound images and…it was too much for her to handle. She, ah, doesn’t want me to contact you. And she…tends to check my phone and email and stuff.”
Oh, boy. That’s not great.
I thought he went on a contemplative run and just wound up at my house. But it’s sounding an awful lot like he escaped and came to my house.
“Dude,” I say. “Are you okay?”
He grimaces. “Yeah?”
“Um. All right. I’m trying to understand…”
He blows out a breath. “She’s having a very, very tough time with all this and…I don’t think it actually occurred to her that you and I might be friends.”
“Can I see a photo of her?” I blurt out.
“Of Eleni?” He blinks at me.
“Yeah.”
It would be so much easier to just decide Eleni is the bad guy and everyone else gets to be the good guy. But, of course, Eleni is a person, with complex feelings of her own, just like mine. And so is Ethan. They’re not stick figures holding up labels for what kind of person they are.
He’s looking at me like this is a test and he’s almost positive he’s about to fail it, but I actually want to see what she looks like. I need a real face or else I’m going to trick myself into believing that she’s the root of all my problems.
He digs his phone out of his joggers and finds a photo and hands it over to me.
Was anyone else expecting a six-foot-tall model type? I-will-eat-your-soul hot and wearing, like, leather pants and a mesh bra or something? Because that’s apparently who I’ve been picturing this entire time.
But no. Eleni is a normal-looking woman in a red blouse with a blue flower embroidered on the front. She’s got very tan skin and curly hair in a ponytail. One of her front teeth is crooked. She’s pretty. And smiling at the camera like she’s absolutely bonkers for the person taking the photo.
I hand the phone back to him. “Where’d you meet her?”
He gives the ground a sad smile. “Greece. I was there traveling on my own and she was visiting her dad. She was born there but moved here with her mom when she was little.”
“And you’ve been together ever since?”
He clears his throat. “Off and on.”
Mind your own business, Eve! “And…she checks your phone and email to make sure you’re not contacting me?”
“She’s not a bad person,” he says defensively.
I’m really not sure there’s a way to positively spin surveilling all forms of communication in order to make sure you’re not interacting at all with the woman you’re having a baby with, but if Ethan doesn’t already know that, I’m probably not the one to tell him.
We walk in silence for fifty feet or so and a group of pregnant power-walkers charges past.
“All right,” I say eventually. “You’re clearly in a hard spot here, Ethan. I get that. But you totally disappeared. Right after you sort of said you were going to help out? It hurt. And it was confusing. And I’m supposed to be peaceful right now, you know! Not wondering whether or not you’re abandoning this kid without so much as a word!” I’m accidentally getting fired up, fueled by the disorientation, the rejection, the worry he’s caused over the last month.
He hangs his head, the weight of my words borne on his back.
“Dealing with that…trying to understand you…trying to make the best decisions I can based on the very little I know…it’s been a lot to wrap my head around. And now you’re here and I’m just trying to figure out what all of this means for—”
“You?” he fills in weakly.
I shake my head. “The baby.”
He stops walking and turns ninety degrees away from me.
“I…cannot believe I’m this guy. I hate this guy,” he whispers.
“Oh, come on.”
“It’s true.” He’s resigned when he turns back to me. “I’m failing everyone. I consider it a miracle that you’re even talking to me. The last month has been…and now I see you and you’ve gotten so much…” He doesn’t say bigger, but he holds his hand away from his belly to show how the bump has grown. “And I just missed it. Like, you’re the one who’s making the baby. Literally the only thing that’s required of me is to just be there, and I’m fucking missing it!”
Couldn’t have said it better myself, actually. I’m not sure if it soothes me or annoys me that he gets it.
I hesitate, because if I’m wrong about what I’m about to say, it’ll be the smackdown of the century and I’m really, really not sure I’ll come back from it. “Ethan, I’ve gotta be honest here…you act like someone who wishes he could be active in this kid’s life.”
He looks utterly wretched, in sweaty running clothes, half his face in bright sun and the other in shadow. His hands are on his hips and he’s staring at me in the way people do when they’re really seeing something else. For his sake I wish the heavens would open and dump buckets of cold rain over him. Really pound the misery out of him. He looks like all he wants is for the punishment to just giddy-up and arrive already.
“I think she just…” he starts, and I poke at his elbow to nudge him back into walking. Once again, I’ve asked him if he wants the baby, and we end up talking about how Eleni feels about it. We fall into pace alongside each other. “I think she just really needs me to say that you and I didn’t have a connection at all.” He glances at me. “That it was just a totally random thing and it was bad sex and I regret every single part of it. But the truth is…”
“We did have a connection. And it was really good sex.”
“Right?” He gives me a very small smile.
“Yeah.” I nod. “I mean, up against the wall, an orgasm apiece, and a quality snuggle afterward? That’s like, varsity level, right there.” I go up for the high five and he must take bro code very seriously because even in his wretched state he automatically high-fives me back.
He looks at his hand as if he doesn’t know how it even got there. I laugh at the befuddled expression on his face and after a startled moment, he laughs a little too.
“Now that we’re talking about that night,” I start. “I think it bears mentioning…if I’m being honest…you were really different.”
“Yeah, uh, that night was special.” He glances at me.
“I’m not talking about our, ya know, epic connection.”
“Then what are you talking about?” he asks.
“Oh, I guess…I don’t know you that well, but did you know that you have a sort of top gear?”
“Huh?”
“Yeah, it’s like this unfiltered charm. A full-throttle smile.”
He shakes his head in confusion so I continue on. “That night I liked you so much and it was so easy, and that was because of you. You made everything really simple. I’m not…” I clear my throat. “One-night stands have historically been very rare for me. And never anything to write home about. So it takes a very…comfortable person to make that into a reality for me. And…you were that person. You were sweet and happy and yeah, like I said, you made everything easy.”
He’s gone a pleasant pink and he doesn’t quite seem to know where to look. “Thank you.” Some kids kicking a soccer ball back and forth come running in our direction and Ethan dives to the side and intercepts the ball before it goes into the ravine at our left. He bounces it on his foot once, twice, and then volleys it back to the kids. Thanks, man! He smiles after them but it fades as his brain brings him back to our conversation. “It’s funny that you saw me in that way because I was actually in a kind of screwed-up state that night. Eleni and I had just split.”
He’s just unknowingly made the point that I’m trying to make. I steel myself because here come the tough cookies. “I know. I remember. But Ethan, what I’m trying to say is, as a third party who didn’t know anything about your life at that point, that night, to me, you seemed…free.”
Sometimes the good news hurts more than the bad.
As soon as the word free vibrates into life, it’s wounding him. His shoulders crunch inward, and his eyebrows are two arrows, pointing down to his mouth that is also pointing down to his heart, which has one of his hands pressed over the top of it.
It’s hurting him, what I’ve said, and maybe, maybe, it’s hurting because he’s recognizing it as the truth.
That night between Ethan and me, it felt electric with possibility on his end. He had this lightness about him. The kind of lightness that comes only after you’ve just shed something really heavy.
“Fuck,” he whispers, and veers off the bike path into the woods. Call it a sixth sense but, yeah, I’m sensing that the fact that he’s almost sprinting through waist-high brush into a dark, dank wood means he could use a minute of alone time. I think of him in his office asking me to close my eyes while he reacted however he needed to react for a minute. I wait for him on the bike path.
He emerges not too long after and immediately starts plucking leaves and burrs off his clothes. “You—you’re telling me,” he says. “That you think I was relieved to be broken up?”
It’s not accusatory. It’s a genuine question.
“All I’m saying, Ethan, is that that was a really great night. There was real joy, real electricity in everything we did together. But I don’t think that was because…of you and me. It wasn’t because you and I are destined for some great love, or something, you know? So my guess is that there was something else fueling that.”
I don’t say the rest, because, after all, it’s just a guess. But perhaps the amount that he was glorious that night was in direct proportion to how good it felt to him to be away from Eleni.
And still, he wanted her back.
Sometimes the bad feels better than the good.
For better or worse, being pregnant can lend you a bit of gravitas. Look at me, the wise old pregnant, doling out relationship advice like I know what the hell I’m talking about. But obviously there’s a limit to how much you can talk out of your ass about someone else’s relationship, and I am nearing mine.
“It wasn’t just me who was like that, Eve,” he says quietly, after two hundred feet of silent plodding. “You were different too.”
“Really?”
He nods. “I think that’s why I was so drawn to you. You had a very…new-chapter vibe going on.”
“Huh.”
Unlike me, he keeps his thoughts to himself, and I’m glad he does because there may or may not be something to excavate there and I really don’t want to do that out loud right now. I shiver.
“Let’s get out of the cold,” Ethan says. And I know he doesn’t mean together. He means let’s part ways and go warm up in our separate homes with our separate lives. And that, that’s okay because it has to be okay.