I DON’T FEEL RIGHT. I wander from room to room in my Santa Cruz place. I could assemble some of the furniture that’s still in fourteen boxes in my dining room. Maple left before we could put that stuff together. If I’m not in the mood for some Allen wrench action, I could change up the line of orderly soldier pillows marching across my ten-foot leather couch with the stupid hairpin legs. The blue pillow could go next to the new brown pillow. Or the white with the crocheted lumps on the front. I bought two leather pillows, as well. So many choices. Life’s exciting at Chez Max’s. Noise, noise, noise.
You know what’s wrong with me?
Not the flu.
Not Ebola.
Nothing that antibiotics can cure.
I have a bad case of the Maples. That’s not me, this mopey, sad llama who works a record number of hours and doesn’t even bother to count them. That’s not my life. The one where I work ten-hour days and divide the rest evenly between sleeping, surfing and fucking, with the occasional well-timed break for personal hygiene. I’m the Jedi Master of productivity—or I was.
Maple.
Maple Maple Maple Maple. If I say it fast enough and often enough, the words blur together until I sound like a drunk. I’d never understood what made two people decide that they were it for each other, that one person was enough—more than enough—for the next sixty, seventy or infinity years. Maple and I agreed—we were just a hookup—so why did I want to change the rules of the game now?
How long until I’m over her? Two hours, two days, two months? I don’t think I can handle much more. I have deadlines, a company to run, a life to get on with. And yet, I’m moping around my house, online shopping for pillows I don’t need, doing nothing. It’s annoying.
This is why I’m out on my board, in the dark. Surfing in the daylight is too easy. Sharks? Jagged rocks? Skull-cracking meet and greet with the ocean floor? Pfft. Bring it on. Surfing at night is risky, but so is life. There are variables in the ocean—shifting light, rogue waves, a rock I didn’t know was there. But since there’s a full moon tonight and I can’t sleep and don’t want to code, I’m out here. Frigging moonlight spilling over the water makes it almost too easy.
I blame all that light for Jack showing up beside me. So much for hiding out. I ignore him and sit there on my board, rocking gently up and down. A tsunami would be good right about now. A hurricane. Anything to stir things up and get them moving.
“Hey,” he says finally.
I eye the ocean, but there’s nothing worth the risk of riding, not yet. It’s all baby waves when I want a huge, epic wave, the kind that hammers you into the ocean floor if you make the wrong move but that also promises the ride of a lifetime.
“You want to talk about her?”
Notice that he doesn’t say it. He goes straight for the jugular and the elephant in the room. Ocean. Whatever.
And... I cave.
“How did you know with Molly?”
“That we were in love?” Jack sizes up the wave rolling toward us. It’s not bad, but not worth riding.
“Sure.” I shift on my board. “Tell me your firsts. The first moment you knew you loved her. The first time you asked her to marry you. The first time you realized that forever didn’t seem like too long.”
“You know how we met.” Jack glances at something swimming beneath us. It doesn’t come equipped with a dorsal fin, so no worries. “College keg party. She wasn’t a fan of cheap beer in a can, so I volunteered to fetch her something else. Since I wasn’t of legal buying age, it took a couple of hours to hack a fake ID. She’d left the party by the time I came back, so I tracked her down and convinced her to drink mimosas on the beach with me and watch the sunrise.”
It’s silly and probably cute, but I don’t understand what made it work. Clarification is in order. “And that’s when you knew?”
He rolls his shoulders. “It’s not a checklist kind of thing, Max, or an array that you feed numbers into to get the predicted output. We met and then there was just something about Molly that made me look twice.”
“I looked twice.” Still waiting for that tsunami, FYI.
“At?”
“At someone else.” No wonder Catholics go to confession in those booths. There’s no way I look Jack in the eye right now. “I fell in love with her. Maybe. How do I know?”
He doesn’t give me shit, but he doesn’t start laying out a ten-step plan, either. Jack fixes things. He takes broken, inefficient, jacked-up companies and he turns them into first-class performers. I’d appreciate it if he could work that magic on me, but instead he just stacks his hands behind his head and gives me a once-over.
“Give me the list,” he says. “The Ten Things I Love about Maple.”
I can give him the first ten things, the ten things I thought about today, the ten things I love but that also make me want to move to Canada or pull my hair out. But just ten? That’s the impossible task. So I deflect.
“What’s on your list?”
“For the record,” he says, “things aren’t so good between Molly and me.”
“That sucks.”
Not profound enough for you? It’s heartfelt. Accurate. I mean, there’s nothing you can say when someone’s raked over by their relationship. To extend the analogy, Jack is getting his ass pounded by some pretty powerful waves as he fights to paddle out and catch a wave. And that sucks and we both know it.
The incoming wave is beautiful. The peak breaks to the left in the moonlight and there’s room enough for both of us to ride, although we’ll have to ride in opposite directions.
“Give me a list,” he says again, his eyes on the wave. He wants to ride it, too. “Stop standing on the side of the pool holding your dick because you’re too chickenshit to engage. Jump. You remember the night you lost your virginity?”
“Afternoon,” I correct, “and you want me to think about another woman now?”
He ignores me. “That was all about your dick. Sure, you popped that cherry, but that was just sex. You’ve never had a relationship, so Maple is your first.”
A relationship virgin? I suppose it’s possible. I laugh.
“So you think I should give it up?”
He starts paddling toward the right side of the wave. “I think you should ask yourself why you’re holding on to your cherry. Who are you saving yourself for?”
Is it PC? No. We’re guys. Cut us some slack.
I think about it as I paddle hard toward the left side of the wave. Remember that list I made the day I met Maple? The things I was so sure I knew about her? It wasn’t complete. I didn’t know her then. All I had was a list of facts, which was like having the dots for a puzzle but no pencil. I didn’t know how to connect them.
The wave’s breaking in the center now and it’s a thing of beauty. I explode onto my feet, pushing up off the board and finding my center. The night-dark ocean stretches out in front of me as I fly toward the beach, board skimming the wave.
I know so much more now.
1. Maple takes pictures so she can’t forget.
2. Sometimes Maple hides behind her clothes.
3. Maple worries that she isn’t enough.
4. She worries that she weighs too much and her partner won’t be able to lift her—and that’s a metaphor.
5. She loves to go barefoot.
6. She hums when she’s thinking. Or sad. Or happy. Pretty much all the time.
7. She needs more puppies and kittens in her life. I don’t know how she feels about babies, but I want to ask. I want to give her the family she dreams about, but I need to listen first. I need to hear what she wants.
8. She’s run four thousand miles away.
9. She’s amazing in bed, but she’s equally amazing out of it.
10. I never want to stop this.
The wave peters out and I glide toward shore. It’s that last one, good old number ten, that sticks in my head. Okay, I’m not exactly forgetting number nine, either, but I’m an excellent multitasker.
All I need is a plan.
And a plane ticket.