RUTHIE WOKE UP to the sound of crockery in the kitchen, always a sign that meant coffee was on the way. She hoped Joe hadn’t turned into a tea drinker. Sunlight was pouring through the window and she was nestled in a soft bed and she was filled with something close to happiness if she didn’t think too hard or too long.
“I just can’t help believing!” Joe sang from the kitchen.
She was only a block away from her own house, and she felt as though she were in a secret clubhouse, hidden away in a dumpy rental. Jem was with Mike, and no one knew where she was.
They had danced in the living room last night. They had sipped ice-cold limoncello. Their kisses had tasted of lemon and sugar. They had wound up on the bed, tilting onto it together, hanging on hard because they didn’t want to break the embrace. She touched her mouth. The night had felt like one continuous deep kiss.
Joe stood in the doorway, holding two mugs. “Don’t start regretting it yet,” he said.
“I wasn’t.”
“Liar. I have a radical suggestion. Let’s tell the truth. Right from the start.”
“Toss me a T-shirt. There’s truth, and then there’s truth at eight in the morning.”
Joe put down the coffees and tossed her a T-shirt. She slipped it on. She ran past him while he chuckled. She thought this was over in life, wearing a man’s T-shirt and examining his bathroom items while she used (this, a mark of their maturity) a new toothbrush he’d left for her on the sink.
When she came out, hair arranged, breath minted, and after a delighted dazed look at herself in the mirror—who was this woman having fun?—he was sitting up in bed, waiting with her mug, in boxers and another T-shirt just as faded and soft as the one she was wearing.
“I want you to know that I regret nothing,” he said. “I’ll even sing it. In French.”
She took the coffee. Last night was hazy, not from wine, but from a certain rushed urgency to the proceedings. Dinner and then he invited her over for a nightcap, an invitation so ridiculously transparent that they giggled. The end of the evening had been inevitable since the moment he put his hand on her knee. Or when she sat down at the table. Or when she saw him again. The truth was simple. When she was with him she felt alive.
They sipped, watching each other. Ruthie spilled a little coffee on his shirt.
“I like this house. It’s nicer inside,” she said. “Outside it’s a dump.”
“Consider it a metaphor. I painted the floors and the walls before I moved in. The kitchen was chartreuse, and not in a good way.”
“The thing is, you don’t have much. It’s very bachelor.”
“Part of my reinvention.”
He didn’t even have a dresser. There was a nautical map on the wall and a single ceramic vessel with sharpened pencils on a table. A stack of books—cookbooks! How promising!—served as a night table for her coffee.
“No art,” she said.
“We argued so long about the collection that one day I just said, Take it all. Halfway thinking she wouldn’t. She did. A shocking thing happened. I didn’t care. I ended up giving away mostly everything in the apartment. I know that sounds monkish but it’s not that elevated. I didn’t want it, it was from another life. The apartment with the vases and the plates and the books and the trays and the lamps…now I’ve got one set of sheets and towels, three pairs of pants, and seven T-shirts. When things get dirty I wash them.”
“You have six T-shirts. I just stained one.”
“When I knew my marriage was over, I talked to my dad about it. I was back here—my parents moved out to Southold when they retired, have I mentioned that? Anyway, my mom was dying. We were at the hospital and Mom was asleep. I said it was a tough decision, to leave—Henry was still in high school. And I asked him how he did it, how he always seemed to know what to do. And he thought for a minute. And then he said, ‘I never made a decision in my life.’ ”
“What does that mean?”
“I never really got it. I was kind of pissed, actually, because it wasn’t helpful. But last night…I got it.”
Wasn’t that just what she’d been contemplating? The whole unthinking rush of it? The lack of decision when she walked through the door? Could that still happen, in the middle of your life?
“I’m sorry to say this, but I have to go to work soon,” he said.
“I’ll find my dress.”
“I will always remember that dress,” Joe said. “It is the pinnacle of summer dresses.”
Only it wasn’t her dress, it belonged to Carole. Sooner or later he’d see her in her own wardrobe, the untailored, unsilked her.
He gently pulled the neck of the T-shirt down and kissed her shoulder. “Of course,” he said, his mouth against her skin, “I don’t have to leave immediately.”
He leaned in, and she leaned back, resisting the pull, the kiss, the feeling that she was not at all able to control this. “Look,” she said.
“Don’t say that. Don’t say look in that fashion.”
“In what fashion?”
“In that We’re adults let’s talk about this fashion.”
“But Joe—”
“And don’t say but Joe.”
“We don’t want to get ahead of ourselves.”
“Let’s get ahead of ourselves,” Joe said, scrambling to sit up straight and spilling more coffee on the sheets. The man was going to have laundry to do. “Let’s flirtatiously text each other during our days, and then at the end of it let’s have you come to my bar and let me pour you a chilled glass of Muscadet and lovingly shuck my best oysters and let me make you dinner and let us do all this over again, tonight and all summer, for God’s fucking sake.”
“Whoa.”
“Whoa as in stop, or whoa as in, that sounded really great?”
“Whoa as in, I’m not in a good place right now.”
“What would make it a good place?” Joe leaned back again.
“To have what I used to have,” she blurted. She meant her house, her job, her peace, her place, so that she would feel grounded enough to try this. She saw immediately it had been the wrong thing to say.
“I guess that brings me to a question,” Joe said, looking down into his mug. “Are you still in love with Michael? Do I have competition here?”
It was the name “Michael” that snagged her. She could hear it in Adeline’s cool, cultured voice. It brought her back to what was waiting for her outside the door.
She heard how much he didn’t want to ask that question. So much banter between them and it had all fallen away last night. They had knelt, naked, and touched palms. They had not been afraid. It had been a night so filled with charged touch, with lust and tenderness, that it would make a poet stand up on a chair and cheer.
Her thoughts moved so fast. In the time it took for him to look down in his mug and look up again she knew she would have to give him up.
She knew this: He was the most honest man she’d ever known. Whatever story she came up with about the watch—a street purchase in the city, a family heirloom—it would be a lie. She would have to pile lie on lie in order to keep her house, and while she had talked herself into the fact that these lies harmed no one, she still had to tell them.
She could tell them, she was almost sure. But she could not tell them to Joe.
“I can’t let go,” she said, and saw his heart fall. He thought she meant Mike, of course, when she meant everything but Mike. To have Joe believe she loved her ex-husband was a lie, but at least she hadn’t had to tell it.
Oh, Ruthie. You parser, you.