“Whyin the world would you think that I wouldeverneed to hear the fact that youcheatedon me, Jeremy? Do you know the damage you could have just caused to my psyche? Now I’ll probably never trust anyone ever again.”
“Pfft, come on, Liza. Let’s not be dramatic,” he says as he adjusts the cuffs on his tweed blazer. It’s painful how I never realized how big of a cliché he is—his jacket even has elbow patches! “I know you are a psychologist, but you cannot expect me to believe that this simple fact can affect your ‘psyche.’” He air-quotes with a look of disgust in his eyes. “You and your social sciences.” He shakes his head at me with a patronizing smile on his lips. “I told you that your psychology master’s program was a mistake the day I met you. You should have at least gone for psychiatry. I mean, it is still a joke, in my opinion, but at least it containssomeactual scientific study.”
“Oh,gawd,” I say, standing up. “You know what? I don’t even care. I am justastoundedby the fact that you could find another woman to even put up with you and howboringyou are.” I toss back the rest of his glass of wine and pick up my purse, digging for my coat check number and five bucks to give to the attendant.
“Let’s not exaggerate now, Liza.” He laughs a little. “I don’t think that a Columbia University Physics professor couldeverbe deemed asboring.”
I burst out into hysterical laughter, scaring the waiter trying to get by me. “Ohmigod,” I laugh. “Just listen to yourself.” I grab a couple of mini-baguettes from the bread basket to take to-go, devastated that I can’t take the French butter with me, too. “You areincrediblyboring, Jeremy—inandout of bed. You know there are more positions out there than missionary, right? I promise you that. You could probably afford to allocate some of your research time into studying them.” At this, I realize we have started to garner some attention, but I don’t care. I will definitely give him a scene now. “I want to personally thank you for this break-up, given that I admit I did not have the lady-balls to do it myself. But I want to let you know thatyou fucking suckfor cheating on me.”
“No need to use foul language,” he whisper-yells at me, looking around nervously at the other tables.
“Goodbye, Jeremy. Thanks for the boring memories. I’m pretty sure I’ll soon forget them.”
“SO,he justreadyou your break-up? Just like that?” my brother, Vinny, asks as he sips his wine in our mother’s kitchen. The smells coming from her stove bring back warm and comforting childhood memories. Ones of sitting at this very table with my parents and brother, eating my mother’s home-cooked meals, essentially ruining all Italian restaurants for me becauseno onecooks Italian like my mother.
“He freaking pulled out a sheet of paper as soon as they served us a drinkand proceeded to read it out loud to me.” I am still shocked. Vinny just snorts and shakes his head. “I mean, Barbara always said he was nuts, since day one, but I just thought the guy was just a little eccentric. Plus, it’s not like she has such a phenomenal grasp on what normalcy is, if you know what I mean.” I raise my eyebrows at Vinny, and he nods thoughtfully.
Barbara is my best friend and the wildest person I know. She was also the first person in my life to meet Jeremy. Two minutes into meeting him at dinner, she textedGet out! Get out now!under the table. But she’s always had a unique personality, so I didn’t take her too seriously.
“The worst part—besides the fact that he couldn’t wait until we were done with our entrees so that I could at least enjoy my Cajun chicken—was that I didn’t understand what was happening at first, so I just let him go on and on while I sipped my wine, listing off all the things I had to do the next day in my head, until I heard him say my name.”
“What do you mean?” He raises an eyebrow at me, taking another sip of his wine.
“I mean, I thought he was reading me another one of his boring articles or letters to the editor. You know how he liked to send in stupid stuff whenever he thought journalists were wrong or their research was lacking?” Vinny nods with a smirk. “Well, he started off saying something about how romance is overrated, and that certain people want romance more than they want the actual person that they’re with. So, naturally, I thought he was going off on one of his rants about the social sciences and some study he read up on or something. But then I heard him say my name, and he got my attention. He said that I didn’t seem to be really into this relationship because of him, but more the idea of him, and that we should just break up.”
Vinny takes a sip from his drink and looks the other way, avoiding my gaze. He shifts uncomfortably in his seat.
“What?” I ask. “Why are you being weird?”
“I mean…” He clears his throat. “Let me just preface this by saying that I never liked the guy. No one did.”
“Except Dad,” I remind him sadly, and he winces. Dad only met Jeremy once before he passed away, but before he died, he had told me how much he loved Jeremy for me, and that meant everything. To tell the truth, I’m not sure that I was all that into Jeremy until Dad told me how great he thought he was.
“Right.” He scratches the back of his head. “Whatever. The point is that I didn’t like him,but…the thing is, Liza…I don’t think that he was necessarily wrong, you know?”
I lift an eyebrow at him. “Excuse me?”
Besides the sound of meatballs simmering in the pan and the low bubbling of my mother’s tomato sauce, there are no sounds in the kitchen. Mom’s in the dining room, setting the table for us, and Vinny and I are hiding here, like children. I’m hiding to avoid any type of housework while I’m back home for fall break, while my brother is hiding from his wife and kids. I’m guessing by how uncomfortable my brother looks now, though, that he’s praying for Danielle to walk in here with some sort of childcare crisis—not bad enough that it’s scary, but just enough that he would need to walk away from this conversation.
I kick one of the legs of his chair and throw him a menacing look. “Vinny. What do you mean?”
He exhales deeply and runs his fingers through his dark-brown hair. “I’m just saying that maybe he has a point. I think all those romance novels and rom-coms you watch are messing with your perception of what love really is, you know?”
There might be alittletruth to what he’s saying. I might have been going through a ‘Hot for Teacher’ trope phase in my reading when I met Jeremy at a prospective students’ school event. But still. There were tons of reasons why I dated Jeremy.
I just can’t think of one right now, that’s all.
“What are you talking about? I really cared about him. And he was plenty romantic.” I frown. “I mean, he brought me flowers every Friday and then took me to nice restaurants, told me I was pretty, blah blah.”
Vinny scoffs, raising a bushy eyebrow at me, and takes a giant sip of wine. “NowI know what your problem is. You don’t know what love is.”
He says it so matter-of-factly my jaw drops. This coming from the bro-est of bros, the epitome of frat boy himself, the man who won the fucking lottery by meeting a woman as amazing as Danielle and getting her to love him, marry him, and start a family with him. I never thought he would ever settle down, and now he’s talking to me as if he were the ultimate authority on love.
I’m about to say something not so nice when the kitchen door swings open, and my sister-in-law walks in holding one toddler in her arms while another trails closely behind her, gripping her pant leg.
“This is for you.” She hands my nephew, Leo, to my brother like a football. Vinny takes him and recoils at the scent of what I can tell is a very poopy diaper.
“See?” he says, holding up his son as evidence. “Thisis love. Thisis romance. Love is not reminding your wife that it’s her turn to change the diaper, that you’ve changed the last ten poop diapers because you love her so much and know that, after two kids, she still has a hard time not gagging when she changes them.”
