Kwan: Also, Nora, since we’re addressing you directly: George is doing great. He even licked Lucy’s paw today, which wassomething I never thought would happen. It might be an accident. It might be some psychological way to assert his dominance. But I’m going to assume it’s friendly until proven otherwise. He’s a champ! Don’t worry about him for even a second!
Tom Rich named the conversation “The Noranators”
I chuckle as I manage to sit up and swing my feet off the bed. It’s a start.
There’s something comforting about having this motley crew checking in on me. We’re all certainly bumbling, but we’re bumbling together.
I drag myself into the shower and manage to get dressed. The English breakfast I ordered myself, with greasy sausage and mushrooms smushed together with saucy beans and inch-thick toast, is helping immensely. It might also have something to do with the double espresso.
But I finally pull myself out the door and walk my way over to theSunday Tribuneoffice, silk black-and-raspberry eighties skirt swishing along and making me feel mildly put together.
When I arrive, the front desk buzzes and sends me upstairs, where Celia is waiting for me the second the elevator doors open.
“Oh, I’m just dying to introduce you around,” she says, linking her arm through mine and immediately making me feel like a part of her orbit.
It’s fun to trail after her for an hour, stopping into various cubicles and offices and seeing her gush over every single person on her team. Everyone is “an absolute wizard” or “completely ace” at their jobs. I’m not surprised she’s convinced me to keep writing over the last seven years when I see her persuasiveness in person again.
And for an office setup without any razzle-dazzle—a newsroom bullpen is about as slapdash and filled with reams of paper as one might imagine—she seems to enjoy pointing all the various areas out.Here’swhere the layout people work; here’s where the researchers hole away; here’s everyone’s favorite conference room, because you can see that sliver of the river in the view.
By the time she’s walking me out, I’m energized and distracted far more than I thought I could be today.
That is, until we turn the corner heading back to the entrance and Eli steps out of the elevator.
It knocks the wind out of me. I’ve been thinking about him for days without reprieve, and suddenly without warning, he’s movement and physicality right in front of me.
He’s rolling his shirtsleeves up, so he doesn’t immediately clock us. It’s strange to see him like this, so out of context and yet so perfectly at ease. You’d never know this was a man in the middle of emotional crises on multiple fronts. There’s no sign of wear from taking care of an ailing mother; there are no worry lines from distressing text conversations. There’s just brash and bold Eli, coming into an office to check in on his colleagues, geared up and ready for whatever the day throws at him.
But then he looks up, and his face pales. His eyes dart from me to Celia and back again. His brow furrows, and I ache to kiss it better.
But I can’t. Because this isn’t how this was supposed to happen. This wasn’t supposed to be how he found out this decidedly brain-melting information. He doesn’t have a Dane to run to in his walk-of-shame clothes so that he can spiral out of sight. He doesn’t have a therapist to overindulge with on psychological theory. He’s the island of Eli, without anyone to process this with and standing in the middle of hisoffice. I wonder if he can see the regret on my face.
“Oh, Eli!” Celia says, blissfully unaware of the mental detonations happening for the other two people in the conversation with her. “I’m so glad you could stop in and meet Donna today. I wasn’t sure if you would! How’s your mum?”
Her expression is so sincere that he can’t keep glancing back at me, even though he clearly wants to. “Um ... she’s well. Well, notwell. It’sa hard recovery at her age, and it was a pretty major surgery. But she’s doing better than we expected, so it feels on the right trajectory.”
“I’m so glad to hear it,” she says, reaching out and patting his arm. He seems scorched by the touch, as though he forgot for a moment that he’s a person in a body.
And then her eyes light up as she realizes the introduction she gets to make. Or at least, what she thinks she’s doing. “And oh my god, it’s also such serendipity, because this is Nora! Or rather, Ask Eleonora, as it were. She came into town for the party yesterday. Isn’t that so neat?”
He’s totally stone silent for a moment, almost to the point of it being awkward. It’s like he’s a computer in the middle of a reboot. But he catches himself, clears his throat, and starts talking before it becomes too much. “‘Neat’ is definitely, most definitely, the word I would use here, yes. Definitely,” he says, eyes boring into me, that placid mask he’s so good at projecting now covering any hint of what he’s thinking.
“I ...” I have no idea what to say. I didn’t know what his reaction was going to be even when I was expecting to get the chance to proactively explain it. Now I’m left looking to him like ... like I lied? Like I knew? Like maybe Ididn’tknow? Does he think I’m just realizing this in the moment as well? “Hi, Eli,” I finally say.
“Oh, it’s good you two are connecting now, because actually ... !” Celia turns to me like she’s realized something else delightful. “Nora—he lives in New York now, and he really doesn’t know anyone. You should show him around! He’s living downtown, too, so you’ll have to show him all your favorite places.”
“Yes,” I say, trying to figure out how to telegraph what I’m thinking to Eli without making anything awkward in front of Celia. “I’ve only very, very recently put that together,” I say pointedly.
“Did you?” he says now, still blank, still impossible to read.
“I ...” I take a deep breath, not knowing how to salvage this. And then a light bulb turns on. “I’m actually really excited about the most recent Ask Eleonora letter I got,” I say, hoping that I can somehow get enough wits about me to not scare him off but also not confuse Celia.“Yeah, it’s about a woman who accidentally reads a text on the guy’s phone she just slept with. And she realizes they actually work together, but she didn’t know it because they were always virtual. And um ...”
I have no idea how to move this along. Our situation is too specific, too improbable. This was a bad idea.
“And did she keep it from the guy?” Eli asks, his mask slipping just enough to an expression aching as much as my head was this morning, and my heart sinks. I don’t know what he’s thinking right now. I don’t know how to salvage this if he thinks I was texting him under some kind of false pretenses.
“No,” I say emphatically, hoping he hears the desperation in my voice. “She doesn’t know how to tell him. She doesn’t want to confuse him, and he apparently has some of his own personal stuff going on, but she ... she really cares about him and doesn’t want to spring it on him when he’s not ready to hear it. Or she didn’t, anyway. It’s ... yeah, it’s not what she expected.”
“Why are you really excited about that?” Celia asks, clearly not following my sort of nonsensical tale. “I mean, she should just tell him what she knows, big whoop.”
