“Because of your wife—your first wife?” she said with a forced casualness. She was totally being nosey, but he’d gotten personal first. She’d spent a lot of time inside the head of this formerly imaginary man—and she and Kimberly had talked his problems through at length, as if he was a real guy with real problems. And, lo.
“I guess. What’s your excuse?”
Right back on her, huh? Ah well, give a little to get a little… “I have no confidence that people will stick around.”
“Maybe you haven’t found the right guy.”
She eye-rolled him.
“What did I say?”
“I don’t mean it like that. I meet plenty of— No, what am I saying? I meet theoccasionalguy who could be a possibility, but I just can’t let myself trust him to stick around.”
“You’ve been dumped?”
“No. I mean, yes, but it’s not that. I mean I can’t trust him tostay alive.”
“You what?”
“I’m aware that sounds insane, but, as we’ve established, people around me have a habit of dying. The relationship thing—it’s not that I’m making a conscious choice, it’s not that I don’t want to. It’s that I can’t.” She held out his coffee. She’d love to be the kind of person who could have a relationship. A partner, children. Busyness, noise,love—the family she grew up in. Shewalked over to the bed and sat, partly to force herself away from the close confines of the kitchenette. “Sorry, TMI.”
“No, tell me about that,” he said, crossing his legs in front of him at the counter, like he was getting comfortable.
“You … want to hear about my relationship issues?”
“Right now, I want to hear about anything that’s not the last words, more or less, of a woman I…” He paused, as if unsure how to define his connection with Nika. “A woman I was close to. Plus, I haven’t spoken a word of Russian in a year and a half. So yes, at this very brief moment in time, I want to know about your relationship issues. It’s not a question I normally ask, unless I’m trying to recruit someone, which I don’t do anymore, so if I were you I’d make the most of it. But only if you want to go there.”
She laughed. “Okay, you asked…” She combed her fingers through her hair. “How can I put it? It’s like, when I was a kid, one day I came home from school and Dad broke the news that our dog had died. Hit by a car.”
“Commiserations to your child self.”
“Thanks. It’s not the end of the story. A few months later we got a puppy—‘a replacement dog,’ Dad called him. Now, I’d loved the first dog with everything I had?—”
“Gonna need the dog’s name. And the puppy’s.”
“Dog was Minnie, puppy was Zack.”
“Okay, continue.”
“So, Minnie was this crazy rescue dog of indeterminate age and breed, and the puppy was a stupidly cute ball-of-fluff poodle cross. Like the actual personification of lovable—dog-ification. But with the puppy, I felt distanced from him right from the start. I mean, sure, I cuddled him, took him for walks, threw a stick, did all the right things—if anything, I overcompensated—but I didn’t feel the love. It just didn’t come. It couldn’t, not when I was genuinely surprised every single day to find him still alive when I came home from school. I guess some walls hadgone up around my heart to protect me. So the new dog never filled the space left by Minnie—I mean, here I am like twenty years later, still talking about him as the ‘new dog’ when he died of old age some years ago. And it was the same with my last boyfriend.”
“Wait, this boyfriend… Was he the rescue dog or the ball of fluff?”
“I mean, I’m not comparing boyfriends to dogs, because obviously dogs are far superior, but I think I may have scared him off by overcompensating, by pretending I was feeling something because I felt bad about not being capable of reciprocating. Is this more babble than you signed up for?”
“Hanging in there so far. So what you’re saying is that it’s not a choice, this not having relationships, because … your dog died when you were a kid…?”
“That was ametaphor? What I’m saying is that I can’t let myself go, let myself believe that everything will turn out. And you have to—right?—to have a relationship? Something’s wrong with my programming, and it doesn’t take a psychotherapist to figure out why. My dad died in an accident at his work a few years after Minnie died, and I’ve since buried almost everyone on the family tree. Almost nothing can touch me anymore, and maybe that’s a relief, so I don’t want to get myself into the situation where I risk getting heartbroken. Boom.”
He grunted, but in an understanding way.
“I don’t mean to sound dramatic, but I’ve tried to fall in love. I’ve been with a couple of amazing guys. Lovely guys—that last serious boyfriend included. I even tried to pretend to myself that I was in love—clung to the theory that love takes time and it grows on you and later it fades, so maybe you’re better off marrying your best friend rather than someone you’re madly in love with. Or that it could be a self-fulfilling prophecy, a fake-it-till-you-make-it type deal. Or I wondered if I’d read too manyromances, seen too many rom-coms, and I had this mistaken impression of love being a thing you could feel physically, and maybe that was bullshit, and no wonder I didn’t feel it, because it doesn’t exist. But when he started talking about getting married, I knew I had to back away. He was a friend and I loved hanging out with him, but I didn’tfeelanything. And I think you should feel something, right?”
“You definitely should,” he said with such conviction that she felt both buoyed by the evidence of his great love for his wife—in that way you got swept up in the romance of weddings even when you didn’t know the couple that well—and also uncharitably envious of her.
“I mean, you shouldn’t have totryto fall in love. But I think after you’ve lost someone, it changes things. You would know that, right?”
“I haven’t thought about it in quitethatmuch detail.”
