Rae felt like she was flying. She’d read these words in his eyes before, but to hear them aloud was another thing altogether.
All those things she’d told herself about how fine she was if they stayed boyfriend/girlfriend for a while, all those calculations in her marriage model that she’d pushed back to reflect a new base case—it was nothing but fabricated rationalization, she saw now in the dancing shadows of the island sun. She wanted to marry Dustin, and she wanted to marry him soon, and this was the proof she’d been waiting on to assure herself that the illusion of their future was more thandelusion. The paper on her finger felt like the finest diamond, symbolizing that Dustin was every bit as committed as she was. There were still some bumps to smooth over, but they were really going to get there. Together.
“Forever, then,” Rae said. She pulled the towel back over their heads to celebrate their symbolic engagement in their cotton cabana, keeping her hand out in the sun so she’d get a tan line in the shape of a ring.
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
SUNK COSTS
“You need to cut your losses,” Ellen told Rae over brunch a few weeks later, early June.
They were seated in a corner booth at the Madison Avenue location of Sarabeth’s, a chic staple of the Manhattan brunch scene near Ellen and Aaron’s Upper East Side apartment. The space was rimmed with crown molding and cluttered with baggy-eyed couples and fancy strollers that seemed to have every feature except an efficient way to fold up. Customers pushed their way in the door to stock up on homemade pies, pastries, and marmalades from the bakery at the front of the restaurant. The swinging doors let in muggy heat from the street and gave that feeling that summer was about to stuff its way into the city and refuse to pay rent.
“I’ve stayed quiet long enough,” Ellen continued, reaching for Rae’s hand across the table. The waiter had deposited a basket of bread rolls, but they hadn’t touched them yet.
Rae pulled her palm away, looking at her ring finger and mourning the way the tan line—or sunburn line, more accurately—had faded, leaving no souvenir except persistent peeling of pasty skin. “Iwouldn’t exactly sayquietis the right adjective,” Rae said. “You hated Dustin before you even met him.”
What Rae had expected to be a pleasant hour or two discussing Ellen’s wedding centerpieces and cupcake selection had turned out to be a hostile relationship takeover, reminiscent of the failed attempt to get Rae to break up with Wall Street.
“I just can’t sit by and watch you waste your twenties getting your heart yanked up and down like a volatile tech stock until you end up in a depression, too, with no love left to liquidate,” Ellen said.
It was one of her most impressive work-love comparisons, but Rae didn’t give her the satisfaction of acknowledging this. “Dustin’s getting better,” Rae said, though he’d spoken mostly in single syllables this week and had skipped his therapist appointment. The Turks and Caicos trip was proving to have been more of an outlier in his emotional chart than the starting point of a new trend line. “These things take time.”
“You’ve given him time. You’ll be twenty-eight this year,” Ellen said.
The number loomed there, jarringly close to thirty.Rae attempted to repurpose her napkin into a fan to cool down her neck, but the invention flopped under too-thick fabric.
“Do you really want someone so emotionally unstable to be dad to your kids?” Ellen went on, clearly victim to the biological clock craze as well.
“I’m not even sure if I want kids anymore,” Rae said, mostly to punch back against Ellen’s anti-Dustin tirade but also to try out how the declaration sounded aloud, so completely opposite what she’d been saying all along. A certain freedom came with the shock factor, but there was an undercurrent of unease.
Though Dustin said he wanted a family one day, Rae was becoming less sure that he actually did, or even that he still would when the time came. He didn’t want much of anything these days, certainly not himself and sometimes hardly even her. She’d been telling herselfthat eventually he’d get better and be in the right emotional state to be a dad, but she was starting to wonder, only privately, if perhaps they’d never be completely free from the white-capped waves that swept up and over him out of the deep, blue sea.
As much as she liked picturing having a full house, the image lost its shine when she thought about Dustin giving up his own sleep for their kids, running himself ragged giving them piggyback rides in the pool when he was struggling to stay afloat himself. She was no longer certain that kids were in their future, but this didn’t shake her conviction that they still had a future.
In the darker days following Turks and Caicos, Rae had begun to see that she might have gotten ahead of herself, that the paper-ring proposal might not have been much more than a sunny-day whim. But as much as she’d tried to get worked up about needing to know when or if a real proposal was coming, and as much as she’d tried to stress out about the dwindling days of her fertility, she’d found that she was becoming alarmingly unalarmed about her grand married-by-thirty plan going up in dust.
Something about Dustin telling her, in those lucid hours when the demons had been dormant, that he would be hers for as long as she’d have him, had fulfilled Rae’s deepest cravings for lifelong commitment and emptied her of her shallowest obsessions to have it fit her analytical plan. It had given her the validation to begin writing herself out of stale narratives and writing herself into fresh ones.
Her new truth was that even if they didn’t have kids, even if they never ended up getting married at all, she would still rather be with Dustin, just the two of them, than have all those other things with someone else. The hallowed end goals of being a wife and mom felt hollow if Dustin wasn’t there beside her.
“What?” Ellen said, stunned by the bombshell Rae had so casually dropped. “Kids have always been a huge deal for you … it’s why you came up with all that marriage math crap in the first place, remember? Three kids by thirty-five and all that?”
A baby two tables down shrieked in shrill colic, and Rae took it as a sign that maybe she’d been idealizing kids in her mind. Maybe they weren’t all they were cracked up to be.
“Well, things change,” Rae muttered, not in the mood to elaborate. “Compromise is a natural part of any relationship.”
“You’re not compromising, you’re forfeiting,” Ellen said, looking at her like she was looking at a stranger. Recovering, she appealed to Rae’s logical side. “Don’t you at least want theoptionto have kids?”
How many times had Rae heard theKeep options openargument? Get a job on Wall Street to keep options open for your career. Date lots of people to keep options open in case someone better comes along.
These days, Rae was less concerned with keeping doors open and more concerned with walking through the right one. Every time she stepped into the Lorimer Loft, it was the only place she wanted to be. Even on Dustin’s worst days, she never felt like there was an opportunity cost associated with being with him.
Dustin was more important than anything and everything else she’d ever desired, even and perhaps especially that strict deal she’d made with herself to close the marriage deal before she was thirty. Dustin was, in fact, all she’d ever wanted. She just hadn’t fully understood her wants until falling in love with him. Now that shedidunderstand her deepest desires—to be understood in that abstract, ethereal kind of way that even the most elegant poetry couldn’t portray—she was willing to give up just about anything so she wouldn’t have to give up Dustin.
“There’s more to life than getting married and having kids,” Rae said. Whenever she’d heard other women say this, she’d assumed it was just a platitude to make them feel better about their own abysmal fates. But maybe there was some truth to it after all.
“I know that,” Ellen said. “But you’ve always said you’ve wanted those things.”
