I’m relieved, but something still seems off. “What’s going on? Why are you calling me?”
“Olivia’s gone.”
By the way he says it, I can tell that Olivia didn’t just leave to goto a hot yoga class or get a five-hundred-dollar facial. She’s actually gone. Not dead but the relationship is over, the wedding is off.
I’m not nearly as pleased about this news as I ought to be, which is how I again verify that my love for Chris is the pure kind, the real kind. It’s unfortunate, but beautiful too.
“Want me to come over?” I ask. He doesn’t say anything, but I can hear him nodding, clenching his jaw.
“Be right there,” I tell him and gallop off to the subway station as fast as my feet can carry me.
I find Chris sitting on the floor of his apartment. His back is hunched, resting up against the couch. He’s staring at the wall, which is now completely bare, devoid of all the old photographs. Arnie is snuggled up loyally on his lap like he knows perfectly well what’s going on.
I sit down next to them. “Was it the pool boy at her parents’ Hamptons estate?” I ask, trying to get a smile out of Chris. It doesn’t work. Chris just keeps staring blankly at the wall.
“Olivia didn’t cheat,” he says. “It was my fault.”
“You’re the one who ended things?” I say it gently, but he winces like I’ve slapped him, which gives me the sensation that I’ve slapped myself.
He says that’s right. “I don’t really know why I did it. I can’t pinpoint it exactly.”
The fact that he can’t find a logical explanation seems to frustrate him to no end. I imagine his analytical brain is going insane trying to understand why one plus one didn’t equal two.
He tells me that his anxiety was acting up as the wedding approached, his thoughts kept racing, and he couldn’t sleep. “It felt like nothing was wrong, but something wasn’t right.”
“That’s really good you listened to your intuition,” I say, because it’s true. I’m impressed, and I’m also trying my best to start building him back up. It’ll be a long process, but we’ve got to start somewhere.
I ask if it just happened today and he says yeah, they’d been having conversations for the last few weeks, but it all came to a head this morning when he floated the idea of postponing the wedding to give them more time to figure things out. Olivia freaked out and said that either Chris was ready to commit to her today or he’d never be ready and she wasn’t just going to sit around waiting and wasting the prime of her life. “She said she’s thirty and wants to start a family soon. And she thought I did too because we’ve talked about it a million times. So she wanted to know what changed, and I didn’t have an answer. I didn’t have an answer,” he repeats.
My heart kind of goes out to Olivia on that one. She’s a victim of the patriarchy and societal programming and the biological inequity of women’s fertility. But I also have to come to Chris’s defense. He was speaking up even at the risk of conflict. “It’s better that you realized you’re not the right fit now rather than after you made it official.”
We sit there for another stretch of time, five minutes or maybe an hour.
“I kept thinking about what you said about how I was trying to live out Luke’s dream life, not my own,” Chris finally says. “And maybe there was a little truth in it, at least when it came to Olivia.”
This should give me a nice boost—Chris is admitting I was right after all. But it just scrapes me because I don’t want this breakup to be my fault. I don’t want to have messed with his head. I should’ve had more tact.
“I’m sorry for overstepping my boundaries,” I say. “That wasn’t right.”
He says no, he isn’t trying to put the blame on me or anything; he would’ve been having doubts anyway. Talking about Luke with me just kind of helped Chris see himself in third person, he says. A boy sprinting his whole life to keep up with his brother. And now when his brother isn’t there anymore, the boy—now a man, orat least trying to be—just keeps sprinting faster through the same trees so he doesn’t have to pick his head up and see the big forest and wonder where he is and where he’s going and why.
“Look who’s gotten all introspective,” I say.
Chris gives me a scrap of a smile, not much, but I’ll take it. I’ll take whatever I can get from this man. I don’t mean that in a pick-me way or anything. I’m just being honest that I’ve missed him and little bits of him are better than no bits at all.
“Well, I started going to therapy,” he says. “So I guess I have to credit you for that.”
“No credit needed. It turns out my own genius isn’t even mine. It comes from someplace higher, someplace prettier. So,” I say, just about holding my breath. “Are you missing Olivia?”
Chris nods, the kind of nod that says he can’t speak because it’s too hard to swallow.
“You could still go after her,” I hear myself say. I resent the words but I revere them too, if there’s a chance they could help Chris feel better. “If you regret it, you could talk through the Luke stuff with her and work it out. You could still get married if you want to.”
“Let me get this straight,” Chris says, talking slowly. “You, the founder of the Anti-Marriage Pact, are telling me to get married?”
“I’m not telling you to get married. I’m just saying it’s still an option,” I clarify. “And as for the pact, it’s been dissolved. Turns out I was kind of misguided in my views. Sure, marriage can be a cage, but so can being single. It’s really a case-by-case thing. Commitment isn’t necessarily suffocating if your partner lets you evolve and supports you as you do. At least that’s my current perspective. I’m still learning.”
Chris looks at me, really looks at me, for the first time all afternoon. His gaze doesn’t make me want to close my eyes or hide behind a sarcastic joke like it usually does. I want him to see how my steel shell has cracked open, how my spirit is oozing out of my body like crepuscular rays from storm clouds.
