“It’s still four weeks away,” I protested.
“Three and a half.”
I didn’t need their doom and gloom. I had my own worries: Aidan had told me about Janie.
It should have been the subject of a late-night confessional, but circumstances dictated that it was a morning bean spilling—the morning after we’d first slept together and he’d gone weird on me. It had made me late for work but I didn’t care. I had to know.
Here’s the gist: Aidan and Janie had gone out with each other for about a hundred and sixty-eight years. They’d been brought up a couple of miles from each other in Boston and had been an item for a long, long time, right since high school. They went away to different colleges and the relationship ceased by mutual consent, but when they arrived back in Boston three years later, everything kicked off again. All through their twenties they were a loved-up couple and they became part of each other’s family, Janie joining the Maddoxes on their summer vacations in Cape Cod and Aidan going along with the Janies to their place in Bar Harbor. Over the years, Aidan and Janie broke up a few times and tried dating other people, but they always returned to each other.
Time passed and they moved into apartments—but not together—and the marriage hints from their families were starting to get a little heavy when, about eighteen months before I met him, Aidan’s firm transferred him to “the city.” (Everyone says “the city” when they mean New York, which seems hard to understand because Boston isn’t exactly a hamlet with three houses and a pub.)
It was a bit of a shock all around but Aidan and Janie kept reminding each other that New York was a mere hour’s flight away, they’d see each other every weekend, and in the meantime, Aidan would look for another job back in Boston and Janie would apply for jobs in NYC. So off Aidan goes, promising to be true.
“You can guess what happened,” he said.
Actually, I was still trying to figure it out. That first night when he’d asked me to put him on my roster, he’d given the impression that he was available—albeit in a nonexclusive way—but had I been conned into muscling in on someone else’s man?
“You’ve barely paid off the taxi into Manhattan when you’ve got your lad out and you’re trawling the bars, looking for takers?”
He laughed a little sadly. “Not exactly. But, yes, I slept with other women.”
In his defense he refused to blame the many temptations of NYC, the exquisite-looking, brazen ladies who’d done classes, learning how to twirl their bras over their heads like they were lassoing a runaway steer.
“No one to blame but me,” he said miserably. “I wanted to flagellate myself with shame. That old Catholic guilt, it gets you every time. Don’t laugh, but I did something I hadn’t done for the longest time: I went to confession.”
“Oh. Are you, like…a practicing Catholic?”
He shook his head. “A recovering Catholic. But I felt so shitty I would’ve tried anything.”
I didn’t know what to say.
“Janie deserved so much better from me,” he said. “She’s a great human being, a very good person. She sees the positive in every situation without being, like, a Pollyanna chump.”
Oh God. I was going head-to-head with a living saint.
“That first day we met, when I spilled coffee on you, I’d just made a fresh resolution—yet another one—that I was going to be totally faithful to Janie. I really meant it.”
So that was why he’d been so odd when I’d asked him out. He hadn’t said, “Thanks but no thanks.” Or “Hey, I’m flattered, but…” Instead he’d given off waves of despair.
“So what happened?” I asked angrily. “Am I another of your guilty slips? Another trip to the confession box on the cards?”
“No. No, no, no, not at all! About a month later when I was in Boston, Janie said we should take some time out.”
“Oh?”
“Yeah. And although she didn’t say it straight out, she hinted that she knew about the other women.”
“Oh?” Again.
“Yeah, she knows me very well. She said we’d been messing around for too long, it was make-or-break time. A final attempt to see if we were right for each other, you know? See other people, get stuff out of our systems, then see where it left me and her.”
“And?”
“I’d shredded your card. I was so scared I was going to call you that I made myself destroy it the day you gave it to me. But I couldn’t stop thinking about you. I remembered your name and where you worked, but I thought it was too late to call.
“You know, I nearly didn’t go to that party that night, and when I saw you there, talking to that meathead, that made me believe in God. Seeing you, it was like…like getting hit with a baseball bat…” He looked like he was going to puke. “I don’t want to scare you, Anna, but I’ve never felt this way about anyone else, ever.”
I said nothing. I felt so guilty. But I couldn’t help also feeling…a little…flattered.
“I wanted to talk to Janie before I talked to you. I didn’t know if you’d want to, like, be interested in being exclusive—I hate that stupid word—but either way it’s totally over for me and Janie. But I feel bad that you know before she does.”
Tell me about it.
And shallow girl that I was, I wanted to know what Janie looked like. I had to clamp my lips together extremely tightly to stop myself asking, but it didn’t work and little sounds escaped. Mwahdoz zhee mlook mlike.
“Wha—oh! What does she look like?” His face went suddenly blank. “Um, you know, nice, she’s got”—he made a rotating gesture with his hand—“hair, curly hair.” He paused. “Well, she used to. Maybe lately it’s been straight.”
Okay, he hadn’t a clue what she looked like. He’d been with her for so long that he didn’t look at her properly anymore. Nevertheless, a powerful intuition was warning me that I should not underestimate this woman and the strength of Aidan’s attachment. They’d shared fifteen years of history, and like a boomerang, he kept returning to her.
He went to Boston, and all weekend, I felt mildly queasy; contradictory thoughts chased one another in a never-ending circle. At the air-guitar competition, Shake accused me of not paying attention when he’d been on, and he was right: I’d been staring into space wondering how Janie was taking it—I hated myself for being responsible for someone else’s unhappiness. And how much did I like Aidan? Enough to let him end a fifteen-year relationship for my sake? What if I was only messing him around? Or what if he changed his mind and got back with Janie? That terrified me; I really liked him. Really, really liked him.