Love the One You're With

An awkward pause follows, in which we all stand inches apart in triangle formation until Leo moves aside and says, “Well. I’ll let you two catch up…”

  Suzanne smiles and plops down onto the couch as if to give us a few feet—and seconds—of privacy. I seize the chance, feeling utterly conflicted. I want Leo to go; I want him to stay.

  I finally say, “Thanks, Leo.”

  I’m not sure exactly what I’m thanking him for. The assignment? His confession that he never stopped thinking of me altogether? His willingness to leave now?

  “Sure,” he says as if acknowledging all of the above. He turns to go, but then stops and spins back around, staring intently into my eyes. “Look, uhh…I’m gonna grab a bite to eat at this great Mexican dive tonight. Best guacamole I’ve ever had—and the margaritas aren’t bad either…No pressure, but give me a call if you guys want to join me…”

  “Okay,” I say.

  “You can call my cell or my room.” He glances at his plastic card key and says, “Room six-twelve.”

  “Room six-twelve,” I echo, noting that it’s exactly one floor above our Room 512. “Got it.”

  “And if I don’t hear from you, I’ll just see you tomorrow afternoon.”

  “Okay,” I say.

  “I understand that I’ll be conducting my interview at a diner of your choosing?”

  I nod, grateful that I know now, ahead of time, that Leo will be there. Leo and Drake in the same room.

  “You always did like a good diner,” Leo says, winking and then turning to leave for good.

  Suzanne’s poker face dissolves into a full-on grin as Leo disappears around the corner. “Jesus, Ellen.”

  “What?” I say, preparing myself for the inevitable onslaught.

  She shakes her head and says, “You could cut the sexual tension with a butter knife.”

  “That’s ridiculous,” I say.

  “Room six-twelve. Got it,” she mimics in a high falsetto.

  “I didn’t say it like that. It’s not like that, Suzanne. Honestly.”

  “Okay. Then what is it like?”

  “It’s a long story,” I whimper.

  “We have time.”

  “Get a drink first,” I say, stalling.

  “Already did. Stood at the bar watching you two fools as I ordered the Pretty Woman special…Did you know the movie was filmed here?”

  “Really?” I say, hoping to divert the conversation to vintage Julia Roberts. “I love that movie. Didn’t we see it together?”

  She shrugs. “All I remember is that it glorified prostitution,” Suzanne says. “So…back to your dreamy ex…”

  “He’s not dreamy.”

  “He’s hot and you know it,” she says. “His eyes are ridiculous.”

  I try to stifle a smile, but can’t. They are ridiculous.

  “Now, c’mon. Tell me what’s going on, would ya?”

  I sigh loudly, drop my head in my hands and say, “Okay. But please don’t judge.”

  “When have I ever judged you?” she says.

  “Are you serious?” I ask, looking at her through my fingers and laughing. “When haven’t you judged me?”

  “True,” she says. “But I promise not to judge this time.”

  I sigh again and then launch into the whole story, beginning with that heart-thudding moment in the intersection. Suzanne doesn’t interrupt once—except to order me another drink when a waitress stops by with a silver bowl of salty snacks. When I’ve finished, I ask if she thinks I’m a horrible person.

  Suzanne pats my leg, the way she used to when we were little whenever I’d get carsick in the back of our mother’s Buick station wagon. “Not yet,” she says.

  “Meaning what?”

  “Meaning the night is but one-martini young…and we have a little situation developing.”

  “Suzanne,” I say, horrified by her implication. “I would never cheat on Andy. Never.”

  “Ellen,” Suzanne says, raising her brows. “Who said anything about cheating?”

  Two hours, three drinks, and many conversations later, Suzanne and I are back in our room, drunk and happy. As we raid the mini-bar, laughing that when you’re this hungry, six bucks for a bag of candy doesn’t seem so outrageous, my mind drifts to Leo’s guacamole.

  “Should we call the front desk for a restaurant suggestion?” I say. “I could really go for Mexican…”

  “What a coincidence,” Suzanne says, smirking as she lifts up the receiver. “Or we could just call Room six-twelve…Or better yet head straight for his room.”

  I shake my head and tell her meeting Leo for dinner is not an option.

  “Are you suuuure?”

  “Positive.”

  “’Cause I think it’d be fun.”

  “Fun to watch me squirm?”

  “No. Fun because I happen to enjoy Leo’s company.”

  I can’t tell whether she’s kidding, testing me, or simply holding to her promise not to judge, but I snatch the phone—and the bag of peanut M&M’s from her.

  “C’mon,” she presses. “Don’t you want to know what Leo’s been up to all these years?”

  “I know what he’s been up to. He’s still reporting and writing,” I say, kicking off my shoes and sliding my feet into a pair of white terry-cloth slippers with the hotel’s insignia. I pop a handful of candy into my mouth and add, “That’s how I got here, remember?”

  “Yes, but beyond his work…You know nothing about his personal life, do you? You don’t even know if he’s married?”

  “He’s not married.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “He’s not wearing a ring.”

  “Means nothing. Plenty of married men don’t wear rings.”

  “Appalling,” I mutter.

  “It doesn’t necessarily mean they are players,” Suzanne says, taking the polar opposite stance of her usual rants on ringless, philandering pilots and leering businessmen populating her first-class cabins. “Not wearing a ring can just be…sort of old school. Dad never wore his wedding ring—and I think it’s safe to say that he wasn’t on the prowl.”

  “Can you really be old school if you’re under forty?”

  “Sure you can. It’s the whole old-soul thing…and I think Leo is an old soul,” she says, almost admiringly, as it occurs to me that calling someone an “old soul” is almost always a compliment.

  I look at her. “And you’re basing that on what exactly?”

  “I don’t know. It just seems like…he’s not caught up in materialism and all the other superficial trappings of our generation.”

  “Suzanne! Where are you getting this crap? You’ve spent about four hours with him, total!”

  “He does noble work,” she says, likely referring to his coverage of the AIDS Walk.

  “Just because he cares about AIDS victims doesn’t make him an old-soul saint,” I scoff—and yet I have to secretly admit that she is tapping into one of the things I once loved about Leo. Unlike so many guys, particularly guys I’ve met in New York, Leo was never a social climber or follower. He didn’t consult New York magazine or Zagat’s to select our restaurants and bars. He didn’t sport the omnipresent black Gucci loafers. He never dropped references to great literary works he’d just read or artsy films he’d just seen or small indie bands that he had “discovered.” He never aspired to settle down in a big house in the suburbs with a pretty wife and a couple of kids. And he always preferred travel and experience to fancy possessions. Bottom line, Leo wasn’t about checking off boxes or trying to impress or ever striving to be someone or something he wasn’t.

  I say some of this to Suzanne now, mostly just musing aloud, but then silently comparing Leo to Andy. Andy who owns several pairs of Gucci loafers; Andy who frequently peruses the popular press for our restaurant selections; Andy who is anxious to exit the best city in the world so that we can live in a big house in Atlanta. And while my unaffected husband could never be accused of playing that pretentious urban game of name checking
the hippest indie bands or art-house films or literary novel du jour, I had to concede that he at least appeared to have a more status-bound lifestyle than my ex.

  A wave of guilt overcomes me as I shift in the other direction, feeling fiercely defensive of my husband. So what if he has an appreciation for the finer things in life, including the occasional brand-name good? So what if he wants a comfortable home and easy life for his family? It’s not as though he makes choices to keep up with the Joneses or mindlessly follow the pack. He just happens to be a mainstream guy, adhering unapologetically to his own preferences—which makes him his own man every bit as much as Leo is his own man.

  Moreover, why do I feel the need to make comparisons between Andy and Leo at all when there really is no connection between the two? I hesitate and then pose this question to Suzanne, fully expecting her to take the diplomatic high ground, say that I shouldn’t compare them. That Leo has absolutely nothing to do with Andy and vice versa.

  Instead she says, “First of all, it’s impossible not to compare. When you go down a fork in a road, it’s impossible not to think about that other path. Wonder what your life could have been like…”

  “I guess so,” I say, thinking that the Leo path was never really an option. I tried to take it, and it turned out to be a cold, dark dead end.

  Suzanne runs her hands through her long, curly hair and continues, “Second of all, Leo and Andy are connected, by simple virtue of the fact that you love—or once loved—them both.”

  I give her a disconcerted look. “How do you figure?”

  “Because,” she says, “no matter how much or how little two people you love have in common…or whether they overlap or have a decade between them…or whether they hate each other’s guts or know absolutely nothing about one another…they’re still linked in some strange way. They’re still stuck in the same fraternity, just as you’re in a sorority with everyone Andy has ever loved. There’s just an unspoken kinship there, like it or not.”

  As I contemplate this theory, she goes on to tell me how she ran into Vince’s stripper ex-girlfriend at a bowling alley recently and, although they only vaguely know each other and share just a few, attenuated acquaintances (which is almost impossible to avoid altogether when you’re both from Pittsburgh), they still ended up having a long conversation while watching Vince score his first and only three-hundred-point perfect game.

  “And it was really weird,” Suzanne says, “because we didn’t really talk about Vince—aside from his ungainly form and crazy Brooklyn-side approach—but it’s as if she totally knows what I’m enduring…What it feels like to love Vince, in spite of all his bullshit…And even though you’re my sister and I’ve told you so much more about my relationship than I’d ever confess to her, in some ways, she still knows more than you could ever know.”

  “Even if she no longer cares about him?” I clarify.

  “Well, based on the adoring look on her face when Vince was carrying on all over the place, high-fiving everyone he could find, that is certainly dubious,” Suzanne says. “But yes. Even if.”

  I put my head down on a pillow, feeling my buzz recede, replaced by fatigue and even greater hunger. I ask Suzanne if she wouldn’t rather stay in and order room service, but then remember that her life is largely about flying to cities and never leaving the airport hotels, so I tell her that I could be motivated to go out, too.

  “Nah. Fuck it,” Suzanne says. “I didn’t come here for the nightlife.”

  “Aww,” I say, laughing and planting a big kiss on her cheek. “You came here for your sister, didn’t you!”

  “Get off me!” she says.

  “C’mon,” I say, kissing her cheek again, and then her forehead, basking in joking moments like these as the only chance I have to kiss Suzanne. Like our father, she is uncomfortable with most physical affection whereas I inherited my mother’s cuddly gene. “You adore your little sister. That’s why you’re here! Admit it!”

  “Nope,” she says. “I came here for two reasons…”

  “Oh yeah?” I say. “For Drake and what else?”

  “To baby-sit your cheatin’ ass,” she says, chucking a pillow at my head. “That’s what else.”

  She is clearly joking, but it is still the last bit of incentive I need to change into my nightgown, select a club sandwich from the room-service menu, and call my husband.

  “Hey, honey,” Andy says. “You guys having a good time?”

  “Very,” I say, thinking how nice—and somehow cozy—his voice is.

  He asks me what I’m doing and I tell him that we’re just staying in and talking.

  “So you’re not picking up any guys?” he says.

  “C’mon,” I say, feeling a pang of guilt as I recall the smell of liquor on Leo’s breath and the lingering look he gave me before he left the bar. I picture him now, sipping a margarita somewhere nearby.

  “That’s my girl,” Andy says, yawning. “Love you.”

  I smile and tell Andy I love him, too.

  “Enough to get me that autograph?”

  “Not that much,” I say. And then think—But definitely enough to forgo that guacamole and the man who will later fall asleep in Room 612.

  Fifteen

  Sometime in the middle of the night I am awakened by the sound of my own voice and a dream of Leo so graphic that I feel flustered—nearly embarrassed—a tough feat when you’re lying alone in the dark. As I listen to Suzanne softly snoring in her bed, I catch my breath and slowly play back all the vivid details—the silhouette of his broad shoulders flexing over me; his hands between my legs; his mouth on my neck; and that first slow stroke inside me.

  I bite down hard on my lip, alert and tingling with the knowledge that he is just one floor above me in a bed just like this one, perhaps dreaming of the very same thing, maybe even wide awake and wishing it were happening. Just as I am.

  It would be so easy, I think. All I would have to do is reach over for the phone, call Room 612 and whisper: Can I come see you?

  And he would say, Yes, baby. Come now.

  I know he would tell me to come. I know because of this assignment tomorrow—the very fact that we are both here in L.A. staying at the same hotel. I know because of that unmistakable look he gave me in the bar, a look that even Suzanne couldn’t miss. But most of all, I know because of how good we once felt together. Despite how much I try to deny it and ignore it or focus only on the way things ended, I know what was there. He must remember it, too.

  I close my eyes, my heart racing with something close to fear, as I picture getting out of bed, silently stealing through the halls, finding Leo’s door and knocking once, just as he knocked on my hotel door during our jury duty so long ago. I can clearly see Leo waiting for me on the other side, unshaven and sleepy-eyed, leading me to his bed, slowly undressing me.

  Once under the covers, there would be no discussion of why we broke up or the past eight years or anything or anyone else. There would be no words at all. Just the sounds of us breathing, kissing, fucking.

  I tell myself that it wouldn’t really count. Not when I’m this far from home. Not in the very middle of the night. I tell myself that it would only be the blurry continuation of a dream too satisfying and too real to resist.

  When I wake up again several hours later, sun is streaming through the window, and Suzanne is already shuffling around the room, tidying her belongings and mine as she watches the muted television.

  “Holy eastern exposure,” I groan.

  “I know,” she says, looking up from her bag of toiletries. “We forgot to shut the blinds.”

  “We forgot to take Advil, too,” I say, squinting from the throbbing sensation in my left temple and a dose of guilt and regret that is evocative of the walk of shame in college—the morning after alcohol and loud music and the veil of nighttime induced you to kiss someone you might not have otherwise even talked to. I reassure myself that this is not the same thing at all. Nothing happened last night. I had a dre
am. That is all. Dreams sometimes—often—mean absolutely nothing. Once, when I was in the adolescent throes of braces-tightening torture, I had an appallingly provocative dream about my orthodontist, a balding, nondescript soccer dad of a guy, who was the father of a classmate to boot. And I can guarantee that I didn’t want Dr. Popovich on any, even subconscious, level.

  Yet, deep down, I know that this dream didn’t come from nowhere. And more significantly, I know that the problem isn’t the dream per se. It was the way I felt afterward, once awake. It is the way I still feel now.

  I sit up and stretch, feeling better just getting out of a horizontal position. Then, once out of bed altogether, I shift into professional, efficient mode, even adopting a crisp, businesslike tone with Suzanne. I cannot afford to indulge in ridiculous, misguided fantasies when I have a huge, career-defining shoot in front of me. In my great mentor Frank’s words, It’s show time.

  But hours later, after I’ve completed a thorough battery check and equipment inventory, reviewed my notes, phoned my freelance assistant to confirm our schedule, and triple-checked with the manager of the diner that she is indeed closing for two hours as per Drake’s camp’s request, I am in the shower, under very hot water, still brooding over Leo. Wishing I had packed cuter clothes for the shoot. Contemplating just how awful I would feel if I had called him last night. Wondering whether it just might have been worth it—and then berating myself for even thinking such a terrible thing.

  At some point, Suzanne interrupts my thoughts, shouting through a thick cloud of steam, “Are you alive in there?”

  “Yeah,” I say tersely, remembering how, as a teenager, she’d often pick the lock with a bobby pin and barge right into the bathroom during my only alone time in our cramped ranch.

  “Are you nervous or just really dirty?” she asks me now, as she wipes down the mirror with a towel and sets about brushing her teeth.

  I turn the water off and wring out my hair, as I admit that, yes, I am nervous. But I do not confess that the real reason for my nerves has very little to do with photographing Drake.