The Do-Over
What to Expect When Your Ex-Lover’s One-Night Stand Is Expecting
As Jennie awaits Eliot on the evening of her last day, something about Scallywags seems off. Jennie concedes that she may be projecting her own emotional landscape on her beloved bar; nevertheless, she cannot shake the feeling that something deeply and profoundly blows.
“Does everything just really blow right now?” she asks Rupert, who, willfully misunderstanding, proffers some reply about air currents. Jennie waits at her table for maybe half an hour, flicking lime seeds from her water glass at her noncorporeal companion and testing her server’s patience. Then she spots Eliot making his way toward her table, and her responding nausea confirms that, yes, everything certainly blows.
“Hey there, pretty lady.” Eliot slides into the chair opposite her. The asshole has his sincere face on, an infuriating balance between attractive and pitiable. How is she supposed to be angry at that face?
“Hey,” she manages. She wants to take herself out back for good beating. With all the time she spent mentally preparing for this meeting—preparing for it twice, and this time knowing what he is going to say in advance—and the best she can do is ‘hey’?
“How have you been?” The timeframe this question presumably covers is the month since he terminated their relationship.
“There are better days and worse days, but I’m surviving.” She pauses for a moment to reflect and concludes that this is false. “How about you?” This dialogue is fast becoming a touchstone of the rhetorical art.
“Umm, that’s a rather complicated question to answer at the moment. That’s part of why I wanted to see you. But we can talk about that a bit later; I’d like to hear more about how things have been with you, first.”
“I don’t think so.” This is Jennie’s first deviation from the conversation as it transpired before. “Something was important enough that you had to meet with me in person talk about it, and I’m not going to sit anxiously through a whole dinner’s worth of small talk before you tell me what it is.”
He blinks his pretty brown eyes in surprise. “It’s kind of big. I thought we’d ease into it.”
Finally finding all that courage she had imagined she would have, Jennie uses the knowledge she cannot possibly know to her advantage. “It’s not that long a story, Eliot. Let me see if I can give it to you in one hundred words or less. After we broke up, you were lonely and went looking for companionship. Which is totally reasonable, but being new to the whole casual sex thing, you made the mistake of trusting the girl when she said she had an IUD. The pregnancy test came back positive, and you’ve decided you’re ready to man up and be a father, only whoever you screwed doesn’t want to raise a kid. So you’ve come to me to ask if I’ll mother someone else’s child with you, despite our having recently broken up.”
His sharp jaw is slack. After a few moments he picks it up and tries to make some words with it. “Jimmy told you, didn’t he?”
(Editor’s note: Eliot’s friend Jimmy is a hitherto unmentioned person, sharing a name with Jennie’s two best friends but otherwise unrelated to them in any way. He shall henceforth not be mentioned again; all other uses in this text of the names Jimmy, Jim, or James reference other persons.)
He squirms in his seat.
She ignores the guess. “Did I miss anything?”
“Well,” he manages, “I’d need it in writing to see if it’s under a hundred words, but yeah, that’s about it.”
The first note of the laugh escapes her lips; she grabs the rest of it by its tail and pulls it back down wherever it came from. If only he wasn’t so charming. Attractive and charming. And good in bed. Not that any of that excuses the audacity of his request. But he is very good in bed.
“Well, I’m glad I didn’t have to wait through a whole cheeseburger for that. Although I’m pretty sure I’ve lost my appetite. I guess that leaves us with the question: why in the name of God, Eliot, what I agree to something like this?” She glances at Rupert, who declines to supply the name of God. Something Anglo-Saxon, probably, given the angel’s name.
Having caught him off guard, Jennie wonders how the conversation will play out. Last time she was the surprised one. But even flustered, Eliot is persuasive. “I don’t know,” he begins, “a lot of reasons. A lot of reasons that might not seem apparent at first, because it’s unconventional and because, yeah, there are some very good reasons not to. But think what this would mean for our lives. Enormous changes, yes, but also a chance to fix things, and maybe even a chance to have the future we used to talk about.”
“I don’t ever remember talking about a future that involved raising your child by another
woman. And how the hell is this a chance? It’s a complication, if anything. Both of us would be stuck in a relationship for the kid’s well-being, even if the relationship itself imploded again. That’s the bright future you’re trying to sell me.”
If there was any doubt before this moment that she still loves him, the wound his expression of pain causes her confirms the fact. “I know,” Eliot says, his voice cracking slightly, “that it wouldn’t be simple. I know it might even feel like I’m trying to force you into something. Please believe it isn’t like that. You know as well as I do that it was only the distance that wrecked our relationship before. I’ll be finishing school this spring, only four months from now, and then I’m back for good. We’ll have a few months together before the baby is born, just to work on us. No, it’s not the ideal arrangement. But I’ve had time to think, and the fact is I’ve never been happier than when I was with you. I want you, I want a family with you, and though this isn’t the way I wanted it to play out, I still think it’s worth it.”
“Easy for you to say, when it’s your child we’d be rearing.”
Eliot becomes preoccupied with the pattern of the wood grain on their table.
“I just don’t see,” she says, “how this is supposed to be a healthy way to rebuild a relationship.” If Jennie expected this conversation to be any easier, any less devastating, the second time around, she is finding that it was a stupid expectation.
“If not for me,” Eliot says, “do it for the baby.”
“The baby that doesn’t even exist yet.”
He clasps his head in his hands. “I’m going to be a father, Jennie. I just can’t do it alone.”
“That doesn’t mean I can do it with you.” This is not what she was planning to say.
Suddenly, the conversation is going terribly wrong. This is the thing, the choice, the choice she was planning to correct. But she does not see how she can choose differently. She tries to convince herself that the content of the choice is immaterial: she will not be alive to raise the child. Herself does not heed this logic. Herself chooses instead to say: “I… I can’t.”
Eliot is quiet for long time, his face concealed by his hands. At some point she realizes that he is crying. The careless bastard, crying when he knows it will make her cry as well. It’s discourteous is what it is. Her eyes sting as tears form. “She’s,” he begins. “The mother. She’s going to… she said she’d abort it if I won’t keep it. And I can’t let that happen. It’s my child, Jennie. I can’t raise a kid by myself. I never wanted to ask something like this of you, and I swear I’ll spend my whole life making it up to you, just…” He pauses for a long time, comes up short. His hands clasp hers now; his brown eyes are bloodshot red. “Please.”
Involuntarily, she shakes her head. The muscles in her thighs tense as if to rise, to retreat to the bathroom until he leaves, just as she did before. She stands slowly, and the helpless look, the hopeless look passes over him like the sheet the doctor strew over William’s face. She turns away to take her first step, and by chance her gaze meets Rupert’s eyes.
And she remembers. She is here to undo this, not to do this again. And even if she is sure, certain beyond any certainty she has felt in her time alive again, that she would choose one thousand times over the same way she chose before,
this is a different choice. It is not her life, and she must not decide as if it were. The evaluation is all that matters. This is only a test.
She slumps back into her seat, blankly nodding. “Okay. Okay.”
The light returns to her ex-lover’s face.