topic/heartbreak

“Don’t tell me,” Cheryl said. “That must be Peter Pan and his ma.” She said, “Jon’s personal Bonnie and Clyde.”

“Shut up.”

I had never said that to her before. She stared straight ahead, as if she hadn’t heard me. We went to the elegant restaurant with our elegant, articulate liberal friends. The food was excellent, the wines perfect. We talked about films and politics and law. Cheryl was charming; I was witty. Something terrible had happened between us.

Cheryl and I are divorced now. I think our marriage began to end because of those Friday nights, not because she began having an affair. She was furious because I never took her to meet them. I’m not sure why I didn’t want to, whether I was afraid she would dislike them, or they would dislike her. Something else … some part of me that I was ashamed to let her see.

Harris walked into the kitchen as we were finishing up. He paused, watching us smooth on the monkfruit-sugar frosting. I held my breath.

Almond cookies with jam in the middle, grain-free banana muffins, carrot custard—even when they turned out all wrong Harris always gobbled them up, which was the highest praise. Praise I maybe couldn’t live without. I was suddenly united with a long lineage of women who fixed everything through food; terror can really strip you of your modernity.

If he eats a cupcake we’re going to be okay.

He paused.

“There’s cream in the middle,” Sam said with great urgency. We were both praying.

But Harris was only looking for something and it wasn’t in the kitchen after all.

There was a lovely woman with whom, as a young man, I was smitten. She seemed to have similar feelings for me. We flirted in a harmless way at work (we were concierges at a well-known upscale New York boutique hotel, I won’t say the name but you’d have heard of it). I was married at the time, too young and unhappily, but we’d had an accidental child and I was doing the responsible thing. This is me in a nutshell. I am responsible. I am a good man. I always do the right thing. But is doing the right thing the right thing? Or is doing the right thing the cowardly thing? The thing that doesn’t make waves? The thing with which others cannot find fault? If romantic films have taught us anything, it is that by being responsible we are being irresponsible—to ourselves. To the cosmos. To the narrative. Even to those we need to wrong terribly by leaving them. Because is not it better to be honest with her, him, thon? I think perhaps it is. In the end, my marriage fell apart anyway. She became smitten with an art critic, a mediocre one at that. But it was too late. My Concierge to Merge (as we once jokingly referred to each other) also married an art critic. A separate art critic, although equally mediocre. One marvels at the accidental symmetry of life. And she was happy, ecstatically so, she told me, although I always felt she sounded a tad defensive. And my life was ruined. And I aged. And I look unhappy, ecstatically unhappy. And I don’t sleep at night. And I take pills to help me cope. And it’s not only her, although if I had her, I feel certain I would be fine with every other disappointment, but I don’t, so my professional failures come to the fore. In a sense, the same brand of cowardice that kept me from pursuing my true love kept me from pursuing my true chosen profession. Oh, I made one movie. I made it on a shoestring with money I had borrowed from my wealthy-by-marriage sister. It didn’t do for my career what I had imagined it would, what to this day I believe it should have. It is, and I say this as an objective professional critic with a PhD in the cinema of postwar Europe, perhaps the single most brilliant film of the last twenty years. Certainly, there were problems with it. I won’t say there weren’t. For one thing, it was decades ahead of its time. For another, I concede, it was perhaps too emotionally draining for audiences. Most goers are not looking for an experience that unrelentingly intense, that devastatingly heartbreaking, an experience that will change them forever. And then there were the critics, who were, in a word, jealous. They all want to be filmmakers themselves but do not have the talent, so they expressed their rage with a slew of moderately negative reviews. In some cases, they refused to review it at all.

When he awoke he found that night was falling, one of those melancholy sunsets at the close of a lovely winter's day. He sat up on his bed. still undecided as to what he should do. Often he used to study at that hour, but now his books looked down from their shelves in vain. All those titles spoke of something dead and gone and quite incapable of making him forget for a single instant the painful life-struggle which was still being waged in his breast.

I repeated that I was leaving, but he scoffed, almost laughed. Not just like that you’re not, he said, and we walked in silence for several blocks and I wondered whether there was any ideal criteria for this, whether there was a correct way to end a marriage on nothing more than an amorphous sense of another life just out of reach, a life that might kill me, it seemed, if I didn’t live it. Once inside our apartment again, he asked me to at least keep living with him for another month, to accompany him to his cousin’s wedding, to give him a chance to make the case for our life together, and I agreed to it, hoping that it would make sense, that the simpler course—staying together, staying the same—would come to seem to be the correct course.

On Bleecker Street you catch the scent of the Italian bakery. You stand at the corner of Bleecker and Cornelia and gaze at the windows on the fourth floor of a tenement. Behind those windows is the apartment you shared with Amanda when you first came to New York. It was small and dark, but you liked the imperfectly patched pressed-tin ceiling, the claw-footed bath in the kitchen, the windows that didn’t quite fit the frames. You were just starting out. You had the rent covered, you had your favorite restaurant on MacDougal where the waitresses knew your names and you could bring your own bottle of wine. Every morning you woke to the smell of bread from the bakery downstairs. You would go out to buy the paper and maybe pick up a couple of croissants while Amanda made the coffee. This was two years ago, before you got married.