The boy in the Zoom box had a sullen expression that said, I hate my job. Or so I imagined. His job was to take notes. Mine was to book the gig designing the invitation for his law firm’s seventy-fifth anniversary. My name (my professional one, the pre-marital Lizzie Schaefer) had come up as a recommendation of a recommendation, so there was confusion among the five lawyers tiled before me about who exactly I was, whether I had indeed been hired, and could we just get on with this? As they discussed my fate (and who would be responsible in the event that I fucked it all up), I studied the boy. He seemed constrained in his suit and tie. He had thick dark eyebrows; his hair was maybe an inch past regulation for this stuffy firm. He had a super-hero’s jawline, a power-chin. I couldn’t stop looking at it. I set my Zoom on Speaker View, so that if he talked, I’d get a close-up of his face, maybe catch his eye-color. His screen name was Braddock Assistant (He/Him). Suddenly, the frame went full, blonde (She/Her).
“Lizzie?”
“Yes!”
“Does the timeline and budget work for you? Can you do this in three weeks? The logo, the invite, the collateral?”
“As long as I get the approvals on time, no problem.”
“OK, great. Jeremy will coordinate. Jeremy?”
With a throat-clearing cough, the boy’s face filled my screen.
“Will do,” he said in a deep voice that matched his chin.
Eye color: inconclusive.
No, this is not that kind of story. I did not fuck the boy in the box. I would see him only once in person, and that would be… illuminating, ultimately disappointing. But that was not his fault: his chin exceeded all expectations in three dimensions! No, because of me. Because of course. The gorgeous twenty-something did to this fading forty-something what he was put on earth to do: arouse, confound, and conjure the one thing I had in abundance over him – experience. Meaning memories. In my case, memories of madness.
But I had yet to make that connection as I drove to pick up my daughter from aftercare at the YMCA. I was buzzy with joy. It was a bright fall day, and I had just booked my first job since Claire was in diapers. I was back among the semi-employed and being paid as if I had options (God bless the lawyers); making some me-money (although my accountant husband was bound to have his own annoyingly practical plans for the extra income). Creatively, the job would be a cinch. And my virtual concierge through the process would be a young hunk who clearly wished he could be doing anything else while I fantasized about doing him.
Ms. Braddock’s Assistant’s follow up email soon appeared in my inbox, crisp and bullet pointed. Dates and deliverables. Please Docu-Sign the agreement. Best, Jeremy. I was underwhelmed. It would take some coaxing to get him to reveal a personality, if he had one. I hoped he did.
Now that I had a job, I needed a place to work. Easier said than done in our cramped little house. My dusty desk and desktop computer were hidden behind an unused puppet theater (What were we thinking?), itself hidden behind an elaborate dollhouse and its many colorful extensions and richly decorated shoebox additions stretching the length of our Barbie- and Lego-strewn sunroom. Plastic toys seemed to metastasize, to colonize every available space as Claire, and her imagination, grew. For the most part, that delighted me – I loved hearing her little voice make littler voices as she narrated her private world. I was not prepared for her shock, her deep outrage when she came home to find I had carved out a corner for Mommy, altering the world she had constructed with such care.
“You are a horrible person!” She tearfully declared and stormed off to her room.
It would take a lot of leftover Halloween candy and extra screentime to win her back. I was not above bribery. In the meantime, with the reassuring chime and a staticky starting-up, the old iMac glowed to life. My Adobe program even opened to a familiar empty canvas bordered by digital tools. I was back in business.
Like most people, the half-life of my dreams was mere minutes before images and narratives dissolved. Sometimes even shorter, since I was usually being woken up by a chatty little girl with a lot to tell me. But occasionally, they lingered and followed me through the day. It didn’t take long for the boy to appear in an actual dream, Elvis-eyes all over me. But God forbid I get a nice personal porno to wallow in and wake up from, sweaty and a little guilty. Instead, Jeremy quickly refracted into Jacques, the mad, ever-out-of-reach lover of my early-twenties. Of course: the chin! Rather than basking in carnal delights, I found my dream-self pursuing his elusive body, overwhelmed with emotion – raw, uncut, twenty-something passion – mixed with the certainty that he was the One, the only One, the capital L Love that would make me whole. It was so fucking real. I woke in the sting of loss and lay in those vibrations for an hour, listening to Neil’s soft snore. When it was too late to fall back to sleep, I got up, made the coffee and stewed. A message had been delivered from my unconscious. But that didn’t mean I had to open it, much less answer it.
No.
Eight years into marriage, five years into motherhood, I had given very little thought to Lizzie’s Wild Years. My daughter, bless her, lived insistently in the present and gave me little quarter for personal reflection. Which was its own kind of freedom – where did my navel gazing ever really get me? I won’t lie and say I never thought of Jacques – Neil hate-followed his fan page on Facebook and liked to mention if one of his old movies was playing on cable – but I had no attachment to his memory. It was an entirely different life and, I liked to think, I was an entirely different person. I didn’t have to remember, anyway. I had journaled obsessively during those years so that future historians could trace the artist as a young woman (I was going to be important). Those embarrassing volumes were in a box in my attic. Where they belonged.
And where did I belong? Fickle fate – or the arc of middle-class history – had landed me in a dormered cape on a leafy block in Lindenhurst, Long Island. The SUV in the driveway. The back yard. The swing set. The mortgage. Bliss. I didn’t want for a hunk in my life, as my devoted husband (To what? To whom?) had heard the starting gun of middle age and begun running, literally, obsessively, in the opposite direction, becoming a better-late-than-never athlete. His birth age was forty-three. His biological age was now ten years younger. He worked long hours on Wall Street and in his free time (which he seemed to have more of than me, somehow), he trained for marathons, triathlons, iron mans… it was a source of both pride and strain in our little family unit. But I didn’t mind the results: his sinewy new muscles were very nice indeed. As for me, I seemed to thrive in motherhood, to my feminist’s surprise. Love poured out of me from the moment Claire was born. Sometimes it shined on Neil, sometimes it swerved around him. Despite all the stress, tedium and sheer exhaustion, I found my daughter endlessly fascinating. I loved being her mom. Professionally, well, that was another matter. But now, with my daughter in first grade and eligible for after care three days a week– granting me a few more hours a day to rebuild my career, such as it was – I could contribute to our collective future. I was back.
The law firm needed an anniversary logo before I could design the invitation or any other artwork. I labored over sevens and fives in all shapes and hues trying to find something original. But there were only so many ways to draft the mark within the firm’s strict, twenty-page style-guide that they provided (summary: be boring). Eventually, I sent Jeremy a range of options, from the staid to the celebratory. Too many, it turned out. Hoping to spark some dialogue, some feedback and direction, I instead received a short note: Ms. Braddock would like to know which version you recommend. Translation: no one wanted to make a decision. They were paying me for that. Surely, Jeremy, you have a favorite, I didn’t write back. Let’s Zoom on this. Let’s do coffee. Bring your chin.
The last time I really wrestled with memories of Jacques was right after Neil and I got engaged. In the space between I will, and I do, I freaked out big time. Think of it: forever. I never doubted that I loved Neil. The world, and my mother (and his mother, I’m proud to say), were absolutely clear that he was the perfect match for me – my last, best hope for stability and happiness. I couldn’t have agreed more. I just couldn’t sleep. I would sit in our darkened living room, smoking Gauloises, and thinking about my lost French lover. At least I did until even I was sick of me and climbed back into bed with that mad boy’s human opposite.
But that affair was now twenty years ago. I was a respectable married, suburban mom. A grownup. Employed-ish. Why did I suddenly feel haunted by him? Maybe it was time for a review of the primary sources. So, the next day I kissed my husband goodbye; fed, dressed and helped my little princess onto the school bus; checked my emails for directions from my only client. Nada. And with the few hours granted to me by the clock and my nagging conscience, I pulled down the ladder to the attic and climbed up into my past.
It was all there. Behind the Christmas ornaments, baby clothes, baby bathtub, baby this and baby that, the boxes of whatever, were the neglected archives of my youth. The journals were easy to find, and I knew which pored-over volumes to pull out. But next to them were the stacked canvases. So many. And the sad easel on its side. The paintbox of gnarled tubes and dried brushes. And piles of sketch books large and small. I dug through those until I found the one I was looking for. I could feel my heartbeat as I opened the charcoaled pages.
Because, naturally, the first time I beheld Jacques Xavier Giraud, he was naked. The young actor was making extra money modeling for life drawing classes at Pratt. I was new to it and still felt a rush when the robes came off. The assignment that day was to capture a series of poses. My hand had to quickly sketch the arc of his back and shoulders before he changed position. I had to see and not see. Capture his curves but not linger on details, like his shy, downturned eyes. With each turn of his body, each flip of my sketchbook page, I worked to distill some essence of him into black lines, always a step behind the next change. It was frustrating and exhilarating. He was beautiful.
And now there he was once again, in my lap, page after blackened page in the dim attic light. My still-in-training artists’ hands had indeed caught the turn of his face, how his neck met his shoulders, his perfect butt… details I would study closely, obsessively, again and again in the ensuing years. The twenty-one-year-old girl who drew this did not know that, of course. The fleeting glimpse was the point of the exercise. If only I had left him there. But now, as my eyes traced the lines of him, and I felt the dopamine-hit of his memory, these innocent sketches felt deeply erotic. I caught my breath, closed the pad, and put it away, hiding it under the stack. I picked up the journals and climbed back down.
I was extra good the rest of the day. I selected what was clearly the best design and completed the 75th Anniversary logo. Sent. I picked up Claire, sang her favorite Kids Bop songs in the car and then sat before her dollhouse as she explained to me how the residents were dealing with the changes to their living conditions imposed upon them by an unfeeling world. I cooked two dinners so both my daughter and husband could have their respective favorites. I granted extra SpongeBob time, just because. I greeted my husband warmly, maybe too warmly, but he didn’t mind. I listened to his stories about his day, the politics of the trading floor. Really listened. I read Claire three books before bedtime. And, later, when the lights went out, did I come on to Neil a little aggressively? And did I display more than the usual heavy breathing when he touched me back? And did I think about a long-lost lover for a moment or two during our lovemaking? Maybe. Did it work? No, not really. Because, in the act itself, as in all other ways, the two men were entirely different. I opened my eyes and loved the one I was with. Honest. And finally, with my family sated and sound asleep, I crept downstairs and read my detailed account of the last time I completely lost my mind.
It’s surprising how memory works. My mind had compressed and edited my Jacques period into a single timeline, maybe a year or two. But in reality, it was broken up over three, nearly four years of starts and stops. From twenty-one to almost twenty-five. Pratt to after-Pratt. Memory had also edited out all the other boys who passed through my life before, during and after him. Good dates, bad dates. Mini crushes. I was a busy girl! Also, I had friends. For a while, I even had a great shrink. Their collective counsel, sadly, was lost on me. Because I was mad about the boy, you see. And I was not a passive girly-girl being toyed with by the mean bad French boy. No. I wanted him. I pursued le merde out of him. Reading my own handwriting (and well aware of the consequences), I couldn’t help but cheer young Lizzie on, envious of her faith in the power of love to change another person. And then it was three in the morning. I closed the journal and sat with the feelings coursing through me. It was delicious.
They say no musician ever sets out to play smooth jazz. Maybe it’s the same for artists who become graphic designers. That was certainly the case for me. I had skills that I could perform in exchange for money. Maybe even a bit of taste and talent, although that was rarely called upon. More often, those qualities needed to be suspended in order to serve the client’s blinkered vision. But you do what you’ve got to do to live the artist’s life, until you eventually are living a graphic artist’s life, with your old canvases staring down reproachfully from your expensive New York City apartment walls. Which don’t pay for themselves.
What was the half-life of that dream?
For most of my time at Pratt, I was a mediocre artist. Which is neither a dig, nor false modesty. I had technical skills, a flair for color and composition. But so did a lot of people. There were some very talented artists in my classes. I wasn’t one of them. I just didn’t know who I was, and it showed in my work. But something happened in my final year. I tapped into something deeply personal. My canvases grew darker, seemingly chaotic. Heartbreak will do that to a girl. But from within those muddy cloudscapes, forms began to appear, sometimes in human shape, sometimes not. When the wolves began to peak out through my brushstrokes, my professor urged me on. Go there. Go deeper. It was actually scary. I’d try and fake it, fall back on my old tropes, but she’d call me out in class.
“What are you afraid of?” She asked.
For my thesis, I produced three oversized canvases, a triptych of emergence that physically and mentally drained me. I knew it was the best work I had ever done. And others agreed. It was strange and exhilarating to be the recipient of praise and attention. To see my paintings in an actual gallery. And although I was under no illusions about how difficult it would be to succeed as an artist, I had hope. Sometimes, even confidence. I just had to figure out a way to earn a living in the meantime. You know the rest. For years when asked what I did, I would proudly say, I’m an artist. Then, I’d add, so as not to sound pretentious, but I do graphic design. At some point, around thirty, it became, I’m a graphic designer but also an artist. And then I dropped artist all together because who’s kidding whom? And then I became a mom. And then I found myself digging in my attic for proof of my former promise. As you do.
After a week of no response, I reached out to Jeremy to let him know I needed to move forward with the invitation design if we were to meet our timeline.
Sounds good, he wrote back.
Even simple projects take time. There are a thousand choices to be made, both technical and aesthetic. Over the next week, I weighed every pixel of the four paneled invitation, finding threads to connect them into a single, elegant idea that balanced legacy and hipness. Even within the limitations available, I impressed myself with the solutions I came up with. I felt my artist-self emerging – invisible to all but me – through the final layout. I may have been a hack, but I was good at what I did. The space between morning school bus and after care pick up flew by. Invitation, envelope, reply card, reply card envelope, web page banner, social media assets (alternates, free of charge). I uploaded the files on time and on budget. It felt great.
Ready for my next assignment, Jeremy.
His reply?
Crickets.
Most evenings, after everyone was in bed, if I wasn’t too exhausted, I read the journals, or paged through old sketchbooks, old letters, random photographs. Twenty-one-old Lizzie Schaefer was very cute, if I do say so myself. I had a bright smile, clear skin and unruly hair. I was neither skinny nor fat, and usually hid my assets in paint-splattered overalls and bohemian chic. I was reasonably attractive to males of the species. I did OK. But I did not date models. So, when I saw the Life Drawing Adonis at a friend’s party in Bed Stuy the week after he disrobed on that pedestal, I blushed but did not approach him. At some point, while cornered with my friend Sally, I saw her eyes widen in near alarm before I turned to see him approaching us, smiling shyly.
“I remember you,” he said to me, sketching the air with an invisible pencil. I smiled back, stunned at the sight of this beautiful man, the form of him no less remarkable for being clothed. He had an accent. And that chin. I must have missed my cue, because he paused. “Do you remember me?”
“Vaguely,” I said.
My pretense at coolness sent Sally into a fit of laughter. “Maybe if you take your clothes off, it will jog her memory,” she said.
He looked confused. She turned and struck a classical pose. He beamed and bent toward me.
“You want me to take off my clothes?”
“Rain check,” I said and held out my hand. “Lizzie Schaefer.”
He took it. “Jacques Giraud.”
Holy fucking shit, I thought.
I did not record that scene in my journal. But I remembered every beat of it. At the time, I humble-bragged to myself about meeting that cute French model with poor English and talking to him most of the night until Sally dragged me away to some bar to find some boy she was stalking. Because we never know what events are going to be important. In my twenties, in art school, in New York City, people came in and out of my life constantly. And usually, I chose the wrong boy or new girlfriend or artist to become obsessed with. But soon, I realized that this gorgeous French boy was maybe a little obsessed with me. He called me. We’d meet for coffee. His English was very limited – and my French was worse. That forced us to communicate through a narrow vocabulary, which was frustrating and exhilarating. He had a goofy sense of humor. When he didn’t have the words to describe someone, he would mime them perfectly. Actor training. And although we both enjoyed each other’s company, part of me did not fully understand or accept why this specimen of international male beauty was so fascinated by little Long Island Me. How was I exotic to anyone? And like the artist who could not fully accept praise, I did not really understand what to do with his attention, which was both charged and chaste. So, when he touched my hand across that tabletop, letting his index finger stroke my wrist, it felt all the more erotic. His warm, gentle palm at the small of my back as we walked sent shock waves through me. Those very French kisses on the cheek at the start and end of each encounter brought the musky smell of his skin into my body.
In that first bloom of discovery and excitement, I felt a new clarity of vision. I tried to pour that onto my canvases, with mixed results. I could see it, but I couldn’t recreate it. The scent of him. The tingle in my skin when he touched me. My classmates and teachers saw an incoherent muddle. But not Jacques. When I finally coaxed him to my dorm room and nervously revealed the sketches of his naked body (a little on the nose, but sometimes a girl has to take charge), his face lit up. He delighted in seeing himself through my eyes. I remember the relief, then the naked joy of being seen, finally, through my work. I put my arms around him and kissed him. He froze, then finally, finally, kissed me back. Really kissed me.
Even then, he moved slowly. We did not have sex that night. It was both frustrating and kind of beautiful, the delay and the waiting, the growing menu of our make out sessions. But I didn’t want to go around the bases, I wanted to devour him. His hesitancy began to feel less like a sign of respect than a withholding. Boy, did I fill some pages of my journals with sexually frustrated rage and speculation. Was he broken? Catholic? Did he want to marry me?
But it wasn’t complicated. He had a girlfriend in Paris. And she was coming to visit. So, would it be OK if we took a break for a few weeks?
A break?
Wait, a girlfriend?
“Delphine,” he said sheepishly. Like that name would mean anything to me.
A younger (less boy-crazy) Lizzie or an older (been there, done that) Lizzie would have received this particular request for what it was – invitation to certain misery – and replied, “Merci, it’s been great knowing you.” Only louder, with more expletives. But the Lizzie I was at this particular point in my life, sexually awake, falling hard and ready to believe that this girl, this Delphine, was an inconvenience, a speed bump to l’amour veritable, just cried and whined and swallowed my pride and agreed.
D’accord!
I remember those next three weeks of Delphine-imposed radio silence as a time of intense loneliness, depression and rage. I couldn’t sleep. I couldn’t draw or paint. Somehow, I was supposed to go about my life while the boy I loved fucked his model girlfriend whom, I imagined, had walked right off a fashion runway, onto an Air France jet, and into his bedroom. I hated her. I hated him. My journals are full of ALL CAPS RAGES and EXCLAMATION POINTS!!! My friends were sympathetic to a point.
“Did he lie to you?”
“By omission.”
“Does he love you?”
“I think so.”
“Did you fuck him?”
“Not yet.”
“How do you say, The Other Woman, in French?”
Fortified by my friends, I cycled through the stages of grief in record time and determined that beautiful Jacques Giraud was a mistake I did not have to make. After three weeks, I was able to go whole minutes without thinking about him. I didn’t call him. And he didn’t call me. Which was fucking annoying since I knew the girl had to have flown back home by then. Maybe he had also made the mature decision to be true his amoureuse. After four weeks, the heartbreaking reality had sunk in. It was over. I was free.
From the journals:
Shithead called me, sounding artificially happy. Within minutes, he was crying. I told him why I can’t see him. He begged me to come over.
No, I said.
He pleaded.
I laid it out clearly. Boundaries. Respect. Integrity. Maturity. Your girlfriend.
He asked again, softly, and I melted.
That fucking accent.
As I stepped onto the subway for the long ride under the river to the Upper West Side, I could feel myself stop thinking. All my strategies, all my mature decisions had flown away. Across town was a man who wanted to hold me as much as I wanted to hold him. My body was in charge.
He buzzed me in and met me at the door, grinning, looking beautiful. We went to his tiny bedroom, and I took him into my arms. We held each other, tightly, for ten minutes. We kissed and clung and talked and fucked for two hours. More. It was…
The overhead light switched on and I jumped out of my skin.
“Jesus Christ!” I yelled, slamming the journal shut.
Neil stood by the stairs in his underwear, squinting.
“What are you doing?”
“Nothing! Go to bed!”
He gave me an annoyed look and walked to the kitchen. “I was just getting some water. What the fuck?”
My heart was pounding.
I feel it’s important to state here and now that I loved my husband. Full stop. There was not a day when I didn’t know that. Even when I wanted to strangle him. But our marriage was far from perfect. And not just because we were cranky, perpetually exhausted forty-something parents. The truth was, before Jeremy jump-started my libido, we hadn’t had sex in months. Which had become the pattern. And if I ever lost track on our rate of intercourse, he was sure to remind me. That was another source of tension between us. So, when I became more touchy-feely all of the sudden, he noticed. And far from oblivious to my midnight wallowing, he put two and two together. How did I know?
“Bonjour mon amour chéri!” he sang-song’ed brightly one morning as I hugged my pillow in shame.
Freud coined a term: cathexis. The attachment to a person or object. Otherwise known as falling in love. Which you are supposed to do, commanded to do by every stupid song and every stupid movie and every stupid book. And by your own stupid libido, which means, your own body. And my body was all in. Achingly in. As I read through page after page of mood swings and self-importance (mine and his) I could feel, between the lines, the power of sex in that young woman’s life. The thinking, the planning, the anticipation of touch was often even more powerful than the act itself. Was Jacques a great lover? Graded on a curve, maybe. He didn’t have to be. His body was scrumptious. His scent ropey and intoxicating. His touch was insistent. Hungry. I fell into him. Under him. Over him. After sex, he liked to pose naked and let me draw him.
After several nights in his evoked presence, the embarrassing memories of that stupid boy and that silly girl I was, I felt a rush of gratitude for Neil, for Claire, for the life we built together. The sippy cups. The car payments. The whole suffocating deal. I even scraped myself out of bed at five the next Saturday morning, lifted and bundled sleepy Claire into the car seat and drove with Neil to Sag Harbor for his next Run For Life marathon. Which meant standing around with a bored child, drinking bad coffee and having to pee for hours while waiting for the runners to return. And then, finally, there was my Neil, sweaty, glowing, wincing, proud, huffing and sprinting the final quarter mile to the finish line and our cheering arms.
Later, while I drove us home, I felt Neil staring at me. Claire dozed in her car seat behind us. I had been thinking about Jacques and suddenly I felt a rush of guilt like he was reading my thoughts.
“You ran well today,” I said.
“For my age bracket.”
“There were a lot of people younger than you who finished far behind you.”
“Of course. There always are. I’m not competing against them.”
I changed lanes to let an aggressive black BMW pass on my left.
“Who are you competing against?”
He turned and looked ahead and shrugged.
“You tell me.”
I could feel my cheeks flush.
“What does that mean?” I asked in soft, testing voice.
He stared forward. I reached for his hand, and he took it and gave a light, reassuring squeeze. I held it there for a mile or so, until it felt awkward, leaden. I pulled my hand back, softly and returned it to my lap.
The next night, I was back in:
Jacques finally came over. He pushed me away when I tried to hug him.
Don’t be a jerk, I said.
What is jerk? He said, pretending, as he often does, not to know certain words.
We sat in silence.
I feel strawnge, he said, finally. I have a prohblem.
I put my arms around him and kissed his face. I’d been waiting to taste him all day. He was unresponsive. I kept at it. Slowly, he warmed up and put his tongue in my mouth. I could feel his erection.
Do you want to make love? He asked.
We took off our clothes and climbed in bed. He acted shy. It was strange, disconnected, sex. He climaxed, and then I rolled on top of him and finished.
He will never leave her.
I told him he doesn’t know how to love. That he did not treat me in a loving way. He did not deny it. He asked if we could be friends.
Fuck you, Jacques, I said.
He began to cry.
Fucking actors.
I tell him I will never be his friend, only his lover. I love you, I said. If I can’t have you, I can’t see you.
I told Delphine about you, he confessed.
And..?
She didn’t want to know about it.
And..?
And on and on and on. Page after page. Year, I am afraid, after year, albeit with long breaks. The turmoil fed my art, but it bled me dry. The times when we were together always felt precious, temporary. I was angry at him all the time. But also, grateful. He believed in my art. He made me feel beautiful and desired. But not enough. Never enough. At one point, during a long, No-Jacques period, I met a boy, a journalist, who treated me with kindness and respect. He was also from Long Island. No translation necessary. We had no-drama dates, easy sex, long New York Times Sunday mornings, movies with friends. One might even call him a boyfriend. But the more he leaned into me, the more I pulled away. One night, we went to a Chinese restaurant and as we sat down at a booth next to a wall-mirror, I saw myself with this boy and my heart sank. At first I didn’t know why. I kept looking at the couple in the mirror. Something was wrong with the picture. And then I knew. He was the wrong boy. Not long after that, I got a text from Jacques. I dumped the boy and dove back in, knowing it was a mistake.
My phone rang at seven in the morning. It was Jeremy.
“The partners hate the invitation,” he said.
“What?!”
“They hate the logo. They hate the design. They hate everything.”
“Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait… but they approved the concept. Didn’t they approve it?”
“Yes, I mean no, I mean some did, but not all… oh, fuck me!”
Somewhere along the chain of approvals, Jeremy had dropped the ball. The lack of response to my work was not indifference. It was incompetence.
“You have to come in and revise everything,” he said.
“I can be much more efficient working from home…”
“No, no, no. Ms. Braddock insisted. You have to work here,” he pleaded. “She wants to see everything… please. You have to come here.” I could picture his chin trembling while I felt the gut punch of failure.
I arranged for Claire to be picked up from after care by her friend Lilly’s mom. Neil would come home early to take her home. I got my precious person onto her bus and barely made the train to Penn Station. Although I was agitated and anxious about the work (did they really hate everything?), I was also excited to meet Jeremy in the flesh. I sat on the blue-grey seat of the crowded train and watched the Long Island suburbs slip by my window, like a rewind of a video taking me back to Manhattan, playground of my youth. I could feel a restless vibration on the surface of the skin. Close to nervousness. Near Anxiety. But neither. Will there be joy or disappointment? The only promise: proximity. I pictured his face. Will he shake hands? Will he put his warm hand on the small of my back as he leads me into his office? I texted him my ETA.
It had been a long time since I faced a morning commute. The crowded warren of Penn Station. The race to the One Train. The stampede to the Shuttle to Grand Central. The Sardine Can Six Train. I used to get a thrill out of this mob scene. I belonged here. Now, I felt jostled and shoved and by the time I climbed the dank stairs up into the light of Lexington Avenue, I was completely disoriented. I walked West to Madison when I should have headed East to Third. The building was a weird oval-shaped marble and glass tower. I felt winded and harried by the time I stepped off the elevator on the fifty-second floor to find a stressed-out Jeremy behind a glass door. He punched a button that let me in.
“Jeremy?” I smiled.
“Hi,” he said sharply. “This way.”
He led me down a long, quiet hallway. It had a monastic feel. Soft voices and quiet keystrokes of lawyers in their offices hard at work for billable hours. Jeremy was shorter than I expected, maybe five-two, and had a compact muscular build. Round butt. Thick neck. He stopped before a tall office door and took a deep breath before knocking tentatively. He looked at me quickly. He was scared. A voice called back, and he opened the door and there was a clearly unhappy Ms. Braddock (She/Her) behind a desk. She wore glasses and her blonde-streaked hair was pulled tightly back, revealing dark roots.
“She’s here,” he said.
It was tempting to join Jeremy’s panic and this woman’s clear disappointment and feel humiliated and ashamed. And I did, for a moment. But of course, I hadn’t fucked up. I did good work, and was told it was approved – by the trembling boy standing next to me.
“We need some changes in the invitation,” she said.
“I understand,” I said. “I’m so sorry.”
“When is the print deadline?” she asked Jeremy.
“Tomorrow morning,” he said.
“Can you do it?” She asked me.
“No problem. I need a place to work and clear instructions on what needs to change.”
She nodded. “Jeremy will set you up. I’ll gather the partner’s notes and forward them to you.”
“Sounds great,” I said, stepping back.
“We’re not paying extra for this,” she warned.
“I wouldn’t dream of it.”
Jeremy led me to a windowless office nearby where I set up my laptop on an empty desk. He got me an extra monitor and the Wi-Fi password. He sat across from me and wrung his hands while I opened the software and loaded the files.
“It’s going to be OK,” I assured him.
He shook his head. “I’m going to lose my job.”
“Not today.”
“You don’t know them.”
I turned to him. “It’s an invitation. We’ll get it fixed. They’ll blame me and you’ll be a hero. Trust me.”
He gave me a look somewhere between helpless and hopeful. His eyes were brown.
“Unless you want to lose your job,” I offered. “We still have time to fuck it up completely.”
He smiled and looked down.
“I’m really sorry.”
“Who’s the partner who hated it the most? Let’s get him on the phone.”
Jeremy and I spent the rest of the day talking to lawyers, getting their conflicting, graphically illiterate notes and reshaping the logo and the invitation from my semi-inspired design into a bland corporate compromise that satisfied everyone and no one. Jeremy actually had a good eye and sense of what people would like. I bit my lip and killed my darlings. It was a long, excruciating day. Finally, I submitted the design package by email for approval while Jeremy ordered sushi for dinner. I called Neil and let him know I’d be home late.
“Welcome back to corporate life,” he said, alluding to the many times I expressed annoyance at his occasional long hours.
“What are you talking about? I’m living the dream,” I joked.
And yes, of course, Jeremy– while still handsome and possessing a beautiful, most kissable chin – had transformed over those hours from a fuckable hunk into a scared young man. When we were waiting for dinner to arrive, I asked him, “What are you doing in this place?”
He shrugged. “My dad.”
“Wants you to be a lawyer.”
He nodded.
“And you want to be…?”
He opened his phone and checked his email.
“An artist.” I said.
He shook his head.
“Writer. Musician. Poet. Astronaut. Bodybuilder. Actor.”
He blushed.
“Actor,” I said. “That’s quite a dream.”
He scrolled with his thumb. “I did some acting in school.”
“Were you any good?”
He smiled shyly, eyes still fixed on his phone.
“Were you?”
He nodded shyly. I felt a wave of compassion for him. And annoyance. This stupid, gorgeous kid was hiding, miserable, in a glass tower to please his parents while all across this city young people with a lot less privilege and a lot more to lose were taking risks, daring to dream aloud…
“Jeremy,” I said impatiently. He flinched and I caught myself. I leaned toward him and found a different voice, a mentor, maybe, or a mother: “Don’t let anybody…”
He suddenly grinned and turned the phone toward me.
“Approved!” he shouted.
I fell into an empty three-seater on the nine-twenty-one to Lindenhurst, surprised at how many other people were also just heading home so close to my bedtime. I activated my ticket and closed my eyes as the doors chimed shut and the train rolled forward into the tunnel. Just this morning, in a seat like this, I had nearly trembled in anticipation of seeing Jeremy in the flesh. Now, the very idea seemed absurd. That was quick. I thought about the many, many crushes in my life, how they would move in, flourish within me, then fade away. Why did some vanish, and others linger? Jacques haunted me for years. Any why not? Love has a long half-life. Yes, I called it love, and I still do, even though it paled in comparison to the kinds of love I later found, or grew into, or gave birth to. Call it a half love, or hate-love, or unfinished love. Love doesn’t have to be perfect to be real. It never is, as people never are. Only babies are perfect. And in spite of all the madness and drama, I believed Jacques loved me – not just because he said so (Je t’aime, Elizabeth…be still my heart!), but because I needed to. Otherwise, what a waste of fucking time, you know? I didn’t dare consider the fact that I wasn’t the only artist he ever disrobed for.
Enough.
“Rockville Center!”
I opened my eyes and refreshed my phone and waited for the man in blue to pass down the aisle and acknowledge my fare. On the partition across from me was an advertisement for a community college (another crime against good graphic design) showing smiling faces of diverse youth in caps and gowns striding into the future. Something in their self-satisfied grins reminded me of Jacques’ face plastered on the sides of city buses that summer after we finally (finally!) broke up for good. The young actor scored his lucky break in a supporting role in a hit teen comedy. His stupid chin was everywhere. Cruel Karma for the Other Woman trying to move on with her life. But eventually, of course, I did. In time, Jacques took his talents back to France where he worked steadily in television for years, occasionally appearing, deep in the cast lists of prestige European dramas. I never saw any of them. I just couldn’t bring myself to, until eventually, I found I wasn’t interested.
Massapequa. Massapequa Park…
Over the past few weeks my feelings for Jacques had gone from dormant to nostalgic to buzzing with desire. He was present again and also, as ever, just out of reach, like living inside that dream. But I could already feel that fading as well. Which was a relief. Because tomorrow, I determined, the journals would return to the box in the attic, along with the sketch books and the photographs. But the easel and paint brushes would come down. Claire and her dolls would have to cede even more real estate to Mommy. I was unemployed, after all. I should use my time productively.
Amityville. Copiague.
As I pressed my temple wearily against the cool glass, I wasn’t longing for lost French lovers, or muscular young actors. I wanted only to crawl inside my warm bed and spoon within the arms of my slumbering husband; to sleep briefly, but deeply, before being woken a little too early by the footfalls and sweaty palms of an excited little girl ready to tell mommy and daddy all about her dreams.
Lindenhurst. At last.