“You are so not fun. You’re like a gigantic buzzkill,” I say as we amble past the other letters, reading Franz Kafka’s words to the woman he loved: “The doors are shut, all is quiet, I am with you once more.” Then Hemingway to his wife: “If anything happened to you I’d die the way an animal will die in the Zoo if something happens to his mate.”
As I read the words again, I can’t help myself. My mind returns to him, the effects of the bike ride are washed away with words, and I am thinking once more of the man I can’t forget, the one who gave me flowers because he found the heart in one of them. I might keep company with cold, hard facts in my notebooks about my mother, but inside of me, in the places she can’t touch, I know who I am. A purist. A lover of love. I adore love letters, and professions of love, and true, heartfelt moments when two people know they’re meant for each other.
Maybe that’s because I know how it feels. I had it for six perfect months with Noah.
I feel my dad’s arm around me. “What a surprise to see you here,” he says playfully.
“A total shock.”
“Hello, Mr. Stanzlinger.” Lane shakes my dad’s hand even though they’ve met plenty of times. “Good to see you again, Lane.”
My dad leans in closer and tells me, “We’ve already sold ten photographs. I so rock. Say it. Say my dad is the best art consultant in all the world.”
“You are embarrassing me,” I say with a smile, even though he’s not and never could. His clients love him, museums love him. He has an impeccable reputation. Because of him, I plan to study art history when I start at NYU in just a few months.
Someone calls him away, and as I watch him join another group of prospective buyers, I can’t help but feel this familiar flicker of pity for him. He’s this outgoing, savvy, smart businessman, but yet he was totally hoodwinked by my mom. Sometimes, I want to ask if he’s over it. But how do you ever get over that kind of betrayal? Have the wives of all the married men my mom canoodled with gotten over it?
I haven’t. I sucked in all her secrets for years, wrote them down in my notebooks, lied for her, lied with her, until I couldn’t take the pressure of them building up in me anymore.
One day, I told my dad everything.
So that would be me who caused the breakup of my parents’ marriage three years ago. But for anyone keeping track, I really broke up their marriage many years ago. Maybe I do deserve an “A” on my chest. Make it a double “A” for “Aiding and Abetting.”
I stop at a reprint of one of the rarest love letters of all-time. This one is from the writer Honoré de Balzac to the married countess Hańska. “I can no longer think of anything but you.” The letter is gorgeous, but it comes from a situation I can’t abide: an affair.
And that’s when it hits me.
Amends.
I can make amends for being her henchman.
*
“Let me get this straight. You’re going to send love letters to the wives of the men your mom had affairs with?”
I nod, then drain the rest of my espresso before I explain the amends project that arrived fully formed moments ago.
“Yes and no. They won’t be love letters from me. They’ll be more like letters of apology. Anonymous letters. It’s like a karmic way of reversing the damage. I’m already sort of making amends for lying to my dad all those years just by going to the shrink, so now I can make them for what I did to all the other people. I can say I’m sorry without saying ‘Oh, hey there, I’m sorry my mom screwed your husband and I knew about it and did nothing to stop it.’”
“But you couldn’t have stopped it,” Lane points out as he leans forward in his chair for emphasis. We’re at Dr. Insomnia’s Tea and Coffee Emporium in the West Village, the best coffee shop in all the world, or at least in New York, which is the world to me. It’s my world. “Kennedy, don’t you get it? Your mom had the affairs. She asked you to lie. You didn’t do anything wrong. She did, and there’s nothing you could have done.”
“Maybe I could have said something before it went too far,” I say softly as I look down at the small brown cup in front of me. “Maybe if I said something way back when it was all starting, she might have stopped. Or he might have forgiven her before she went too far. So this is my chance. I can write letters to the women she wronged, sort of like a wish for happiness, a hope for more love in the world. Then maybe a line from a famous love letter.”
“Sounds a bit stalkerish.”
“It’s not stalking. It’s like I’m putting the love back into the world that was taken,” I say, the words sticking in my throat, but I push past the lump because it’s time to move beyond all those lies.
“You are obsessed,” he says, tossing his hands up, knowing he can’t convince me otherwise. He arches an eyebrow, shifting to a playful mode. “But yet, I cannot resist an opportunity for potential troublemaking, so I must insist on joining.”
“But you have nothing to make amends for,” I say, since Lane’s in therapy for other reasons. His dad died two years ago.
“I know this is going to sound a bit crazy and radical, but I kind of think it would be fun. You won’t deprive a poor, fatherless boy of a little fun, would you?” he says, dropping his lips into a forced frown.
“Stop it,” I say with a laugh, because only Lane could take the tragedy in his past and turn it into a joke.