Of course, the theater date itself was idyllic, the reason not so much. I’d needed to escape from my mom, especially since I’d heard her talking to Jay Fierstein, and he was on his way over.
“Can’t wait to see you, handsome,” she’d cooed into the phone as I walked through the kitchen to make a piece of toast, and my chest burned when I heard her voice. I stopped in place, my hand clutched around the fridge handle as she planned her next tryst. I wanted to claw her eyes out, claw his eyes out, claw out my own.
Instead, I turned to Noah and to Broadway and to show tunes, and we spent the afternoon holding hands in the darkened Winter Garden Theatre as songs from Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons took me away. That evening, we stopped in Sardi’s for appetizers, and I told him about the phone call.
“I wish I could just make up a new story for my life before this year.”
“What would yours be, K? What would you change?”
I reached for his hand under the table. “Everything. First, my mom would never have cheated on my dad. Second, she would never have asked me to lie about it. Third, they never would have gotten divorced.”
He nodded and stroked my hand gently, knowing this small action of his thumb against my palm soothed me. But more than that, telling him soothed me. Telling someone soothed me. He was maybe the only one besides my dad and me who knew my mom had cheated.
“You know that about her, right? This isn’t news, is it?”
He nodded. “Yes. I mean, it’s not like Jewel and I ever discuss it, but it’s not that hard to figure out. It never was. Besides, I think I have good radar in that department.”
“What department? Detecting cheating?”
“No. Detecting addictive behavior.”
It was the first time anyone had ever used the word addict in relation to my mom. It was strangely freeing to hear it, to know that someone else got what was going on. I didn’t feel so alone with her secrets.
“Did you want to rewrite your backstory with your mom?” I asked.
“Absolutely. I would have done anything to get her to stop drinking,” he said, and he sounded sad and wistful at the same time. “I wish I had known what she was like without all the drinking. I would have loved to have known her sober.”
“Yeah. I know what you mean.”
“When I was younger, I used to try to get her to stop. I would hide her beers, or empty them out. But she always found a way to get more. And so all I could do was just not drink myself.”
I nodded, because that’s what I was trying to do too. I was trying to not be her, to not make the same choices my mom made. She didn’t know how to love. She only knew the merry-go-round. I vowed to never go on the merry-go-round.
And so eventually we made plans.
As the fall cruised along, we laid out on a blanket one Sunday afternoon in Central Park on a rare warm day in October. We were off in a secluded spot, one of those cloistered corners where tall trees and stout bushes formed little inlets for lovers. We ate strawberries and cherries and mini hummus sandwiches. As the sun dipped farther in the sky, Noah read a new script from one of his other clients, and I read a book about the Impressionists and Manet’s friendship with Charles Baudelaire, since my dad was helping a collector to acquire an Impressionist painting in an upcoming auction at Sotheby’s. I wanted to be able to talk to my dad about his work, to converse with him about his job.
I finished the final few pages and then put the book down.
“Good book?”
“My head is stuffed full of facts about the Impressionists now,” I said.
He placed the script pages next to him. “Tell me something about the Impressionists.”
“Well, they were pretty much hopped up on absinthe all the time.”
“So they were getting by with a little help from their friends,” he quipped.
“Indeed.” I stretched out closer to Noah, resting my head on his chest. “It makes you think too about all the things that were going on in France at the time of the Impressionists. The Franco-Prussian War and the French Third Republic, and then in the midst of it all, this beautiful form of painting real life emerged. There has to be a connection.”
“Look at you, already the art history major.”
“And I haven’t even applied to college yet.”
“Ah, college. That thing that happens in a year.”
I shifted again, so I could look at his face, rather than the sky. “Yes, this time next year I’ll be in college.”
“Where do you want to go?” he asked, and it wouldn’t take a rocket scientist to detect the nerves in his voice.
“NYU,” I said. There was no point pretending I wanted to go anyplace else. NYU was my first choice and always had been. I’d already finished most of the application. “I’ve always wanted to go to NYU. I don’t want to leave New York. This is my home. I love it here.”
“Can’t argue with that.”
“Plus, it’s close,” I said, and now the butterflies in me took off racing. I’d thrown it out there. I’d said it. The future of us, the possibility of an us next year and beyond.
He traced the edge of my hair with his index finger. “It is close,” he said, but he sounded noncommittal.
“Do you want me to be close?”
“I want you to be where you want to be. I want you to go to school where you want to go.”
“Right,” I said, knowing he was being magnanimous, knowing he had to say that, because he’d never be the guy who held his girlfriend back, especially not over such a massive life choice. “But now that you know my first choice happens to be a few blocks away, what do you think?”