36. JACK

Iaccepted that he didn’t want to speak to me. How many missed calls and ignored texts did you need to take the hint? One thing I had learned about love was that you never entirely know what the other person wants or thinks, but sometimes you have to accept that they do want or think something, and it might be different from you. In fact, it might not be you.

A few weeks passed after the trip to London. I stayed in Chicago the whole time. Things should have clarified for me, perhaps, but in fact, they just grew blurrier. There was work, always lots of work, and things with Emma did not move quickly in one direction or the other.

I wondered if I had been caught up in some game of hers in which she was walking through her own fears about divorce rather than any great urgency to get back together. Now that I was back, without Paul, I was aware of how being afraid of your own life can stop you from living it.

***

But even if that’s true, still I found myself retreating further into work, seeking solace in the solitude of my own thoughts, the numbing comfort of staying busy with work, spellbound by the glow of my laptop, the unending demands of clients on my phone, tapping out emails, new projects being discussed, new planning documents or software models being considered.

There was so much to do in both the other offices, so I could have left Chicago if I had wanted, but I avoided returning to New York. The thought of facing Paul, of confronting the wreckage of what had happened in London, filled me with dread. It was not a dread of seeing him. It was a dread of confronting whether or not I had made a terrible mistake.

At the Chicago office, I truly was king. I had a huge office with its own seating area. There was even a private bathroom with a shower in my office, hidden behind a concealed door disguised as a mirror. I could keep changes of clothes there or send out for a new shirt, new socks, if I needed to.

In those weeks, I wouldn’t quite say I lived at the office. I didn’t sleep there on the couch, but my days opened up from first thing in the morning to late at night. Sometimes I headed out to a work dinner, or I had something sent in. My Chicago assistant, Erin, said I was working too hard.

“I know!” I said to her. “Tell my blood pressure!”

She gave me a kind smile.

“But you are, Jack, you know? You are working too hard.”

Zoom calls became my lifeline to the teams in London and New York. Sometimes they were small and sometimes whole-team with tens and tens of little squares with faces in them. But if the name PAUL (NYC) ever appeared in one of those boxes, his picture would be blacked out, and his sound would be muted.

I so wanted to reach out to him. I would go as far as typing out emails to send to him:

“Hey, Paul,” I would type, my fingers moving over the keyboard. “How are you holding up?”

“I miss you,” I wrote in a text once. But I realized that I could not send them. I was his boss, and he believed the worst of me: that I was messing him around, that I was using him in some trivial affair, that this had all been a game.

I wanted to speak to him, touch him, and ask him to believe me, to trust me, but I knew I could not, and that he did not.

***

One day, Emma finally asked me to meet her for breakfast. It had been some days since we had even texted, surprising given the message she had sent me in London. There had been some interest in the house after it had gone on the market, and suddenly, it seemed very real that we were going to sell up and potentially divorce.

The diner she asked to meet me at was one of those places you find downtown – nothing special, quite anonymous. That was probably good: it was a no-man’s land. As I stepped into the brightly lit space, the familiar scent of coffee, eggs, and bacon cooking filled the air. All around was the soft hum of conversation.

I saw Emma sitting in a corner booth, her eyes fixed on the menu in front of her. Seeing me, she lifted her hand in greeting, and I did the same. Smiles flickered over our faces, but so cautiously.

I slid into the seat opposite her in the booth. The high clear backs to the chairs cut off the noise of the rest of the room. The seats had worn vinyl upholstery, the color almost radioactively bright yellow. For a moment, neither of us spoke, gazing at each other.

“Anything look good?” I asked, indicating the menu in her hands.

“Oh, sure,” she said. “I’m talking myself out of having a burger.”

I laughed.

“Man, a breakfast burger?”

“I expect they don’t eat those in London.”

“Nah,” I said. “It’s scones and cream and jam every day there.”

She smiled at me, knowing my corny jokes.

“Jack, it’s been a while. It’s nice to see you,” she said.

I nodded.

“Yeah,” I replied. “You too.”

We fell into an uneasy silence, the kind that can exist between two people who know each other incredibly well, as partners do, but who know they are probably running out of road. A waitress approached, her pen poised expectantly over her notepad, but I said we needed a few more minutes. She breezed off, looking irritated.

“I meant what I said,” Emma said once we were alone. “I have missed you. I’ve missed us.”

I looked into her eyes, searching for her intention toward me about our relationship.

“You’re using past tense,” I said.

“What?”

“You have missed us. Not you do miss us.”

Emma nodded, her eyes glistening unexpectedly. I thought she might say I was being a smart-ass, but she didn’t.

“What do you want, Jack?” she asked. “If you tell me what you want, I might be able to think clearly about what I want.”

“That’s not fair,” I said.

She shrugged.

“I’m sorry.”

I hesitated, the weight of her pressure on me bearing down very hard. I found it suffocating, in fact. She knew how hard it was for me to be so open, to share my deep feelings. It felt a bit like a trick. I had to say the right thing, but I did not know what.

“I want…” I began, but my voice faltered. I thought of something I said to Paul, back at the beginning of us being together, before we had even made love, I think. With Paul, I realized then, I had wanted to be open. I had told him outright what I wanted. That was because I had, in fact, liked him. I had wanted to share myself with him on all sorts of levels.

I did not want that from Emma anymore.

“I want to be in love with someone,” I said finally. “I want that love to be a wonderful, all-encompassing thing. That’s what I want…”

I exhaled long and slow. She gazed at me, and I could see her grow more tearful. She reached across the table, her fingers brushing against mine. But our hands did not entwine.

“I want that, too,” she said. “I want to feel love again.”

I swallowed hard.

“But do you feel that for me, Emma?” I asked. “Is it love we feel or trust? Or is it fear?”

She seemed surprised by the question.

“Fear, Jack?”

“Fear of being out there again, fear of being forty and making ourselves vulnerable, fear, even, of love itself.”

She hesitated, her gaze dropped to the tabletop.

“I…” she began, but her words trailed off.

“Tell me, Emma,” I pressed, my heart pounding in my chest. “Do you want me to love you, or do you just really want to stay married?”

“Both,” she said.

“But if you could find someone entirely new tomorrow, who satisfied your every need, in the ways that I don’t, would you choose him or me?”

“What?” she whispered.

“You heard me, Em. If you found someone perfect, someone who you felt completed you, would you run toward your future with him or your past with me?”

“Jack—”

I realized then that she wasn’t answering me. She was avoiding doing so because her response was not that she would choose me – she would choose her future. And here’s the trick in all this.

I had met that person. I had met him and let him go.

Her shoulders sagged with defeat. The bitter truth was now all too obvious, but the funny thing is, it wasn’t bitter at all. It was sweet.

“We’re fooling ourselves,” I replied, but in fact, it was me who was fooling myself. “It’s over, Emma. It’s been over for a long time.”

The waitress returned and asked us what we wanted. I gazed at my wife and got to my feet.

“Keep the house, Emma,” I said. “I don’t mind. We are getting divorced. Let’s move on with our lives and find someone who makes us really brilliantly happy, like we once made each other.”

I looked up at the waitress, who was listening with an open mouth. I peeled a ten-dollar note from my wallet. “This is for your trouble,” I said to her as I finally walked away from my past.