I sat down on a chair with the bathing suits on my lap and told Kate—actually for the first time—that I’d seen you for a drink.
“How was that?” she asked, carefully.
“Weird,” I told her. “I love Darren, I really do, and don’t doubt that. But it feels so different than it does with Gabe. I can’t tell if I just love Darren less. Or love him differently . . . Does Tom make you feel more alive when you’re with him than you do without him?”
Kate looked at me very seriously, like she was contemplating the question and how best to respond. I love that about Kate. Her words have always been fully considered, even when we were kids.
“No,” she finally said. “I feel just as alive right now, here in this dressing room with you, as I do when I’m with Tom.”
I handed her one of the bathing suits.
“I feel more alive when I’m with Gabe than I do with anyone else on the planet,” I told her. “Not to take anything away from how much I love you,” I added.
“Or Darren?” she asked.
“It’s just . . . it’s different,” I said. “And I’m worried that it won’t be enough. That what I feel for Gabe is just so monumental that nothing else will ever be enough.”
Kate pulled the bathing suit up and stuck her arms through the straps. “What do you think?” she asked, looking at herself in the mirror.
“Honestly?” I answered.
“Always,” she said.
“Honestly, I think it cuts your butt in a funny place.”
She turned around and then twisted her head to look at her back in the mirror. “Oh wow. You’re right. How strange.”
Kate started pulling the bathing suit off and said, “I was talking to my sister about relationships earlier this year, and she said something interesting.”
Did you ever meet Kate’s sister? I must’ve told you about Liz, even if you hadn’t met her. She went to Brown and is pretty much the opposite of Kate in every way someone could be an opposite—she’s incredibly creative and artistic and moved to Paris after college to work for Vogue when Kate and I were sixteen. She’s had a string of romances with men and with women, and she remains, to this day, one of the most interesting people I know.
“What did Liz say?” I asked.
“She said that she thinks of every romance she’s in as if it’s a type of fire. That some relationships feel like a wildfire—they’re powerful and compelling and majestic and dangerous and have the capability to burn you before you even realize you’ve been consumed. And that some relationships feel like a hearth fire—they’re solid and stable and cozy and nourishing. She had other examples—a bonfire relationship, a sparkler—that one was for a one-night stand, I think—but the wildfire and the hearth fire are the two that I remember most.”
“Are you and Tom a hearth fire?” I asked.
Kate nodded. “I think so. And I think that’s what I want. Safety and stability and warmth.”
“I think Darren and I are a hearth fire,” I told her, ruminating on what she’d just said. “But Gabe and I were a wildfire.”
“Yeah, I think that’s true,” Kate said.
She had a bikini on. It was red-and-white polka-dot, with a high-waisted bottom. “Oh, that looks great on you,” I told her.
She checked herself out in the mirror. “I like it!” she said, nodding at her reflection. “One down, one to go.”
“So did Liz say which is better?” I asked.
Kate shook her head as she unclasped the bikini top. “She said it depends on who you are. On what you want. She said that hearth-fire relationships bore her after a while. That she prefers wildfires, but that she’s starting to think she might want something in between. Oh, I think that’s what the bonfire was—where the relationship is always on the verge of being all-consuming but doesn’t quite go that far. She said she hasn’t had any of those but wants to find one.”
“Can you tame a wildfire or grow a hearth fire?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” Kate said, stepping out of the bikini bottom. “Liz said she hasn’t had any luck transforming a relationship from one to the other. But, I mean, if you extend the metaphor, firefighters can tame wildfires, so maybe people can, too. I guess the question is if you can tame them without putting them out completely.”
I handed Kate another bikini, wondering if I should look for a bonfire too. If I should experience all of the different kinds of relationships before I decided which one I wanted.
“The thing I worry about,” Kate said, “is what if you give up a wonderful hearth fire to try out a bonfire, and discover that it’s not what you wanted after all. And then you lost the hearth fire.”
“Are you talking about you and Tom now?” I asked.
She shrugged. “Maybe. I don’t know.”
“I guess it’s complicated,” I said. “And that bikini top gives you side boob.”
Kate looked down. “Oh, that’s terrible,” she said, pulling the halter straps over her head. “I think you have to do a kind of risk analysis in a relationship. How happy you are factored in with whether losing that happiness is worth potentially finding more of it with someone else. I don’t know if I’m willing to take that risk. Like, what’s the threshold? If I’m eighty-five percent happy with Tom, do I risk it for the possibility of being ninety-five percent happy with someone else? And what’s the maximum happiness you can achieve with someone? I don’t think it’s a hundred percent.”
“No, definitely not a hundred percent,” I said. “Nothing’s ever perfect.” I wondered what my happiness percentage had been with you. And what it was with Darren.
And then I wondered how you or Darren would answer that question—about your happiness percentage with me. What do you think? Was our percentage the same back then? Were we eighty percent happy? Eighty-five percent? I have a feeling I was happier than you, because you were the one who left, who wanted to go. Even if you didn’t think about it in those same terms, clearly you were willing to take that risk—to see if you would be happier without me in your life, pursuing the career that you wanted.
Did it work? Even for a little while?
I know it didn’t in the end.
xxxix
Sometimes a year feels like an eternity, broken up into tiny capsules of time. Each chunk is so monumental that it seems like its own lifetime within a life. That was my 2004. There was the chunk of time we were living together, the chunk of time after we broke up, the chunk of time after I met Darren. That year had three discrete sections to it. But the twelve months after Darren and I met felt like one solid unit. It almost came as a surprise when Darren said one Saturday, the minute I walked in his door after meeting Julia for brunch, “So, our anniversary is in two weeks. Were you thinking about doing anything in particular?”
I had the urge to double-check the calendar on my BlackBerry, but I knew he was right. He wouldn’t ever forget a date. Besides, the summer was ending, and that was when we met last year—the end of the saddest summer I’d ever had.
“Is that a Montauk weekend for us?” I asked, grabbing myself a glass of water. He’d put in the bids for our weekends and was in charge of keeping track of when we went out to the house.
“But of course,” he replied.
I should’ve known better. He’d probably had the date marked when he gave in our requests.
“Maybe a clambake dinner?” I said, as I added ice to my cup. “At that fancy place on the docks? You know, where it’s mostly grown-ups and everybody gets dressed up?”
Darren crossed the kitchen to kiss me. “We’re grown-ups,” he said.
I laughed. “You know what I mean.”
He kissed me on the nose this time. “I think that sounds great. I had one other thought, too,” he said. “And it’s about gifts.”
I wondered if he was going to talk about an engagement ring. Sabrina had gotten engaged the month before—mostly because she’d gotten pregnant—but still, the idea of it seemed nice. Satisfying, like finding the right piece of a jigsaw puzzle, one you’d been hunting for for a long time and never would have to hunt for again. Not right then, but one day.