Been There, Done That (36 page)

A pause. The quickened pulse had morphed into a pounding thud. “No. You?”

Shit. I could lie, I thought. But no: I’d lied to Jeremy enough for one lifetime. “Yes. But only on Saturdays. And alternate Tuesdays.” Max and I had dropped the occasional Thursdays, both claiming to be too busy, but mostly feeling too closed in.

“Oh,” he said. And he was disappointed, I could tell—or maybe I just wanted him to be.

“But today’s Friday,” I said quietly.

I could hear him breathing. Maybe his heart was thudding, too. “And tomorrow?”

“Tomorrow’s Friday, too.”

 
 
Max was relieved to be cut loose. He did his best to act hurt, but then he confessed that he’d been carrying a torch for a secretary in his office ever since he’d joined the firm, but he hadn’t asked her out because she was a working-class girl from Revere with a killer accent and no college education. “Besides,” he said as kindly as he could, “I’ve always felt that there was a bit of a, um, generation gap between you and me.”

I smiled tightly and sent him on his way, wondering what I’d ever seen in this shallow twerp.

Jeremy graduated with distinction. I didn’t attend the ceremony, as we both agreed it would be too weird. Besides, his parents were having some trouble accepting our relationship. During our one tense dinner, his mother, after a couple of martinis, asked about the health of my ovaries, which I told her were, to the best of my knowledge, in tip-top shape. As much as I disliked his mother on other grounds, I understood her concern. I, too, thought Jeremy deserved better—or at least younger—than me.

“Are you sure you aren’t just staying with me to piss off your parents?” I asked, mock jokingly, one night. He was lying on my couch, his head on my lap, while I stroked his curls, which were set to be chopped off in a couple of days in preparation for his new job.

“I’ve already told them I’m not going to medical school,” he said. “That’s pissed them off enough already.”

Marcy and Dan had us over for dinner. I expected it to be uncomfortable, for my friends to set a place for Jeremy at the children’s table or to at least send me knowing smirks. Instead, Dan nodded to me in the kitchen, as I scraped plates into the sink. “You look happy,” he said.

“I am.”

“That’s all that matters.”

Jeremy rented an apartment in Framingham with three other guys from Mercer, but he spent most nights at my apartment and did a reverse commute out of the city. Each morning, he put on one of his three suits and a dress shirt he had ironed the night before. He looked handsome, of course, in spite of his cheap suits, but I liked him best when he came home and put on sweats and a T-shirt after neatly hanging his suit and shirt in my closet. He seemed lighter without that suit, more himself. His job was in ad sales for a radio station. “I never knew you were interested in radio,” I said when he first described the job to me.

“Neither did I,” he laughed.

After a few weeks of rude receptions to his cold calls and a paycheck that seemed so much smaller after the taxes had come out, he asked me if work ever got any better, and I told him sometimes, but not always. It was as honest as I could be. He talked about architecture school for about a week, then he moved on to ideas about social work, real estate or teaching. Dennis, who I still saw as much as possible, although he, too, was seeing someone, suggested that Jeremy find a sales position in the interior design industry. “Between the men and the women—honestly, no one would say no to you.” Jeremy laughed (and blushed), but said he secretly coveted a recliner with a drink holder and couldn’t really see getting excited about upholstery and “curtainy things.” I think he fell a bit in Dennis’s estimation after that, although Dennis continued to describe him as a “nice, nice boy.”

I tell him he should save his money, buy a backpack and spend a year in Europe. “You’ll never regret the things you did,” I tell him. “You’ll only regret the things you didn’t do.”

“Would you come with me?” he asks every time.

“No, but I’d wait for you,” I say. We leave it at that.

One Sunday, Jeremy looked up from circling every entry-level ad in the help wanted section and sighed. “I really envy those people who grow up knowing exactly what they want out of life,” he told me. “Like, they’re five years old, and they say they want to be a veterinarian when they grow up, and twenty-five years later, that’s exactly what they are.”

I put down my coffee and walked over to him. I held him tight and told him that knowing what you want takes the fun out of life, that true joy come from the surprise.