The Road Taken (40 page)

Chapter Fifty

Markie hated being alone even more than she had thought she would. Not only was there loneliness but there was the fear of AIDS, something you thought about even while you were in denial. She deeply resented David Laurent for sending her off unmoored to try again in a world where death waited under the guise and the bait and the promise of love.

She had been on the Pill ever since her one pregnancy disaster with David. She had decided then that any mistakes she made from that moment on would be her responsibility alone. Now that she was available again she also had a supply of condoms, for men she did not know well enough to trust, although they seemed to be men she knew well enough to have sex with. You could buy luminous condoms, or condoms in colors but no matter what they looked like everyone hated them and often didn’t use them. After all, the people they had sex with were from “their” world.

Life, she thought, was arbitrary, mean, and sad. Seeing David’s familiar face at the office, not every day, but often enough to be disturbing, was both painful and reassuring. Of course they were friendly to each other but “seeing other people” actually had meant not seeing one another anymore. At least, as far as she was concerned. She would not share him. If she had to be part of a nonexclusive relationship, it would be with a man she didn’t care about.

She’d heard that most promising young men were too busy trying to advance in their careers to bother to go out with women, but so far she had not found that to be true, at least not for her. She supposed she exuded a kind of desperation that they liked because they misread it as a sense of adventure. She was too conscious of being thirty-one, of worrying that soon she would be too old for the competition. Having been with David for so long had been a sort of vacation, and now she had to work at her social life as if it were her second job.

Every bit of this mating game was fraught with tension. The third date was the crucial one. Either you refused to go to bed with him, and then he wouldn’t call again; or you went to bed with him, and then he might never call again anyway because that was all he had needed, or he was frightened, or it was too close, or for whatever noxious reason; or, knowing that the third date was crucial he might beg off altogether before he had to see you, saying he had to go out of town on business and that he would be in touch, and then you never heard from him again. Of course you could call him, with some inducement like tickets to an event, but he knew what you wanted.

She and her friends were all such bright, accomplished young women, but when they were together somehow the conversation always quickly turned to men. How to get one, what was wrong with them, where to find them. One of Markie’s friends was going to AA meetings even though she wasn’t an alcoholic; she said she used to smoke pot and that counted, so she wanted to get over her “problem,” while the real reason was she was looking for a recovering alcoholic bachelor. She said AA was full of men, and that a lot of them, deprived of their addiction to drink, were making up for it with an addiction to sex. You weren’t supposed to date other members for a while, of course, but she did.

A connection between two people worked right away or it didn’t, Markie believed. She was not here to be some loser’s psychiatrist, or his mother, or the opposite of his mother if his mother was what he didn’t like. She worked long hours, she needed her concentration, and she didn’t want to be sidetracked by the anxiety of waiting for the phone to ring, or the fear that when she and the man were together she would say something to drive him away. Her mother liked to say that all relationships were the wrong one until the right one, but what did Peggy know, since she’d had only one relationship in her entire life and she was fourteen when it started.

You should have stayed, Markie told David silently; you should have stayed and we could have worked things out.

It was summer, and Markie took an expensive share in a group house in the Hamptons with some other single people she didn’t know all that well, women and men. It was a move she hadn’t planned to make, but someone had dropped out at the last moment leaving them short of funds, and they begged her to come along since she was free now. Markie was not attracted to any of the men, and as soon as they all spent their first weekend there some of the women were already showing her their worst side, but at least there would always be someone with whom to have dinner on those long balmy Saturday nights when you were feeling sorry for yourself.

Angel, who had not been recently hurt and was less cynical than Markie, had a new boyfriend, a rich one, who had a house in the Hamptons too, and so Angel would be spending weekends with him. They would all see each other, give parties, go to the polo matches and to benefits, have fun; but under the hectic plans was always the knowledge that it would have been much more interesting with someone who made your heart pound. Markie didn’t think she’d find him here. There were too many people in the Hamptons who were already couples, even if just for this summer, and there were too many gay men.

When fall came she was glad. She was tired of communal living; she was too old for it. New York was better in the fall, more alive, but even so, people were already planning to leave. Some of her friends had arranged to go to Aspen to ski over the Christmas/New Year’s holidays leaving the day after Christmas. They had rented a house, and Markie thought she would join them, although it was clear to her that she would just be chasing men in warmer clothes. She felt as if she had been single again forever. She wanted to have take-out Chinese food at home in from of a rented video with someone she loved. It was something so simple and yet so inaccessible. She wondered if David was enjoying his new life, but of course she couldn’t ask him directly; she could only hope he wasn’t.

And what if he had a real girlfriend? What if someone in the office were to find out he was engaged? The thought made her miserable. You have to go on with your own life, Markie kept telling herself. She smiled at him when she ran into him in the hall, she made small talk when they were trapped together by the water cooler or in the elevator. She pretended she was happy . . . and perhaps, so did he. But she was not going to be the one to ask to try again; she had too much pride. Markie wondered if there was something wrong with her because she had only discovered she was really in love with him when he was gone.

At least now that she was back in the city she was popular again, which was more than she could say about many of her women friends, who complained all the time. She had met a man at the gym, and another one while running—take that, David, if I don’t run with you I do better!—and two others at parties. None of them lasted very long; he was either going back to his old girlfriend, or he hadn’t yet gotten over his ex-wife, or he was a self-avowed workaholic. Why don’t they tell you at the beginning, Markie thought, instead of putting you through all this? She was beginning to hate men, but she didn’t like being alone either.

The low abdominal pain and slight fever, then accompanied by painful urination, sent her to her gynecologist, Dr. Brodsky, a young woman of her own generation who knew that good girls could get bad things too. “You have chlamydia,” Dr. Brodsky said.

Markie had heard of chlamydia, of course, had read about it in her women’s magazines along with the slinky clothes, stiletto heels, and makeup tips. Usually she shuddered and turned the page, but she was aware anyway. Chlamydia was the most common bacterial sexually transmitted disease in the nation. Dr. Brodsky gave her an antibiotic called doxycycline and told her she was actually lucky because four-fifths of the women who were affected had no symptoms at all, and of course if you had no symptoms you would not get rid of it, and that was dangerous. “You should tell him,” the doctor added, “so he can get rid of it too.”

Tell which one?

“And until you’re both cured,” the doctor said, “be sure he wears a condom.”

“I want an AIDS test,” Markie said. She was grateful there was no look of shock, no protestations that it couldn’t have happened to
her,
or questions about why she thought she might be a candidate. Markie knew that the reason she was asking to be tested was that in her heart she was sure she would be negative. But during the ten days she waited for the results she thought of nothing else.

She tried to reassure herself that she knew people who were tested for AIDS all the time, they were always fine, they were just cautious. It was the people who thought they were infected who were afraid to find out. How much easier, she thought, it would have been to use protection and be done with it. But she also knew that her friends who were tested and found they were fine went right back to their old reckless ways, as if their escape were a validation, as if the same faulty instinct that told them it was going to be love this time would also tell them when it was safe.

The test results came back. She was negative; she would live. She hadn’t told anyone, even her sister, and now she wouldn’t have to. After her moments of great relief and celebration, to her surprise Markie suddenly found herself being very careful. She was celibate during her skiing holiday and then through the winter. It was as if her sex drive had vanished. She didn’t even care. No man is worth all the aggravation he causes, she thought; there are other things in life, and fate will bring me what it brings. I am, finally, tired of other people and only interested in knowing myself.

Sometimes she still thought about the mystery of her real parents. She wondered what part of her came from them, if, after all this time, it did anymore. There were organizations that would try to find your birth parents for you, but she hadn’t done anything about it. In a way, she was afraid. At long last, she was satisfied with the family she had. Now she was trying to become satisfied with herself. Oddly, this celibate and rather isolated period of her life did not make her irritable or horny; it made her serene and relaxed. She was even able to be friendly to David Laurent and mean it.

He sensed it was safe now and asked her to lunch. Markie agreed; why not? She still liked the things about him that she had liked all along. How strange it all is, she thought, sitting across from him at the little table with the thick white tablecloth and the tiny bunch of flowers in the upscale Italian restaurant near the office, smiling, daring to look into his eyes even though she didn’t know if it would upset him, and noticing there a kind of apologetic affection.

“So how is it being free?” Markie asked.

He shrugged. “Exhausting and overrated.”

“Exhausting?”

“The mental part. The games.”

“Ah, yes,” she said. “The game that no one wins.”

He considered that for a moment. “You’re right,” he said.

They looked away then. It would be so much simpler if you just came back to me, she thought, and we could try again. You’ve had enough time to play. Grow up. I did.

“How is your family?” he asked.

She remembered he had liked her family. He had said it was unusual to find a family that was so good to each other, that wasn’t dysfunctional, and that he wished they were his. They could have been, of course, Markie thought now.

“Uncle Hugh is still living with Grandma,” she said. “I think he should just stay there. He refuses to sell his house. Peter and Jamie are having another baby. It’s going to be a boy and they’re naming him Henry. Henry Glover and Hannah Glover, it sounds like someone’s grandparents; they’ll be getting jury duty notices when they’re four years old. And Peter is actually getting a job. It’s at Webster and Dally, the publishing company where Aunt Joan works. He asked her to help him get it. It’s not easy to support two children with nothing but freelance work. My parents are thrilled, of course. Oh, and Trevor is making a movie. He plays a bad cop who you don’t know is bad until the end. It’s shooting in New York so Aunt Joan is happy. And Angel is having a show next week in Soho. Maybe you’ll come to the opening.”

“I’d like to,” David said.

“She’d like that too.” She didn’t ask him how his family was. Whatever ideas he had about dysfunctional families he had learned from them. He had never gotten over his parents’ divorce and his father’s remarriage, his mother’s bitterness made him feel guilty, he didn’t get along with his domineering sister, he was all alone. We would take you in and nourish you, Markie thought. I would. You and I could start our own family.

Thoughts like that were hazardous for your mental health, and when the following week David was sincere about coming to Angel’s opening, Markie was a little sorry she had invited him. He was extremely solicitous, and of course everyone thought they were together again, or at least they wondered. Angel had reserved a table in a downtown restaurant for afterward, and Markie let David come with her as if he were her date, because she didn’t know what else to do. When the dinner was over the two of them shared a cab uptown.

“Why don’t you ask me in for a drink?” he said.

“No. I think it would be dangerous, and besides, it’s late.”

“Could we see each other again?”

“As what?”

“We could go on a date.”

“I don’t date,” Markie said.

“How do you get to know someone?”

She didn’t answer.

“Look, I’d like to try again,” David said. “Slowly.”

“Slowly is good,” Markie said. “But I don’t share.”

“You’re tough.”

“I have to be.”

“Leaving you was a mistake,” he said.

Wasn’t that what everyone wanted to hear? He probably knew it. “It was your choice,” Markie said.

“I guess you’re really angry.”

“No.”

“Would you have dinner with me Friday night?” he asked. “We could be alone and talk.”

And it would segue so easily into the whole weekend, Markie thought, and then what? That was what she wanted, but Sunday night would hurt again. And what if it was only Friday night after all, and then he left on Saturday to go out with some other woman? People had previous plans. People had their own lives. “Dinner,” she said. “No sex.”