Unsuitable Men (22 page)

“You’re still angry with me,” she said.

He looked at her. “I was never angry with you.”

“Really?” she asked, skeptical. “So that last night we were together? What was that about?”

“I
was
angry,” he admitted. “But more at myself than at you.”

“What for?” she asked, her voice barely audible.

“For lying to myself about what you and me were about.”

“What did you think we were about?” she asked.

Brendan looked over her head again. “Tracy, this isn’t the time or the place. You just lost your Dad . . .”

“He wasn’t my ‘Dad’,” she said, her voice hard. “Not by a long shot. And I want to know.” She held his arm. “Tell me what you thought . . .”

“It doesn’t matter anymore does it?” Brendan said. “You’ve got somebody and he looks . . . he looks like a good guy.”

“I don’t have somebody, as you put it. And Jason is a good guy. I guess. Just not . . .”

“Okay, so are we ready?” Riley was back. She looked from Tracy to Brendan and then apologized. “I can
come
ba
. . .”

“No,” Brendan said quickly. “I’m ready.

And he was. It was already too much—all the back and forth of emotion; it was exactly what he didn’t want. What with the dead father, the new boyfriend and her interminable ambivalence about him, he was fucking exhausted. His life never used to be like this, marked by sharp lurches of feeling, up and down, forwards and backwards.

It used to be that he was the happy-go-lucky guy, who nothing got to. Well, she’d fucked
that
all up. Or he had. But either way, it was time to get his shit straight again. Brendan decided right then that when he got back to New York he would have left all this behind him. And the next time he showed up at Shawn and Riley’s and Tracy was there, looking the way she did, he would absorb the emotional blow that seeing her would undoubtedly produce, and then he’d just keep on stepping.

“Brendan . . .”

“
It’s
okay, Tracy.” He touched the side of her face, and attempted a smile. “It’s all good.”

During the car ride back to the hotel, Brendan could feel Riley wanting to say something. He stayed silent, hoping she wouldn’t, but at the same time wishing she would. His hold on this new resolution to stay away from Tracy was tenuous at best, and all it would take was one encouraging word from the person who knew her as well as Riley did before it would crumble and disintegrate entirely. He waited, but she said nothing and at the hotel, they paused in the lobby.

“You okay for dinner?” Brendan asked her.

Riley nodded. “I’m a little tired so I’ll probably do room service. You?”

“Same,” Brendan nodded.

“You’ll call me before you decide about leaving early?” Riley asked.

“Already decided, Riley. You want to get on the same flight?”

“No, I’ll stick with the one in the morning.”

Brendan hesitated. Shawn would not appreciate him leaving Atlanta to run away from a woman and leaving Riley alone to take an airport taxi at seven a.m.

“Y’know what, I could use some sleep too,” Brendan said. “I’ll meet you down here in the a.m. like we planned.”

“Okay.” Riley smiled at him and squeezed his arm before heading for the elevators. He wasn’t sure how he felt about all the sympathy being lobbed his way. He would drink himself silly tonight and tomorrow would be a new day.

“Are you going to open the door?”

Brendan sat up in bed and listened for a moment as it began to dawn on him that Tracy’s voice wasn’t in his head, but in the real world where things were considerably fuzzier since he’d polished off almost all the little bottles in the mini-refrigerator. At the peak of his drunkenness he had laughed aloud at himself, remembering how he’d watched Shawn go through this same mad dance, and felt sorry for the dude. This was his punishment.

“Brendan? You’re making me worried now. If you don’t open up, I might have to call hotel security.”

That spurred him to move a little more quickly and he swung his long legs over the edge of the bed and went to open the door. Tracy was standing there in jeans and a t-shirt, her face clean of make-up.

“You’re flattering yourself,” he said as he walked back into the room.

“I wasn’t implying you would hurt yourself . . . because of me,” she said.

“Not for
any
reason,” Brendan said. “I happen to be one of my favorite people.” And with that last sentence he knew that he was still pretty fucking drunk. By the tiny smile on her face she was trying to hide, Tracy knew it too.

“You’re one of my favorite people too.” She shut the door behind her and sat on the edge of the bed next to him. “I didn’t like how we left things.”

“Which time?” he asked.

“None of them,” Tracy said after a moment.

“So you need
closure
?” Brendan asked. The word didn’t roll off his tongue as easily as he’d hoped. “Whatever the fuck that is.”

“I’m not trying to close anything,” Tracy said.

The stubbornness in her voice made him look at her, and she looked right back at him her chin tilted slightly upward, the way she did when they argued and she refused to back down.

“Y’know Tracy, to be the prettiest woman I ever knew, you sure have a lot of ugly inside you,” he said.

The effect of his words was immediate. She blinked as though he’d punched her in the gut and tears sprang to her eyes. And then he felt like a shit for making her cry.

Brendan sighed and reached out, pulling her against him, burying his face in her hair. “I’m sorry,” he said, and because he was too drunk to censor himself he went on. “I’m hurt so I’m hurting you, and I’m sorry.”

Her head snapped back and she looked at him, her eyes strangely hopeful.

“You’re hurt?” she asked.

“Fucking crushed,” Brendan admitted. He used his nose to nuzzle hers. “Wasn’t it obvious?”

“I knew you were angry.”

“But only because I was hurt. I thought we were okay. I thought we were . . . starting to get each other. And then out of left field, you tell me
that
shit? That you want to date?”

“I didn’t know what to do.”

“About
what
?”

“About you. About everything. I didn’t know what to do. It was just too much. It wasn’t what I expected.”

“What did you expect?”

“Not to feel anything.”

That knocked him back a little.

“What does
that
mean?”

“It means,” Tracy said slowly. “That I’m used to not feeling anything. With men. That’s what I’m used to.”

Brendan struggled to wrap his alcohol-addled mind around that, not sure he understood what the heck she was talking about. Tracy, probably seeing his confusion, stood and went to sit on one of the armchairs a few feet away so that they were opposite each other and could look each other more easily in the eyes.

“I want to tell you some things about me,” she said. “Things that only Riley knows. And when I’m done, you have to promise me that you won’t try to respond. At least not now.”

Brendan was even more confused, and Tracy read that on his face too.

“I know it doesn’t make sense yet. But when I’m done, maybe you won’t want to see me again. Or you will. But I want you to promise not to try to give me an answer tonight.”

She looked terrified. Even in his inebriated state, he could read that expression. Whatever it was she wanted to tell him, it was clearly not something she shared lightly. Brendan could feel sobriety battling for supremacy in his brain because he wanted to hear and understand what Tracy said, even though another part of him dreaded it.

“I promise,” he said.

Tracy’s chest heaved as she took a deep breath and began speaking.

Tracy would never have thought in a million years that Brendan would fly all the way to Atlanta for Malcolm’s funeral. After all, he had never met him, and even if he had, things hadn’t exactly been left on a high note between them. And Riley, in true form, hadn’t breathed a word. But seeing him there at the graveside, in his black suit, wearing a tie—Brendan in a tie— had been the sweetest thing. And as she stood there, listening to the preacher intone, she realized that all the “sweetest things” anyone had ever done for her,
he
had done. In the few months they had been together, the list seemed endless.

What she had known for at least a month came crashing down on her again in that instant.
She loved this man.
She loved him and she didn’t care one whit about what her mother or anyone else might think. She loved him, and she was pretty sure he might love her too. But there was the reality of Meghan who he’d begun dating again, and Jason who had breezed into town, looking like he expected a medal for showing up.

Over the last few weeks of dating Jason Miller half-heartedly and more out of inertia than anything else, she had figured him out. He was the Prince of the Grand Gesture. He wanted to take her to the best, most expensive restaurants, in the newest luxury car, and to the exclusive-run ballet where tickets were
impossible
to get for mere mortals. And it all felt a little contrived, as though he didn’t enjoy doing these things for her so much as he enjoyed how doing these things for her made
him
look.

Even coming to Malcolm’s funeral had been a big showy thing. He’d gone to great pains when he was in New York to apologize with flowers that he couldn’t be there, and then at the last minute chartered a jet to fly him in, because he just “needed to be there” for her, “no
matter the inconvenience.” She’d
almost rolled her eyes when he said it. For heaven’s sake, they’d only been on about five or six dates; a nice card and a wreath would have sufficed.

But her mother of course had loved the whole bit, and looked approvingly at him when he explained his ordeal getting there.
My god,
Tracy thought,
can she not see through this guy? He’s everything she thought Brendan was!
And the way he stuck to her throughout the reception was nauseating, acting the part of the solicitous boyfriend, basking in everyone’s approval.

Watching him reminded Tracy of the way he’d asked her out in the first place. That was a Grand Gesture too.
It’s worth half a million dollars just to have you go out with me.
What a crock of shit. And she’d fallen for it, because she was just that stupid and thought it must mean someone, thought it meant she was worth something.

And the person who
really
thought she was worth something, and who had shown her that every day, was across the room, avoiding her and obviously itching to leave. Every time she looked up at him, Brendan was gazing longingly toward the front door, or impatiently at Riley; and her heart ached because all she could think about was having him hold her, and how she missed that.

He made her feel so small, but so safe when he held her. If she moved across the bed in the middle of the night, he would drag her back toward him, sometimes even grumbling at her, though half-asleep.
Where you goin’?
he’d
say, sounding annoyed. And she’d smile and push back against him, wedging her butt into his groin.

Letting Brendan leave and fly back to New York where they would both once again be pulled away from focusing on each other was out of the question. But when she tried to talk to him at the door, he was back to being the Brendan she’d run into at Shawn and Riley’s baby shower brunch months ago—nice, cordial, friendly, but closed off to her in some fundamental way. That was not going to happen. She would not let him send her back there into emotional exile.

When she called Riley later, she was scarcely sympathetic, having also been thrown by Jason’s presence.

“What should I say to him?” Tracy asked her, feeling desperate. Riley was always her life preserver, and she was refusing to play that role this time.”He won’t
talk
to me.”

“Tracy, I’m tired, and I miss my husband and kid. I don’t know what you should say. Try the truth.”

“I tried to tell him before . . .”

“Oh, you mean the night you told him you were going back into the dating pool to find better fish? That time?”

Tracy said nothing.

“Goodnight Tracy,” Riley said, her voice bearing a note of finality. But then before she hung up, because Riley could never truly
not
be her life preserver, she said, “he’s in room 2018.”

So as soon as she could, when various and sundry family members were occupied with tending to her mother’s needs, Tracy had changed and slipped out of the house. Finding Brendan drunk had been a blessing, really, because part of her hoped that when she was done talking, he would remember only the spirit of what she
said,
the generalities rather than the awful, sordid details.

And he was—as she should have known he would be—an adorable drunk, an emotional one, not a mean one, despite that one comment about the “ugly inside” her. God, she’d only gotten all teary-eyed because it was true. And now she would have to tell him just how true.

Tracy took a deep breath and looked at Brendan sitting across from her, his elbows on his knees, hands clasped between them, waiting.

“Y’know the old joke about the man who has a perfect family in the suburbs? And across on the other side of town a whole other perfect family?” Tracy said.

She could see Brendan’s eyes already narrowing in confusion.

“Well, I’m the punch line to that joke. My mother and I. For twenty years, my mother was the mistress. She had been for three years before I was even born. And then for seventeen years after that.

“The thing of it was we didn’t live clear across town from my father’s family. We lived fifteen minutes away. I had a single mother. So what? Lots of my friends did. So I never noticed anything until I was about twelve and I started to make the connection between those nights my mother would get dressed up and prepared for company, and I would be sent to my Aunt Rose’s house.” Tracy paused and took another breath. Brendan said nothing, still listening.

“I figured she had a boyfriend and I didn’t care. I was glad she did, because she was happier on those nights and even if the day after, she seemed a little moody, I assumed it was just because she missed him.

“When I was fifteen, I was in the same grade as a girl who everyone said looked like me. We thought it was funny, she and I. We weren’t close friends, but we joked about it sometimes, saying we were cousins or whatever.

“And then one day, her mother came to the school and there was a big scene in the administrative offices and this girl who looked like me was pulled out of my homeroom. And by the end of the semester, she was pulled out of the school altogether. I think I knew, vaguely, that she had a sister and that her sister was a senior who’d graduated that year.”

Tracy saw something pass fleetingly in Brendan’s eyes; a realization of some kind. But then it was gone and he was listening again.

“Around that time, my friends and I were starting to like boys, talk about hair and make-up and the usual things. And I had a really close girlfriend who I was inseparable with. We liked this boy who we thought was way out of our league, so there was no real competition, I thought. Because it wasn’t as though either of us had a chance in hell of getting to go out with him.

“But then there was a school dance, and he asked me to dance and didn’t ask her. And he spent the whole night talking to me, and didn’t pay attention to any other girls and I was over the moon. But my friend . . . she was upset and we had a huge fight the next week at school in front of everybody. And then she told me what everyone knew. Everyone except me.

“That my mother was a slut. And I was a bastard and a slut like my mother; and that I had driven that girl who looked like me out of the school because it made her mother sick to her stomach to have her daughter attend the same school and be in the same class as her husband’s bastard.”

Tracy swallowed and looked around the room, trying to look anywhere but into Brendan’s eyes. She knew how they would look. He would be feeling sorry for her. And that was something she didn’t want to see.

“Anyway, you know I had to go right home and ask my mother. And when I did, she turned white, and couldn’t say anything and so I knew it was true. And I
hated
her. I hated that she let me go to that school without knowing. And after that, things were very different for me there.

“It was like, in saying aloud all the stuff that people had been saying behind my back, my friend . . .” Tracy laughed a mirthless laugh, “. . . my
ex
-friend at that point, had made it a live, true thing. And so everyone started treating me like a slut. Even that boy I liked, who I thought liked me.”

Brendan made a move as though to come to
her
and Tracy shook her head, so he sat down again. When she continued he might not want to come to her. It was better that he not touch her now, because it would hurt like hell when she told him the rest, and he let her go.

“So I
became
a slut,” she said matter-of-factly. “The first time I had sex, it was with that boy. And then I had sex with other boys, not because I was interested, but because they were other girls’ secret crushes, or their boyfriends. I had sex for the first time when I was fifteen and by the time I graduated, I’d probably had six or seven sex partners. And that’s only the ones I had actual intercourse with.

“It was like I had a double-life. I had no friends, so I studied a lot. But I had these secret hook-ups with guys that only they and I knew about. And I felt powerful and spiteful and I hated them and I knew they didn’t give a shit about me.”

“Tracy, you don’t have to . . .”

“I know it’s tough to listen to,” she said, wryly. “It’s tougher to have to tell you, believe me.”

At that Brendan was quiet and allowed her to go on.

“Occasionally a parent would get wind of a rumor and complain about me, or call my mother. And I lied so convincingly that she believed me and told me that it was because I was beautiful and they were all jealous.

“In the middle of senior year, I met Malcolm for the first time. I met him as Malcolm at first, not as my father. I found out later that his wife had died and so he was free. So he came to visit my mother openly, and took her out and for awhile she was happy. Or seemed to be.

“But his daughters were pissed. The one I knew from school, Charlene? She moved away to be with her sister who was in college, and finished high school there. And Malcolm finally married my mother and she pretended we were this perfect little family. But he cheated on her too,
big
surprise.

“And she wanted me to treat him like my Dad, but to me he was just the man who’d made a whore out of my mother. And in some ways, made me a whore, too.”

“Tracy, you’re not a whore,” Brendan said.

“Really?”
she
asked, her voice lifeless. “What if I told you that I did the same things I did in high school all through college and beyond? That as recently as a year ago, I was still doing those things?”

Brendan said nothing. But his face had changed. It was finally starting to sink in.

“Well I was,” she nodded. “I picked up men all the time. I hardly ever dated. And even when I did, I couldn’t connect with anyone. So I picked men up and I’d fuck them and move on. And as long as I followed my rules of being safe—always using protection, getting tested every three months—I felt like I was just someone in charge of her own sexuality.

“I never went for men who chose me. I always chose them. I’d never take them home. It was always someplace other than where I live. And I always made sure someone knew, even in a general way, where I was. In college, Riley found out what I was doing and she was . . . I guess you could say, inconsolable?” Tracy stopped and put her face in her hands for a moment, remembering what that had been like, and the tears she’d been holding back spilled over onto her cheeks. She noted that Brendan
wasn’t trying to come to her any longer. Well, that was about what she’d expected. She felt numb. There was no point not going on now.

“I mean, I always
understood
that sex and love could be connected, but I never felt that, y’know? I didn’t even
like
some of the men I had sex with. And for sure some of them despised me.”

“I don’t want to hear anymore,” Brendan mumbled.

“And that’s what you saw that night when Lounge Two-Twelve opened, Brendan. The aftermath of me fucking some stranger who . . .”

“Tracy, stop.”

“. . .
thought
of me as a whore, and who told me so right to my
fa
. . .”

“
Stop
!” Brendan put his head in his hands, his breath audible.