Ethan and I take the flat. Or we fill out an application and turn it in with our twenty quid, hopeful and positive. He is positive because he wants the flat. I am positive because I want to want the flat.
When Posey questions my lackluster enthusiasm I freak out on her.
“Oh my God! I want the flat, I freaking want the flat, all right?”
“But, do you want the flat alone or with Ethan?” she asks me.
I have to think about that one for a minute.
“You’re evil,” I tell her. “And I hate you.”
“It’s okay to be you, Yara,” she says. “The people who love you will work with your shortcomings, not against them.”
“What does that even mean?” I ask her.
“If you’re in a relationship with Ethan, you should feel comfortable enough telling him that you’re freaked.”
“If I tell him I’m freaked, he will get freaked,” I say.
“Then he’s not strong enough for you, is he?”
I give her a dirty look as she moves the subject on to something else. Harrods. She’s talking about Harrods. Posey is two extremes. She’s either too deep or too shallow. There is no grey area, no middle anything. It’s exhausting being with her because you’re either listening to asinine shit you don’t care about or she’s tearing your psychology apart and making you cry.
Who is really equipped to deal with someone else’s reality? It’s why we’re all so afraid to show ourselves, the vulnerability of being left once our truth is discovered. Also there is no way I’d date me. If I were a man I’d date another man. Men cry less than women.
Ethan and I are at a cafe one afternoon having lunch when he tells me the agent has left a voice message on his phone. We press our faces close together so we can listen at the same time, and he holds the phone between us. She informs us in her hoity-toity voice that we got the flat.
“Congratulations,” she says. “It will be a lovely place for you to begin your…er…lives together.”
“She sounds quite surprised,” I say to Ethan, pulling away to look at him.
He smirks and shushes me as she rattles off the address where we’re to drop off our deposit check. I laugh as soon as he sets down his phone.
“She thinks I’m a prostitute,” I say. “She hates that we got it!”
“Former, my love. You gave up that lifestyle to be with me. I can’t believe we got it. Fate, don’t you think?”
“Absolutely,” I say.
I reach for my glass of wine, already imagining where I’ll put my record player and my small collection of potted plants. Ethan is so happy he orders a bottle of champagne to celebrate. I hold my glass and smile, smile, smile.
I’m on autopilot; there are things to be done so I do them. I turn in my notice and carry home an armload of boxes to start packing. Ethan texts me pictures of dining tables and bookcases he finds online. I like white and he likes wood, so we settle in the middle and buy grey. I am euphoric, so into this shit. I imagine mornings in the spacious kitchen, cooking breakfast with a view of central London before me. I can almost smell the coffee brewing around my perfect life. The coffee brewing brings back a long suppressed memory and I move it away. Be gone, memory! I have a beautiful, centrally located flat!
I hum as I tape the boxes and wrap my things in newspaper. I don’t have much, mainly books and a few records I brought with me from the States. You’d think they’d remind me of David, but they don’t, they just remind me of me. Our move-in date isn’t for another four weeks, but I have to shave down my belongings, decide what comes with for my new, domesticated couples life. It’s not a marriage, but it’s close, the joining of belongings and lives, the determination to merge existence with another human being.
I don’t know if it’s because I’m on the verge of committing in a big way—a bigger way than I’ve done in ages—but I find David’s face in my mind. His smile, and his eyes, and his laugh, which always seemed to be directed at me. I’d liked being laughed at by David. He found me effortlessly amusing. I do what a woman in my position shouldn’t do, but often does anyway—I make comparisons between Ethan and David.
They are very different, but also very similar. Ethan’s playfulness and self-deprecating jokes remind me of David. But, Ethan is a businessman. He was a womanizer by choice, seeking out the ones he wanted to sleep with—or in my case—be in a relationship with. Women just fell all over David without him having to ask, and he dealt with it all in good humor. It almost bored him. He was committed to the music, and he’d been committed to me. Perhaps that was the highest praise I’d ever received. Ethan is more set in his ways, a contractual man who likes to have everything in order. David was an artist, there was no order. I love Ethan, but in a different way than I’d loved David. Perhaps it’s because I’m a different person than I was three years ago. As you age, your propensity to love changes and evolves with your personality. You gain in either selfishness or selflessness. What I do know is that I didn’t give David what I could have…I wasn’t able. And now we’ll never know what we might have been together.
That’s why I’m determined to make things work with Ethan. I won’t play games. I won’t flake. I will be good to him. And besides, I’ve never felt quite like this before. Ethan isn’t as good and isn’t as bad as the men I’ve dated before. He lies somewhere in the middle, which cushions all of my needs and gives me some assurance that I’ve broken free of all of my daddy issues. Who did I compare men to before David? There’s been a man I’ve run out on in every city, and yet none of them have been worth a fond remembrance.
I check the calendar for the date. My meeting with David is two weeks away. There’s a distant throb in my heart when I think about it, but I push it away and focus on here and now. My life is good. There is a doting boyfriend and a buffet of possibility spread out in front of me. I will not be arriving at my meeting with David as some lonesome girl, empty-handed and speckled with regret. I am moving forward. No, I am charging forward.