33
BEN
DECEMBER 2000
Amanda calls just before I slide on my coat to leave for New Year’s Eve. Caller ID alerts me to the 415 area code, and I check my watch because I don’t want to be late. I can spare three, maybe four minutes. Despite my better instincts, I press the Talk button.
“Hey,” I say.
“It’s me,” she replies.
“I know.”
The clock on the microwave in my parents’ kitchen tells me it’s 8:23. I told Tatum I’d pick her up by nine, so we could wedge our way into Times Square by midnight, which I still can’t believe I’ve agreed to.
“This is practically highway robbery,” I’d said when she proposed it. I’d stopped at the bar to thank her for her work on Romanticah, and she’d said: “Well, as payback, you have to come to Times Square with me for New Year’s.”
“Like a date?” I’d grinned.
“I might let you kiss me if you’re lucky,” she said, then her eyes widened, and she laughed her machine-gun staccato and slapped her hand over her mouth. “Oh my God, sorry, I don’t even know where that came from.”
I sip a lukewarm beer abandoned on the kitchen counter. Leo must have opened it as part of his pre-party celebration.
Three minutes, I tell myself. Then you hang up and are gone.
Leo wanders in, his coat zippered, his gloves already on, and swipes the beer from my hands and chugs it. Then notices I’m on the phone and shoots me a quizzical look.
A-man-da, I mouth.
He rolls his eyes and slits his throat with his gloved finger.
I flip him off, then shoo him out of the room.
He turns and whispers: “Hurry up, dude, we gotta stop and get Caroline.”
He says this as if I have any idea who Caroline is, one of the ever-revolving lithe young women from high school or now, his dorm or fraternity house up at Columbia.
“I just . . .” Amanda starts on the other end of the line, three thousand miles away; then she falls silent. We haven’t spoken since she left for California in June. Technically, we broke up—I broke up with her—in February, but I did it solely to get out in front of it: the fact that she was leaving, the fact that she chose a residency over me. It didn’t feel real back then—we still occasionally slept together, still sometimes found ourselves crying to each other in the dark hours of the night when one of us couldn’t sleep, and the permanence of her move or my decision (or hers) would set in.
“I just wanted to call to wish you a Happy New Year,” she says finally.
“Thanks. You too.”
Leo circles back and whispers, “Hang up, dude. This isn’t just some casual call, like girls don’t call on New Year’s Eve to say ‘hey.’”
I press my finger into my other ear to ignore him, listen to Amanda’s quiet crying through the line. I think she’s crying, anyway, but I don’t want to ask because now I have two minutes before I’m pulled toward someone new, toward Tatum, and I’m not sure I want to get sidetracked.
But we’d dated for three years, a lifetime in your early twenties. We’d made plans for this millennium; we were supposed to be in Cancún right now, not on separate coasts making lonely phone calls that wouldn’t change anything. I was going to be the next Scorsese: write from New York, tell New York stories, build a family here, invite Leo over on the weekends to play the part of overly indulgent uncle to our 2.5 children. She was going to work at NYU or Mount Sinai, eventually shifting to private pediatrics so she’d have more time for all things that mattered.
But then she applied exclusively to schools out west and it became clear, then clearer, that maybe the story I’d spun about the two of us wasn’t much more than something akin to the scripts that I’d dreamed up too.
She said she just needed some time to live on her own.
I broke up with her and gave her that.
Though it didn’t make it easier, of course. Didn’t mean that you stop loving someone just because you’ve split and said good-bye. She left in June, and I refocused on my work: drafting, then redrafting Romanticah, writing it for her, no, writing it about her. Those were two different things. About all the ways that love goes wrong, then all the ways that it corrects itself. When I really thought about it, maybe I was writing it about me. About how love disappoints you but also finds its way back to you.
“I keep thinking about Cancún,” Amanda says, gathering her breath and composure. “That would have been fun.”
“Yeah,” I say. “It’s freezing here.”
One minute on the clock. Then I have to get to Tatum.
“You going out? Big plans? A wild party?” She laughs, though it rings hollow.
“Times Square.”
“Shut up.” She laughs for real now.
“I swear. Don’t ask.”
“You’d never be caught dead in Times Square. You always wanted to stay in, fall asleep on the couch.”
“I guess things change.” You and me. Times Square. Cancún. Everything.
“Wow,” she says. “It must be for something special.”
I want to correct her—someone special who might want to kiss me and who announces such things like she’s surprising herself for doing so, which surprises me—and I’m learning I like that in a partner. But I don’t correct her, don’t say anything because it’s Amanda, and my stomach is churning and my brain is jumbled and my adrenaline is sending me uncertain signs.
“I miss you,” she says. “I guess that’s what I was really calling to say.”
I chew on my lip. I miss her too, but now there is Tatum. And if Amanda had called a few weeks ago, before Tatum starred in Romanticah and before I stopped by the bar to thank her, and before . . . whatever else, I don’t know. Maybe things would have been different. Maybe I’d be willing to forgive her or move to San Francisco or just have flown out for the holidays and slept with her again just because. But she didn’t call a few weeks ago, and now Tatum is waiting for me to take her to Times Square and kiss her.
“I should go,” I say.
“OK.”
“Happy New Year, Amanda.”
She’s silent, and so am I. It’s been six months, and my foot is out the door to Tatum. But that doesn’t change the swell of sickly nostalgia for what you once had, how easy it is to revisit those softer spots in your heart for someone who once occupied it.
“I wish we were in Cancún, Ben,” she says after my final minute has expired.
“But we’re not,” I say.
“That doesn’t make me not wish it anyway.”
“I know.”
Leo reappears in the kitchen and signals for me to hang the fuck up.
“I guess our timing was wrong,” she says.
“Something like that,” I reply, just before I click off for real.