“Is this a ‘heartbreak bottle’?” he asked, putting air quotes around his term.
Deb couldn’t help but think of Marco again. She wanted—needed—to tell someone about this, and he was the only person she could think of who would care more about her than about the sensational story of it all. She couldn’t call him, though. She was just having a moment of weakness, exacerbated by the wine.
“In a way,” Deb told the bartender. Because, in a way, her heart was broken.
“Oh, sweetie,” the bartender said. “We’ve all been there.”
She wanted to tell him that he likely hadn’t been where she was, but he wasn’t the person to hear her story. He set a dish of nuts on the counter next to her glass and walked away.
Deb remembered once, when she was about twelve, crying to her mother about how tall she was. At nearly five feet, nine inches tall, she towered over the boys in class and hated it.
“You and Dad aren’t tall,” she’d said.
It was true. Her parents weren’t tall. They were short. Her father was barely five foot five, her mother barely five feet. And they weren’t just short, but they were small, in general. Petite. Deb had always been big-boned.
“You’re right, we aren’t tall. My grandpa was tall though,” her mother had told her.
“But why do I have to be so tall?”
Her mother attempted a look of sympathy, jutting out her bottom lip.
“My dear, life has so many questions,” she’d said, stroking Deb’s cheek. “Sometimes we have to be okay with what we cannot know.”
Her mother did this often—made big, philosophical statements. Deb always rolled her eyes.
Now she thinks what her mother should have said was “Sometimes you have to be okay with what I don’t want to tell you.”
Deb met Marco when she was just twenty-five, starting her first real job at Genixer, a small pharmaceutical company specializing in chemotherapy drugs. Deb started as an assistant to a marketing director, which meant she was in meetings throughout the day, taking notes. She noticed Marco right away.
Marco was a product manager, a few years older than her and the most attractive man on her team. He reminded her of Ponch on the TV show CHiPs—a full head of black hair, twinkling brown eyes, a charming smile, fluorescent white teeth. He was shorter than she was, but he carried himself like he was the tallest person in the room. When she felt the buzz of attraction in her chest, she did what she always did—checked his ring finger. And there it was: proof that he’d been claimed by someone else.
She didn’t see any harm in fantasizing. Whenever they were in meetings together, Deb stared at Marco’s olive-toned hands and imagined them running up her legs. She hiked up her skirt when she sat near him, hoping he’d take notice of her legs. Her mother always said they were her best asset.
Deb couldn’t rationalize spending money on takeout, so she brought her lunch to work every day. Marco brought his lunch too. A few weeks into the job, he came into the break room just as she was sitting to eat her sandwich and said, “Hey, Deb, mind if I join you?”
She couldn’t believe he knew her name. She hoped she wasn’t blushing when she said, “Sure.”
His lunch was in a brown paper bag. When he opened it, he seemed surprised at its contents: “Roast beef,” he said. Deb guessed his wife packed his lunches.
They chitchatted about work and where they’d gone to college (UCLA for him, USC for her). He was one of those people who didn’t break eye contact during a conversation. Deb found it flattering—he seemed so interested in everything she had to say—but also unnerving. She kept finger-combing her hair behind her ear nervously.
Over the next several weeks, they made a habit of meeting in the break room. It wasn’t a planned thing, or not admittedly so; he just kept showing up right at 12:30 p.m., when she was there. She found it easy to talk to him, which was something. She didn’t find it easy to talk to most people. He wanted to know her thoughts—on politics, food, religion, books, movies, everything. She’d never felt so seen before. He told her about his marriage. He and his wife had been together since high school. They had two kids, a girl and a boy, both in elementary school. “It’s hard on a marriage, having kids,” he’d said, breaking eye contact as he looked down at his sandwich. In retrospect, this is when the affair started—with this confession.
Their lunch dates turned into happy hours at the bar across the street from the Genixer building. The happy hours turned into kissing in the parking lot. Kissing in the parking lot turned into Marco coming back to Deb’s apartment. He could never stay long, for obvious reasons, and Deb didn’t mind, really. A girlfriend of hers had told her once, “You always go for the unavailable men.” She didn’t disagree.
The affair went on for nearly a year—Marco telling his family he had to work late, Deb telling herself she wasn’t a home-wrecker. One afternoon, they each left work early, around four o’clock, so they could have an extra hour at her apartment. They made love then lay together naked in her bed, staring up at the ceiling fan as it whirred.
“I’ve been thinking,” Marco said.
Deb’s heart started beating faster, anticipating his words. She’d been bracing for this—the day he would say, “We can’t do this anymore.”
That’s not what he said though.
“What if I left Joan?” His wife, Joan. “She would be happier, in the end. We’re not happy together. The kids see it. You and I, we could get a place together. I’d have the kids every other week. It sounds kind of ideal. I’d get a chance to miss them, wouldn’t be so exhausted by them. They’d love you.”
He leaned into her, kissed her cheek. She couldn’t help but smile, but something nagged at her—the kids, the idea of herself as a stepmom.
“Really?” was all she managed to say.
“I’m serious.”
She rolled away from him, sat up, swung her legs over the side of the bed. She pulled her robe off the chair and draped it around herself.
“I don’t know. I just … I’m not sure I’m the mothering kind,” she said.
“You’d be a wonderful mother,” he said, with that charming smile, those shining teeth.
She saw it then—he assessed her not just as a lover, a girlfriend, but as a mother. She’d never wanted to be assessed that way.
“I need to think about it,” she told him. She had a hard time looking at him.
He got out of bed, came to her, wrapped his arms around her middle. He was short enough to rest his head on her shoulder, and she suddenly found this embarrassing.
“You take all the time you need,” he said.
She started making up excuses for why she couldn’t get together after work—she was meeting a girlfriend for drinks, she’d signed up for an aerobics class, she had a migraine. It wasn’t that she didn’t love him; it was that she knew they couldn’t be together in the way she wanted. She wanted the luxury of being obsessed with only each other. The moment he’d made it clear she couldn’t have that, the moment he’d mentioned Joan and the kids, she retreated—not to hurt him, but to protect herself. He got the hint and wasn’t shy about confronting her.