“It’s not embarrassing,” Abigail said, although she was having trouble meeting his eyes.
He must have noticed, because some of the color left his face, and he said, “Oh, I fucked up.”
“No, no, no. You didn’t. It’s just that honesty is …”
“It’s embarrassing.”
“I guess so, yes.”
“Should we just forget I ever said what I just said?”
“No, not at all. I like you, too, and I want to keep seeing you. To be honest, I don’t have the confidence about our relationship that you seem to have, but maybe I’m just in a fragile place right now. How about I stay in New York a little longer than I planned, we continue to see one another, and I will consider letting you pay off some of my student loans, but I don’t want you to bring it up again until I do?”
He looked relieved, some of the color returning to his cheeks, and said, “Deal.”
After that conversation, Abigail let herself relax with this new, strange man. There was something childlike and inexperienced about him, despite his success and his wealth. He loved horror movies like she did, but he’d never seen anything before the turn of the century, and Abigail introduced him to the greatness that was 1970s horror. She showed him pockets of New York City that he’d never have discovered, and together they took a weekend trip to Philadelphia to go to her favorite museum, the Mütter, a place famous for its displays of vintage medical instruments and numerous skulls and skeletons. It turned out he had a macabre streak similar to hers, or at least an interest. He did love many of the old movies she showed him, and he admitted that when he’d first seen her in that coffee shop one of the things that had attracted him was how she’d looked like a woman from a different time.
“What was I wearing? I can’t remember,” she said.
And he told her in detail, about how she’d been wearing a black dress with a high white collar, and how her hair was held back by her polka-dot headband. She didn’t tell him that that was the headband she wore when she hadn’t washed her hair in a couple of days.
She did worry that she only enjoyed being with Bruce because of his willingness to be introduced to new things by her, and that, over time, it wouldn’t be enough. But he introduced her to things as well. Great restaurants, for one. An appreciation for cocktails. He even took her to the opera—they went to see Macbeth—and it was an almost transformative experience for Abigail.
And there were qualities about Bruce that she really did love. He was a vulnerable person, despite all his successes. In some ways, he reminded her of her own father, always questioning his life, always looking for reassurance. There was something passive about him, and it led to her feeling stronger in his presence. She didn’t know if this was a good thing or a bad thing, but she did know that it was a dynamic that she was comfortable with.
Down deep, she knew that Bruce was more in love with her than she was with him. But wasn’t that the case with every couple? There was always one person in each relationship who cared a little more than the other. And wasn’t it better to be the person who cared less?
One year after they’d started dating they were engaged, the student loans were paid off, and Bruce was already pressuring Abigail to let him invest in bringing back the Boxgrove Theatre.
“You’ll lose money,” she told him.
“Then it’s a write-off for my taxes. Either way, I win.”
“I don’t even know if my parents would want to save the Boxgrove. It was a lot of work for them. It’s probably what eventually wrecked their marriage.”
“Ask them and find out.”
“How about we do it after we’re married?”
This was in June, and they had set the wedding date for the beginning of October. “Whatever you want to do for the wedding is fine with me,” Bruce told her. “If you want something huge, let’s do it. If you want to get married at the registry, I’m happy to do that as well. But I want to plan the honeymoon.”
“Oh yeah?” Abigail imagined some sort of grand tour of Europe.
“I have a place in mind.”
“Yeah?”
“That’s all I’m going to tell you.”
“Well, you’ll have to tell me a little more than that. Like what kind of clothes I’ll need to pack.”
“Fair enough. But that’s all I’m telling you.”
“I’m intrigued.”
“It’s kind of life-changing,” Bruce said, and she wondered exactly what that meant. She truly did not know. It was hard to know what would impress him. She’d brought him to a classic New York diner that had blown him away, and it turned out he’d never actually been in a diner before. Before he was rich, he’d lived almost exclusively on take-out Korean food while he coded at home, and after he was rich, his new friends had introduced him to top-end restaurants. He’d skipped the in-between restaurants and the dive bars and the lean years. He was also both innocent and experienced when it came to relationships. He’d had a longtime girlfriend from his freshman year at college—his only year at college, as it turned out—who’d broken his heart by leaving him for one of his early business partners. He was vague about any relationships he’d had since then, and Abigail sometimes suspected that maybe he’d been to prostitutes with other Silicon Valley types. (There’d been a trip to Thailand after his first big sale.) But in bed he was conservative, and while it was nice, Abigail sometimes missed the sex with Ben, usually drunken, frenzied, and filled with talk. Bruce made a lot of sincere eye contact when they made love, and sometimes it was a little too much for her, but that was who he was. He was sincere. And if the price to pay for a lifetime with a guy like that was a little too much reverence in the bedroom, then Abigail thought she could put up with it.
The bachelorette party was his idea. He was having his own bachelor party back in California, flying all his friends to an island in the Puget Sound. (“This place run by Chip Ramsay. You’ll meet him—he’s legendary.”) “Legendary” and “life-changing” were two of Bruce’s favorite adjectives, a fault she chalked up to too many years on the West Coast. Abigail told him that she thought she’d just have a night out with friends in New York for her bachelorette party, but he told her they should do a weekend away, and he offered to pay, of course. She mentioned that she’d always wanted to go to Northern California, and an hour of web-browsing later he’d found the perfect place, Piety Hills, a Spanish-style vineyard that boasted its own hotel and restaurant. He booked it, and paid for the rooms, although she talked him into getting just three rooms for the five of them. “We can share,” she’d said.
She was grateful, plus a little bit annoyed, that he’d gotten so involved with the planning. And she was equally annoyed when they arrived at Piety Hills and were told that there would be a special dinner for all of them—a seven-course meal—in the wine cellar, already paid for. It was generous, and sweet, but it wasn’t what she had pictured, exactly, for her bachelorette night. She told her friends this during dinner.
“I don’t know, Ab,” Zoe said. “This is pretty amazing.”
“I guess I was just picturing us all in the bar upstairs, getting a little rowdy.”