Y2K
It’s 1999. I’m twenty-four years old and living an artsy city-girl’s life. I work all day in public radio and spend my free time in used bookstores and going to see bands. Every Wednesday night you’ll find me and my friends here in this bar, before we head out to a well-known dive for dancing. They all drink and party and stay in school forever, but not me. I rarely drink, and certainly don’t drink to get drunk. I’m not being pious, I just love to experience life, and I feel like I’d be missing out if I put a filter on it.
I also, with every part of me, love love. I mean, I love it! Being in love and falling in love and writing about love and singing about it and living it. I’ve had one boyfriend after another since I was fifteen years old. All long, committed relationships. I haven’t slept in a bed alone in years. Relationships are everything to me; I know no other way. I just love to get lost in another person, to learn everything about what interests them, to see what they see and feel what they feel.
And that’s how it is with my boyfriend right now. We’ve been together since I was nineteen. He’s a musician, and four years older than me, and so intelligent and mystical that, probably out of youth or just abject insecurity, I defer to him on just about everything. I think he’s so much better than me — he’s read every book, he knows every song, he’s knowledgeable on all subjects, every topic imaginable. He’s an atheist, and a passionate altruist. He’s a vegetarian, so of course now I am, too. He’s a devoted boyfriend, a real partner; we are honest and expressive and artistically inspired by one another. We have matching tattoos, because it’s the nineties. It’s been a perfect, symbiotic relationship. We say we’ll be together forever.
But lately, things are different. The Musician has been talking about us having an open relationship. Like, open open. He thinks we’re mature enough and secure enough to handle sleeping with other people while still maintaining our committed bond. I’m less sure — a big part of me feels like true love doesn’t want to be shared. But that seems old fashioned, so I start to entertain the thought. Could I really do something like that?
The only guy I find even remotely interesting is this weird, brooding graduate student. A friend of a friend, who always seems to be around but doesn’t exactly fit in. He’s completely different than all the downtown artsy guys I know. A small-town boy, a scientist, here in the big city doing his master’s degree. We’ve never really talked, but I find him kind of cute. He’s tall, with awful glasses and the worst long hair. But there’s something about him. I kinda like that he gives zero fucks about what anyone thinks of him.
The Scientist drinks three pints of beer to every regular guy’s one. He whistles to get the waitress’s attention, which we all find mortifying. He sits with us, but doesn’t really talk to anybody. He hasn’t seen the latest Thomas Vinterberg film. I don’t even think he reads books! You can tell he thinks we’re all a bunch of big-city snobs, which of course we totally are. But he likes Top-40 music. And watches football. The Musician can’t stand him, but I have been completely awakened from my elitist stupor by his very presence.
On this Wednesday in the bar, The Musician is holding court as he always does, orating on some political issue or another with everyone’s rapt attention. Bored, I look across the table and find The Scientist just staring at me, his arched eyebrow indicating he thinks my boyfriend is a blowhard and also that he knows that deep down I agree. And so I smirk at him, and he smirks back, and this is all it takes for us to fall in love.
It’s that knowing smirk we will share for the next thirteen years — on our wedding day, at crowded parties when other blowhards speak, in the middle of huge arguments, during sex, when any of our parents speak at any time about anything, and several times in the delivery room when he stays awake with me for forty hours straight until our daughter is born. It’s the same knowing smirk we still share today, long after the divorce. All I can call it is true love. There’s no more truth than that look between us.
But back to 1999. Things are escalating between us. We find ways to sit beside each other or walk together or run into each other. He stares at me across the bar and I feel it before I even turn around. There’s an electrical current that’s been switched on. He’s wild and wounded, and it’s this sad complexity that draws me to him, a thing that I think I can somehow fix.
On this night in the bar, after the smirks, I leave the table and go down into the basement. Just as I’m about to go into one of the washrooms, a hand grabs mine. The Scientist is behind me. He doesn’t say a word. He kisses me so hard and his body is so physically strong, the breath gets literally knocked out of me. It is the best kiss I’ve ever had. In fact, the kiss is better than any sex I’d ever had. Then he turns and leaves without a word. It was so aggressive and unexpected. The Musician is sooooooo Mr. I’m-A-Sensitive-Feminist guy, and this is just the complete opposite. From this moment on, we begin an intense relationship.
The Musician can’t understand why I would pick The Scientist of all people. I mean, it was his idea to be open, and now he doesn’t like that I’ve chosen this football-watching, beer-drinking guy in cargo pants. But it’s too late. I’m done. Hooked. I’m less and less interested in The Musician and the life we’ve built together. I’m tired of our shabby apartment, our vegetarianism, our bohemian lifestyle. The Scientist has plans, and goals, and eats meat for Chrissake. He’s driven and focused, and I’m enthralled by the contrast.
We fall in love with each other hard and fast, writing long emails back and forth all day, every day. Me from my ninth-floor office downtown, and him in his lab at the university uptown. We are obsessed with each other. By the end of December, I’m packing up my things and preparing to move out of the apartment I share with The Musician. The Scientist and I meet on the day before Christmas Eve and he gives me a gift — our emails printed out and bound in a book. He’s made two copies, one for each of us. He calls it Our Book. He says he loves me. He says he’ll wait for me. His dark eyes are so shiny as he holds my hand across the table and says, “I don’t want to share you with anyone.”
When I get back to the apartment, I look around at all the boxes and think, Only a few more days. The Musician isn’t there. I sit on the floor with Our Book. On the cover is a drawing The Scientist has done in pencil, a face with a tree for a body.
When I close my eyes, he is all I see.
THIRTEEN YEARS LATER
We’re in a restaurant with our daughter, Birdie, having our weekly “family dinner.” We’ve been separated for eleven months.
Out of the blue he says, “I was just reading Our Book. All the emails back and forth.” It’s like he’s just put a fist through my chest. There’s no way I’d be able to read it yet; there’s no way I’d expect him to re-read it, not now or ever.
“Did it make you sad to read it?” I ask.
“Yeah,” he says, “but a little happy too.”
We smile at one another, but I want to jump across the table and shake him. I also want to crawl into his arms and feel his skin against mine. I want to kiss the nape of his neck and also punch him in his stupid face. It’s complicated to love someone who’s betrayed you, okay?
Afterward, as he walks me and Birdie to my apartment, he puts his arm around me. For the first time in almost a year, we walk like that, his giant parka and mine all bunched together. We stop outside my building. He kisses my forehead and says, “I love you.” He waves at us as we go in.
This is how we are now. This is who we are. Together, alone.
HURRICANE
In the year 2000, after I’ve broken up with The Musician and moved out on my own, I figure my relationship with The Scientist is no big deal. I’m pretty sure that the sex is all we have between us. That we’ll