Maine - J. Courtney Sullivan [101]
“I know,” Maggie said, though sometimes she had believed that if they got married, the rest would work itself out. All around New York City—on the subway, in the cafeteria at work—were wedding bands on the fingers of men her age, the men who hadn’t been ready to commit back when she met Gabe, and had somehow gotten scooped up in the meantime, every last one of them a shiny reminder of what she didn’t have.
She knew it was strange, how badly she wanted to be married, despite what she had seen. The urge seemed hardwired, so that each time she heard of something bad happening to an adult—a co-worker of her dad’s got laid off, a friend of her mother’s had emphysema—the first question out of her mouth was always, “Is he married?” As if that guaranteed safety, someone who would tenderly care for you forever, instead of resenting you for losing your job or smoking all those years when she had begged you to quit.
It wasn’t a terribly liberated thought, but sometimes Maggie envied her grandmother and other women from her generation, for whom love and marriage and children seemed automatic, a given.
“Despite what he’s put me through, I really do love him,” she said now.
“Hmm.” Rhiannon nodded her head. “Love’s a bitch.”
“I have this theory about how the things we love destroy us,” Maggie said.
“Oh, I love theories like that. Go on,” Rhiannon said.
As far as she had seen, Maggie explained, what made people and pleased them, and threatened to ultimately ruin them, was love. Not romantic love necessarily, but the love of something, the thing that defined your life. Her mother was in love with booze. While other people might have a glass or two of wine with dinner because they liked it well enough, Kathleen loved the stuff, and so it destroyed her. Her uncle Patrick and aunt Ann Marie loved status, money, appearance—that would wreck them one day, if it hadn’t already.
Maggie herself did not love liquor, though she feared its power over her anyway, knowing how alcoholism ran through her veins like blood. She didn’t love money, either. If she had enough for a roof over her head and school loan payments, if she could find a way to afford to raise a child, that would be plenty.
Maggie’s ruinous love had always been men. She fell for someone, and desperation overtook her. She wanted him all to herself, to build a cocoon around the two of them, to keep him safe, but more so, to keep him near. She lost interest in her work and friends, though she tried to pretend otherwise. In every other way, she was controlled, sensible. But men brought out some crazy part of her. Gabe wasn’t the first. Before him there had been Martin, the fifty-two-year-old gallery owner who she had met during an informational interview in Manhattan her senior year of college. She had sent along some fiction samples with her résumé, and the first thing Martin said to her was what she most wanted to hear: “You’re no gallerist. You’re a writer.”
He was handsome, charming, knew all the most interesting people in the city. They had dinner that night in the West Village, at a dimly lit café that she was never able to find again. When they were leaving, his long fingers brushed her neck as he helped her into her coat. They went back to his apartment—surprisingly cramped for a man his age—and made love in his bed. He seemed to love her youth, running his hands over her thighs, her breasts, saying again and again that she had the smoothest skin he had ever touched. She thought his age—the slight wrinkles around his eyes when he smiled, the strength and assurance of his hands—suited her old soul much better than those shiny-faced college boys back at Kenyon.
After graduation, she moved into his place. He helped her get a job at a small literary journal run by a friend of his. The affair lasted a year. When it ended she felt empty and lonesome; she immediately met Chad Patterson, a kid from Wisconsin, two years her