Maine - J. Courtney Sullivan [60]
(Shortly thereafter, he was fired for doing just that. Now he got by on the odd freelance gig and biweekly checks from his father. The handouts embarrassed Maggie, but Gabe seemed to accept them just fine.)
Even then, so early on, she had a nagging feeling that she ought to run. This guy wasn’t an author, as she’d thought, but an overprivileged slacker photographer who had agreed to write a book about homemade porn. She told herself to stop being negative and look on the bright side. Perhaps he hadn’t finished it because he knew how gross it was. And now she’d never have to explain it to her parents.
He taught her how to deal with all the weird nuances of her own apartment: how to flush the toilet so the handle wouldn’t come loose, the correct way to screw in the antique glass light fixtures, his trick of slicing an orange and heating it up gently on the stove to kill the unpredictable mix of smells from the Korean restaurant downstairs. Mr. Fatelli had been there for years (Rhiannon had come along shortly after Gabe moved out), and he was somewhat baffled when he saw Gabe hanging around the place again, eventually seeming to settle on the belief that the two of them had lived there together all along. For some reason, things like this made Maggie feel like they belonged.
And if Gabe was a slacker, at least he was smart—his new place was filled with books, piled high on every chair and in each corner, mixed in with Cunningham’s ridiculously huge collection of eighties movies on VHS. On Saturday mornings they would sit and read on the couch, their bare feet touching, each of them occasionally pointing out a funny passage to the other.
Twice, Gabe had come over to trap and kill a mouse after midnight. He had put together her table and chairs from Ikea. On the morning of her thirty-second birthday, he woke her up with a homemade chocolate cake, a ring of glowing candles around the edge, like mothers always baked in movies set in the fifties. In his best moments, he seemed like someone who could take care of her. Though she was thirty when they met and in some ways had been caring for herself since she was a little girl, she found with some surprise that she wanted this, needed it.
Gabe had gone up to Boston with her for Easter the previous spring. He and her brother, Chris, goofed around in a back pew, struggling to be quiet in that way you do when something seems all the more hilarious because you know you cannot laugh out loud. Her aunt Ann Marie had shot them a look, and Maggie caught her eye, making a face that said she too disapproved. But in fact, she felt joyful watching her brother and her boyfriend, side by side. She imagined them being close for years to come—golfing in Ogunquit each summer, grilling out in the yard between the cottage and her grandparents’ place as their children ran this way and that, and fireflies zipped from tree to tree.
But she couldn’t always rely on Gabe. Once, sent out to pick up her prescription when she had strep throat, he got distracted by a friend from work, went for drinks, and ended up telling her to get the medicine herself—he was all the way in Manhattan, but if she really wanted, he’d be happy to pay for the delivery. They argued like crazy, almost from the start. Sometimes Gabe lied, even when the truth would do: He’d go out drinking with Cunningham until two a.m. and say he was on a photo assignment. He’d have a boozy lunch with an old girlfriend, and only fess up after Maggie unearthed the hundred-dollar receipt in his wallet. He seemed to get off on tricking her, making her wonder whether she was really as controlling as he said, or if he just had some sort of mommy complex, or both.
There were moments when her stomach sank a bit, when she wondered what exactly he was made of, and whether it could really last through the long haul. Like the night, a few months into their relationship, when they went with the Goons to a wedding in Gabe’s hometown