Maine - J. Courtney Sullivan [62]
Tears crept from the corners of her eyes and down to her lips.
“Fine,” she said bitterly. And now came the regret, because he had told her he loved her, they had been so close to making up, but she kept pushing.
A moment later, he was asleep. She stayed awake until morning, thinking, thinking. Was it just the childhood imprint of watching her parents go at each other at the breakfast table or at one of her brother’s soccer games—screaming, shouting, storming off, only to make up again a few hours later? Is that why she fought with Gabe the way she did? Had she really been drawn to a hard-drinking, short-tempered man, when these were the exact traits in her parents that scared her the most? Her mother said that alcoholics tended to seek one another out as a way to make themselves feel normal. Maybe that extended to their children as well.
Maggie thought, as she often did at times like this, about her cousin Patty. She had been raised by the even-keeled, forever happy Aunt Ann Marie and Uncle Pat, and she had easily fallen in love with and married Josh, her law school boyfriend who was sweet and kind. It really might be as simple as that—good model, happiness; bad model, despair.
Her shrink had said once that the right sort of relationship wouldn’t require so much thought. It would just fit. Maggie had wanted to point out that if that were true—if love actually came easy and stayed that way—the woman would likely be out of a job.
The problem was that you couldn’t divide a person up, pick and choose the parts you liked and the parts you didn’t. There were parts of Gabe that made her love him so much that she wanted to hold on to him forever, even though there was no such thing. She could actually cry at the thought of him dying before she did, when they were both in their nineties.
He stirred around seven o’clock, and she reached for him, running her hand down his stomach, dipping her fingers under the elastic band of his boxer shorts.
“You awake?” she said, feeling desperate for him, when he lay right there beside her.
He grunted.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I shouldn’t have been such a drama queen.”
Gabe opened his eyes. He grinned. “Damn woman, you’re Oscar-worthy.”
With those words came the familiar flood of relief: the fight was over, and it hadn’t ended them. She slid his boxers down and climbed on top of him, kissing his neck. He pulled off her T-shirt and licked her nipples in tiny perfect circles. They made love and afterward he ordered them eggs Benedict from room service, and made Maggie laugh with the story of how Cunningham’s girlfriend, Shauna, had passed out drunk on an ice sculpture after Maggie went upstairs.
“So, can I stay?” she said, in a child’s voice that she hated the sound of.
“Are you going to behave yourself?” he asked.
“Yes,” she said.
“Good, because I hate being away from you.”
“Me too.”
Things were fine between them for a few months after that. Gabe took her for a surprise long weekend in Berlin, and they had an amazing time popping into galleries and cafés. They stayed in a five-star palace, which had been the setting for the Greta Garbo film Grand Hotel. (Maggie sent her grandmother a postcard to tell her so.) She was impressed with how easily Gabe spoke to the locals, how charmed everyone seemed by him. She felt proud to be the one he had chosen.
But then one Friday night back in New York he canceled their dinner plans abruptly because he said he was coming down with a cold. She asked him if she ought to come over and bring him some soup, but he was tired and said he didn’t want to get her sick. He called her before ten and said he was going to bed. The next day, sensing that he had lied (he seemed perfectly healthy to her, and it wasn’t the first time she’d heard him pretend to be sick), Maggie looked through the call log on his cell phone while he was out picking up lunch, and there they were: two calls from the previous night, around three