The Breakup Doctor (27 page)

Kendall was never good with awkward silences. He finally had to fill it. “I...I am so, so sorry.”

It spread over my heart like ointment on a wound.
More. More.

“I screwed this up.”

Yes
. Maybe there was nothing I needed to say. Maybe I could simply sit here, just make myself an audience so that Kendall could say it all, everything I had dreamed of hearing.
I messed up. I made a huge mistake. I love you. I want you back.

But the script stopped too soon. Kendall lapsed into silence and contemplated his Kendalltini as though mermaids might breach from its surface.

I leaned toward him, moving my hand but stopping just short of resting it on top of his where it lay on the table. Too soon.

“Kendall.” God, it was good to let his name fill my mouth again. “Kendall... What happened?”

He slumped forward as if someone had replaced his spine with rubber, elbows on the table, looking down through the wrought-iron waffling of the table to the dingy bricks below it. “I don't know.”

I had to resist the urge to slap him. My reaction caught me by surprise; all I had been feeling since I saw him was melted. But I kept my voice modulated, calm, neutral.

“I'm not sure what you mean by that.”

He fingered the base of his glass, and I wondered if he'd answer.

“I...guess I got scared,” he said, almost inaudibly.

“Scared of what?”

“I don't know.”

“I need more than that, Kendall.”

“Yeah. I know. Okay...scared of... We moved so fast. Everything all of a sudden started happening so fast. And the next thing I knew you were about to move in.”

I must have looked as incredulous as I felt, but Kendall wouldn't have seen it. He hadn't looked up at me once since he'd started talking.

“Kendall...
you're
the one who asked me to move in.”

“I know!” he exploded. “I know! Why do you think this has been so hard for me?”

No, Brook—don't follow that path. If you get sidetracked on that comment, you'll never get back on the road to where you want to go.

Dr. Evanston? My mom? Sasha? I couldn't tell whose voice that was, but I didn't care—it was good advice. I literally bit my tongue and clenched my jaw against the retort I wanted to swing at him like an anvil.

“Can you explain what you mean by that?” I was therapizing him—Sasha would have caught it in a second, but Kendall was too involved in whatever was happening inside his head. And there was a reason therapists used this stuff—it worked.

“Brook... I loved you. I still love you. I thought... Well, I wanted us to spend our lives together.”

Flowers opened in my heart. Dried rivers flowed. Arias were sung.

“But I didn't know if I was...was ready for that again.”

Locusts invaded. The earth grew fallow. Dirges sounded.

I carefully reminded myself not to get off task. And couldn't help myself.

“‘Again'?”

The silence after my one word weighed about fifty tons. Kendall looked up for the first time and searched my face, and I could actually see him calculating, watched potential tactics flit across his face and be discarded in the space of a few seconds.

“Yeah. After, you know. Teresa.”

Let it go. Move on.
But I couldn't. Nothing in his words specifically told me there was more here, but I could see it in his face. Sensed it.

“You mean...after you moved to Chicago for her? To live together?”

He nodded, jerkily.

“Yeah. We were...more than just living together.” The words were muttered, quiet.

I bit the inside of my cheek and nodded stiffly. “Engaged?” Even in my own state, I could see that Kendall was miserable, and I felt a vague twinge of sympathy for him.

He cleared his throat. “Married.”

I'd misheard. I had to have misheard.

“You were... You had... What?”

“We were married. Not long.” He said it like a palliative, quick, desperate. “Or not long working at it, anyway. But it's over now, Brook. It's been final for months.”

Months
was slowed down, dragged out in my ears like the presidential assassination scene in a cheesy old movie.
Months
was how you marked the passage of short-term, recent things…tax periods…pregnancies…
Months
was how you spoke of a baby's age.
Months
might have been less long than we'd been together.

“When was it actually final?” The voice coming out of my mouth was Wise Therapist's voice: reasoned, objective, unemotional. The hysteric in my head marveled at the calm, level sound of it.

Kendall was too far gone into his own play to register that he ought to tread carefully. Too relieved, maybe, at my steady reaction. It made him incautious.

“End of January. I took you out to celebrate that night—remember? We went to Caravelli's, stayed the night in Naples...?”

Oh, I did remember. It was the most excruciatingly romantic thing Kendall had ever done for me—that almost any boyfriend had ever done. He instructed me to dress up and pack an overnight bag, and told me nothing else. Picked me up at my house, had me wait in the lobby while he checked us into the Bay Inn on Fifth Avenue. Dinner at swanky Caravelli's, and back upstairs to our room—a suite—where there were white roses and chocolate-covered strawberries and champagne.

I was so surprised that my no-nonsense, business-focused beau had a hidden and ornate romantic side. So moved that all of this was spontaneous, no occasion, no reason. So overwhelmed that all of it was just...for me.

But Kendall had been having his own private celebration, a secret commemoration of his freedom. For me the night had been a turning point for us—when I began to realize we were more than just casual, that I meant more to him than a fling. For him, it had been his own personal marking of a milestone. I was just along for the ride.

And it was also the night he'd asked me to move in.

“So that was when your”—I made myself say the word—“divorce was final.”

He nodded pathetically.

“Were you going to tell me? Ever?”

“Brook... Of course—of course I would have. I was just waiting until the time was right.”

The right time might have been when we met, I reflected. The right time might have been on one of our early dates, when it was clear things were heating up between us, or when we started to get serious. I wanted to ask Kendall what he deemed “the right time” would have been—pictured him down on a knee, avowing his love and asking me to spend the rest of my life with him:
And oh, before I forget, I've done this once before.

But I kept my tone modulated—I knew from experience that as soon as you got emotional, most men tuned out. And, I reminded myself, I had kept something from him too.

“Kendall.” I breathed deeply. “I can understand why you wouldn't have told me this early in.” I couldn't. “But how could you have asked me to move in with you without telling me?”

He looked down into his fascinating drink again, then flicked a glance toward the door to the Bar Belle. He shifted in his chair. Fingered the stem of his martini glass. Cleared his throat and smoothed the sharp crease of his pants.

“I didn't... I didn't...know.”

“You didn't know
what
? That you were married?”

“I didn't know...” He muttered something else that sounded vaguely English.

“What? I didn't hear you.”

His face contracted like a fist. “I didn't know that I was going to ask you to move in. I hadn't exactly planned it.”

My fingers and face felt suddenly cold, and I sat staring at him. “What do you mean?”

“I...I just... I was feeling happy Brook, and we had such a good time that night, and...so I…”

“So you asked me to
live
with you?”

“It just popped out.”

“It popped
out
?” I yelled in disbelief.

“Brook... shhh-shhh.” I didn't know if he was trying to soothe me or silence me, but it set me even further off.

“Were you just asking out of
relief
, Kendall? Was it even about me?”

“Brook!” He glanced quickly around the patio.

“
What
, Kendall? What was it?”

He pushed back his chair and stood. “Look, we're not doing this here. Wait while I pay my tab and we can go—”

“No!” I grabbed his arm and shot to my feet. “You're not running away from this. Turn around. Goddammit, Kendall, turn around and be a man!”

He yanked his arm away and stepped back. “Jesus! What the hell has gotten into you?”

“What's gotten into me? What's gotten
into me
, Kendall”—my voice dripped with a nasty sarcasm that made me shrill—“is that in the last five minutes I've found out you were having a completely different relationship than I was. What's gotten ‘into me' is the realization that most of our relationship was a lie.”

“Brook, calm down,” he hissed.

“No, I don't think so.” The pitch of my voice rose along with my volume. “We're not going to ‘calm down' and ‘talk about this rationally' this time. Here's a radical idea, Kendall—instead let's be honest for once. Let's actually say things we mean. Oh, and hey—another nutty thought—what if we actually have a real fucking emotion for a change?”

He raised his hands as though I were holding him at gunpoint and started backing away, toward the door to the bar. “You're not rational. You need to calm down and call me when we can talk like adults.”

“I
am
talking like an adult. Why don't you
act
like an adult, Kendall, instead of like a recalcitrant child who's afraid of getting in trouble.”

“I'm out of here.”

But I was too far gone for a retreat. I lunged forward and grabbed an edge of his suit, yanking him back. Some part of me registered that we'd drawn the attention, even through the glass, of everyone at the Bar Belle. But I couldn't stop myself; I was out of control.

“What are you doing? Quit it, Brook.” The harder he pulled away, the more I jerked the expensive tropical wool toward me.

“You don't mess with someone's emotions like that. You don't tell them things just to make them feel better. You don't just up and
leave
! You don't say you love someone and then leave them!” I didn't think I was talking just about Kendall anymore.

“Back off! Let go of me!”

Looking back, I think he probably did the only thing he could do in that position to get himself out of my death grasp on his lapels: he set his hands on my chest and pushed me away.

But Kendall was a big man, and strong, and charged up with emotion (for maybe the very first time—or at least, the first time with me).

His hands hit my breasts hard and the push hurt. I stumbled back a step and my heel caught in the brickwork. I felt myself losing my balance, flailed wildly trying to catch it, but plowed backward, my tailbone cracking against the edge of the wrought-iron table as I went down, bringing it tilting over on top of me. Our glasses slid off and over, Kendalltini and gimlet splashing over my chest and lap and the martini glass shattering on the patio beside me. My highball glass landed in my lap.

“Brook! Oh, my God.” Kendall started forward.

“Stay away from me!”

The doors behind him crashed open and people swelled out as if propelled through them. Wet and sticky, I started to scramble furiously to my feet.

“Brook, the glass!” Kendall was still coming, a hand out to help me up.

“Do not touch me!” I was screaming. I reached down to lever myself off the brick and instantly realized what he'd meant as broken glass cut into my palm. I cried out and lifted my hand, glittering with glass and red with blood.

Peter and David were heading over, their faces alarmed, Ricky's face bobbing amid the onlookers, looking at me with a fierce pity. I thought I saw Melissa Overton's smug, gloating face in the crowd that was still swelling outside on the patio, everyone staring at me, but rage and shame were blinding me, blending all the faces together.

“You need a doctor.” To Kendall's credit he was still there, still trying to help, but his expression was distant, his tone flat and removed, as if he were a passerby who'd witnessed an accident.

“You need a soul.” I couldn't stop my mouth. It was like I'd sprung a toxic leak.

By this time Peter had come to one side of me, David on the other—“You okay, honey?” “Careful now...”—and they were hoisting me up under my armpits.

Kendall threw his hands in the air, washing his hands of me, of us, and turned to go inside. Leaving me there on the patio, sopping, bleeding, humiliated in front of a crowd of mostly strangers.

“That's right. Walk away. That's what you do, isn't it? That's all your infantile little emotions are capable of.” I was shouting it after him, a fishwife, a harpy, a Jerry Springer special.

Kendall didn't even slow down.

And because I hadn't hit actual rock bottom yet, I had one last encore, my aria, the big denouement of our scene. The gimlet glass was still clutched in my hand from where I'd picked it off my lap as Peter and David had taken my arms. I jerked out of David's grip on my right and cocked my arm back, let the glass fly with all my strength toward the back of Kendall's head. He started to turn at the collective gasp and a couple of shouts from the erstwhile audience, and I had a satisfying image of it smacking his pretty face.