A Beautiful, Terrible Thing Read online

  BEFORE

  I HAD the next day off from work, and I spent the morning getting ready for the three auditions I had that afternoon. One was for a pet-food commercial, one was for an off-off-Broadway play, and one was two lines on a prime-time television show (two lines!). All called for completely different wardrobes and looks. By the time I had packed the clothes, shoes, and makeup I would need for the day, my backpack was bursting at the zipper. All three auditions went fine. Not bad, not amazing, just fine. Somehow they were all over before I even realized they were happening. I left each casting room with a sinking feeling. The chipper “Thank you’s” from the casting directors really seemed to say, “I won’t remember you five seconds from now, but thanks for wasting everyone’s time.” I walked to the train from my last audition thinking about everything I should have done in the audition room that I hadn’t. The buzz of my phone brought me back to the sidewalk.

  “Drink at Doyle’s?”

  My heart sped up, and all thoughts of my failed auditions floated away as I imagined seeing Marco again. It was 4:30 P.M. It seemed early for a drink, but the thought of being in a dark, cool bar that smelled of old beer and peanuts was deliciously freeing. I had no obligations, nowhere to be, and no one to answer to. Except Jeff. Just one drink, I told myself. There’s nothing wrong with one drink with a coworker. I responded, “Meet you in 30,” and sped down the subway steps to catch the train pulling into the station.

  Marco was wearing a black T-shirt that showed off lean, muscular arms. Black ink formed a tattoo on his forearm, and I saw that it was a Nietzsche quote: “And when you gaze long into an abyss, the abyss also gazes into you.” He was sexy and mysterious and all of a sudden I wanted him more than I had wanted anything in my life. I sat down on the bar stool next to him and ran my finger along his tattoo.

  “Pretty dark,” I said.

  “I got it when I was twenty-five and my son’s mom had just left me. I decided right then and there that I wouldn’t ever try to find happiness again.”

  He told me that after Seb’s mom, Natalia, had left him, he had rebounded immediately with another Eastern European girl, Tania, a hostess where he worked at the time. He told Tania that he was still in love with someone else and that he wasn’t ready for a serious relationship, but somehow they had stayed together for seven years. It was a miserable seven years, full of fighting and distrust. I asked him why on earth they had stayed together for so long, and he said their relationship was a crutch for both of them; neither were happy but both were afraid to let go and have nothing. They had finally broken up a few months earlier. He dropped my gaze. “There’s something I have to tell you,” he said.

  “Yes?” I tapped my foot rhythmically under the table and then clamped my hands down on my knees. I knew it. He has a girlfriend, I thought, and then reminded myself, and you have a boyfriend.

  “I’m not legal. I’ve been living in the States for twelve years illegally. I can’t go home and visit my family. I can’t get a job that isn’t willing to pay me under the table. My grandma died a few months ago, and I couldn’t go to the funeral or say good-bye. . . .” His voice broke and trailed off. We were both quiet for a moment as I struggled to find the right words. He pulled his chair closer to the table so that his knee brushed mine. “You know . . . I hadn’t allowed myself to be hopeful about ever being happy again until I met you.” He looked at me with such a combination of intense sadness and awe that my head felt light and fuzzy.

  Suddenly, I was leaning toward him. His hand brushed the side of my face as our lips touched and opened, and my heart pounded as our mouths and tongues came together and explored each other. It was a kiss unlike any other in my life. For twenty seconds I was transported to a completely different world where only Marco existed. When I pulled away from him, finally aware that we were still in a dive bar and the bartender was a mere twenty feet away, his eyes searched my face, and he tucked a strand of hair behind my ear.

  “Wow.” The word came out of his mouth in a low sigh.

  “Do you want to come back to my apartment?” I asked quickly.

  What the hell are you doing? the voice in my head yelled.

  Back at my apartment, I led Marco into my bedroom. When he laid me down on my bed and then slowly unbuttoned my shirt, kissing my neck, my breasts, my stomach, I started to cry. He intertwined my fingers with his. “I can stop,” he whispered, and I nodded, unable to speak, embarrassed that I turned out to be a fraud, not the exciting, adventurous “bad” girl I thought I could be. He climbed up beside me and kissed me sweetly, wiping away my tears with his thumb.

  “I’m sorry, I feel like such an idiot,” I mumbled. “I thought I could do this but . . . I’ve never cheated and—”

  “It’s OK. You don’t have to be sorry.” He kissed me again and laid his hand on my waist. The kiss grew more intense. This time it was me reaching down to undo his belt. I was in control, and my apprehension was replaced by courage. I pulled him on top of me and guided him inside me, his eyes locked with mine the entire time. When it was over, there was no awkwardness or disappointment that usually rushed in after the first time with someone new. We laid side by side looking at each other, and I thought, I have to break up with Jeff.

  A half hour later, right as Marco was about to leave, our good-bye kiss turned into him pressing me against the wall, and as it grew more intense, he spun me around and pulled down both our jeans, thrusting inside me as I bit my lip, half ecstatic, half nervous about my roommate coming home any minute. After he finally left, I staggered back to my bedroom in a daze and started to cry again as reality rushed back in.

  The next few days passed in a blur. I thought about Marco nonstop. I broke up with Jeff the next time he came to visit. When I told him that the distance was just too much, that we had different priorities, what I really meant was: “I’ve met someone else, and I’ve already moved on.” I cried because he cried, but it was like ripping off a Band-Aid—painful for a moment and then just a slight stinging that faded into the background.

  I practically skipped to work the days I knew I would be working together with Marco. One morning, I walked into work and immediately checked the schedule posted in the changing area. Marco would be coming in in a few hours! I changed quickly into my black shirt and pants, smiling and humming the whole time.

  “Um, you’re in a good mood. Did you get laid last night?” Andrew asked as he sashayed into the locker room.

  “No, I’m just a happy person. Not everyone can have perfect resting bitch face like you and Karly,” I said with a smile.

  “Oh, wait, right I forgot you’re from Maine. Everyone from Maine is happy. Just wait until you’ve been in New York longer. You’ll see. There will be a lot less humming and smiling and a lot more ‘step off or I will cut you, bitch.’”

  I laughed. “I can only hope. I am learning from the best.”

  “Damn straight, honey,” he said, and pushed back through the swinging doors into the main dining room.

  A few hours later, I sidled up to the bar as Marco was settling in for his shift.

  “Oh, hi,” he said. “I didn’t know you were working today.”

  “I’m on a double,” I said.

  “Oh no,” he said, smiling, and then dropped his voice, “this is really bad.”

  “What?” I asked, looking around.

  “Every time I see you, I get really, really happy,” he said. “What are you doing to me?”

  Before I could respond, Bruce walked by and Marco said louder than he needed to, “Jen, could you help me get a keg from the walk-in? The nut brown ale is tapped.”

  “Do you want me to grab one of the guys to help you?” Bruce said as he breezed by.

  “Oh no,” I said quickly. “It’s OK. I’m stronger than I look.”

  As we walked through the kitchen to the walk-in refrigerator, I whispered, “Is the nut brown really ta
pped?”

  “Maybe. Maybe not,” Marco said with a grin.

  He closed the huge refrigerator door behind us and turned toward me, placing one hand on my waist. “Hi,” he said.

  “Hi.”

  “Do you know how extremely beautiful you are?” he asked, tugging a strand of hair behind my shoulder.

  “Do you know how extremely cheesy you are?” I said, laughing, aware of his thumb rubbing my side and the closeness of his chest to my body.

  “Oh, that’s my Latin charm,” he said.

  I wondered if he could feel my heart pounding a few inches away.

  He cocked his head, and then his other hand was cupping my chin and he was drawing me in for a long, intense kiss. “I think I could kiss you all day,” he said. My heart beat harder. “But unfortunately people might start to wonder where we are.”

  “And we would get really cold,” I said.

  “I would keep you warm,” he said with a wink.

  “I better get back to my tables,” I said, and started toward the door.

  “Hey, I still need your help with the keg.”

  “I thought that was a ploy,” I said.

  “Nope. I was just mixing business with pleasure.”

  —

  OVER the next few weeks, I spent every second thinking about Marco. Whenever we were together, I felt the tiniest bit drunk. I had a strange sensation of seeing the world in color for the first time—after not even knowing I was living in black and white before. We texted hundreds of times a day; every morning I woke up to a rush of endorphins as I read Marco’s messages: “Good morning, beautiful,” “Time to wake up, sexy,” “How do you make me so happy?” At work we were like lovestruck teenagers, trying our best to act blasé around each other in front of coworkers and failing miserably. We met in the locker room and exchanged salty, hot kisses, made even more exciting and furious by the fact that someone could walk in at any time. We went to Doyle’s with our coworkers most nights and always stayed for “one more drink.” After everyone else had left the bar, Marco would pull his chair closer to me and drag his finger across my neck, telling me about his dream to open his own bar someday. And I told him how scared I was that I was going to fail, like so many others, at acting, but that it was the only thing that I wanted to do.

  Except that was no longer true. I wanted to be with Marco. I wanted it to be my full-time occupation. It didn’t matter where we were or what we were doing; I just wanted to be close to him, forever.

  In late September, he announced that his sister, Sofia, who lived in Denmark with her investment-banker husband, had had her first baby, a boy named Domenico. He asked me to come with him to pick out a baby gift, and we met at Bloomingdale’s on a beautiful, sparkling afternoon. With Marco’s arm draped around my shoulders, we took the escalator up to the baby-clothes section. We walked through the racks slowly, touching fifty-dollar onesies, running our fingers along silk baby kimonos, picking up a four-hundred-dollar baby bathing suit with a frilly pink tutu, and laughing. The expensive department store air, the way Marco leaned down to kiss my neck, the adorable newness of the baby clothes—all of it mixed together into a cocktail that made me feel woozier than any double vodka soda. After asking my opinion about the tiny shirts, Marco settled on a miniature white T-shirt with a blue outline of the Manhattan skyline on the front, perfectly touristy and elegant for his new nephew.

  On our way back down to the first floor, Marco pulled me off the elevator and led me to Forty Carrots, where he ordered a small frozen yogurt topped with peanut butter cups to share. The no-nonsense yogurt lady handed us an overflowing cup of yogurt—white waves and ripples punctuated by heaps of brown chocolate and peanut butter.

  “This may be the best thing I’ve ever tasted,” I said as Marco spooned a bite into my mouth.

  “I thought you might like it,” he replied, digging back into the cup and bringing another overflowing spoonful into my mouth. After my third bite, I told him he had to try it.

  “Oh no, I hate peanut butter,” he said, smiling.

  “What? Why did you order peanut butter cups then?” I asked.

  “You mentioned once that they’re your favorite candy.”

  Marco watched me eat with a glowing satisfaction.

  “See. It was worth not taking a bite, just to watch how happy that made you,” he said, and brought my fingers to his mouth, swirling his tongue around my pointer finger and then licking away the stickiness from the rest of my fingers. “I don’t think I’ll ever be able to get enough of you,” he said, pulling me against him so tight that I felt his excitement growing. I thought, I know exactly what you mean.

  AFTER

  “MAY I speak to Marco, please?” I ask politely, keeping my voice as steady as possible even though it comes out high-pitched and slightly wobbly. The hostess says, “Just one moment.” While I wait, my eyes travel back to the e-mail. My girlfriend and I have decided to go with another apartment, but thank you for your time. Girlfriend, girlfriend, girlfriend. Why is my husband calling me his girlfriend? And what apartment? I study the profile picture that fills the other half of the screen. A blonde woman in a fur coat stares back at me. She is wearing large black sunglasses perched on the tip of her nose. Her glossed lips are pursed into a duckface. Long, blonde hair falls straight to her waist. Viktorija Novak.

  “This is Marco.” My husband’s voice fills my ear, strong, assertive, work-mode Marco.

  “You’re having an affair,” I scream. Beside me, Louisa erupts in an equally impressive scream. I hold my breath. I’ve almost never raised my voice at my husband in the five years we’ve been together. We never fight. We’ve always just gotten along; the few fights we’ve had, we’ve always been able to resolve with some deep breaths and calm discussion. Part of me is already thinking how we will make this into a joke, after he explains everything, after the miscommunication is cleared up. It will be our “crazy, first few weeks postbaby” fight, over some ridiculous misunderstanding. So she actually thought I was having an affair with a fur-coat-wearing club girl right after Louisa was born, I imagine him telling our friends. Everyone will laugh at the absurdity of Marco—Marco, the guy who gets made fun of on a regular basis for how unapologetically obsessed he is with me—having an affair. But another part of me, the deep-down, behind-the-walls-of-my-stomach part of me, sits with the phone pressed hard against my ear, not breathing, waiting for something in his voice to tell me everything I need to know.

  “Babe,” he says calmly, “what are you talking about?”

  “I found an e-mail”—the words come out in a rush—“between you and an apartment broker and you say ‘my girlfriend.’ What the hell is going on, Marco?”

  He laughs. A goofy, genuine, incredulous laugh, and it is the sweetest thing I have ever heard, because in that laugh I know that this is exactly what I thought: a misunderstanding. Now he will explain and everything will be OK.

  “Baby, first of all, trust me when I say I am not having an affair. I would never, ever cheat on you. You are my life. Baby? I want you to hear that. You are my life, OK?”

  “OK,” I say, and all the muscles I didn’t realize I was holding tight loosen back into their normal spots. I breathe again because I know this is true.

  “Second, this is all a mix-up, and you’re seriously going to laugh when I tell you. This server, she’s Croatian, and she’s new in the States. She saw me looking at apartments for us on my office computer and she pleaded with me to call the broker for her. She has no savings and no credit and no broker will take her seriously when she calls them.” His voice is calm and steady. “Now that I’m thinking about it from your perspective, it was really stupid of me to say ‘my girlfriend’ when I wrote, but I was really trying to help and get some appointments set up for her so she has somewhere to live. I am so, so sorry, babe. I’m an idiot.”

  “OK,” I say again. I know h
e is telling the truth, I feel it in my bones, but I am still shaking. “That’s really fucking inappropriate to call someone else ‘my girlfriend.’”

  “I know, I know, I am realizing that now, and I’m so sorry. Please don’t cry. It’s really all a stupid mistake.”

  “I need you to come home now, Marco. I believe you, but I am having a really hard time with this. You crossed a major line when you did this kind of favor for another woman. I don’t care how innocent it may have been. It makes me feel so extremely uncomfortable. We need to talk about this in person.”

  “OK.” I can tell he hears the seriousness in my voice. “I’m coming home; just let me tie up some loose ends here first. I’ll be home in an hour, OK?”

  I don’t say anything. An hour seems like an eternity. Louisa is now screaming so hard she has begun to choke on her screams.

  “Babe? OK?”

  “OK. I love you.”

  “I love you so much. I’ll be home soon.”

  Thank God.

  BEFORE

  “SEBASTIAN, this is Jen. Jen, Seb.” Marco nudged the small boy in front of me, and Seb reached out a skinny arm to meet my hand. I was meeting Marco’s seven-year-old son for the first time on a hot Saturday afternoon at a tiny Brazilian restaurant a few blocks from my apartment.

  “Oops. Oh dear, excuse me,” Seb said, pulling his hand back. “Let me just . . . OK, sorry about that.” He pocketed the small white object he had been holding and brought his hand back up to mine.