The restaurant is called The Back Porch and you can’t remember why you decided to meet there, since it’s far from where he lives, even farther from where you live in Brooklyn. You and he had taken some time away from each other, a couple of months, to decide whether you wanted to be together or not. When he comes up the street and sees you, he cringes. This is not expected. You get a table in the crowded restaurant and he tells you about those two months, about how he didn’t spend them the way you’d hoped.
So you leave the restaurant (and the check) and rush into the night. Light pours from the windows around you–City That Never Sleeps and all that. You hail a cab. You know it’ll be a long cab ride; you cry during this cab ride. The cabbie, bless him, says nothing–New York cabbies are used to seeing and hearing a lot. “Just another night in the city, pal.”
When you get home and call him, he tells you that you’d never had a relationship, that it wasn’t like that, that you’re like the delusional guy in the play Harvey who keeps trying to get people to see the man-sized rabbit standing next to him. He seems angry that you’d walked out of the restaurant. A week or two later, in the college library, you run into a friend of his who had become a sort of friend of yours, and she says she’s sorry about “whatever transpired” between the two of you–says he’d been so happy with you, that you’d been different from the other women he’d been involved with because you’d actually had a relationship. The friend tells you that she’s decided she doesn’t like him, that he’d “done a thing” with her sister, and that she knows it’s hard to hear about other people but she has to say it. It would be easy to get involved in a weird undefined “friendship” with him, she says. He can really get inside your head, she says.
She nails that last part. You’d wondered about the giant rabbit, if he was right about that.
You find out a few months later about the sister: he sends you a letter after your restaurant rendezvous, saying they had decided to marry and it had happened unexpectedly and he would really appreciate talking to you. This is 1991, before the days of cell phones and texts and So. Much. Internet. You leave a message on his voice mail–you know he won’t be home, it’s during the day, he’ll be at work–saying you don’t want to see him, you have a new boyfriend. The new boyfriend becomes your husband; you’ve been married, happily, thirty years now. You hear through mutual friends that the ex and the sister have also been married thirty years. New York is still there, though not the city it used to be: people have to be rich to live there, the mom-and-pop stores are gone. You miss almost everything that happened to you there, but not that cab ride.
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