Look Closer

I was supposed to be so nervous. I’d built this hypothetical reunion up in my head so much that I figured I’d be sweaty and jumpy, stuttering and stammering. But my nerves instantly fluttered away when I saw you, whatever lines I’d rehearsed vanished. It was just you and me again.

“You’re married?” you asked me, seeing the ring on my finger.

“Almost ten years,” I said. “Her name is Vicky.”

“Is Vicky here?”

No. Vicky wasn’t at the club. Vicky wouldn’t be caught dead at a country club.

“She couldn’t make it,” I said. I think my face showed something, because yours did in reaction, like you realized you’d touched a nerve.

You weren’t as beautiful as you were nineteen years ago, Lauren; you were more beautiful. You looked experienced, tested, wiser. You weren’t the hot, blond twenty-year-old paralegal burning a path through my father’s law firm but someone who had ripened into a poised, confident woman, who had lived and learned, who knew where she was and who she was.

It bothered me that I didn’t tell you that I’d seen you back in May on Michigan Avenue, that the only reason I’d come to this stupid event at the Grace Country Club was that I’d looked up the membership roster and saw that you and your husband, Conrad, were members, and I thought I might run into you at this Fourth of July party. That my “surprise” at seeing you was not completely sincere. It bothered me that something that could be so real between us was starting under false pretenses.

So I told myself, Okay, one white lie, but that’s it. I will never lie to you again, Lauren.

On my way home from the club, I stopped and bought this spiral notebook, just some ordinary notebook with a green cover. (Green for fresh and new, I suppose.) It’s been years, Lauren, years since I kept a journal. I’d given up writing my daily thoughts. Maybe because I no longer had anything interesting to say. I have a blog and law review articles and class to talk about the law, and the law has basically become my blood and oxygen and nourishment. What else is there to talk about? A wife who doesn’t love me A marriage that’s grown loveless and stale? My personal best time in some 10K?

So it’s back to a journal—hello, Green Journal—because now I have something to write about, Lauren. Or someone, that is.

Someone who agreed to meet me next week for coffee!

No harm in having some coffee, is there?

4 Simon