Love Saves the Day

Josh was simply a person who enjoyed his life and his work. He was passionate about music and books, the way Sarah had been, but he viewed them as smaller gifts that made everything else better rather than ends in themselves. He could make something as minor as a spontaneous afternoon movie or midnight pizza order seem like a holiday, a treat they’d earned by working so hard. For Laura, the idea of hard work being rewarded with anything other than money and the security of knowing more work and money would follow was so foreign as to come as a revelation.

She would think about him all day, imagining Josh’s hands and Josh’s legs wrapped around her own, and her knees would tremble beneath her desk. Innocuous office talk, like, Laura, could you please come in here? or, The meeting is starting now, reminded her of the urgency of a please or now whispered in the dark. In her bed alone on the nights when she didn’t see Josh, her legs contracted and kicked restlessly, keeping her up for hours, as if they were desperate to walk away with or without her, desperate to walk back to him.

To fall in love in New York is to walk, and she and Josh spent hours walking all over the city, although when they were downtown Laura made sure they never went any farther east than Soho or the Village. Their long legs naturally took rapid strides, but they deliberately slowed their pace to save their breath for the conversations that went back and forth and around and around, never ceasing, like an endless game of tetherball.

Once, only a few months into their relationship, they’d walked past a store on the Upper East Side, one of those tiny boutiques whose window mannequins wore heartbreakingly lovely, stunningly expensive gowns. One of the dresses in the window, a floor-length spaghetti-strapped number, was made of silk the exact color of the soft inside of a peach. Laura had stood contemplating it for a moment and said musingly, “I’ve always wanted to wear a dress like this.”

“Then we should go in so you can try it on,” Josh had replied.

Laura had glanced down at her faded jeans and light sweater—her typical nonwork uniform—and laughed. “What’s the point? Where would I even wear something like that?”

“Trying on isn’t buying,” Josh had pointed out, and so the two of them went into the shop.

Looking at herself in the dress in front of the store’s three-way mirror, Laura had felt transformed. Her pale skin looked creamy and rose-tinged next to the soft peach of the dress, and her hair gleamed against the delicate fabric like jewels in a velvet case. She didn’t look like a lawyer with 150 pages of contracts to read through that night before returning to work in the morning, trudging to the subway with a shoulder bag so heavy that she was already developing back problems. She looked like someone who went whirling across polished floors before collapsing gracefully into a delicate chair with a glass of champagne and perhaps the smallest finger sandwich for refreshment.

“You should buy it,” said Josh’s voice, behind her.

“Are you crazy?” Laura whirled to face him. “Do you know how expensive …?” But her protest trailed off when she saw Josh’s face.

He looked at her as if seeing some version of herself she hadn’t met. It was a look Laura had seen sometimes on Mr. Mandelbaum’s face as he’d watched Mrs. Mandelbaum do the simplest things, like stand on her toes to pull a book from a high shelf, or pour boiling water from a kettle into a teacup. It was a half smile, stronger in the eyes than it was around the mouth. And even though Laura was very young when she’d seen it, even then she’d thought it was a smile that contained a lifetime of books and teacups, of sleepless nights next to a feverish son’s bedside and clasped hands years later at that same son’s graduation, months when the checkbook refused to balance and years of holiday dinners that were festive nonetheless. But, always, there had been this. This room. This woman.

“Marry me,” Josh said. “Will you marry me?”

He reached out to take her hand, but Laura took an instinctive step back. “Are you serious?” She felt perspiration collect beneath her arms and thought, Well, now I guess I have to buy this dress. “Do we even know each other well enough to get married?”

“I know how I feel,” Josh replied. “This is something I’ve been thinking about for a while.”

His voice was firm, his eyes clear as they looked into her own. He really has been thinking about it, Laura realized. A wisp of an idea curled around the edges of thought: That you never knew, truly could never know, what another person was thinking. And yet what was love if not the possibility—the promise, even—of perfect understanding?