Элисон Скотч - The Theory of Opposites

“Coming,” I say, hoping for greasy eggs, which remind me of Shawn, so I reconsider and pray for Belgian waffles.

I unlatch the lock.

I look for the food cart, but there’s no food cart.

It’s Theodore. (Of course.)

“Sorry,” he says. “I had to.”

“You really didn’t,” I say. “You really shouldn’t have.”

He takes an arm out from behind his back and holds out a plate of waffles.

I shake my head. (He’s the founder of Y.E.S., for God’s sake.)

So he smiles. “Come on. Give a guy a break.”

So I smile back. “Fine. Only because I’m starving.”

One night, early in our relationship, Shawn and I were waiting on the popcorn line for the new Batman. He knew the guy who had done some of the special effects, so he was talking quickly, excitedly, about what we were about to witness. Two girls in line behind us overheard and interjected and said:

“Like, that’s so awesome! You know someone who worked on this movie?”

And as the line crept forward, Shawn beckoned them into the conversation, still spilling his secrets, and the two girls inched closer to him, and I was pushed ever so slightly further away.

Eventually, we bought our popcorn and sodas, and they bought their Red Vines and whatever, and on the way back to the theater, the prettier girl said to Shawn when she thought that I was out of earshot, “I don’t see a ring, so you should call me sometime.”

I turned around just as she handed him her card.

Shawn stood there shell-shocked for a moment, and then he got this loopy grin on his face, and then he noticed me watching, so he gave me this endearing look, like what the hell was that about? — and then he balled up her card and tossed it in the trash.

He had been a late bloomer, all pimples and bones and awkwardness in high school. His college girlfriend had been cute enough – she was from Missoula and was sort of boring, a little dull, and she liked reading Popular Science as much as he did. She broke up with him when she moved to St. Louis after graduation. So at Batman , he hadn’t yet adjusted to his handsomeness or the fact that coders and Internet geeks ruled the world. He was still a kid who played Dungeon and Dragons with the neighbors in his parents’ basement.

Later, back at his apartment, I asked him why he chose me, though I felt really presumptuous because it wasn’t like we were engaged or anything. It wasn’t like I had a ring.

“I don’t know, we fit,” he said. “You’re Switzerland. I am too.”

And we were. So I didn’t dispute him. (Switzerland doesn’t dispute anything.)

Now, I guess I hadn’t seen it, that we no longer fit, that he outgrew me. That the gawky high school kid eventually discovers that he can go back to his reunions and make the prom queens jealous with regret.

But what’s regret anyway?

Regret, I am learning these days, is a lot of things. But mostly, it’s a slippery seed of longing, of looking back and asking yourself why you didn’t know better when the answers were so obvious all along.

Theodore sits in the hotel room desk chair while I awkwardly position myself on the bed, clutching the robe shut so a boob doesn’t fall out. He sets the plate of waffles in front of me, balancing them on a pillow, and then returns to his chair, a safe distance away so I don’t feel threatened. I can tell that he does all of this unintentionally, even though with Theo, it’s second nature. That’s what he does: he reads your instincts and responds accordingly, before you’re even aware of your own instincts yourself.

“I can go at any time,” he says, once he’s settled in.

I laugh. “You’re such a bullshitter.”

He laughs too because he’s really not, but he also sort of is. Then he says, “I just wanted to see you. Talk to you. But I don’t want to, like, make you uncomfortable.”

I pick up a waffle and take a bite, buying my time, assessing him, how much the past eight years have changed him, or how they really haven’t. He is still boyishly handsome; he still wears black-rimmed glasses that add to his allure; he is still skinny but strong enough for that twenty-mile bike ride. He’s grown more confident, though that was a trait he never lacked, and he wears this certainty with ease, like he has all the answers. Which a lot of times, he does. He swipes his brown hair off his forehead and nudges his glasses up his nose, and I feel a tug of something inside of me, something familiar, something like what it felt like at twenty-one when I fell in love with him.

I push it all away and offer:

“I kind of have a lot going on right now. That’s all.”

“That’s all?”

I chew for a few seconds. “Okay. That’s not all.”

“But you got my email. On Facebook.”

“Did you know that Mark Zuckerberg’s wife made him sign a contract before she moved in with him?” I grab the little bottle of syrup and try to wrestle it open.

“I did,” he says.

“You did?” I say.

He reaches for the syrup and swivels it open, then hands it back to me. I dip the corner of waffle into the tiny mouth of the jar.

“I couldn’t even get my husband to let me visit him in Palo Alto, much less have him sign a contract.”

“Vanessa told me,” he says. “And I’m sorry.”

I stop chewing and stare at him. Theo was never that easy to read, mostly because he was so good at telling people what they wanted to hear, even if they didn’t realize they wanted to hear it.

“You don’t have to assess me,” he says, and I feel my ears burn. “I mean it — there’s no double-speak here. It’s a crappy thing he did. That’s not marriage, that’s not better or worse, thick or thin.”

I shrug.

“Don’t do that. Don’t shrug. It is. It’s a really terrible, selfish thing, to up and leave.”

(LIST OF SHAWN’S FAULTS #5: It turns out that he really is an asshole!)

Then Theo adds, less forcefully: “It’s why I ended my own engagement. I didn’t know if I could be there forever. I mean, I thought I could. And then I got sick. And everything changed. And I didn’t want to be the one to break that promise that I made to her.”

“I’m sorry you got sick.” I touch his knee. “I should have at least written to tell you how sorry I was for that.”

He bites the inside of his cheek. “I found myself wishing I could talk to you then, have you there to help me.”

“I don’t think I could have helped much.” I say, sliding my hand back to the safety of my side of the room.

“Why do you do that? Why do you say things like that?”

There’s no answer for this, so I say instead, “I don’t know how you handled it. The diagnosis. I don’t think I could have.”

“You handle it because you have to. And you could have. Everyone can. Everyone does. Life sucks sometimes, but you handle it. Don’t keep selling yourself down the river.”

I try to think of something to deflect the conversation from me and my shortcomings. Because that conversation could last a lifetime.

“How’d your fiancée take it?” I ask.

“The cancer?” he asks.

“Your broken engagement,” I say.

“Oh, less well than she took the cancer. So about as well as you’d think.”

“So…well?” I smile.

“Depends on your definition of ‘well,’” he says, grinning back. Then more seriously: “But it was the right thing to do. Ending it. Short-term happiness isn’t worth a long-term disaster. I…have an entire business model built on it.”

“I bet my dad would say that it was inevitable.”

“My breakup or you and me in a hotel room in Seattle after my breakup?”