Элисон Скотч - The Theory of Opposites

“Theo…” But I have nothing else to add, so drop it. I rip a waffle in half and offer it to him. He takes it but doesn’t eat.

“So you got my email.” It’s a question phrased as a statement.

“You know I did,” I sigh. “Vanessa told you. I told you on the mountain that I did.”

“Should I not have sent it?”

“No…yes…I mean…”

“Because I’m usually pretty decent at reading the room.”

“So I read in Time magazine.”

“So you’re reading up on me in Time magazine?” He sinks back into the chair and splays his hands behind his head and winks, and I hate him (love him) because he is so goddamn irresistible. He always was.

“I have a subscription.”

“There is no chance you have a subscription,” he says, laughing. “Zero.”

So I laugh too because he’s right: I am not the type of woman who subscribes to Time magazine. I make a mental note to at least download the app later, once Theo has gone.

“I’m glad you wrote,” I say finally. “And I know I said it before, but Theo, it’s true: I’m sorry about the cancer. I…I should have tried to find the words to write you back.”

“Be sorry for my testicle,” he says. “Otherwise, I’m fine.”

“He was a good testicle,” I say.

“That he was. And I miss him dearly.”

“Ah well,” I shrug, my eyes bright.

“Sucks to be me,” he shrugs back, his eyes brighter.

“Oh please, your life rules.”

“Oh please, m’dear. My life can always be better.”

My phone vibrates on the duvet, breaking the spell.

“I should get that,” I say. “Family disaster.”

“With yours, it always is.”

That Theo and I broke up is entirely my fault. I don’t know if he would see it that way, but it’s true. Maybe “fault” isn’t the right way to phrase it. Relationships end. People fall away. That’s life. That’s, not to quote my dad or anything, inevitable. And so when Theo and I split, I did indeed chalk it up to inevitability, to the fact that fate must have had something else in store. And then when fate delivered Shawn, that was how I embraced what happened with Theo: he wasn’t here, Shawn was. It absolved any personal responsibility in the way that placing all your faith in the universe does.

But eventually, exes are supposed to make sense. You’re supposed to be able to see their name pop up in an old correspondence and think, “Oh my God, I’m so glad I dodged that bullet,” or “He’s not such a bad guy, but he wasn’t the right guy for me.” But I never really found that sense of logic with Theo. We were together, and then we weren’t anymore. And I could attribute all of that to inevitability as much as I wanted to, but when I was really being honest with myself, when my brain and memory and nostalgia compelled me to google him and wonder What if? ... I knew that really, inevitability wasn’t the only explanation. I had ruined things, and it was as simple as that.

Shawn and Theo; Theo and Shawn. Is it possible to love two people at once? Vanessa has said, because we’ve discussed this ad nauseam, that she doesn’t believe that you can truly love two people at once, but that doesn’t mean you can’t have two great loves. She has had three, actually, and always managed to both break their hearts but still have them, in some weird way, covet her. She was still Facebook friends with them; she still slept with the second one (Ryan) every now and then when they both happened to be drunk at the same time (and he invariably texted her for days after the hook-up, hoping they could reconcile); and I always wondered if maybe, because they were all so kind and well-mannered and friendly post-split, this wasn’t actually love. That their feelings for Vanessa were something that they mistook for love, because how could you keep someone in your orbit when she was unwilling to move the earth for you to begin with?

But anyway.

Theo and I were together for three years before I blew it. The easy version of our breakup is that he asked me to move to Seattle, and I said no. But that’s the version you believe because if you remember what really happened, you wonder if you’ll ever forgive yourself for such a giant fuck-up. Isn’t it funny how that happens? The cognitive dissonance that time provides? My father built an entire multi-national conglomerate around this cognitive dissonance, though he’d claim that it’s just the opposite. That the Master Universe Way isn’t about reflecting on our past and trying to rationalize our choices and shortcomings, rather accepting those choices and rephrasing “shortcomings” as “life-comings.” I suppose that when I ruined things with Theo, I chalked it up to my own Master Universe Way: that what would be would be, and that if I screwed things up with Theo, well, you get what you deserve, as my dad would say. This was my own “life-coming,” though that didn’t really make me feel any better.

But my cognitive dissonance and my stupid Master Universe Way didn’t change the truth of what happened: the years and time that slide one memory into a different one don’t alter the honest events one bit.

About two years into dating, Theo decided that he wasn’t sure that he believed in marriage. It wasn’t a particularly revelatory announcement; he was an only child from parents who stayed together for “his best interest,” which of course, wasn’t his best interest at all. He channeled this loneliness into an incessant need to be sure that everything in life added up , and it was this obsessive need for order and logic that eventually made him such a success, turned him into the great mind of the future. He was, in many ways, the opposite of my father: rationality ruled, proof of something made it real. And though he had met my dad on occasion and had nodded politely when my dad marveled over the randomness and thus the inevitability of our meet-cute, Theo really thought that he was a quack.

But Theo wasn’t sure that marriage added up, and when he made this decision, he told me about it quickly, honestly, lovingly. We had just gotten home from Raina’s wedding to Jeremy at the Central Park Boathouse. It was a grand affair of 500 of my parents’ closest friends, with a big brass band and more tiger lily centerpieces than you could ever dream of. Though Raina doesn’t seem to remember it now, she looked so very, very happy. When the rabbi announced that Jeremy could kiss the bride, she literally jumped up, straddled him and knocked him to the ground. And when they emerged from their kiss, she held up her bouquet triumphantly and shouted, “I’m Raina Farley now!”

I had thought the wedding was pretty fun, as far as weddings go, but Theo evidently felt otherwise. And since Theo felt otherwise, I started to reconsider too. After all, Theo was a decision-maker, an expert at knowing exactly what to do. Whenever I was unsure about something (which was pretty much always), he would be sure for me. He urged me to accept my first job as a copywriter; he helped guide me away from a toxic college roommate; he encouraged me to be closer to Raina, to read more, to find one thing in life that I loved doing and do it. (I never got around to that.)

So when Theo and I sprawled on the couch after Raina’s wedding and he declared that he didn’t think marriage “added up,” I didn’t argue. He said that his parents stayed together out of obligation, not out of love. That he’s never been one to follow the straight and narrow, and so why should he now? That he loved me more than anyone he’d ever loved but he’d been round and round and run the figures and the facts and the economics (evidently there were economics of marriage), and a legal union didn’t “add up.”