Loved - A Novel Read online

  “Maybe you can help me put some music to these!”

  He came straight from band practice with his guitar and we sat down on my bedroom floor. The first one I read him was “Willow,” which I had written that summer about a girl who makes life decisions by what song is on the radio.

  “It’s about how seriously music can affect our lives,” I explained.

  “I get it,” he said. “That’s so true. Do you like Phish?” He held his guitar as a shield and wouldn’t quite look me in the eye. He was scared.

  “I like Dave and Trey’s stuff, but I don’t really know Phish’s music,” I said, referring to collaborations between Dave Matthews and Phish’s front man, Trey Anastasio.

  “Well, I like Phish even better than Dave. Their music has opened so many doors for the kind of music that my band plays. You’ll have to come to our next show!”

  He wants to see me again.

  We wrote music to three songs that night and talked until 6:00am. I had to convince him to set down the guitar. He seemed unsure of what to do with his hands without it. The longer we talked, the better he became at eye contact. And then he left. He didn’t try to stay over. He didn’t even try to kiss me.

  I fell asleep smiling.

  The next day was my first shift back at Betsey Johnson and I went all out, so glad not to be in khakis and brown loafers at Starbucks. I wore a strapless lace cupcake dress that faded from tan to rose to black with black heels. Lily was so glad to have me working more because I was always a big help to her. I was so eager to learn and grow that I took over a lot of her duties like goal setting and schedule making, just for the experience.

  I was closing up the store when Chad called and asked if I wanted to meet up with him and some of his friends at a sports bar a few blocks away.

  “I’m a tad overdressed,” I said, “but if you don’t care I don’t.”

  I sat with him at a booth while he and his friends drank foreign beers and I sipped a mixed drink. He held my hand under the table. It was clear from the way his friends talked to me or said, “So nice to meet you,” that he had told them about me.

  When the group was thinning, we weren’t quite ready to end the night.

  “Where do you usually hang out?” he asked.

  “My favorite place in town is Hamilton’s.”

  “Jen’s just getting off work, why don’t we have her meet us there?” he asked.

  So we did. The three of us closed down the bar, talking more than drinking and when we had nowhere else to go, Chad and I sat in his car in the parking lot and talked until after three a.m.

  That is what falling in love is supposed to be like. Sleep no longer matters. You can’t risk missing the next words out of his mouth. You can’t separate yourself from his presence. You can’t unlink your fingers from his. Finally, I managed to get out of the car and drive home, sleep settling in just as the euphoria wore off.

  I knew I would catch up on sleep that weekend because I was babysitting at the Jamison’s house overnight. I had been sitting for them occasionally since sophomore year. Now, Maggie was 10, Peter was 6 and baby Sawyer had just turned 3. I would go to bed shortly after they would and get a decent eight hours of sleep for at least two nights.

  Chad called Saturday afternoon.

  “How’s it going?”

  “Ugh! They are great kids,” I said, “but the boys fight when they get antsy and the little one cries every time. I need to get them out of the house for a bit so we’re going to McDonald’s for dinner. Would you like to meet up with us?”

  We were already at McDonald’s when Chad came in so he said hello then went to order his food. The boys were playing in the colorful plastic tunnels and Maggie and I were talking at a table nearby. A mature ten year old, she and I were able to have real conversations from when I first met her.

  “His beard looks like a bird,” Maggie said, pointing out the fact that his goatee was indeed sort of shaped like a bird with its wings spread out. I laughed.

  He talked to Maggie like I did—like she was a small version of an adult. He listened to her opinions, and I was so impressed. The boys were understandably too busy to care that we had company for dinner, and I was glad they were occupied by something other than wrestling each other for a while.

  We left and Maggie told me in the car how nice she thought he was.

  I was reading on the couch after I put the kids to bed when Chad called.

  “How are they?” he asked.

  “Asleep. Sawyer’s in his parents’ bed. He wouldn’t sleep in his own but that’s fine.”

  “What are you doing now?”

  “Reading a book about Marilyn Monroe... Would you like to come over?”

  “Would that be okay?”

  “Yeah, I’m like family. They wouldn’t mind. We can watch a movie or something.”

  I was wearing a black velour tracksuit and my hair was damp and wavy from an evening shower. I added a little mascara as I now cared what he thought, but in a way that still kept me from trying too hard.

  We watched Shrek 2 and we actually watched the whole movie. The kids may as well have been awake. I was dying for him to kiss me but I still refused to be the one to do it. The movie ended and we talked about other movies we liked.

  “My favorite movie of all time is Playing By Heart,” I told him. “In the opening scene Joan tells Keenan about a friend who once told her ‘talking about love is like dancing about architecture.’ Her whole monologue about it is amazing. I could do the whole thing but I won’t.”

  But we talked about love.

  I told him I was giving him control for two reasons. First, because he told me he had never been in a relationship where he was in control, and he didn’t like that because aggressive girls frightened him. Secondly, I had noticed that whenever I started to be the one leading the progression of a relationship, it started to go badly.

  Then, Chad turned to me and grabbed both of my hands in his.

  “I’ve been wanting to do this for days and I can’t wait any longer.”

  He put his hand on my cheek and he kissed me. When it was over, I turned back toward the front of the couch and tried to catch my breath and collect my thoughts.

  Besides the fact that it was a physically perfect kiss, it shook me to my core emotionally. I blushed red as a rose and I couldn’t speak.

  Me, with no words. There’s a first time for everything.

  “Please say something,” he said nervously.

  But I just couldn’t think of the right thing. “It was good” wouldn’t do it justice. What I was actually thinking was too scary, not that it wasn’t true but to say it out loud would be too much. Finally, I just explained that my silence was a good thing.

  What I was actually thinking was that that kiss would be my last first kiss ever.

  One of the things that Chad admired about me was my hobby of painting. I had only been painting for a few months and I was entirely self-taught. I didn’t really care if anyone thought they were good enough to sell. I just enjoyed being able to express myself. They weren’t about other people seeing them.

  I never topped the very first one I did. The right side of the canvas was gray, the left side covered in pink and yellow flowers with little black seeds. Scattered on both sides were sharply shaped pieces of black, and the words “and it breaks her heart” were written in spring green over the grayness.

  It was basically a visual of the Dave Matthews song, “Gray Street,” where he says, “All the colors mix together to gray and it breaks her heart.” The black shards were my broken heart.

  Was I finally moving on from Chase? It really couldn’t get any worse. He had passed on me repeatedly to date people that he said weren’t as good for him as me, but I just couldn’t keep hoping that he would come around. Apparently, we weren’t going to make it work. And all the colors mix together to gray.

  A second one I did shortly after the first was more interesting to Chad. This one had a turquoise back
ground with several mustard yellow lines intersecting across the middle. At two points, the lines held yellow signs, one with an up sign and the other pointing down. In black script I had painted, “I am ready, I am ready, I am fine.” Chad didn’t know what I meant by the signs, but he knew right away the words were not what they said. He guessed that at the time I had painted the picture I was far from fine; although, I seemed to be doing alright now.

  We painted together. I laid the old sheet I used to protect the carpet out on my bedroom floor and put out two fresh canvases, my paints and the brushes. We left the door to the balcony open to get some fresh air circulating in the room and we set out to work, agreeing not to look at each other’s work until we were finished.

  I was too nervous with him there to focus on my work and I had nothing deep and seriously sad to paint about so I continued to get frustrated and paint over what I had done, and then over it again. Finally, I gave up as he was finishing his piece. He showed it to me.

  He had painted a man in different positions: first crawling, then half-crawling/half-walking, then walking, then shielding his eyes, then what looked like being slain and then flat on the floor, dead. All of this was happening in a white bubble inside a blood red border; the caption he used was a cue taken from me and it included the words, “out of the darkness comes light...?” This was a Dave Matthews lyric to which he added a question mark.

  The next night we went to dinner with Sophie and her new boyfriend. The guys got along so well that Sophie and I joked that we were intruding on their first date.

  They were talking about their musical influences.

  “I think the guy learned bass from Jesus,” Sophie’s boyfriend said about his personal hero.

  “Jesus played the bass?” I said. “I love that guy!”

  Everyone laughed.

  After dinner Chad and I went to his parents’ house, where he was living while he finished school. We tried to watch a movie but the giant flat screen TV wouldn’t work so we talked instead. I told him that he was charming, and he told me that I was captivating.

  “I have this metaphor,” I said. “I see love as a cliff. In my experience, when a guy and a girl get to the edge, the girl jumps and the guy hesitates. By the time he thinks he might jump, she’s long gone.”

  “I’m pretty sure I jumped last night,” he said, and my heart skipped a beat. “And it’s scary!”

  “The fall is the best part.”

  And we fell.

  The night of my birthday party, after blowing out twenty-two candles and saying goodbye to all my friends, Chad and I sat alone at our big booth in the almost empty lounge, talking and kissing like two fools in love. I hadn’t made a wish; there was nothing else that I wanted.

  That weekend, I went to Pittsburgh to celebrate my birthday with Meredith. She was living in an apartment in an old house in Oakland, one of my favorite areas of the city. I liked walking from her place to Chestnut Street, where there were boutiques, restaurants, a coffee shop and a record store. I talked about Chad the whole time.

  We decided to throw my birthday party at Meredith’s place so I would have a chance to see the people I wanted to see and drink what I wanted to drink. I invited Chase. He said he would like to come, and he would try to get a car and drive down. Two hours passed and I hadn’t heard anything. Good thing I knew not to get my hopes up.

  The party—my birthday party—was a bust. There were very few people there who I knew and even fewer who cared that it was my birthday. Chase never showed up. He didn’t even call to explain. I had a few drinks and sat quietly on the couch alone. I’m not good at pretending that I’m having fun when I’m not so I went to Meredith’s room to lie down.

  I thought of all of the dreams that I had with Chase, I thought of our apartment in the city, and I decided to let it all go. Whatever path my life would take was the right path for me. It really was time to move on. I was ready. I am ready. I am fine.

  I really was.

  Back in Nashville, I was in full Chad mode. “I am definitely falling in love,” I wrote in my journal. He took me to a party to introduce me to his friends and band mates. Lipscomb students are very political compared to Belmont students. Belmont students choose their friends by creative chemistry. Lipscomb students choose their friends by where your father works or what social club your mother is in.

  Regardless of their politics, they seemed to like me. I got smiles and raised eyebrows, and “so you’re the girl Chad is dating” comments. We were sitting on the couch in our own little world when a thin girl with curly blonde hair and dimples burst into the room and proclaimed, “You’re Chad’s girlfriend!” I felt my face get hot and I smiled at her. Then, I looked helplessly at him. “Well, if that’s okay with you,” he said, “I’ve been saying that for a few days now.”

  Yes, that’s okay with me.

  For Thanksgiving, I cooked the turkey at my apartment and drove it over to Sophie’s, where we ate while watching Steel Magnolias. Chad came over later that night. We were kissing in my bedroom when he suddenly lifted me off the bed a little and pressed me against the wall. Not violently but playfully. He looked me in the eyes, a mischievous grin pulling the side of lips. Then he kissed me deeply. I was elated and I couldn’t get enough of him.

  I couldn’t wait for what was next, specifically, because I felt like I was ready to have sex with him. I had waited much longer with other boyfriends, some of whom I lost because of it. This was what I imagined an adult relationship was supposed to be like. Still, he wasn’t taking things that far.

  One Friday night, we went downtown to one of the Nashville’s honky-tonk bars and had a few drinks with some of his friends. Later, after the usual round of kissing, I reached for the elastic waistband of his boxers. He moved my hand away and put my arms around him instead. Then, he pulled his face away just enough to look me in the eyes and he said gently, “First the ring, then the thing.”

  I could not believe it. I had spent the last six years turning guys down or wishing I would, wanting and hoping to wait and the one time I was willing and wanting sex in a relationship, I was told to back the truck up? I felt dirty, I felt hurt and then I was amazed. I was touched that someone saw me as precious and on top of that, I was excited at the idea that this man might just marry me. This amazing, caring, smart, sexy man might marry me.

  I met his parents, which was hard to avoid for long because he lived with them. He went to school just a few miles from his parents’ house so he planned to live at home until he graduated the following spring in order to save up some money.

  They were so nice. Right away, I found them very welcoming and easy to talk to. They reminded me a little of my own parents—if my mom loved cooking and crafts and if my dad carried a highball glass around. He also had an older brother, James, who was applying to law schools. James was extremely proper and educated, always using big words but never being a showoff. We got along particularly well; he took an interest in me and I enjoyed our conversations.

  I really fit in with his family and with his life and I was glad he had family values like mine. His parents were still together, involved in church and supportive of his dreams. They were the kind of family that I was looking to be a part of some day. I was finally making the right decisions when it came to love.

  I watched myself change, blossoming into a woman in love and discovering not just what I wanted out of life someday but what was actually within my reach. I envisioned us as Chris Robinson and Kate Hudson; he was the quiet classic rock star and she was a beautiful flower child. They had just enough educated hippie and just enough rock and roll, and we were going to be just like them.

  I spent a lot of my time with Chad or with Sophie, but I still had Anna and Lacey and groups of other friends too. It was a much healthier situation than I’d been in with Brian and Megan, when we were all so dependent on each other.

  I still loved Chase, though it wasn’t the same. I had come to accept that things hadn’t worked between
us, but I did consider him to be the only guy before Chad I had really loved, and I knew it was okay that he would always be special to me. We weren’t really speaking but not because we were still punishing each other.

  December, 2004

  One evening we rented the movie, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. I thought the theme of the movie was an incredible idea—to erase someone from your memory and to go on living as if they’d never existed. I wondered if I would really go back to who I was before I’d met the person who’d been erased. Or would I always wonder how on earth I’d gotten so into rock music, and why it was that I so adored all things dramatic.

  I did move on from Chase, but I didn’t erase him. As I reflected on the idea, I decided that no matter what happened, I would never have erase one moment of Chase in my life. He shaped me like he had written me in a song. I breathed life from his words and I danced to his melody. I was thankful for it, and Chad met me there, in a place that I wouldn’t have been if it weren’t for Chase. And he was falling in love with me, just as I was with him.

  One night Chad pointed out a rendering of Nashville’s Union Station hotel that was framed above his parent’s couch.

  “There’s a restaurant inside there,” he said. “That’s where I’m going to propose to you.”

  He caught me off guard but his statement bothered me for more reasons than just surprise. My mind reeled. What for? Because it’s fancy and expensive? That’s not personal. We’ve never been there before. I have no emotional connection to that place.

  Dad put a ring on Mom’s finger one day while she was napping on his couch—sweet, private, personal and unexpected. I just figured that I would let him do his thing. I did believe I was going to marry him, but I also didn’t feel that there was any hurry.

  Chad was gone over New Year’s Eve, recording with his band in Texas. I tried not to miss him. I didn’t want to be so vulnerable. I didn’t want to need anybody. Sometimes I focused so hard on not being one thing that I put myself in danger of leaning too far in the other direction. Sometimes I forgot that I didn’t have to be perfect.