David hadn’t been alone with Cheryl since she threw a martini in his face, knocked their table to the floor, and got them both banned from their once favorite restaurant. That was fine with David. He never wanted to set foot in there again.
The whole scene had been straight out of a bad soap opera. For God’s sake, how many people have actually had a drink thrown in their face in real life? David had wondered this often in the months since. To make matters worse, the cocktail skewer had scratched his cornea and he’d had to wear an eye patch for a week. His best buddy Jeff had called him Long John No Silver, a prophetic joke that everything David owned would soon belong to Cheryl.
David thought Cheryl would’ve been eager to get the divorce over with. Looking back, he suspected she didn’t even really like him, much less love him. So why was she dragging this thing out? To torture him a bit more, he supposed. Digging her claws in one last time before she released him from her grasp.
Cheryl had asked him to meet her outside of their old apartment building, which was now her apartment building, at 2 p.m. David pulled his coat together, exhaled into his dry and cracked hands, and checked his watch again. 2:23. Classic, thought David. Toying with me while she still can. She’s got another thing coming if —
The dueling horns of a taxi and an Uber drowned out his thoughts. David watched as the cab driver got out and marched toward the other car with a baseball bat in hand. The Uber driver seemed unfazed, as if the threat of being bludgeoned to death was a typical, everyday occurrence. David could relate to that, in a manner of speaking.
Finally, Cheryl emerged from around the corner. They locked eyes immediately, but she kept on sauntering. David could see she was in no rush to make an apology either, not that he’d expected one. If anything, her pace had slowed since she spotted him.
“There she is,” David called out, his voice battling the sounds of the city. “My old ball and chain.”
“Not old, just not as young as you like,” said Cheryl, pulling a manilla envelope from her bag.
David tried not to look too excited, too eager. He was afraid Cheryl might sense his impending happiness and snatch the folder away.
She looked unusually unkempt. Haggard. Her bottle-blond hair was unwashed and oily with dark roots sprouting up to reclaim their territory. She generally wore pea coats or blazers, but today she’d shown up in his old NYU sweatshirt — just another thing he’d never be getting back. David gestured at the ratty, lipstick-encrusted coffee cup clutched in her hand. “You’re not going to throw that in my face, are you?”
“Of course not. It’s cold now.”
David thumbed through the pages, ensuring everything had been signed and initialed. He wanted this over with today, and he never wanted to see her again.
“I know how to sign a contract, David. I’m a lawyer.”
“Oh trust me, I know,” David sneered. “Just give me a minute here, sweetheart.”
“What’s going on over there?”
The drivers were still at it. Or at least, the cabbie was. The Uber driver was still just sitting there, looking almost meditative as the other man threateningly slapped the bat against his own palm and screamed some of the worst obscenities David had heard in his whole life in the city.
“Hell if I know,” said David. “Don’t really care either.” A lie.
“Maybe they’re getting a divorce too,” said Cheryl.
David surprised himself with a small chuckle. It was far from the funniest joke he’d ever heard, but Cheryl hadn’t made him laugh in God knows how long. Certainly not since the separation, of course. But it’d been much longer than that, hadn’t it? David thought hard but couldn’t remember. This bothered him.
“Well,” said David, snapping himself back to attention. “Looks like you got it all.” In more ways than one, he considered saying aloud.
He extended his right arm and waited for a handshake. He knew a hug or even nothing at all would’ve been more appropriate, more kind, but he’d rehearsed this meeting over and over again and had decided this was what he would do.
“Still Mr. All-Business-All-the-Time, I see,” Cheryl said as she reached for him.
It was then that David noticed her wedding ring. It was on the wrong hand, but the fact that she had it on at all both disturbed and flattered him. It wasn’t like she would ever be in the position to pawn it, and David had never bothered trying to ask for it back — Cheryl would’ve taken the crud under his fingernails if she sensed he had any fondness for it. But the ring, well, he’d just assumed she would’ve chucked it off an overpass; melted it down to harvest the diamonds; plunked it into the Hudson for some poor and unsuspecting fish to choke on.
Or, she could have tucked it away in a drawer to revisit from time to time when she was in the mood to be melancholy, as David had done.
“So,” said Cheryl, David’s hand still firmly in her grasp. “That’s that?”
“That’s that.”
“Well then,” Cheryl sheathed her hand in her jeans pocket. “The end of an era.”
It was more like three eras, thought David. The first when they were happy, the second when they thought they could be happy again, and now the third when he couldn’t imagine how they’d ever been happy together in the first place.
“You might say that.”
“Can you come up for a minute?”
“Why on Earth would I do that?”
“Relax. I boxed up a few more of your things I found.”
“Oh,” said David, unable to hide his surprise that she’d willingly give him anything at this point.
The lobby still stank of mildew and the old elevator with its metal gate that opened like a cage still shook violently as if it were ready to plunge to the basement at any moment. In this particular moment, David sort of wished it would.
He followed Cheryl down the long hallway and stood behind her as she unlocked the door to the place he once called home. He wouldn’t miss this dingy building. He was certain he wouldn’t miss Cheryl. But he would miss this apartment. Opening its door was like stumbling out of a sewer into a secret cathedral. Light poured in from the wall-to-wall windows and bounced off the waxed oak floors, creating dancing shadows of the leaves outside. David was an atheist — one of the many things he and Cheryl disagreed on — but if there was any place he ever felt close to God it was here.
“Alright, here it is.” Cheryl hoisted a large cardboard box from the kitchen table and passed it to David.
“Thanks.” It was surprisingly heavy. “What all is in here?”
“Some old books, CDs, a few records. Couple of t-shirts, I think. Oh, and your cologne is in there too. God-awful stuff.” She’d always told him she preferred his natural musk. She’d hated his pomade too. It made her fingers gunky when she stroked his hair.
“Well, thanks then,” said David. But as he turned to leave, an errant pair of Cheryl’s shoes tripped him and sent the box flying.
Everything spilled out onto the floor. Records lay broken, clothes rumpled, books bent. All of it soaked with cologne.
“Shit. Let me help you.”
“Always told you your shoes were going to break my neck one day.”
“Well if it’s any consolation, I’m never going to get this smell out of here now.”
“Just when you thought you were finally rid of me. Rid of ‘it,’ I mean.”
Cheryl smiled. David hadn’t seen that in a long time. Probably as long as the last time they shared a laugh. He still couldn’t remember when that was. It still bothered him.
“Listen,” said Cheryl. “I don’t want to keep you. If you want to get out of here, I get it. But would you like a drink? We can toss those t-shirts in the wash.”
David looked around the apartment. He looked at the light pouring through the windows, at the dancing shadows of leaves. At Cheryl. “Sure,” he conceded.
In here, the chaos of the city dulled to a murmur. David could still hear it faintly, calling out to him like a siren song. But it became easier to ignore. Even his thoughts seemed quieter.
Cheryl started the laundry, grabbed an already opened bottle of Chablis from the fridge and poured it into two crystal wine glasses. They were Tiffany, a wedding gift from David’s aunt and another thing he had tried for and lost.
“Do we toast?” said Cheryl.
“To what?”
“To getting out of this without killing each other?”
“A close call,” said David.
They clinked their glasses and sat down on the couch.
“You know,” said Cheryl, “if we’d had kids, I think I still would’ve fought you harder over the in-unit laundry.”
“You’re starting to sound like a real New Yorker.”
“Only took me 20 years.”
“You ever think about going home?”
“To Oregon? No, I don’t think they’d want me back now. What about you? You always said you were sick of New York. What happened to going out to see the world?”
“Well you can see a lot in Bushwick these days, you know.”
“I’m serious, David. What are you going to do now that nothing’s holding you back? You can’t blame it on me anymore.”
“I never blamed you.”
“Debatable.”
“Well sure, you can debate anything.”
Cheryl topped off their glasses with more Chablis. She’d become a bit of a lightweight in the two decades since they’d met at a kegger in the backyard of some frat house. David knew she was already feeling it from her usual tells: hair down, earrings on the coffee table, legs criss-crossed on the couch, and a gentle blush spreading across her cheeks and nose.
“Are you hungry? I’m hungry. I’ll make a pizza,” she said, heading for the freezer.
Snackish. Another tell.
“DiGiorno’s?” David criticized. “Never mind what I said about being a real New Yorker.”
“Don’t start.”
David rummaged in his box of lost treasures. “I think I saw… yep, here it is.”
“Oh God, not that one.”
“It’s a classic!” said David, plucking the burned disc from its Sharpie-scrawled jewel case and setting it up on his — on her — stereo.
David pressed play and John Coltrane’s frenetic saxophone erupted through the speakers as Giant Steps filled all the space in the room.
“I can barely hear myself think with that on,” said Cheryl.
“That’s exactly what it’s for,” said David, offering his hand.
"You want to dance?”
“Why not?”
“Because you hate to dance. And because the last time, the only time we ever danced was at our horrible, horrible wedding.”
“Oh come on, it wasn’t that bad.”
“David, a bird shit on my dress.”
“Right, I’d forgotten about that.”
“And the band getting sick in the middle of the reception? Nobody could forget that. Not even you.”
“Yeah, well, I guess we should’ve known what was coming.”
Cheryl took his hand. “I don’t know. We had some good years too. Mom always said a bad wedding was good luck — it was for a while, I guess.”
“Maybe more bird shit would’ve helped.”
David placed one hand on her waist and intertwined the other hand with her right. The two of them swayed back and forth for a while without saying another word, dancing too slow to music that moved too fast. Cheryl’s head rested on his shoulder. He could smell the remnants of her rosemary shampoo blending with her floral perfume. He didn’t realize how much he’d missed that smell. He gazed at her wedding ring, now an artifact from the first of their three eras. He thought about asking her why she still had it, why she still wore it. Most of all, why she wore it today. But then he thought better of it.
The washing machine interrupted their dance with its familiar little jingle, which had always annoyed David to no end. Now even more so.
“I better switch that,” said Cheryl, pulling away from him.
“In a minute,” said David, tugging her back.
He wasn’t sure how, but they were having a moment. A moment where they weren’t fighting or arguing, where they weren’t questioning everything about their marriage or themselves. They weren’t blaming each other for working too much and loving too little, for not caring enough and for caring too much, for the places they never lived, the sex they never had, and the kids they never could have. It was a moment that was quiet, and comfortable, and theirs.
Until it was interrupted by the smoke alarm.
“Shit, the pizza!” Cheryl rushed to the oven and opened the door, unleashing a thick, black cloud that billowed out into the apartment.
“I’ll get the windows,” said David.
The chaos of the city wasted no time. As soon as David opened the window, car horns, barking dogs, shouting drivers, bicycle bells, and screaming sirens all shoved their way in at the same time and settled into their newfound space, blending together with the smoke and the alarm and the jazz to create one big, toxic beast that stared Cheryl and David down and swallowed their moment whole.
***
As David left and stepped out into the winter wind that whipped between the city buildings, he felt mostly the same. Still angry, still lost, still David. Just no Cheryl — only now, he was painfully aware of it.
The Uber driver had finally gone, but the cabbie remained, refusing to relinquish his territory. Refusing to admit that the way things once worked would never work again.
“Can I get a ride?”
The cabbie tossed his cigarette into the street and started the meter. David looked back at the doors to the old, dingy building. He imagined Cheryl sitting out on the fire escape, waving goodbye like she used to do when he’d leave on long business trips. Part of him wondered if she’d be up there now, waving goodbye one last time. But as the cab pulled away, the other part told him not to look.
