One True Loves Read online

  I watch him as his eyes narrow and his shoulders broaden from the tension in his body. I watch as he puts butter on a piece of bread.

  Maybe I understand him more than I think.

  Sam is making his fiancée a grilled cheese sandwich while worrying that she might leave him.

  He’s scared he’s about to lose the person he loves. There’s not a fear on this earth more common than that.

  “Let’s make these together,” I say, stepping toward the pan and taking the spatula out of his hand.

  I’m great at flipping things with a spatula.

  I’m not great at choosing what to add to a lackluster soup and I have no idea what cheese to pair with anything. But show me a half-baked omelet and I will flip it with the ease of a born chef.

  “You keep buttering; I’ll flip,” I tell him.

  He smiles and it’s honestly just as striking as watching the sun shine through the clouds.

  “All right,” he says. He puts more energy into swiping butter across the sliced bread. It’s so yellow, the butter.

  Before I met Sam, I kept sticks of cheap butter in the refrigerator and when I needed it for toast, I chopped it off in tiny chucks and futilely tried to spread the cold mess over the hot toast like a woman in a faded dramatization of an infomercial.

  When Sam and I moved in together, he had this small little porcelain container that he put on the counter and when I opened it up, it looked like an upside-down cup of butter sitting in a puddle of water.

  “What the hell is this?” I’d asked him as I was plugging in the toaster. Sam was putting glasses away in the cupboards, and when I said it, he laughed at me.

  “It’s a French butter dish,” he said as he got off the step stool he’d been using and flattened the box the glasses had been in. “You keep the butter in the top part, put cold water in the bottom, and it keeps it chilled but spreadable.” He said it as if everyone knew this, as if I was the crazy one.

  “I have been all over France,” I said to him, “and I have never seen one of these. Why is this butter so yellow? Is this some sort of fancy organic butter?”

  “It’s just butter,” he said as he grabbed another box and started unloading its contents into the silverware drawer.

  “This is not just butter!” I held the top cup part out to show him, as if he’d lost his mind. “Butter butter is pale yellow. This butter is yellow yellow.”

  “All I just heard was, ‘Butter butter yellow butter yellow yellow.’ ”

  I laughed.

  “I think we’re both saying the same thing,” he said. “Butter is yellow.”

  “Admit there is something up with this butter,” I said, pretending to interrogate him. “Admit it right now.”

  “It’s not Land O’Lakes, if that’s what you’re asking.”

  I laughed at him. “Land O’Lakes! What are we, Bill and Melinda Gates? I buy store-brand butter. The name on my butter is exactly equal to the name of the store I bought it from.”

  Sam sighed, realizing he’d been caught. He confessed. “It’s all-natural, organic, hormone-free, grass-fed butter.”

  “Wow,” I said, acting as if this was a great shock. “You think you know a person . . .”

  He took the butter from me and proudly put it on the counter, as if to say that it was officially a member of our home. “It might cost almost twice as much as regular butter. But once you try it, you will never be able to eat normal butter again. And this will become your normal butter.”

  After we had fully unpacked the kitchen, Sam opened the bread and took out two slices. He put them in the newly plugged-in toaster. When they were done, I watched how easy it was for him to spread butter on the slices. And then my eyes rolled back into my head when I took a bite.

  “Wow,” I said.

  “See?” Sam had said. “I’m right about some stuff. Next, I’m going to convince you we should get a pet.”

  It was one of many moments in my life since Jesse left that I wasn’t thinking about Jesse. I was very much in love with Sam. I loved the piano and I loved that butter. A few months later, we adopted our cats. Sam was changing my life for the better and I was curious to see what else he would teach me. I was reveling in how bright our future felt together.

  Now, watching him place evenly buttered bread onto the pan in front of me, I desperately want to simply love him—unequivocally and without reservation—the way I did back then, the way I felt until I found out Jesse was coming home.

  We were so happy together when there was nothing to muddy the waters, when the part of myself that loved Jesse was happily and naturally repressed, kept neatly contained in a box in my heart.

  Sam moves the slices of bread around the sizzling pan and I propose something impossible.

  “Do you think, maybe just for tonight, that we could put a pin in all of this? That we could pretend I had a normal day at the bookstore and you had a normal day teaching and everything could be the way it was before?”

  I’m expecting Sam to tell me that life doesn’t work like that, that what I’m proposing is naive or selfish or misguided. But he doesn’t.

  He just smiles and then he nods. It’s a small nod. It’s not an emphatic nod or a relieved nod. His nod isn’t saying anything along the lines of “I thought you’d never ask,” or even “Sure, that sounds good,” but rather, “I can see why you’d want to try that. And I’ll go along with it.” Then he gathers himself and—in an instant—seems to be ready to pretend with me.

  “All right, Emma Blair, get ready to flip,” he says as he puts the top slices on the sandwiches.

  “Ready and willing,” I tell him. I have the spatula in position.

  “Go!” he says.

  And with two flicks of the wrist, I have flipped our dinner.

  Sam turns the heat up on the soup to get it ready.

  He grabs two bowls and two plates.

  He grabs himself a beer from the fridge and offers me one. I take him up on it. The cool crispness of it sounds good, and for some reason, I have it in my head that having a beer helps to make this seem like just another night.

  Soon, the two of us are sitting down to eat. Our dining room table has benches instead of chairs and that allows Sam to sit as close to me as physically possible, our thighs and arms touching.

  “Thank you for making dinner,” I say. I kiss him on the cheek, right by his ear. He has a freckle in that spot and I once told him I considered it a target. It is what I aim for. Normally when I kiss him there, he reciprocates by kissing me underneath my eye. Freckles for freckle. But this time he doesn’t.

  “Thank you for flipping,” he says. “Nobody flips like you.”

  The sandwich is gooey in the center and crunchy on the outside. The soup is sweet with just a little bit of spice.

  “I honestly don’t know which I love more, this or your fried chicken,” I say.

  “You’re being ridiculous. No tomato soup has ever been as good as any fried chicken.”

  “I don’t know!” I tell him, dunking my sandwich. “This stuff is really outstanding. So cozy and comforting. And this grilled cheese is toasted to—”

  Sam drops his spoon into his soup. It splashes onto the table. He drops his hands and looks at me.

  “How am I supposed to pretend everything is OK right now?” Sam says. “I’d love to pretend things were different. I would love for things to be different but . . . they aren’t.”

  I grab his hand.

  “I can’t talk about soup and cheese and . . .” He closes his eyes. “You’re the love of my life, Emma. I’ve never loved anyone the way I love you.”

  “I know,” I tell him.

  “And it’s OK if, you know, I’m not that for you. I mean, it’s not. It’s not at all OK. But I know that I have to be OK if that’s what ends up being the truth. Does that make sense?”

  I nod and start to speak but he keeps going.

  “I just . . . I feel . . .” He closes his eyes again and then covers his
face with his hands, the way people do when they are exhausted.

  “Just say it,” I tell him. “Whatever it is. Just let it out. Tell me.”

  “I feel naked. Like I’m raw. Or like I’m . . .” The way he’s trying to find the words to describe how he feels makes him look like he wants to jump out of his skin. He’s jittery and chaotic in his movements. And then he stops. “I feel like my entire body is an open wound and I’m standing next to someone that may or may not pour salt all over me.”

  I look at him, look into his eyes, and I know that whatever pain he’s admitting to is a drop in the bucket compared to how he feels.

  I’m not sure that emotional love can be separated from physical love. Or maybe I’m just a very tactile person. Either way, it’s not enough for me to say, “I love you.” The words feel so small compared to everything that’s in me. I have to show him. I have to make sure that it’s felt as much as heard.

  I lean into him. I kiss him. I pull him close to me. I press my body against his and I let him run his hands up and down my back. I push the bench back slightly, to make room for me to fit, straddling his lap. And I rock, back and forth, ever so gently, as I hold him and whisper into his ear, “I need you.”

  Sam kisses me aggressively, like he’s desperate for me.

  We don’t make it to the bed or to the couch. We clumsily move only as far as the kitchen floor. Our heads bang against the hardwood, our elbows bump against the low cupboards. My pants come off. His shirt comes off. My bra rests underneath the fridge, next to Sam’s socks.

  As Sam and I moan and gasp, we keep our eyes closed tightly except for the fleeting moments when we are looking directly into each other’s eyes. And it is in these moments that I know he understands what I am trying to tell him.

  Which is the whole point, our only reason for doing what we are doing.

  We don’t really care about pleasure. We are aching to be felt by the other, aching to feel each other. We move to tell each other what’s in our souls, to say what words can’t. We are touching each other in an attempt to listen.

  Toward the end, I find myself pressing my heart into his, as if the problem is that we are two separate people, as if I could fuse us together and when I did, the pain would be gone.

  When it’s over, Sam collapses on top of me.

  I hold him close, my arms and legs wrapped around him. He moves and I hold him tighter, my limbs asking him to stay.

  I don’t know how long we lie like that.

  I swear I’m almost asleep when Sam knocks me back into reality by pulling himself off me and rolling onto the floor between me and the dishwasher.

  I roll over onto his shoulder and put my head down, hoping that this reprieve from reality isn’t over.

  But I can tell that it is.

  He puts his clothes back on.

  “He’s your husband,” he says. His voice is quiet and stoic, as if it’s all hitting him right now. I find that this happens a lot with shocking things; it seems to hit you all at once even though you could have sworn it hit you all at once an hour ago. “He is your husband, Emma.”

  “He was,” I say, even though I’m not sure that’s exactly true.

  “It’s semantics, really, isn’t it?”

  I grab my shirt and throw it over myself, but I don’t respond. I don’t have anything comforting to say. It is semantics. I think I’m heading into a time in my life where words and labels will lose their meaning. It will only be the intent behind them that will matter.

  “I’m so miserable. I feel torn apart,” he says. “But it’s not about me, right? He’s the one that spent three years lost at sea or wherever he was. And you’re the one that lived as a widow. And I’m just the asshole.”

  “You’re not an asshole.”

  “Yes, I am,” Sam says. “I’m the asshole who’s standing in the way of you two being reunited.”

  I am, again, at a loss for words. Because if you replace the word “asshole” with “man”—“I’m the man who’s standing in the way of you two being reunited”—then, yeah. He’s right.

  If I hadn’t run into Sam that day at the music store, if I hadn’t fallen in love with him, this would have been the greatest time in my life.

  Instead of the most confusing.

  For a moment, I let myself think of what my life would be like right now if all of that had never happened, if I’d never allowed myself to move on.

  I could have done it. I could have shut myself off to life and to love. I could have pinned Jesse’s name to my heart and lived every day in honor of him, in remembrance of him. In some ways, that would have been a lot easier.

  Instead of writing that letter telling him that I needed to let him go and find a new life, I could have spent my days waiting for him to return from a place I thought he could never come back from. I could have dreamt of the impossible.

  And my dream would be coming true right now.

  But I gave up on that dream and went out and found a new one.

  And in doing so, I’m ruining all of us.

  You can’t be loyal to two people.

  You can’t yearn for two dreams.

  So, in a lot of ways, Sam is right.

  He is the wild card.

  In this terrible-wonderful nightmare-dream come true.

  “It’s like I’m eighteen all over again,” he says. “I love you and I have you and now I’m terrified I’m going to lose you to Jesse for the second time.”

  “Sam,” I say. “You don’t—”

  “I know this isn’t your fault,” Sam says, interrupting me. His mouth turns down and his chin shakes. I hate watching him try not to cry. “You loved him and then you lost him and you loved me and now he’s back and you didn’t do anything wrong but . . . I’m so mad at you.”

  I look at him. I try not to cry.

  “I’m so angry. Just at everything. At you and at him and at myself. The way I told you . . .” he says, shaking his head. He looks away. He tries to calm down. “I told you that I didn’t need you to stop loving him. I told you that you could love us both. That I would never try to replace him. And I really thought that I meant what I said. But now, I mean, it’s like the minute I find out he’s back, everything’s changed. I’m so mad at myself for saying those things back then because . . .” He stops talking. He rests his back against the dishwasher, his arms over his knees. “Because I think I was kidding myself,” he says, looking at his hands as he picks at his nails.

  “I think it was just this thing that I said because I knew it was theoretical. It wasn’t real. I wanted to give you the comfort of knowing that I wasn’t trying to replace him because I knew that I was replacing him. He wasn’t a threat because he was gone and he was never coming back. And he was never going to be able to take you away from me. He couldn’t give you what I could. So I said all of that stuff about how I didn’t expect you to stop loving him and how we could both fit into your life. But I only meant it in theory. Because ever since I heard he was back, I haven’t been happy for you. Or even really that happy for him. I’ve been heartsick. For me.”

  He looks at me, finally, when he says this. And between the look on his face and the way his voice breaks when the words escape from his mouth, I know that he hates himself for feeling the way he does.

  “Shhh,” I say to him, trying to calm him down, trying to hold him and comfort him. “I love you.”

  I wish I didn’t say it so often. I wish that my love for Sam wasn’t so casual and pervasive—so that I could save that phrase for moments like this. But that’s not very realistic, is it? When you love someone, it seeps out of everything you do, it bleeds into everything you say, it becomes so ever-present, that eventually it becomes ordinary to hear, no matter how extraordinary it is to feel.

  “I know you do,” he says. “But I’m not the only one you love. And you can only have one. And it might not be me.”

  “Don’t say that,” I tell him. “I don’t want to leave you. I couldn’t do that. I
t’s not fair to you. It’s not right. With everything that we’ve been through and how much you’ve done for me, how you’ve stood by me, and how you’ve been there for me, I couldn’t . . .” I stop talking when I see that Sam is already shaking his head at me as if I don’t get it. “What?” I ask him.

  “I don’t want your pity and I don’t want your loyalty. I want you to be with me because you want to be with me.”

  “I do want to be with you.”

  “You know what I mean.”

  My gaze falls off of his eyes, down to his hands, and I watch him fiddle with the beds of his nails—his own version of wringing his hands.

  “I think we should call off the wedding,” he says.

  “Sam . . .”

  “I’ve thought about it a lot for the past few days and I thought, for sure, you were going to pull the trigger. But you haven’t. So I’m doing it.”

  “Sam, c’mon.”

  He looks up at me, with just a little hint of anger. “Are you ready to commit to me?” Sam says. “Can you honestly say that no matter what happens from this moment on, we are ready to spend our lives together?”

  I can’t bear to see the look in his eyes when I shake my head. So I look away as I do it. Like every coward in the history of the world.

  “I have to let you go,” Sam says. “If we have any chance of surviving this and one day having a healthy, loving marriage.”

  I look up at him when I realize what’s happening.

  He’s leaving me. At least for now. Sam is leaving me.

  “I have to let you go and I have to hope that you come back to me.”

  “But how can—”

  “I love you,” he says. “I love you so much. I love waking up with you on Sunday mornings when we don’t have any plans. And I love coming home to you at night, seeing you reading a book, bundled up in a sweater and huge socks even though you have the heat up to eighty-eight degrees. I want that for the rest of my life. I want you to be my wife. That’s what I want.”

  I want to tell him that I want that, too. Ever since I met him I’ve wanted that, too. But now everything is different, everything has changed. And I’m not sure what I want at all.