Page 28 of Nora Goes Off Script
Leo laughs and kisses my shoulder. “You really aren’t very romantic, are you?”
“I might be an overthinker.”
“I’ll fix you,” he says, and I turn around to face him. He’s joking, but I love the idea of being on the other side of the fixing equation. I love the idea that he thinks I’m worththe trouble. I love that buried deep in that sentence is a hint of the future tense.
•••
My kids knowsomething’s up, but mercifully they don’t know what. They’re at an age where their first suspicion wouldn’t be sex, but they’re also at an age where they are exquisitely tuned in to subtle changes in their mother. I feel them watching me, and I don’t know if it’s the lightness in my body or the smile on my face while I wash potatoes. I know I’m glowing, and there’s nothing I can do to hide that or make it stop.
While everything’s changed, in that first week my routine isn’t so different. Sunrise, breakfast, kids to school, run, shower, tea house from ten to two. Except instead of writing, I lie in bed with a movie star. There’s a lot of sex, like a ridiculous amount of sex. In my previous life, I would have considered half this amount of sex to be a complete nightmare, but now a day spent in bed feels like a day well spent. It’s possible that I didn’t really understand what sex was before Leo.
I used to think about the plumber a lot when I had sex with Ben. Not because I was in any way attracted to the plumber, but more because I’d wonder if I’d called to have him check the seal on the outdoor water spigot. If I hadn’t, the pipes might freeze and burst, and that would be really pricey. A fix like that would bite into my already tight Christmas budget. And I really needed to convince Arthur that he doesn’t need a drum set. Forget the noise, but just the amount of space it would take up and how much it would irritate meto vacuum around it when he was sick of it by New Year’s. On New Year’s Day, I like making a curried chicken salad, but Arthur’s doctor has repeatedly told us that he might want to cut back on dairy. I’d have to break that tradition because of the mayonnaise. But, wait. Mayonnaise is just oil and eggs. There’s no dairy in mayonnaise! Arthur can have all he wants! I could even make macaroni salad and that vegetable dip he likes.Mayonnaise isn’t dairy, I’d smile to myself as Ben rolled off of me. Of course, Ben thought that smile, like everything else, was about him.
I guess the problem with Ben in bed was the same as the problem with Ben out of bed: Ben’s all about Ben. Ben is focused exclusively on what’s going to make Ben happy, what’s going to make Ben feel good, and what’s going to reflect well on Ben to the outside world. With Leo, it’s not about either of us. It’s like there’s this third thing we’ve created. We step into that space and the rest of the world is gone. There is no time, no news, no world outside that daybed until three o’clock.
Leo likes to run his finger from the bottom of my ear, down my neck, and along my collarbone, and sometimes the rhythm of it puts me to sleep. We get up for food deliveries. Sometimes we run errands. We are at once energized and lazy, supercharged and sleepy. I wonder if other people can feel that we are operating on a different energetic wave, like we hear a separate soundtrack and feel the air on our skin in a more exquisite way. Deep down, I’m fully aware that this is not a sustainable reality, but I cling to it like you do with a really good dream when you’re sure you could never replicate the feeling in real life.
Leo has never set foot in my bedroom. He doesn’t so muchas brush his hand against mine when my kids are home. We don’t discuss this, but he seems to understand my instinct to protect them. In the darkest corner of my being, where a tiny piece of me still recognizes reality, I know Leo is temporary. I’m in for a horrible fall, but as long as I can keep that as my problem, not theirs, this is worth it.
He starts coming on my runs, which he says are boring. I like a loop because it forces me to finish. And, frankly, my whole life is a loop; every day I end up right where I began. He likes variety, so we start exploring the back country roads that wind around Laurel Ridge. Some stretches are paved and some are dirt, changing up that sound our feet make as we run. We pass an occasional house with a split-rail fence, but mostly the roads have meadows on both sides, lined with the last of the daffodils. Old cherry trees and dogwoods offer sporadic shade, and if the wind blows at just the right time, we run through a shower of white blossoms that feel like confetti.
Sometimes we run so far out that we walk back, and sometimes he holds my hand. We are in the middle of a days-long conversation that winds around the most inconsequential and most monumental details of our lives.
“So, my mom had lung cancer,” he tells me on a walk. “But they didn’t tell me until the very end. They didn’t want to interrupt my filming, like that matters.” He’s quiet for a while. “I finally saw her the day before she died. Luke had been there for two weeks, which really pissed me off. The last thing she ever said to me was ‘movie stars don’t do hospice.’ ”
“What does Luke do?” I ask.
“Luke’s a lawyer. I guess lawyers do hospice. Anyway, inthree days I found out she was sick, said good-bye, and she died.”
“So that’s why you’re here?” I hate the neediness in my voice the second I say it.
“You’re why I’m here,” he says. “But before you, this, it felt good to connect to real life—the forest, the sunrise, the schedule. Like a person who knows about that stuff can totally handle hospice.”
Later, in the tea house, he wants to know more about Ben. “There must be something very, very wrong with him,” he says and kisses me so softly that I might start to cry.
He knows most of the story, because he played him in the movie. How we met in college and moved to the city. How I got a job in publishing and he was going to start a tech company. How a year into his start-up, a bigger company launched the same project. How the same thing happened with his next idea, and the next. The movie doesn’t cover the real money stuff—how Ben blew through any money I made almost aggressively. Like he shopped out of anger.
“I guess because he was raised rich, he never expected anything to be hard. He literally couldn’t handle it if things didn’t go his way. Like he was owed.”
“What happened to the grandfather’s money?”
“It was all mismanaged over the years; Ben’s dad didn’t really focus on the business when it was his turn to run it. So what’s left is a bunch of angry, entitled people with no money who don’t know how to take care of themselves.”
“You should have put that in the movie. I would haveliked that for his character, like it was hard for me to understand why Trevor was such a tool.”
I move Leo’s hair out of his eyes. “It was my fault too. I let him pretend he was about to hit it big. I covered for him for years because I didn’t want to be wrong about my marriage, my life.”
“You’re a chump,” he kids. “I should tell you, I’m not good with money either. I don’t know anything about it.”
“Except that you can afford a lot of bananas.”
Leo laughs. “So many bananas.”
“Well, I’m rich now, so it’s all good,” I say.
“You are? All my dreams have come true.” He pulls me in tight. “What a catch.”
“I’m serious.The Tea Housegot me out of debt. When you’ve been in a lot of debt, having no debt feels pretty rich. This isn’t going to be the movie where the heroine has to sell the farm.”
