Every Vow You Break Read online

  “I’ll pay them. How much are they?”

  “That’s not the point. I can’t have you paying my college loans.”

  “Look. I give money to charities all the time. I have more money right now at my age than I’ll ever in a million years be able to spend. You’re a good person. I assume your parents are good people. Let me pay the loans. You can still move back home. I’m not trying to get you to stay in New York.”

  “It’s crazy. We don’t even really know each other.”

  “Look,” Bruce said, and took a deep breath through his nostrils. They were at an upscale gastro pub, sitting at the corner of the bar, a plate of truffled deviled eggs between them, and they both had to talk a little louder than they normally would to be heard. “When I lived in Silicon Valley, I gave pitches all the time, and the standard line among my colleagues about giving pitches was to practice them, to know exactly what you were going to say, and to stick to the script. I used to do the opposite. I’d go into pitch meetings and just speak from my heart, describe my product exactly as it was. I never practiced. I never worried about how I’d come off. I just went in with total honesty, and it made the whole thing so much easier.”

  “What does this have to do with you wanting to pay my loans?”

  “I think because when I told you I wanted to do that, I wasn’t being entirely honest. So, here it is, I’m about to be totally honest. I don’t believe in love at first sight, but something very close to that happened when I saw you in the coffee shop. I wanted—no, I needed—to get to know you, so I took a shot. And now here we are three dates later and I know, with certainty, that I want to spend the rest of my life with you. No, let me finish. You’re the most interesting woman I’ve ever met. You love poetry and horror movies, and dress like a 1950s housewife. You’re far smarter than I can ever hope to be, and you’re kind and selfless. Plus I think we fit, and I know that we could make it work. I feel, in a way, that you are now my purpose for living. I don’t expect you to have the same feelings. I would be pleased, obviously, if you shared some of them, but that’s not why I’m telling you this. I just want to be open. I think we should be together. I also think that if you’re about to tell me that I’m scaring the shit out of you, and that you never want to see me again, that I still want to pay your student loans, because you’re a good person and you shouldn’t have to worry about something that I can take care of so easily. Consider it your payment for sitting through this embarrassing speech.”

  “It’s not embarrassing,” Abigail said, although she was having trouble meeting his eyes.

  He must have noticed, because some of the color left his face, and he said, “Oh, I fucked up.”

  “No, no, no. You didn’t. It’s just that honesty is …”

  “It’s embarrassing.”

  “I guess so, yes.”

  “Should we just forget I ever said what I just said?”

  “No, not at all. I like you, too, and I want to keep seeing you. To be honest, I don’t have the confidence about our relationship that you seem to have, but maybe I’m just in a fragile place right now. How about I stay in New York a little longer than I planned, we continue to see one another, and I will consider letting you pay off some of my student loans, but I don’t want you to bring it up again until I do?”

  He looked relieved, some of the color returning to his cheeks, and said, “Deal.”

  After that conversation, Abigail let herself relax with this new, strange man. There was something childlike and inexperienced about him, despite his success and his wealth. He loved horror movies like she did, but he’d never seen anything before the turn of the century, and Abigail introduced him to the greatness that was 1970s horror. She showed him pockets of New York City that he’d never have discovered, and together they took a weekend trip to Philadelphia to go to her favorite museum, the Mütter, a place famous for its displays of vintage medical instruments and numerous skulls and skeletons. It turned out he had a macabre streak similar to hers, or at least an interest. He did love many of the old movies she showed him, and he admitted that when he’d first seen her in that coffee shop one of the things that had attracted him was how she’d looked like a woman from a different time.

  “What was I wearing? I can’t remember,” she said.

  And he told her in detail, about how she’d been wearing a black dress with a high white collar, and how her hair was held back by her polka-dot headband. She didn’t tell him that that was the headband she wore when she hadn’t washed her hair in a couple of days.

  She did worry that she only enjoyed being with Bruce because of his willingness to be introduced to new things by her, and that, over time, it wouldn’t be enough. But he introduced her to things as well. Great restaurants, for one. An appreciation for cocktails. He even took her to the opera—they went to see Macbeth—and it was an almost transformative experience for Abigail.

  And there were qualities about Bruce that she really did love. He was a vulnerable person, despite all his successes. In some ways, he reminded her of her own father, always questioning his life, always looking for reassurance. There was something passive about him, and it led to her feeling stronger in his presence. She didn’t know if this was a good thing or a bad thing, but she did know that it was a dynamic that she was comfortable with.

  Down deep, she knew that Bruce was more in love with her than she was with him. But wasn’t that the case with every couple? There was always one person in each relationship who cared a little more than the other. And wasn’t it better to be the person who cared less?

  One year after they’d started dating they were engaged, the student loans were paid off, and Bruce was already pressuring Abigail to let him invest in bringing back the Boxgrove Theatre.

  “You’ll lose money,” she told him.

  “Then it’s a write-off for my taxes. Either way, I win.”

  “I don’t even know if my parents would want to save the Boxgrove. It was a lot of work for them. It’s probably what eventually wrecked their marriage.”

  “Ask them and find out.”

  “How about we do it after we’re married?”

  This was in June, and they had set the wedding date for the beginning of October. “Whatever you want to do for the wedding is fine with me,” Bruce told her. “If you want something huge, let’s do it. If you want to get married at the registry, I’m happy to do that as well. But I want to plan the honeymoon.”

  “Oh yeah?” Abigail imagined some sort of grand tour of Europe.

  “I have a place in mind.”

  “Yeah?”

  “That’s all I’m going to tell you.”

  “Well, you’ll have to tell me a little more than that. Like what kind of clothes I’ll need to pack.”

  “Fair enough. But that’s all I’m telling you.”

  “I’m intrigued.”

  “It’s kind of life-changing,” Bruce said, and she wondered exactly what that meant. She truly did not know. It was hard to know what would impress him. She’d brought him to a classic New York diner that had blown him away, and it turned out he’d never actually been in a diner before. Before he was rich, he’d lived almost exclusively on take-out Korean food while he coded at home, and after he was rich, his new friends had introduced him to top-end restaurants. He’d skipped the in-between restaurants and the dive bars and the lean years. He was also both innocent and experienced when it came to relationships. He’d had a longtime girlfriend from his freshman year at college—his only year at college, as it turned out—who’d broken his heart by leaving him for one of his early business partners. He was vague about any relationships he’d had since then, and Abigail sometimes suspected that maybe he’d been to prostitutes with other Silicon Valley types. (There’d been a trip to Thailand after his first big sale.) But in bed he was conservative, and while it was nice, Abigail sometimes missed the sex with Ben, usually drunken, frenzied, and filled with talk. Bruce made a lot of sincere eye contact when they made love
, and sometimes it was a little too much for her, but that was who he was. He was sincere. And if the price to pay for a lifetime with a guy like that was a little too much reverence in the bedroom, then Abigail thought she could put up with it.

  The bachelorette party was his idea. He was having his own bachelor party back in California, flying all his friends to an island in the Puget Sound. (“This place run by Chip Ramsay. You’ll meet him—he’s legendary.”) “Legendary” and “life-changing” were two of Bruce’s favorite adjectives, a fault she chalked up to too many years on the West Coast. Abigail told him that she thought she’d just have a night out with friends in New York for her bachelorette party, but he told her they should do a weekend away, and he offered to pay, of course. She mentioned that she’d always wanted to go to Northern California, and an hour of web-browsing later he’d found the perfect place, Piety Hills, a Spanish-style vineyard that boasted its own hotel and restaurant. He booked it, and paid for the rooms, although she talked him into getting just three rooms for the five of them. “We can share,” she’d said.

  She was grateful, plus a little bit annoyed, that he’d gotten so involved with the planning. And she was equally annoyed when they arrived at Piety Hills and were told that there would be a special dinner for all of them—a seven-course meal—in the wine cellar, already paid for. It was generous, and sweet, but it wasn’t what she had pictured, exactly, for her bachelorette night. She told her friends this during dinner.

  “I don’t know, Ab,” Zoe said. “This is pretty amazing.”

  “I guess I was just picturing us all in the bar upstairs, getting a little rowdy.”

  “We can do that after dinner,” Zoe’s sister, Pam, said. “They’re open late.”

  “Okay. I feel better. It’s just that sometimes Bruce is … too attentive, I guess.”

  “Yeah, that must suck.”

  “I know, I know. I’m not complaining.”

  After dinner they all did go to the bar, drinking several more bottles of the amazing wine, and eventually spilling out onto the patio area, with its firepit and a sky full of stars. Abigail, who’d been tired earlier, found herself fairly drunk and wide awake by midnight, then time suddenly sped up and her friends had disappeared one by one, and the fire was dying down, and she was wearing a stranger’s sweater.

  CHAPTER 5

  Frankly,” she said, staring at the half inch of wine at the bottom of her glass, “it’s getting a little creepy how much you seem to care about my sex life.”

  The man held up both hands. “Okay, I’ll stop. I am being creepy. I just … you seem a little hesitant about this impending marriage, and as someone who’s not in a particularly happy marriage myself, I guess I’m projecting a little.”

  “Because you wished you’d slept with more women when you were single.”

  “I’ve slept with plenty of women. I think my problem was that I hadn’t been in a serious emotional relationship with another person before I got married. I don’t think either of us had been. And when we couldn’t have kids, it just took too much out of us, and now it just feels joyless.”

  “Do you think you’ll get divorced?”

  “Probably. I think she’s already involved with someone else, this guy she works with, although I’m guessing it’s more of an emotional affair right now. Honestly, when I think about it, I worry more about who’s going to get the dog. And I worry about my parents, because they both love her, love my wife. More than me, I think.”

  “But if you’re not happy …”

  “Right,” he said, straightening his back but staying seated. “Enough about this, though. Let’s get back to you.” He held up his glass. “To the bride-to-be. May you have better luck than the rest of us.”

  Abigail took the last sip of her wine. “Your hand is trembling,” she said. “Are you cold?”

  “I’m fucking freezing to death,” he said, smiling.

  “Oh my God. Take your sweater back.”

  He reached across and placed his hand on Abigail’s arm to stop her from taking the sweater off. “No, then you’ll be cold.”

  “Let’s go inside, then.”

  “I’d rather stay cold. If we get up and go inside, you’re suddenly going to realize how late it is, and how tired you are, and then you’re going to go to your room and I’ll never see you again.”

  “How late is it?” Abigail asked, looking at her wrist where she normally wore her Fitbit before realizing she’d taken it off for the night.

  “I’m not telling you,” the man said, digging into the front pocket of his pants, pulling out a crumpled pack of cigarettes. He extracted one, putting it between his lips, and said, “I hope you don’t mind. I limit myself to one a day, usually around this time of night.”

  “How do you do that? I only smoked in college, but I was up to a pack a day in less than a month.”

  “You want one now?” He held out the blue pack of cigarettes, a French brand, and Abigail took one.

  “Why not?” she said.

  “They’re unfiltered, so go easy. I figure if I’m only going to have one a day it might as well pack a punch.”

  He lit her cigarette first, then his, using matches that had been tucked inside the pack.

  Abigail slid back along her seat and blew a plume of smoke into the night. The taste of smoke in her mouth made her feel younger than she was, younger and drunker. The whole evening was reminding her of something, and she realized that it felt like that first night she’d spent with Ben Perez in college, like she’d met a stranger and suddenly anything was possible. And even though she didn’t want to admit it, she didn’t want the night to end, either. She liked this guy. Or at least she liked the feeling of being with this guy. She liked his insistent questions, and his honesty. And she liked his sweater. It was a yellow cardigan with corduroy elbow patches. It smelled old, but in a nice way—mothballs and aftershave.

  Tilting her head back, she stared across at the man. “You never told me your name. Remember, it was part of the deal. I tell you my entire sexual history and you tell me your name.”

  “Maybe, at this point, we shouldn’t tell each other our names.”

  “We could make them up,” Abigail said.

  “Sure. How about I make up your name and you make up mine?” He tapped his cigarette, and ash dropped onto the patio. She wondered if smoking was even allowed at this vineyard.

  “Okay. You go first.”

  “Um, I’ll call you Madeleine.”

  Abigail thought about it for a moment. “I can live with that, I guess. Why Madeleine?”

  “I don’t know. It just popped into my head, like it’s the name that you should have. I’ll call you Maddy for short. What’s my name?”

  “Scottie,” Abigail said.

  “Scottie? Why Scottie? It makes me sound like a dog.”

  “It’s a movie reference,” Abigail said. “If I’m Madeleine, then you’re Scottie.”

  The man pursed his lips, then said, “Vertigo.”

  Abigail smiled. “Yes.”

  “If I recall, that particular relationship didn’t end very well.”

  “Look, you started this, Scottie, when you named me Madeleine, so don’t blame me.”

  “You’re too young,” the man said, “to know about movies like Vertigo.”

  Abigail took a long drag on her cigarette, her throat burning, then picked a shred of tobacco from her tongue. “My father gave me my movie education, and my mother gave me my book education. I was an only child, so I was also their project.”

  “What are you going to do with all those skills after you get married?”

  “Oh, let’s not talk about that right now.”

  “Is that because it’s a boring subject or because you’re not going to work after you get married?”

  “Why do you say that?”

  The man stretched an arm above his head and rotated his wrist.

  “Because your fiancé is rich.”

  “Him being rich
has nothing to do with whether I’ll keep working. And, no, it’s not the reason I’m marrying him, but it is a part of him that I find attractive. I won’t lie. It will be very nice to never have to think about money again, because, honestly, that’s all that my parents seemed to do before they separated, and I worry it’s wrecking them. You’re really overly concerned that I’m marrying the wrong guy.” During this short speech, another internal speech was going through Abigail’s head, one in which she told herself that she sounded haughty and defensive. She stared at the cigarette in her hand, realized it was making her dizzy, and flicked it into the fire.

  “Point taken,” the man said. “I’m only overly concerned because of jealousy. But you’ve convinced me. He sounds like a catch. I just think that, knowing you for all of two hours, you’re an amazing person, and I don’t think you should sell yourself short for someone less than amazing. It is the rest of your life, after all.”

  That phrase “the rest of your life” had actually been going through Abigail’s head a little bit during the course of the weekend, a thread of worry that Bruce’s overprotectiveness, his undying love for her, was going to wear thin over time.

  The man stood up. “And with that final obnoxious comment I think I’m going to quit while I’m still ahead.” He dropped the cigarette onto the patio and ground it out under his foot. She thought he was going to leave it there, but he picked it up and put it in his jeans pocket.

  Abigail stood as well. “It was only a little obnoxious.”

  “If I have one more glass of wine, I’m going to beg you not to marry him, and to run away with me.”

  Abigail laughed. “When it rains, it pours. Oh, your sweater.”

  She pulled it off, the fabric crackling a little with static electricity, and handed it back to him. Then the man held out his hand, as if to shake hers, and said, “Madeleine, nice meeting you.”

  She shook his hand and their eyes met, and a part of her took two steps back and watched this stranger and herself in their circle of firelight. It felt like watching the last spontaneous romantic moment of her life. There was a hitch in her breath, and for an awful moment she thought she was going to cry. “How about a hug?” she asked, and he pulled her in toward him, and because she was cold, she let the hug go on too long. He smelled of smoke, but not in a bad way.