Meet Me in Manhattan (True Vows) (17 page)

For a guy who was naturally restless, sitting behind the counter
wasn't exactly fun. He whiled away the time reading the newspaper, listening to music, straightening the bags of potato chips
on the chrome shelves. But he'd rather be drawing. Thinking.
Creating.

His picture had to be spectacular. It had to express everything he felt for Erika. It had to dazzle her.

Them. Of course, it would depict them. In bed. Making love.
Their bodies intertwined. Not pornographic, not tawdry but
beautiful. Over the days, he stole spare minutes when he could,
plied his colored pencils, poured himself into the drawing.

Not just him and Erika. Animals, too. He always drew animals.
She loved horses. He'd grown up with sheep and geese, ducks and
rabbits. He added donkeys to the drawing. They were kind of like
horses, but also like the farm animals he'd taken care of throughout his youth. Donkeys had spirit. They were strong, energetic,
stubborn. Like him. Like his passion for her.

Somehow, he managed to intertwine them with the lovers in
the bed. He added color, shading. Lines, shapes, intricacies. No
rushing, no shortcuts. This was his masterpiece, for the woman
he loved.

After a week, he was satisfied with what he'd created. More
than satisfied-he was proud. His drawing was amazing. She
would love it, and she would love him.

He had an early shift and was able to leave the gas station midafternoon, before the post office closed. He had no idea how to
ship the drawing; he couldn't fold it to fit inside an envelope. He
hoped the post office would know how to package it.

The postal clerk, a middle-aged woman with frosted blond
hair and a double chin, gasped when she saw the drawing. "That
is beautiful," she said.

"I have to send it to Colorado," he told her. "I don't know how
to pack it. I don't want to fold it."

"Absolutely not. You can't fold it." She circled the counter to a
corner of the room where packing supplies were on display and
pulled a rugged cardboard tube from a rack. "This is what you
need for a drawing that beautiful," she said, carrying it with her back to her side of the counter.

Ted watched as she meticulously rolled the drawing, making
sure not to crease or dent it or bend the corners. In her pale blue
post office shirt with the fake tie at her neck, she looked like the
antithesis of Erika. Surely her taste differed from Erika's. If she
thought the drawing was beautiful, Erika might hate it.

Even so, Ted absorbed the clerk's compliment like blotting
paper soaking up a spill. "It's for the love of my life," he confessed, smiling when he realized how gooey that sounded. He
didn't owe her any explanations; he didn't have to prove himself
to her. But she thought his drawing was beautiful, and once she'd
rolled it for him, she inserted it into the tube with the care of a
mother laying her baby in its crib. She was his accomplice, his
partner in this essential act. She understood its import, and she
was honoring his drawing, and him, and his love.

He hoped Erika would honor it as well. He hoped she would
look at it and realize he wasn't just a loser working at a gas station. He was an artist. She had inspired him to create this masterpiece that depicted how much he loved her. He hoped she
would pull the drawing from the tube, gasp, and murmur, "That
is beautiful."

And then she would get on a plane and fly to Newark, and drive
up to Mendham, and charge into the gas station and say, "I love
you, too."

The wait was excruciating. Ted alternated between lying on his
bunk listening to the mix tape Erika had given him and lying on
the blue sofa in the living room and lapsing into dark, depressed
moods. When in the grip of one of those dark moods, he had no
appetite, and he lost weight he couldn't afford to lose. When he
listened to the tape, though, he felt Erika's nearness. Surely she'd chosen the songs for the tape to communicate with him, just as
he was using his artistic ability to communicate with her.

He listened to Christine McVie's flute-like voice singing, "I
love you, I love you, like never before," and he thought, This is
Erika's message to me. I haven't lost her.

A week after he mailed the drawing, she phoned. Hearing her
voice was like injecting a powerful drug into his veins. It jolted
him, heated his entire body, wrenched him into another place.
"Hey, Ted," she said.

"Hey, Fred." As gobsmacked as he was, he did his best to sound
cool and nonchalant. "How's it going?"

"I just got the drawing you sent me. That was so sweet."

So sweet? So sweet? He'd poured his soul into that drawing. His
heart. Every last ounce of emotion. Every bit of love and passion
and yearning. He'd killed himself over that drawing, and she
thought it was sweet?

He wanted to cry. Or bang the phone against the wall until it
broke, until it was smashed into as many pieces as he was.

Sweet. Jesus freaking Christ.

"Yeah, well ..." he said in a deceptively calm voice. "So, how
are you?"

She told him exactly how she was: Fantastic. Terrific. Never
been better. She told him about her classes and her roommate
and the kegger she'd been to last Saturday night. She told him
about how she and all her wonderful new friends had gone hiking and they were going to teach her how to ski, and she was so
happy to be trying new things. She told him that as much as she'd
loved riding, she was welcoming the changes in her life, the different challenges of these activities.

Ted knew what she was trying to communicate: not the sentiments of the Fleetwood Mac song, not that she loved him like never before, but that she was glad to be gone, glad to be embracing all that was new and different in Colorado. Glad not to have
stayed home in New Jersey, living the life she'd lived for eighteen
years. Glad not to have stayed with Ted.

"That is really cool," Becky said. She and a few other girls had
gathered in Erika's dorm room to admire Ted's drawing. No one
had been around when Erika had retrieved the mysterious cylindrical shipment from the package room at the campus center.
She'd seen the return address and freaked out a little; what could
Ted have sent her in a tube-shaped mailer?

She'd wanted to open it right away, but she'd carried it back to
her dorm room before prying open one end and sliding out the
drawing. And then she'd freaked out a little more, because it was
the most astonishing drawing Ted had ever done. Vivid, visceral,
an explosion of line and color-and passion. Two lovers in bed,
surrounded by all that imagery.

He'd drawn it for her. Gone to all that effort, for her.

Would any other boy ever do so much for her? Would she ever
meet another boy as devoted to her as Ted was?

Someone as obsessed by her? Someone determined to cling to
what had been rather than open himself to what lay ahead?
Someone who refused to step outside his safety zone and see what
else the world had to offer?

She'd stared at the drawing and tears had spilled down her
cheeks. Crying over Ted came easily to her. He had the key that
unlocked all her emotions, and his power over her frightened
her. She'd been smart to leave him. If she'd stayed with him,
she would have given him control over her hopes and dreams. She
would have become Ted's woman, rather than her own. She would
have lost herself.

She'd spread the drawing out on her bed, hurried down the
hall to the bathroom, and washed her face. Once she'd regained
her composure, she'd returned to her room and phoned him. ""I
just got the drawing you sent me," she'd told him when he
answered. "That was so sweet."

He hadn't sounded exactly thrilled to hear her voice. She
wondered why. She couldn't believe he hated her after he'd drawn
such a magnificent picture and sent it to her. Maybe he'd wanted
her to say something else.

She'd said what was in her heart: it was so sweet that he'd
done this.

And she'd realized, as they'd talked on the phone, that staying
connected over two thousand miles was next to impossible. She'd
spoken honestly yet sensed that she'd said the wrong thing. He'd
sounded clipped and chilly. She couldn't see him, couldn't gauge
what he was thinking. She couldn't read his feelings in his eyes,
the way she could when they were together.

The more she'd talked, the colder he'd sounded. He didn't
want to hear about the hike she and a few schoolmates had taken
up Pike's Peak. He clearly felt as removed from her as she did
from him.

"Who sent it to you?" Adrienne asked.

Erika set aside her memory of her phone conversation with
Ted and basked in the oohs and ahhs of her college friends as they
admired the drawing. "My-a friend of mine," she said. Ted
wasn't her boyfriend. He wasn't her love. She'd told him when
she'd left for Colorado that she wanted them to be just friends.

After talking to him, she doubted they were even that.

MAINE IS LIKE NEW JERSEY, only colder, more rugged, more
forested, less congested and the people have tart Yankee accents.

All right, it's nothing like New Jersey, except for the one thing that
matters to you: Erika isn't there.

You help your parents move up to Maine, figuring the change of
scenery will be good for you. You want to get away from all the places
that remind you of her: the high school, your friends' houses, the stable where her precious Five Star boards. Ghosts may be able to travel
up the road from the cemetery to the house you grew up in, but if
you're lucky, the ghost of your love affair will not be able to travel all
the way to East Machias.

You still write to her, of course. Sometimes you send her a drawing. You and she are still `friends," whatever the hell that means.
You know what it means to you: you are still so sick in love with her
that you'll take whatever scrap she tosses your way. What it means
to her is that she occasionally drops you a line and she doesn't hang
up when you phone her.

You sign up for some college courses. Maybe that will impress her.
Maybe all she ever wanted from you was a little ambition, some
proof that you didn't expect to spend the rest of your life pumping gas and wiping dead bugs off windshields. You always had ambition-if you weren't ambitious, you wouldn't have aimed your
sights on a girl as classy as Erika Fredell. You just didn't know what
you wanted to do with your life.

Other than love her.

There's a branch of Maine's state university system in Machias,
so you sign up and hand over a check. You wander around the campus, sit in on a few classes and think, What am I doing? Why am I
here? How the hell am I supposed to sit still for ninety minutes while
this tweedy windbag takes twenty minutes to define macroeconomics-yeah, it's the study of broad economic systems, you get it
already. How are you supposed to wait patiently while that militantly funky woman spends half the art class talking about shading? You get that, too.

This isn't the place for you. Going to college to get Erika to love
you isn't going to cut it.

She used to love you just for who you were. She used to think the
fact that you were reasonably intelligent and fun and utterly
devoted to her was enough.

When did it stop being enough?

Winter came earlier to Colorado than it did to New Jersey. As
much as Erika missed riding, she was glad she wasn't pursuing
the rigorous training schedule she used to have back home. She
would have had to start riding indoors by early November.

Instead, weeks before Thanksgiving, she found herself on a
bunny slope, strapped into rented ski boots, perched on rented
skis and gripping rented poles. And feeling like a toddler learning
to take her first faltering steps.

"Just tell me what to do," she said to Becky, who owned her
own equipment-not just skis, boots, poles, and a helmet, but fancy insulated gloves and a form-fitting jacket that made her
look sleek and slim, unlike Erika's puffy down parka. "I've ridden
horses. I made nationals. I'm sure I can do this."