Page 86 of Twice
She leaned over and began kissing my neck. That was as close as I came to telling her the truth. We spent one weekend at a resort along the coast, and another weekend in Cancún. During those escapes, she was less guarded, and we sometimes walked hand in hand along a beach, or swam together in a pool. She never really asked about Gianna, but I volunteered that things were not good between us and that we had separated. I was mixing years, of course. During that time, Gianna was actually still in New York, in our apartment, and we hadn’t yet tried having a baby, hadn’t yet fought over that failure, hadn’t yet taken a “break,” orhad a surprise confrontation with her old boyfriend standing behind her.
Didn’t matter. I knew it would happen. And I was living the way I had always lived, with many lifetimes snaggled around each other. The truth is, I told myself where Gianna was going, so I could excuse where I was.
?
At the beginning, I had called Gianna every night from Mexico, telling her about the daily movie activity and lying about why they needed me there. By the end of the shoot, we only spoke every couple of days.
One night, after some particularly wild lovemaking with Nicolette, followed by grilled cheese sandwiches and a bottle of wine, I was leaving her room when, wearing just a cropped T-shirt and panties, she grabbed me close, tipsy, and nuzzled her cheek against mine. “Sing me something,” she said. So I softly sang another verse from “Make Someone Happy,” the song I knew she liked:
“One smile that cheers you
One face that lights when it nears you
One girl you’re everything to.”
She made a satisfied groan when I finished, and as I opened the door to leave she kissed me gently on the lips and said, “Mmm, love you,” and I instinctively replied, “I love you, too.”
?
Now, Boss, comes the tragic part. It will make sense once you read it, and maybe then you will grant my last request regarding Gianna. I hope so. It’s all I have left.
I returned to New York once the movie finished shooting. Gianna left a message saying she was stuck at work and couldn’t make it to the airport, could I get a cab into the city? That was different. Usually, if I went away, even for a few days, Gianna would be waiting at the gate, holding snacks in case I was hungry and jumping up and down as if she hadn’t seen me in a year.
I used the cab ride to set my composure. How was I going to handle our reunion? I’d time jumped back nearly three years to Mexico because I’d been angry at Gianna, and Mike, and that whole confrontation. And once in the past, I’d been narrow-minded in my emotions. Nicolette and I were making a film during the day and making love at night. I selfishly made no room for outside thoughts about my wife or our future. Maybe because I knew, deep down, I’d acted rashly. I didn’t want to face that.
But back in New York, everything felt different, as if a summer had ended and I’d returned to a sterile classroom. Nicolette was off to make a film in Canada, so there was no seeing her for a while. We hadn’t formalized anything, other than to say we would miss one another and I would try to fly out to see her during her shoot.
As I waited for Gianna to return, I wandered around theapartment, remembering my last time here, three years in the future, when we’d already separated and my presence had been erased.
But now my coffee mugs were on the kitchen counter and my shoes were in the closet and it hit me that I was about to relive not days or months, but the longest stretch I had ever repeated in my life. While I’d known this intellectually, I don’t think I absorbed it emotionally until that moment, staring at my old sneakers.
“Hey, hi,” Gianna said, pushing through the door. “You’re home. How was it?”
The first thing I noticed was her tone, which was different. Flatter. Her hair was cut short, the way she’d worn it back then. But her usual smile was missing.
“It was good. Good. Tiring.” I injected more enthusiasm into my voice. “How areyoudoing?”
I stepped forward and initiated a kiss, which she returned. I can’t say if it was my lips or hers, but something had changed.
“I’m fine,” she said.
“What’s been going on?”
“You know. Same stuff.”
“Yeah.”
There was a pause that lasted a couple seconds. It felt like a decade.
“You hungry?” she said.
“Um... yeah. Yeah. Let’s go out.”
“I have some food here.”
“All right. We can eat here.”
“OK.”
