London Is the Best City in America

“What she’s doing in Paris?” I asked. “Your girlfriend?”

“My girlfriend?”

Who was it that said you should never ask a question unless you’re ready to hear the answer? Was that just a Josh-ism too? I still was having too much trouble listening to it.

“Yes.”

He smiled at me. “Well, my ex-girlfriend, Lily, was just transferred to her firm’s Paris office,” he said. “She’s a tax attorney.”

And he stopped there, not saying the rest of it. But I could start to hear it anyway: Matt getting a great job at a small French architecture firm, his first well-deserved break. He would start to love the city, explain to me one day that he just hadn’t understood it before, but how, now, he was going to every small alley-café, every out-of-the-way gallery. How, tramping down the streets late at night, he found the hidden chapel behind the Champs-Elysées where the symphony practiced at midnight on Tuesdays, the front pews always empty.

Matt stubbed out his cigarette on the ground beneath the bench, clearing his throat while he did it. I stared at the cigarette. It was sinking in the ground, which was wet from the water, full of little puddles of mud.

“But it’s my son I’m talking about,” he said. “He’s the reason that I’m trying to go there now.”

I was sure I’d heard him wrong. “What?”

He nodded.

“I don’t know what to say,” I whispered. And I didn’t. I started doing admittedly faulty math in my head, trying to figure the dates out. His son would be what now? Could be what? Two if he started seeing Lawyer Lily right after us. His son could be as old as two years old. “Do you have a picture?”

He felt around in his pocketless T-shirt, his empty jeans. “Not on me, I don’t think,” he said.

But it didn’t matter anyway. The little boy was all I could see now. This sweet little baby. Matt’s eyes and coloring. Someone else’s nose and chin and long fingers. Someone else’s lips.

“His name’s Nathaniel.”

“After your . . . grandfather?”

“Her father, actually. Her father had that name too. He died right before Nate was born last year.”

I held my hand above my chest, staring at him. I thought it would suffocate me—my heart—it was beating so fast out of me. Matt was someone’s father now. He had become someone’s father. All these images of him came into mind: walking in the park, changing a diaper, standing crib-side. Someone needed him for these most basic things, and I knew he was doing them, giving all he could. But the weirdest part was that he was looking at me so apprehensively, so carefully, like that wasn’t the trick of it—of what he had to say to me. Like there was still more to come.

“Matt, I feel like I should be saying more, but it’s just so much,” I said, hoping there wasn’t more, hoping I was wrong. “From ice hockey to Nathaniel in under five minutes.”

“I’m sorry,” he said.

“No.” I reached out and touched his arm. It was the first time I had touched him. “Don’t be. I think that’s how it happens.”

He looked down at my hand on his arm, before looking back up at me, meeting my eyes. I followed his eyes with mine, wanting to say something else. But before I could, he did. “Then forgive me,” he said. “From going from there to this.”

And he kissed me. He just leaned in and—just like that. It was so soft that I almost missed it. So soft and scared and light. There was no time to argue with it, almost no time to really even feel it.

As he pulled away, I felt stuck in place. My face still next to his. I couldn’t seem to move.

“I’m sorry,” he said.

“For which part?” I said. His breath right near my neck. His breath still a little too near.

“You should know,” he said. “You’re the reason I came home this weekend. You’re the reason I’m here. I read your brother’s wedding announcement in the paper, and I thought, I’ll go home. I won’t go find her, but at least I’ll go home. And if I see her, I was supposed to see her. If I see her, I’ll figure out a way to say what I want to say.”

I was waiting to hear the rest of it—what he thought he was supposed to say—but it was like I was hearing just the beginning again and again. You’re the reason I came home.

I moved closer to him.

“It all sounds better in my head,” he said. “I love Lily. She gave me Nathaniel. I can’t be sorry about that. But it’s just not the same. With her or with anyone else. Things just aren’t the same as they were with us.” He paused. “When things were good with us, they were so good. Don’t you think? Everything else just feels . . . less honest or something.”

I tried to think of what to say back. I felt like I should say something back, if for nothing else than because he had managed to do that thing that only he seemed to know how to do: say something that fit perfectly into an empty place inside me.