I shrug. “It was fifteen years ago, kid. No worries.”
She shakes her head. “It was shitty of me. I’ve felt terrible about it ever since. And I heard you were … not good for a while.”
I lean back in my chair and stretch out my legs. I guess we’re talking about this.
“I was pretty torn up about it for a minute.” I spare her the details.
She nods, avoiding my eyes. “You might not believe me, but I was too.”
She’s right. I don’t believe her.
“I kind of assumed you’d call, eventually,” I can’t help but say, probably because I’ve had four drinks. “Or write. Or like at least send a carrier pigeon letting me know you were alive.”
She picks up her Parmesan twist and commences breaking it into quarters. It pains me. She’s wasting good saturated fat.
“Yeah,” she says. “That’s what a normal person would have done. I can’t really explain it. I was a jerk.”
I don’t believe that she has no better explanation than that. The truth is, despite her demeanor, she was never a jerk. She was sensitive, and she covered it up with cynicism. When she dropped her guard, she was so incredibly lovely.
“I don’t think that’s true,” I say.
I expect her to dismiss me, but she takes a beat to consider this.
“I guess I was scared. We were going to schools a two-hour plane ride apart, and I thought you’d end up breaking up with me, and I couldn’t deal with it. So I just snapped and ended things before they could get more intense.”
It’s a reasonable explanation. Better than me doing something awful to her I never knew about, or her not really loving me, or any of the other painful scenarios I brooded on over the years.
But it also seems like something she could have just told me at the time. A worry I could have hugged and kissed away, like I did so many of her other anxieties.
Whatever. I didn’t come here to engage in retroactive couples therapy with Molly Marks.
I came here to slap backs and get drunk and maybe make out with a cute girl from the tennis team.
I need to change the subject.
“Look, Molls, no worries, okay? It’s water under the bridge. Anyway, check out Marian and Marcus. I think they’re in love.”
“Wow,” she says, eyeing the dance floor, where they are holding each other so tightly they may as well be one person.
In my capacity as an expert on relationships, I can say with authority that you don’t dance that way to “Cheeseburger in Paradise” unless you are soul mates.
“I always thought they’d end up together,” I say.
“Certainly seems like they will tonight. I’m not even sure they’re going to make it to a hotel room.”
“No, I mean I thought they would end up married or something. Look at them. You really don’t think they’re soul mates?”
“I don’t believe in soul mates.”
This throws me. Her movies are romantic and life-affirming. And in each one, an oddball finds their perfect match with someone equally odd and perfectly suited. I love her movies. They’re funny and sweet and optimistic, but with an edge that gives you a glimmer of the wry sensibility of the person who wrote them.
(Not that it means anything that I’ve seen them both at least three times.)
I don’t want to disclose how familiar I am with her IMDb page, so I just say:
“What! You’re a rom-com writer who doesn’t believe in soul mates? Unreal.”
“Yeah, unreal.” She leans back in her chair. “Exactly. Romance is a fantasy. This”—she gestures at Marian and Marcus—“sadly, is real life. And in real life, there are very few happy endings.”
I refrain from suggesting she thinks this because she killed ours at an impressionable age.
“That’s kind of cynical, kid,” I say.
“I’m just reporting the facts. I’m an expert, right? Romance is a genre. It has a set of beats, like thrillers and detective novels. It starts at the meet cute and ends when things are finally going well. And as the writer, you hit the pause button there forever, leave the story in suspended animation. You don’t show the part where he cheats on her, or she falls out of love with him, or their kids kill their sex life, or they die in a snorkeling accident on their honeymoon. You know? It’s a fantasy. Just some stupid love story.”
“God, that’s depressing.”
“Says the guy who destroys relationships for a living.”
“Um, excuse me. Having presided over many divorces and seen many last-minute reconciliations, I happen to know that just because a relationship ends doesn’t mean the love behind it wasn’t real. Sometimes it just wasn’t right. At this point I can tell when people are gonna reconcile, and when they need to go off and find their true love. Everyone is meant to find their person. Everyone is meant to have a love of their life.”
“That’s sweet,” Molly says in a nice, dismissive tone—abandoning the all-consuming intensity of our conversation rather than conceding my brilliant argument. I can’t even be annoyed because getting into it with her like that—like we’re alone and the only thing in the world is our brains—has made me extremely nostalgic for when we were sixteen and obsessed with each other.
I roll my eyes at her. “Don’t condescend to me, Marks.”
“I’m not. It’s nice that you think that. I just know you’re wrong.”
“Who hurt you?” I ask. I am completely kidding, but she winces.
