Forty Seven: Cheap Merlot
Five days after returning home from Disney, Gabrielle still hadn’t called. She hadn’t even stopped by the house except for dinner briefly one night. I tried to call her once, but she didn’t pick up. I debated showing up at her apartment again, but I figured that counted as dwelling in the past so I spent my evenings trying to focus on music, and my kids, and the divorce instead. Comforting, eh?
Natalie and I finally talked. We contacted a lawyer to work up a contract and paperwork and a divorce agreement. She was going to get what felt like half of my money. The funny thing? I didn’t care. I wanted her to have it. It helped ease the guilt.
She was still trying to figure out what she was going to do. I even helped her draw up a list of pros and cons to moving back to Georgia. It felt sort of cheap, sitting at the kitchen table sitting with my wife and helping her decide which was most logical, but she seemed to appreciate it and I wanted to get the process moving along.
“Well staying here would be good because I could see your family a lot, I guess, and the kids wouldn’t have to fly back and forth and I could get to see Kate… not that I really see her these days either…”
I rolled my eyes with her. Both Natalie and I were annoyed with my little brother and his new wife ignoring everyone else.
“And it would be nice to not have to have my parents around all the time,” she laughed to herself.
Truthfully, I wanted Natalie to stay. I wanted her to stay because I wanted her in my life, just not as my wife. I wanted to see the kids a lot and I wanted them to see my parents and I felt bad to see her move back to Georgia to resume a life without me. I just nodded though because it was her decision. I’d made enough decisions for the two of us.
“What do you think?” she asked.
I shrugged. “Nat, it’s whatever you want to do. Honestly, your decision. I support anything.”
It wasn’t even forced- those words. I really meant them. I felt like me again. I was slowly discovering me again with each day.
Like in the line at the grocery store when the woman behind me realized she didn’t have her card and she had 30 dollars worth of dinner groceries, I paid for her. I felt like me then. And then when my mother was exhausted one night after a big family dinner, which included all of us right down to Gabrielle and my children, I offered to clean up for her and do the dishes. I blasted Stairway to Heaven, sang along, and filled the dishwasher. I felt like me then too. And when Gabrielle was leaving that night after dinner I followed her outside and told her we needed to talk and she said she had to run because she was meeting someone for drinks that night, I didn’t ask who it was. I nodded. I let her go. I told her we’d talk later even though I knew damn well she wouldn’t call and she wouldn’t pick up her phone. It felt like me to leave her in peace when I knew she really needed it. With each moment that I remembered who Taylor Hanson really was, I also remembered how nice it felt to be him.
I cannot stress how surprised I was the afternoon that Gabrielle contacted me first. I was sitting in our basement studio sitting on a chair with headphones on, listening to some tracks we had just laid down and trying to give Isaac a proper analysis about the drums which he felt were “weak”. Zac, as he always did during these kind of critiques, disappeared upstairs to “get something to eat” so he didn’t have to hear Isaac’s bitching about his work.
I was trying to focus on the drums, but my mind kept going back to the divorce and Natalie in Georgia and the kids and Gabrielle and… there she was. Just as she passed my mind she appeared in front of me. I blinked to make sure I wasn’t hallucinating and then took the headphones off and set them on the controls in front of me.
“Hi,” was the best thing I could come up with to say.
“What are you doing?” she shrugged, although she knew neither of us were ones for small talk.
“Listening to some tracks… checking something out for Isaac,” I humored her. “What’s up?”
“I wanted to talk to you.”
“Okay…” I said, and glanced around. Isaac was in a recording booth playing an acoustic guitar and Zac was gone so I patted a swivel chair next to me. “Have a seat.”
She sat down next to me and I noticed she was wearing an old Hanson shirt which she probably had dragged out of the boxes and boxes of them in the attic. I was going to comment, but she spoke first.
“I wanted to come and see… if you wanted to go to dinner.”
I paused, my mouth hanging open just a bit. Was Gabrielle pursuing me? What? Gabrielle Carter? No fucking way.
“Excuse me?”
She sighed and glanced down nervously at her skirt.
“I mean! Yes. Sure. I would love to,” I corrected myself, feeling guilty about my reaction. “I am just… surprised to hear you ask.”
“It means nothing,” she said quickly and I have to admit my heart shrunk just a little bit. “I mean, I just think it would be nice for us to go out to eat and catch up. I haven’t really seen you in nearly a week… we should talk.”
I raised an eyebrow. Did she mean talk or talk? There was a big difference between the two.
“It’s nothing major,” she assured me. “Don’t get all worked up about it. I just think it would be nice to see each other or something… away from everyone else.”
I raised an eyebrow again.
“Taylor!” she sighed and I couldn’t help but notice she smiled too.
I laughed. “It all sounds awfully suspicious and strange, you have to admit. You can’t blame me.”
“So is it a yes or a no?” she said, cutting to the point like usual.
“It’s a definitely.”
“Lovely,” she nodded, and then stood up.
“Are you leaving already?” I cried. “I’m on break. Stay. Talk. Stick around.”
She smiled and started for the stairs. “Tomorrow night okay? Seven? Grant’s? An outside table?”
“Perfect,” I said, although I knew I’d made plans to get something to eat with Zac since we hadn’t talked in forever. I figured that could wait. Eating with Gabrielle, at her request, was far more special than my little brother who got married and had no interest in me anymore anyway.
I told Natalie the truth that night, that I was going out for dinner with Gabrielle, that I’d help her get the kids into pajamas before I left, that we needed to talk and catch up on things. She seemed hurt, but I guess there was no avoiding that. I scooped her a bowl of vanilla ice-cream, drizzled chocolate fudge on it, and showered it with rainbow sprinkles before I left. I left it on the counter and prayed she’d find it before it melted. It was weird how easy it was to treat Natalie well when I knew we were splitting up. I suddenly felt like I didn’t have to be nice to her anymore, but I could if I wanted to.
When I met Gabrielle at the restaurant, she was already there since I was a few minutes late. She didn’t see me at first. She was sitting outside at a table drinking a glass of red wine and wearing a plain white shirt with black pants. It was strange to see her in something that wasn’t long and colorful for once. She looked chic.
I sat down and noticed she had bought a bottle of wine instead of just a glass and there was a glass waiting for me. I couldn’t help but wonder if my arched eyebrows the day before were in fact appropriate.
“Fancy, fancy,” I smirked and sat down. Even though it was just a semi-casual Italian place, I still felt a little underdressed in my torn jeans and polo shirt that was still wet in spots from holding soapy children after their bath.
“Don’t get all excited,” she smiled. “It’s cheap wine. The cheapest they have.”
I poured myself a glass and took a sip. Yep. It was. “I wouldn’t expect anything else.”
I took a few big gulps of mine to loosen up, because honestly, I was feeling sort of awkward in front of Gabrielle for one of the first times ever. Usually I felt so collected and confident with Gabrielle, or at least I could talk myself into feeling that way, but at that moment I felt like she was in control I didn’t know what I could expect from her.
“What did you want to talk about?” I finally asked. Again, no chit-chat.
“I just said I wanted to talk and catch up. I didn’t say it was about something specific,” she sighed, picking at a piece of dry, complimentary bread.
“But it is,” I smirked, shaking the glass in my fingers and studying the swirling wine.
“I wanted to see how you were doing. I wanted to make sure everything was okay,” she tried to look me in the eyes but I continued my gaze on the sloshing Merlot… at least, that’s what it tasted like.
I shrugged. “Everything’s okay, I guess, if you’re asking about Natalie and I.”
She nodded.
“I guess it’s probably one of the least messy divorces in the world, which is strange considering how shit went down at Epcot.” I paused, regretting that statement. I glanced at her eyes to see any awkwardness but she just sat there listening to me so I continued. “I mean, we’re still living together and everything which is pretty crazy, you know? I guess because we’re so young and she doesn’t have money so it’s not like she can just go out and get a little place to herself… and I wouldn’t ask her to do that anyway. And I certainly can’t leave because it’s my family’s house and everything…”
I realized my answer was probably longer than she was hoping for. Leave it to me to ramble about my divorce to the love of my life. How lame.
“Sorry,” I sighed. “Everything’s okay, yes.”
She smiled. “You can talk. I genuinely wanted to know so it’s fine, really. Do the kids know? How’s Natalie?”
I paused. I debated stopping the conversation right there- moving on to flirting and seducing and talking about recent movies and what not. But Gabrielle wasn’t just some woman I was pursuing. She wasn’t a piece of ass in a tight little white shirt consuming too many glasses of wine for her own good. She was my Gabrielle who I’d loved and known since I could really remember. So I told her. I told her about how Natalie cried herself to sleep at night- I pretended to be sleeping because I was too ashamed to comfort her. I told her about how we explained to Ezra that Mommy was moving out, maybe even to Georgia, and that he didn’t seem to understand although he could tell something was wrong. I told Gabrielle that sometimes I questioned, sometimes I worried, sometimes I wished things had turned out differently. I talked until my mouth was dry and I’m sure her ears were bleeding, but it was okay because she knew me better than anyone else in the world. She didn’t care what I said. She saw me no differently. She got me.
“Have you cried?” she asked.
I frowned and flinched a bit, taken back that she’d ask such a personal question. It might be an acceptable question if I were one of her tofu-loving, feminist friends, but I was a man, and a man who wanted to impress her. Describing the details of my divorce was one thing. Tears were another.
“Of course not,” I said.
She cocked her head and looked me over. “Are you telling me the truth…?” She said it in a light, innocent voice to take the pressure off, I think.
I forced a laugh. Of course I’d cried. Only once, but I’d cried. It was scary and stressful and exhausting saying goodbye to my marriage of four years and I felt so guilty about Natalie that I could hardly swallow it all. Of course, in the barrenness of my car one night driving home to The Eagles and wondering if life would actually be better on my own, I’d cried.
“Have you ever seen me cry?” I smiled.
She paused. “Yes. More than once. Remember… your wedding day? In the exercise room?”
The irony was overwhelming. I’d cried the day I’d entered the cursed marriage, and I was crying about the day I’d end it.
“It’s been hard,” I finally sighed, admitting my tears in my own guyish fashion.
She nodded empathetically. When I first met Gabrielle, she could hardly console. Whenever someone was upset, she felt for them, she did, but she didn’t know what to do about it. She’d just sit there awkwardly examining the hurting person before her wishing she had the right words for them. After years of taking care of my siblings and knowing the Hanson family, an emotional, talking kind of family to say the least, she was a pro at the whole listening game.
“I wouldn’t say I’m sad, Gabrielle, because I know it’s for the best… I’m pretty sure it is. It’s just that it’s the end of an era; the end of something that will always be important, no matter how wrong it was for us.”
She smiled and poured me another glass of wine. “I think it’s a good thing that you care. It would scare me if you didn’t.” She paused for a moment to contemplate that and then added, “In fact, the fact that you care, and that you cried,” she winked, “lets me know that I’m sitting across from someone who resembles a Taylor Hanson I met a long, long time ago.”
I grinned.
“Some crazy, platinum blonde guy who wandered onto my front porch asking me about the human condition of poverty,” she laughed.
I couldn’t help but laugh too. Wow. I was a dick in my youth. “My hair was never platinum blonde,” I said, because I couldn’t deny my psychosis like I could my hair.
“Oh, yes it was! You were still highlighting it back then,” she laughed and I cringed.
“Why are you so nice to me?” I finally asked. It was puzzling, really, that after everything, she treated me so well. After breaking her heart and marrying someone else and moving on without her and then harassing her and hounding her and refusing to let her forget me… after all of it, she still cared about me.
“I’ve told you before and I’ll tell you again. You’re family. I have to look out for you,” she said, her gaze fading away from me and settling on the cars whizzing by. I knew there was more to the answer though. That wasn’t just it. There was always more behind Gabrielle’s statements.
“And?”
She glanced back at me and took a dainty sip of her wine. “And I guess… I want to make sure you’re okay, because the sooner you’re okay, the sooner we can be okay too.”
I stared at her for a moment and tried to figure out if it meant what I thought I meant. She wanted to move on… move on with us? Not as separate individuals with agendas to forget each other and find happiness elsewhere, but she wanted us to move on into the sunset holding hands… Prince Charming and his beautiful Princess? Is that what she was saying?
“I want to be okay too…” I said quietly, and then looked up to make sure she could hear me. “As soon as we can, I want to be okay too.
“Just keep on going… taking the steps, making things okay with Natalie… as okay as they’re going to get. We’ve waited four years. I can wait a few more months.”
Oh my god. She was saying she wanted me. She was saying she’d wait for me. She was giving me more than just a maybe but a forthcoming yes. I had more than hope but… was this actual certainty?
She probably could tell how stunned I was because I sat there holding my wine in my hand, slowly letting it tip without noticing it. I was just staring at her, taking in the statement that she was actually waiting for me. She was actually longing for me and counting down and missing me and excited and…
“Taylor!” she gasped as I poured the red wine all over my jeans. I flinched and put the glass straight again, noticing the red trickling down my legs.
“Whoops…”
She laughed. “That’s so… typical you,” she got a cloth napkin and set it down on my thigh, pressing it down to soak up the wine. I felt like an immature 8th grader for letting her touch excite me, although only mentally. Thank god.
“I’m an ass,” I smirked to myself, glancing down at the embarrassing spot on my pants and the half empty wine glass in my hand.
“Can’t I take you out anywhere without you publicly humiliating us in some way? Geez, Taylor.”
I laughed. “Apparently not.”
“Well, then I’ll just have to deal with your embarrassing incidents and clumsy displays for the rest of my life.”
The rest of her life. The. Rest. Of. Her. Life. Things were going to be okay. Maybe not perfect, but things were going to be okay.
I smiled and shrugged. “Yep. You better deal, because you’re stuck with me.”
“Wonderful.”
Yes. Wonderful. My life had the possibility, after everything, after mistake after mistake after mistake, of being just that. Wonderful.