Chapter 5 — Thirteen Nights

By the thirteenth night, she knew the following things about Arjun Mehta:He had a very precise sense of the structural problems of any building they walked past. He couldn't help it — he'd catch himself on the way from his apartment to Manny's mentally calculating the load distribution of a parking garage they passed on Erie Street and then feel slightly embarrassed. He had grown up in Bangalore the youngest of three siblings, which he said explained the specific quality of his stubbornness — not aggressive, just quiet and very durable. He read historical non-fiction at a pace that suggested he was using books as furniture, stacking them up against something. He made tea with the precision of someone conducting an experiment. He had not talked to his ex-wife since moving to Chicago, except for two emails about the apartment logistics, and both emails had been so carefully worded that he'd spent thirty minutes on each of them before sending.He had not said the word wife. Or marriage. He'd navigated around the shape of it for two weeks, and she'd navigated around her own shape, and they'd both learned the topography of what wasn't being said.She was not in any way deceived about why she looked forward to 3 AM.It was a precise and specific problem: she was in the worst period of her adult life, she was chronically sleep-deprived, she was meeting a man in a late-night diner, and she was beginning to understand that the highlight of her day was the stool at Manny's counter and whoever was going to be on it two seats over.This was not the circumstances under which good decisions were made.She was aware of this. She was also aware that she had not made any decisions; she had simply kept showing up at the same place at the same time and he had been there, and they had talked, and the talking helped in a way that nothing else currently helped, and she was a person of generally excellent judgment and she thought she deserved something that helped.On the thirteenth night, he arrived before her.This had not happened. She was always there first — she lived four blocks from Manny's and walked it, and he walked from River North, which was twelve minutes away, and he was always twelve minutes behind her.She came in and he was on the stool — her stool, not his — with two coffees in front of him.She looked at the two cups."I went early," he said. "I wasn't sure how you took it.""Black," she said. "No sugar."He slid the right cup over. She sat on his usual stool."You learned," he said. She knew what he meant — her coffee preference, which he'd observed and remembered."You take it with one sugar and no milk," she said. "Even though you wince slightly every time like you're surprised it's sweet."He looked at her. "I do not wince.""You do. A small one. Like you ordered it wrong and you're going to try again next time and you never do."A pause. "I've been ordering it wrong for twelve years," he said. "Old habit."She heard the weight in that. "Whose habit?" she said, carefully.He was quiet for a moment. She had asked something direct for the first time, and she felt him deciding whether to meet it."My wife used to take it sweet," he said. "We made coffee together for six years. I think I just — defaulted."Used to. Wife.She absorbed this. Let it sit."My—" she started, and stopped, and tried again. "There was someone. Who I was going to marry. The wedding was three weeks out when he decided he didn't want to anymore."She had not said this to anyone who didn't already know.The words were smaller than she'd expected. Not terrible. Just — small and real, sitting on the counter next to two cups of coffee."Three weeks," Arjun said."Yes.""That's—" He paused. "There is no good version of that. I'm sorry.""I'm sorry about your marriage," she said."Thank you." A pause. "How are you?"It was such a simple question. It was such a hard question."I don't know," she said. "I was very angry for a while. Now I'm just — tired. Like the anger was very loud and then it used all its fuel and now there's just—" She looked for the word. "Static."He nodded slowly. "I'm in the part where I keep trying to understand it," he said. "Like if I figure out why it happened I'll be able to put it in the right place and the weight will be correct. But you can't always understand things. Sometimes things happen for reasons that are real but not available to you.""Did your therapist say that?"He smiled — a small one. "I don't have a therapist. I should have a therapist.""I should also have a therapist."They looked at each other."We are both handling our situations poorly," he said."We are sitting in a diner at three AM," she said. "Yes.""And yet," he said, "this is the least badly I've felt in four weeks."She felt that. In her chest, specifically. Like a door opening just slightly.She looked at her coffee. "Same," she said. And then, because honesty was apparently what they did here: "Same."