Too Simple a Word
Prologue
PG
November, 2006. On the eve of Joey's return for Thanksgiving, Rachel and Chandler find themselves on the edge of the forbidden. They must decide whether to lengthen their stolen moment, or return to their half-lives.
Disclaimer: It's hard to think of characters as "property" in any tangible way, but in any case, they're not mine. Disclaimer goes for all chapters attached to this story.
Prologue. From Ross' point of view.
November, 2009.
Standing there at the window watching melon moon shadows dance to their pale silver song in the places the streetlamps did not reach, he felt more and more like a man who knew everything and understood nothing.
He knew every line of her face, every fleck of gold in her eyes, all the textures of her skin . . . how his erupted in heat at her touch. He knew her favorite song, the way she looked at herself in mirrors, the sound of her hum, languid, homey, and always slightly out of tune, after she read Emma a chapter out of her bedtime book. He knew the way she smelled when she was weary, like warmed buttermilk in a gently rounded, cream-colored mug.
But of her, he understood nothing.
He knew he loved her, but could not understand why, or even if he had tagged what he felt for her with the right word. "Love" seemed too simple a word for Rachel's complexity. But he did. He just . . . . loved her. And he always, always had, ever since he could remember loving anything at all. It was, if he had to chose a word, fate, the crazy underpinnings of a destiny he used to think was out of reach and that he now held dear, not unlike the way a child holds in his mittened hand the first perfect snowflake of winter, in awe that the crystals actually form the shapes mirrored in the flimsy paper cut-out kind that cover the refrigerator in a cascade of faded blue.
He looked at her, curled up on the couch fast asleep, her face softer, more peaceful, and somehow more like itself than it ever looked when she was awake, a blanket floating just beneath the place where her chin rested on her chest, her honey hair spilling unguarded onto the green pillow beneath her. A wisp of it was in her face, and her breath sent it curling skyward at sleep-measured intervals.
In sleep she seemed to return to herself, and even now, after all that had passed between them, he had the urge to wake her gently, kissing her temple, the lids of her eyes, the rise of her lips, and in doing so awaken also her inner workings, the heave and sigh of her unstated life, her private minutes that ticked by even as she went about her day at work, as she paid her cab fare, and those moments when she would slip briefly out of the tide of the conversation and hover inside herself, as if she were pressing her ear against her heart and listening to its secrets.
After their fight he had tried to take the couch, but she resisted, leveling his mumbled protests with a fiery glare, her finger pointing him to the bedroom. On top of the argument she had stacked a new guilt, and now he could not find enough peace to sleep off the exhaustion of their whispered bickering or the knowledge that Emma had long since slipped into her bedroom and under her covers, trying to shrug off her growing weariness at these weekly spats. He couldn't even pinpoint when they'd started, just that they were small and defiant, and left the apartment with a cool that the out-of-date heating system couldn't compete with.
So there he stood propped up against the window, his tie still knotted and his boots starting to feel too heavy and too hot for his feet. But somehow, standing rigidly awake at the window was better for his conscience than enjoying butter-soft sheets, fluffy blankets, and the scent that Rachel leaves behind on her pillows.
Again he watched the moon shadows and let a long sigh slowly escape from his lips. It was time now to admit, if only to himself, what deep down he had known all along. It was time to admit a short-coming, a defeat, a fault created and maintained only by himself . . . .
Knowledge, for all its blessings, does not bestow understanding on its keeper.
It was the biggest joke of all. The person he loved the most in the world was the one person he could not understand, the one person it seemed he could not make happy. He wondered if she felt the same way.
Suddenly it had all become clear. All this time he had thought that at the heart of his unhappiness were the mistakes of others . . . .
Perhaps. . . . Perhaps it was better this way. Perhaps it was better than pretending that those moments of rare joy that peeked shyly from amid the everydayness of their lives actually strung together to form something meaningful, something resembling an overall happiness. . . .
Perhaps it was better than pretending that the two of them alone was just as potent a thing as the six of them together used to be, all those months ago. . . .
Outside, the trees creaked and the wind lent its music to the November leaves. Softly, as if it had waited with prolonged hesitancy and at last decided it wanted to be heard, a branch began a tap-tap-tap beat on the window, the drum of irregular downtown jazz.
He leaned his forehead against the window pane, expecting its coolness to bring him back to reason. There has to be something else, he thought, There has to be truths about us we yet to uncover. There has to be more than this.
Through the window he could see both the street far below, the cars lining its sides looking small and toy-like, and the reflected image of Rachel asleep on the couch before his breath fogged the glass and neither was visible at all anymore. Breath came upon breath, and before reason found its foothold he had risen, his feet finding their way into boots, his arms shrugging into a wool coat the November wind couldn't get through.
The routine of it was oddly familiar, though this was the first time it had happened. It seemed he had lived this moment in a dream. And as he grabbed his scarf from the back of the couch he somehow knew this would not be the last time. He could see himself in August performing this now rehearsed escape, still not knowing what exactly it was he was fleeing but nonetheless finding himself descending into a 2am thunderstorm, alive and giddy and laughing as warm rain fell in fat drops to wash the streets.
At the door he turned to look at her once more, promising himself he would be back before the light of day broke in wide, bright shards over the city and lives had to start all over again. He promised himself she wouldn't have to know he had left. She wouldn't have to know what the image of him leaving looked like, the brown of his eyes deeper, his cheeks flushed with embarrassed excitement, his scarf plummeting red and trembling down the length of his coat, his hand on the doorknob. She wouldn't have to know he'd tiptoed out the door with his breath held, escaping to the beauty and anonymity of lamp-lit streets and moon shadows.
Outside, the branch continued its slow jazz.
She wouldn't have to know he had needed to escape.
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