The Buenos Aires Broken Hearts Club (27 page)

“Okay,” he says. He threads his fingers through mine, and I let him. “Whatever your heart desires.”

What my heart desires. I’m thinking of this as I help Jamie pack. Like Dan, she’s almost giddy, talking about home. “This is gonna be perfect for New Year’s,” she says, holding up a sequined halter dress we found at the craft fair near the cemetery. “Did I tell you about the massive party my friend is organizing? Vancouver isn’t known for its wild nightlife, but there’s this restaurant with a courtyard and they put all those little lights up in the trees. Very glam. You know, I’ve never been single on New Year’s Eve before. Not ever. I can’t wait. Just me, my friends, and all those cute boys in suits . . . Do you think this purse goes?” She holds a black satin clutch against the dress. I nod encouragement. “But you know what I’m really looking forward to? My bed. God, I miss it. That’s one relationship I can’t live without.”

Although I smile at the joke, when she turns to tuck the purse into a suitcase, my smile folds. As our last afternoon ticks away, I should be getting sad; instead I’m jealous. Leaving is easy for her. She had a great time here, and she’s excited to go home. She’s been here only a month, I remind myself. It would never occur to her to think any differently. Buenos Aires is another place she can check off her list. She can pack it all up and take it with her—dresses to wear, photos and stories to share, souvenirs to display, and nothing left behind but unwanted guilt about leaving her fiancé.

Jamie catches my sour face. “Thinking about him again?”

“No.” Still, in a way, she’s right. I am thinking about Mateo because I am always thinking about Mateo. He’s always there, on my brain, under my tongue, in the pit of my stomach. But I might never see him again, and I’ve got to come to terms with that. It wasn’t meant to be. It was three galaxies over from meant to be. “I told you, I’m going home in three weeks. Period. End of story.”

“Okay . . .” She looks around at the pile of clothes on the bed and grabs a pair of short red boots. “Then let’s talk about how fabulous I’m going to look in these.”

Her taxi comes sooner than expected. While the driver risks dislocating a disk trying to get her giant suitcase into the trunk, Jamie gives me a big squeeze at the curb. I am accosted by shopping bags dangling from every shoulder and elbow. “Ouch,” I say, and we laugh. She shimmies into the backseat, and I shut the door for her.

“We’ll always have Buenos Aires,” she says through the window and blows me a kiss. The taxi pulls away, and I hold back my tears until I’m certain Jamie won’t be able to see me crying.
We’ll always have Buenos Aires.
It’s normal to be sad, I tell myself. It didn’t turn out to be quite so awful here. There are things I’ll miss. Places. People. All perfectly normal.

I walk to the closest busy street and hail my own ride home. A few blocks from the yellow house, I reach into my purse for my wallet. Tucked in between the bills is a note, scribbled on the back of a sales receipt in Jamie’s barely legible pseudo-doctor script:

A good psychotherapist never gives advice. But screw it. I’m no therapist. So here goes . . . You are an amazing person, Cassie Moore, and you deserve everything you want from life. But love doesn’t come on schedule. Or in the right place or the right time, the right size or the right color. It just comes. Take it from someone who knows. If you wait around for what you think you need, you might miss out on what you really want. Be brave, chica. XOXO Jamie

Romantic poison, my mother would call it, the kind of Hallmark sentiment that sucks the reality out of a woman. I leave the note on the seat beside me, retrieve five pesos from my wallet, and thank the driver. And then, hand on the car door, I reach back and grab the scrap of paper, stuffing it into my purse and swearing under my breath.

Right about now Jamie is waking up in her own bed in her own bedroom in her own apartment to what is, no doubt, a perfect moment of pure bliss. Thousands of miles away, I am standing in front of a mirror that doesn’t belong to me in an apartment full of someone else’s things, getting ready for the wrong man.

I’m wearing the Antonio dress again, but tonight it’s for Dan. He’s called four times to confirm our plans for his last night. He won’t tell me what we’re doing, but I’m supposed to dress up. I twist my hair into an unsuccessful bun. The crown is bumpy and there’s a big chunk of hair at the front that refuses to stay back. I take charge with a comb and a liberal dusting of hair spray. How is it that Argentine women always manage to look simultaneously flawless and effortless? Anna probably doesn’t even use hair spray. No doubt she wakes up every morning looking like she stepped out of a hair salon.

Dan arrives at exactly seven o’clock, looking quite handsome in a pale gray suit and blue tie. “You look beautiful,” he says.

“So do you. I can’t believe you brought a suit all the way from Boston.”

“I didn’t,” he says.

Dan ushers me into the waiting taxi. He still won’t say where we’re going, even insists on covering my eyes for the last minute of the ride. My eyes open to bright marquee lights. A poster in front of the theater advertises tonight’s tango show. It might as well have the words “tourist trap” written across it.

“Oh,” I say. “How wonderful.”

“Is this okay?” He looks concerned. I smile brightly. “You told me once that seeing one of these shows was near the top of your list.”

“My list? Of course.” Seems like a million years ago that I made that list. “No, this is great, really. I’m just so surprised.”

“That was the idea.” Dan’s chest puffs with pleasure. “Well, then.” He offers an elbow. “Shall we?”

The room is packed with tourists, easily identified by their unkempt blond hair, slogan T-shirts, and menu squinting. No one is as dressed up as we are. We make the best of it, eating too much and drinking even more. The lights dim to signal the start of the show. Dan’s hand squeezes mine in the dark and I squeeze back. It doesn’t spark so much as a tingle. She doesn’t know it yet, but one day some lucky woman in Boston is going to be thankful for that fact.

Touristy or not, the show is spectacular. Men in tight black pants and shirts and shiny patent-leather shoes move with smooth confidence. Women with red lipstick and hair slicked into tight buns float across the stage, their ruffled dresses fluttering birdlike. The choreography and music are raw, sexual, dangerous, but the dancers’ faces remain stoic, their bodies impossibly graceful. I can’t help smiling at my own efforts to learn tango—the two things bear little resemblance. Though with the right partner, the dance didn’t seem so daunting. There’s no point in thinking about that now, I remind myself. I push away the rest of that evening and focus on this one.

I don’t know if it’s the tango or the hot summer night or the sweet champagne, but I’m buzzing when we leave the theater. I try to mimic the dancers’ steps and almost twist my ankle. I hum those last bars of music that won’t leave my head. Da-da-ta-da-da. I feel like skipping. Things aren’t looking so bad anymore. I don’t protest when Dan suggests we go back to the grungy one-bedroom apartment he shares with an American student he met online. It is his last night, after all.

The apartment is pitch-black and dead quiet. “Like the desert,” I whisper.

“What’s that?” asks Dan.

“Nothing,” I say and stumble over the suitcases lined up in the hall, cursing loudly, then clamping my hand over my mouth. “Sorry,” I say, giggling through my fingers.

“It’s okay.” Dan laughs. “Be as loud as you want. John’s gone rock climbing for the weekend.”

“You mean we don’t have a chaperone?” I ask jokingly.

“No lifeguard on duty,” he says into the dark, finding my shoulders.

“Which way to the couch?”

Dan spins me around and gives me a nudge. I grope my way over to the gray outline of the couch and flop down. I sit and wait in the dark. Dan moves down the hall, flicking on a light as he goes. A slice of white carves across the living room’s hardwood floor in the shape of a question mark. I hear him fumbling with kitchen things. Sharp metal noises and soft cursing. Finally, he walks in carrying champagne in one hand, glasses in the other. He sets them on the small table in front of me and leans forward to light a couple of candles. Vanilla. The gold light glows and flickers and jumps.

The rest happens too fast. One second Dan is pouring the champagne and talking about how happy he is that he met me, the next he’s down on one knee and proffering a small pink box. Before I can process it, there’s an enormous square-cut diamond on my hand. I study it in the candlelight. It sits like an alien thing on my finger, big and sparkly and strange.

“It’s not the real thing,” Dan says quickly. “I went back to that store in Recoleta, but the one you wanted had been sold. This one’s the closest thing I could find, but it’s not a diamond. We can pick out the real one together when we’re back in the States.”
Real one. Together. We.
I hear the words, but they aren’t adding up into anything I understand. “You can come to Boston, or I can go to Seattle,” I hear him say, his voice small, as though from a distance.

“What.” It isn’t a question, just the only word that comes to mind. It hangs in the air between us for a moment.

“Sorry?” Dan squints at me, trying to decipher.

“What are you saying?”

“Cassie.” He grabs my hand. “I’m asking you to marry me.”

The details of the scene come into focus. Wax slowly tracking down the candlesticks and oozing onto the tile tabletop. Bubbles rising and bursting inside the two full glasses. Dan perched shakily on one knee. Coldplay warbling sincerely in the background. The scent of vanilla cloying in the hot night. Then something even clearer pulls into view. Dan at my parents’ front door, stepping inside, shaking my stepdad’s hand, complimenting the spread my mother has put out for us. She’s set out the good dishes, the expensive nut mix with no peanuts. She beams at Dan with approval, thrilled at this catch of a man her daughter has landed, all her hard work paying off in one spectacular parental moment. My stepdad looks on supportively. I see Dan meeting my friends, who adore him instantly, Dan working in the garage on weekends when he’s not playing golf, Dan on a beach in Puerto Vallarta. It looks so perfect. Everything is the way I’ve always thought it would be.

This is it, I tell myself. The drama and confusion of the last few months have been leading me to this moment. It all seems so obvious that this is the way it was supposed to be. Yes, I shout in my head. Yes! Yes! Yes!

The word leaps into my throat.

I choke it back down.

I look at Dan waiting for an answer. He watches me calmly. Why is Dan so calm? I see him again in my parents’ house, at backyard barbecues, on the beach. He looks calm there, too. Happy. But how do I look? Am I happy? Content? I can’t see myself. Where am I in all those moments? Inside this brilliant plan I’ve made, where am I?

I need a second to catch my breath. I hold up a finger, but my breath slips away. The buzzing starts in my ears; it’s soft, but I can hear it. My chest contracts slightly. I press my hand to my breastbone. A tingling in my shoulder. Panic is coming.

“Where am I?” I whisper, the words snagging in my throat. Dan leans in toward me. “Where am I?”

“You’re here with me.” He crinkles his brow. “Are you okay, sweetie? Too much bubbly, I think.”

I look at him and realize that he’s right, though not about the champagne. I am here. He is there in Seattle or Boston or wherever, and I am right here in Buenos Aires, watching this other life unfold as though it’s happening to someone else. Part of me wants so badly to say yes, to take the easy way out. But I can’t. I’m looking at Dan—perfect Dan—and knowing in every cell and corpuscle that the wrong man is kneeling beside me. I force the words out.

“I can’t marry you, Dan.” The buzzing recedes. Breath comes. I inhale long and deep. It feels like this is the first breath I have ever taken.

“Why not?” His voice is unsure, his eyes pleading and hopeful.

“You’re a great guy. A really, really, really great guy. Any woman would be lucky to have you. But I don’t . . . I don’t love you.” I shake my head at myself, both astounded and incredibly proud. I am rejecting the perfect man. I haven’t found a job. I will go home broke and alone, with nothing to show for my six months here. None of this has gone the way I expected, but I’ll be okay. I came to Buenos Aires all by myself, didn’t I? I had no job, no friends, no Spanish. But I found ways to be productive, I made friends, I even learned a bit of the language, to my surprise. I didn’t fall apart or run home. I didn’t get kidnapped. Someone once told me I am brave, and I’m beginning to think he was right.

“Oh.” Dan contemplates this for a minute, still balanced precariously on one knee. I’m thanking my lucky stars for getting off so easily when he stands up and paces the floor. Then he stops and holds up his hand.

“Hold on. Wait. Why can’t this work? We want all the same things. Your plan, the whole thing, it could have been me who wrote that stuff. And I can give you all of it, every single thing. Home, family, everything you want.”

My plan. The thought of it makes me weary. I think of the note in my purse on the floor near the door.
Love doesn’t come on schedule. Or in the right place or the right time, the right size or the right color.
I look down at my fidgeting hands, at the water-stained floor, at the chipped polish on my left big toe. These imperfect things are real, not some spreadsheet on a computer. I didn’t plan to be sitting here on this couch saying no to a marriage proposal to a dear, sweet man, but these are the moments that make up a life, for better or worse. “I was wrong,” I say. “It’s not enough. It’s not everything.”