“Only wanted for your looks. Shocking.”
“Well, I can’t rely on my personality. Apparently, I’m pretentious.”
An hour later, they were still talking about photography at the museum café, flipping through her website. She showed him the best headshots she had taken and talked about the challenges of the task: how it was hard to catch people’s real personality, how actors would practice looks in a mirror and then look ridiculous doing them in front of the camera, how rarely people were aware of their best traits.
“None of us are aware of our best traits,” Ren said lightly, looking through the images.
She allowed herself to drink in the sight of him in case this would be the last time they met up like this. His head was tilted down, his black curls tumbling across his forehead. He smiled when he glanced up.
Ren wasmarried.
“These are really good, Sarah.”
“Well, I studied photography. I’m supposed to be good at taking pictures.”
He shook his head. “You do something special with your headshots, though,” he said. “They have a narrative quality, like you’re telling each person’s story.”
“Well, they pay the bills,” she said at last. “Or some of the bills. I have a day job. When I first moved to Toronto, I used to come up with these creative ideas to try to get into galleries and nobody liked them, so I sort of gave up.”
“I’m sure they were great.”
“No. I think I have nothing to say right now,” she said. “I’m twenty-six, and I no longer have any opinions on anything.” Twenty-six felt terribly old to her, like the bitter end of youth.
He gestured towards the pictures. “Well, these say something. They say that you’re fascinated by people.”
“So are you,” she said. “I read your articles in theStarand they reminded me of how observant you are. You always had this way of looking at people like you were missing nothing. I thought you could totally see through me back in school.”
He looked genuinely surprised. “You were one of the smartest people I knew.”
“Not about some parts of my life.”
He frowned and looked down at the table, considering. “Well, I didn’t have much insight into some things. I probably thought I did.” He took a sip of his coffee. “So unrelated question,” he added. “What happened between you and Ivan? I heard you two got back together and then I never heard anything else.”
“Well, that’s a long story, but the short version is, he broke up with me before that party of Kristie’s, if you remember that night.”
Ren nodded, his mouth a straight line. “I remember that night.”
“He had gotten accepted to graduate school in California, and he knew I didn’t want to go because I had this assistant photographer job in Montreal—which turned out to be a nightmare because the guy harassed me—but I didn’t know that yet. So Ivan pre-emptively broke things off as a way to convince me to follow him. Like, ‘You’ll lose me if you don’t come to California with me.’ And when it didn’t work, he begged to get back together. And I agreed, but once he was in California, I took the coward’s way out and broke up with him by phone.”
“Why not do it in person?”
“Because he used to say he might kill himself if I ever left him. Which I guess counts as emotional abuse. I didn’t realize it at the time.”
Ren’s eyes widened. “Sarah…”
“Don’t feel bad. It’s over.”
Ren’s eyes were full of pity, and Sarah hated it. “Don’t look at me like that,” she said. “Someday I will be like you and happily married and dazzlingly optimistic. Wait and see.”
He shook his head. “To be honest, I’m not feeling terribly optimistic either. I love my wife, but I think most people are profoundly screwed up. My job hasn’t convinced me otherwise.”
She nodded, then followed his gaze around the café. It was filled with young people adorned with nose piercings and corduroy jackets. University students, she thought, like she and Ren had once been. They looked so young to her now. It occurred to her that she and Ren had never hung out like this at school, just the two of them meeting over coffee. Instead, all their meetings had been incidental: chatting after class or when they ran into each other at a coffee shop or party. She wondered if he had never invited her on solo outings because it might have felt too much like a date. He had carefully made it clear that he had no interest in dating her.
It was a briefly mortifying thought, especially in the context of his gorgeous wife, but Sarah let it go. At least now she could hang out with him. Now that there was no risk of getting romantically involved, they could finally talk.
“So speaking of that night,” he said. She had the rare experience of watching him struggling to find the right words. “My parents got divorced,” he continued after a moment, surprising her. “I don’t know if you knew that. Right around the time we stopped hanging out.”
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I didn’t know that. I know you idealized them. Or maybe you didn’t, but that was how it looked from the outside.”
