How Starbucks Saved My Life. Michael Gill

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СКАЧАТЬ Five.

      Crystal laughed. Then she smiled, almost kindly.

      “You’ve been busy,” she said.

      “Yes.”

      I did not want to say any more; it was way too complicated to explain in a job interview.

      “Well,” she went on, still with a positive tone, “your five kids can all be covered for just one small added deduction.”

      What a relief. My youngest child, Jonathan, was the main reason I was so eager for work. It wasn’t his fault. It was all my fault.

      I had met Susan, Jonathan’s mother, at the gym, where I had started to go shortly after I was fired. I needed a reason to get out of the house every day, and exercise became my new reason for getting up and out.

      One morning I had been lying down on a mat resting. I was in a room that happened to be empty at the moment and was occasionally used for yoga classes. Susan had come in. It was clear she did not notice me and thought the room was empty. She was crying as she moved over to lean against the wall.

      “Are you okay?” I asked. I was uncomfortable around emotional people.

      She was startled, but did not stop crying.

      “My brother is dying of cancer … just days to live …”

      “That’s tough,” I said, sitting up on my blue mat, getting ready to leave.

      “And just last year I lost my father to lung cancer.”

      “Tough,” I repeated, standing up. I should have continued my progress out of the door, but I did not feel I could just leave her with her sorrow.

      I moved closer to her.

      “Don’t worry,” I said, not knowing where these words came from. “You will soon be happier than you ever have been before.”

      She looked up at me. Susan was small, barely more than five feet, with lots of dark hair and brown eyes. I am over six feet tall, with little hair and blue eyes. We were a study in contrasts, an odd couple for sure.

      Susan rubbed her tears away, but more kept flowing.

      “What?” she said, not quite believing that she had heard correctly.

      I could not believe what I had said. Where had those crazy words come from?

      But I repeated them.

      “You will be happier than ever.”

      She nodded, as though understanding at some level.

      I turned to go.

      “I like a man who does yoga,” she said. “It shows flexibility.”

      Susan and I started our relationship on totally false assumptions. She had taken me for someone interested in yoga. I had no interest in yoga. I did not like to stretch: It made me feel even more inflexible. I was rigid about many things. Physically. Mentally. Emotionally. I liked old songs, old ways. Until now, my past had worked well for me. Susan had no idea about what I was really like. Meeting me in the yoga room, she thought I was a flexible, perceptive person who could understand the deeper, more positive profundities of life. Like I was some wise guru.

      It is funny, sometimes, how wrong people can be.

      Susan was so wrong about me, and I was so wrong about Susan. I took her for a sad waif, a person who needed comfort and protection. Yet I learned later that she was an accomplished doctor of psychiatry with a large group of enthusiastic patients.

      I thought she needed me.

      She thought I could help her.

      We were both so wrong.

      Yet there was an immediate attraction between us. Was our powerful chemistry proof of the saying that opposites attract? Especially early morning in a gym. I had nothing better to do. And she had two hours free before she had to see her next patient.

      Since I had been fired, I had found it impossible to make love to my wife, not that we tried that often. Like many married couples, we made love only occasionally. Still, it had scared me when I had tried to perform last time and failed. That physical failure compounded my recent professional failure. I had always counted on sex as a joyous release. Now it was one more sign of my seemingly irreversible decline.

      Until I met Susan.

      Yet, despite the attraction, I moved to the door. I was inflexible, and did not have affairs … especially with people I met at a less-than-exclusive gym.

      “Would you like to have a cup of coffee?” Susan asked gently as I moved toward the exit. I almost did not hear her. She spoke so softly.

      I found myself saying, “Sure, let’s have a cup of coffee.”

      What could be the harm in having a cup of coffee with a sorrowful little person? We could get a latte at Starbucks and I could cheer her up.

      But instead of Starbucks, she suggested her apartment. I went with her, and I was hooked. After that, I saw Susan almost every morning when she was free—which was two or three times a week.

      Susan was not that young. In her mid-forties. She told me that her gynecologist had told her she could not have babies. So she said she saw no point in getting married.

      “Marriage is for having kids,” she said. “Sex is better without the bonds.”

      “Not to mention you already are married,” she reminded me, glancing at my ring to confirm the fact.

      I acknowledged her point with a significant amount of guilt. I loved how Susan made me feel, but I wanted to have my cake and eat it too. I loved my wife and wanted my four kids to live in a stable family environment.

      Then one morning Susan called me at home—something she had never done before.

      “I have to see you.”

      “When?” It was seven-thirty A.M. I had not even had breakfast.

      “Now.”

      She was standing naked in her apartment; the curtains open to the East River. It was a March morning, but the sun was bouncing off the water.

      “Michael,” she whispered, “I’m pregnant. And God has told me I should have this baby.”

      My heart stopped. This was not on my agenda. I had lost my job and was struggling just to support my own family. I did not need another child.

      “What are you thinking?” she asked.

      “You have got to decide,” I said.

      “Tell me.”

      “No,” I said, getting up. I was not going to tell her to have an abortion. This might be her only chance СКАЧАТЬ