Love Has a Time Difference

The restaurant was loud enough to hide the sound of my phone buzzing against the table. I had chosen it, a small Italian place tucked between a bookstore and a nail salon on a street I had walked past a hundred times without noticing. Lena was already seated when I arrived, her hair wet from the shower, her coat draped over the back of her chair like she had claimed the space before I could. "I ordered us a bottle of red," she said, not looking up from her phone. "You're going to need it." "I'm not going to need anything." "You say that now." She had been talking about the test for two weeks, ever since she met someone named Julian at a gallery opening. Julian sent her good morning texts before she was awake and followed up with questions about her dreams. She had decided this meant something. She had also decided that the way to confirm it was to measure how quickly he responded to things that mattered. "The test isn't cruel," she said, setting her phone face-up on the table between us. "It's just information. You send a message. You wait. What happens next tells you everything." "What if it tells you the person was in a meeting?" "Then the meeting becomes the answer." I didn't argue. I had been with Marcus for two years, and in that time I had learned to stop asking questions that made me feel small. He was busy. He was always busy. He had a job that consumed him and a boss who texted at ten o'clock at night and a team that depended on him. I understood this. I had built a version of my life around understanding this. Lena sent her first message to Julian while we were looking at menus. She wanted to see if he would offer to pay for dinner, a small gesture she considered a reliable signal. The screen lit up before the waiter had returned to take our order. She turned it toward me. Julian: Dinner's on me. Get whatever you want. Below it, a payment notification. Five hundred dollars, transferred without commentary, as though money were the least complicated way to say he was thinking of her. "See?" she said. "That's not a response. That's a decision." I looked at my own phone. Marcus and I had made plans three nights ago to have dinner on Thursday. He had confirmed twice. That morning I had sent him a message asking if he still wanted me to make a reservation. There was still no reply. "He's probably just busy," I said. "Probably." The waiter came. Lena ordered for both of us, a habit she had developed in college and never abandoned. I let her. I watched her refill my glass and I watched the door and I did not look at my phone again until the appetizers arrived. By then, forty minutes had passed. I picked up my phone as though I had not been thinking about it. Marcus: In a meeting. Will call later. Five words. No punctuation after the first sentence. No question about the reservation, no acknowledgment of the plan, no apology. I set the phone face-down and took a long drink of wine. "There it is," Lena said. "It's not a competition." "No. It's a measurement." She was smiling, but the smile was not unkind. That was the worst part. Lena had a way of being right that made you want to forgive her for it. The main courses arrived. I ate half of mine and stared at the rest. Marcus had not called. By the time the check came, I had received nothing else from him, and the message on my phone was still sitting there, its timestamp a quiet accusation. Lena paid with Julian's money. I let her. We walked out into the street, where the air was cold and the sky was clear and the kind of quiet that comes after a long dinner settled over both of us. "Do you want me to stop talking about it?" she asked. "No." "I will, if you want me to." "I know." We hugged outside the restaurant and promised to talk tomorrow and I walked to my car alone. In the driver's seat, with the door closed and the engine off, I opened my messages again. Marcus: In a meeting. Will call later. I typed four different replies and deleted all of them. Then I drove home. That was the first night of the test, though I did not know it yet. What I knew was that Lena had received five hundred dollars in four seconds, and I had received five words in thirty-eight minutes from a man who claimed to love me, and I could not decide which of us was the fool. I parked in the garage beneath my building and sat in the dark with my hands on the wheel. The dashboard clock said it was nearly eleven. He said he would call later. The word "later" had always been elastic in Marcus's hands, a thing he could stretch until it snapped. I had learned to live inside that stretch. I had learned to call it patience. My phone rang. Not Marcus. My mother, calling to ask about Thanksgiving. I let it ring until it stopped. Then I went upstairs, and I did not cry, because crying felt like agreeing with Lena, and I was not ready to agree with anyone.