Swim

on was scheduled to air on a Thursday night. My grandmother, who’d been as charmed by Rob as I was, decided a party was in order. She’d invited a bunch of her extra friends over to our apartment, and spent two days making brisket and borscht and potato-and-onion pierogies, covering the dark wood of our dining room table and sideboard with lace doilies, then loading them with platters of food. “A feast fit for a czar,” I’d told her, straightening the plates, filling the ice bucket, too nervous to sit or eat a bite as her senior-citizen friends, with their canes and walkers and snap-brim hats, filed into the living room.
    I’d perched on the edge of one of the dining room chairs, in a pretty pale-green sundress I’d bought for the occasion,counting down the minutes on the VCR’s clock. Rob never showed. I left him three messages—two casual-cool, one desperate. I forced myself to watch the episode; then I’d hidden in my bedroom until the last of the extras, bearing Tupperware containers full of beet soup and sour cream, had gone home. I was under the covers in my sundress and my sandals when my grandmother crept into the room.
    “You came home pretty late last night, Ruthie.”
    I groaned and opened my eyes. She was standing beside me, still dressed for the party in a vintage cocktail caftan, with diamanté hair clips and rhinestone-buckled shoes that clattered on the terra-cotta floors. “Did you sleep with him?” she asked.
    I could hear Boston in her voice, and it made me ache for home as I nodded, too ashamed to say yes. You know what you need? I’d asked Rob the night before, at one in the morning, afer we’d finished our script. He’d lifted his shaggy eyebrows. Me, I said, marveling at my own boldness, holding my breath until he grinned and said, Well, Ruthie, I wouldn’t say no. I’d looked straight into his eyes, imagining—oh, it made my insides cringe to think about it—that I was Taryn Montaine as I unbuttoned my blouse, as I crossed the room, knelt, and unzipped his pants. His quick inhalation when my lips had touched him, the way, at the end, he’d groaned my name, all of it had made me think that he was feeling something more than mere gratification, or gratitude; that he was falling in love.
    Afterward, snuggled against him in the Barcalounger, I’d been foolish enough to hope for the impossible: the workplace romance that actually worked. We were good together. Our months as writing partners proved it. And maybe, after one night of bliss on scratchy synthetic tweed, Rob would realize that I was the love of his life, that we belonged together.
    My grandmother sat down next to me and stroked myhair. “Are you okay?” she asked, and I’d nodded again, without knowing whether it was true.
    On Friday I’d gone to the office and Rob hadn’t been there. I accepted congratulations numbly, nodding my thanks, asking everyone if they’d seen him. Nobody had. I spent the weekend in agony, looking at my cell phone every thirty seconds or so, imagining horrible scenarios: Rob dead in a car accident, Rob in a hospital with amnesia, or cancer, or both.
    The show-runner, a twenty-seven-year-old named Steve, called me into his office first thing Monday morning. “So where’s that partner of mine?” I asked with a smile.
    “Sit down,” he suggested. I sat down on an impressive, wildly uncomfortable Lucite and metal chair underneath his Emmys. “Rob and Taryn eloped over the weekend.”
    “He...Taryn... what?” This was a joke, I thought. Had to be. Rob barely spoke to Taryn during the read-throughs and rehearsals, and when he talked about her, it was usually to make fun of her implants or her pornographic past.
    Steve kept a Magic 8 Ball on his desk (ironically, of course). He picked it up and shook it gently. “I guess she’s pregnant.”
    I nodded numbly. I couldn’t speak, couldn’t move. I breathed deeply, hoping he wouldn’t see that the blood had drained out of my face. I pictured Rob and Taryn together, his arm around her shoulder, one hand resting lightly on her belly. The little family.
    “Hello? Excuse me?”
    I looked up, startled, and sucked water into my nose. The janitor was standing by the side of the pool, pointing at the clock on the white-tiled wall as I coughed and spluttered. “Ten o’clock. We’re closing now.”
    I shook the water out of my ears, took a quick shower, and toweled off, avoiding the ubiquitous mirrors as I pulled on myclothes. On the