Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow

by Gabrielle Zevin

But it was Dov’s cologne that Marx loathed. It wasn’t a cheap cologne, but as soon as he came into the room, his scent was everywhere, and even after he left, and they opened every window in the apartment, Marx could still smell him. The room felt murky and musky, oppressive with pine, patchouli, and cedar. It was, he felt, an aggressively male cologne, a roofie of a cologne.

Sadie, laughing with a strange, brittle tone. Dov, brushing strands of hair out of her eyes. Marx recognized it as the intimacy of ex-lovers.

He took her in his hirsute arms and he pressed her face deep into his chest. Marx wondered how she could bear the stench.

“I’m making a game!” Sam rambled on about Ichigo and Sadie, and Anders, who was not a gamer, looked at him blankly, but kindly. “It seems, my friend, you have found love?”

Sadie knew that Sam loved her in the same way she knew that Sam had not seen the Magic Eye.

“I’ll do whatever you want,” he said. “Okay, Sam,” she said. “Opus it is.”

Sadie walked under the gates, one by one by one. At first, she felt nothing, but as she kept moving ahead, she began to feel an opening and a new spaciousness in her chest. She realized what a gate was: it was an indication that you had left one space and were entering another. She walked through another gate.

Sadie’s metaphor was that it was like buying a house you liked in a bidding war, and then moving that house to a different country by boat, and then once you got the house to the other country, deciding that you liked the materials the house was made from but not, in fact, the house itself, and then building an entirely new house after painstakingly disassembling the old house piece by piece.

The omission let him know it was fatally serious.

And eventually, Sadie would be a stranger. And this would be a disaster for Sam. A tragedy. He would know that if he hadn’t been the person he was, terrified and cowardly and petty and insecure and sexually panicked and broken, Sadie might have been his.

It wasn’t her fault. He had had years to figure out the solution, but he’d wasted his time making games with her instead. He had had years to contemplate the puzzle of himself. And now the old puzzle would be replaced with a new puzzle: How do I go on when the person I love most in the world is in love with someone else? Someone tell me the solution, he thought, so I don’t have to play this losing game all the way through.

Having never lived alone before, Sam was lonely, but contradictorily, his pain made him not want to be with people.

“Your cousin Albert told me that, in business, they call this a pivot. But life is filled with them, too. The most successful people are also the most able to change their mindsets. You may not ever have a romantic relationship with Sadie, but you two will be friends for the rest of your lives, and that is something of equal or greater value, if you choose to see it that way.”

It was easy to dislike the man; it was harder to dislike the little boy who existed just below the surface of the man.

Sam used to say that Marx was the most fortunate person he had ever met—he was lucky with lovers, in business, in looks, in life. But the longer Sadie knew Marx, the more she thought Sam hadn’t truly understood the nature of Marx’s good fortune. Marx was fortunate because he saw everything as if it were a fortuitous bounty. It was impossible to know—were persimmons his favorite fruit, or had they just now become his favorite fruit because there they were, growing in his own backyard? He had certainly never mentioned persimmons before. My God, she thought, he is so easy to love. “Shouldn’t you wash that?” Sadie asked.

“ ‘Zweisamkeit’ is the feeling of being alone even when you’re with other people.” Simon turned to look in his husband’s eyes. “Before I met you, I felt this constantly. I felt it with my family, my friends, and every boyfriend I ever had. I felt it so often that I thought this was the nature of living. To be alive was to accept that you were fundamentally alone.” Simon’s eyes were moist. “I know I’m impossible, and I know you don’t care about German words or marriage. All I can say is, I love you and thank you for marrying me anyway.”

But now, here Sadie is, telling a doctor that she is your wife. If you could speak, you would say to her, “All I had to do was fall into a coma for you to marry me. If only I’d known it was so easy.”

“No, Marx always knew everything about everything.” When you figured out Sam’s dead mother’s name, you decided that it was fate, and from that day forward, Sam would be your brother. A name is destiny, if you think it is.

The way to turn an ex-lover into a friend is to never stop loving them, to know that when one phase of a relationship ends it can transform into something else. It is to acknowledge that love is both a constant and a variable at the same time.

“What is a game?” Marx said. “It’s tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow. It’s the possibility of infinite rebirth, infinite redemption. The idea that if you keep playing, you could win. No loss is permanent, because nothing is permanent, ever.”

Sitting at his desk, Sam could not quite identify what seeing Marx in Sadie’s game had made him feel. It was not just pain, or sadness, or happiness, or nostalgia, or longing, or love. What touched him the most was the sound of Sadie’s voice, untouched and clarion, speaking to him through a game, across time and space. Others, like Charlotte Worth, might recognize Marx in the sequence, but Sadie was speaking to Sam. After a long silence, he could hear her voice again, and he determined that what he felt was hope.

“And what is love, in the end?” Alabaster said. “Except the irrational desire to put evolutionary competitiveness aside in order to ease someone else’s journey through life?”

“The boredom you speak of,” Alabaster said. “It is what most of us call happiness.”

But how to explain this to Destiny? How to explain to Destiny that the thing that made her work leap forward in 1996 was that she had been a dervish of selfishness, resentment, and insecurity? Sadie had willed herself to be great: art doesn’t typically get made by happy people.

At once, his eyes fixed on something. In a world of planar surfaces, someone became 3D. It was Sadie.

How quickly you go from being the youngest to the oldest person in a room, she thought.

“The knowledge and experience we have—it isn’t necessarily that helpful, in a way.”