Wistful is a Good Word for It

Rolling Out the News

Olive and I had started to slowly tell people that she and I were dating.

She told her family over group text. She didn't show me the responses, but it would be fair to say that they were not favorable. The immediate Polcari family was pretty alarmed. Olive's dad, Robert, warned her against having a relationship in the workplace, especially with her boss! Her mom, Linda, expressed her disapproval by not defending Olive - at least that is how Olive interpreted it. I'm not sure I interpret the lack of response the same way. Her older sister, Bobbie, an FBI agent, threatened to interrogate me and run a background check. The one saving grace among them was younger sister, Amelia. Amelia seemed to enjoy that Olive, always the level-headed one, was doing something scandalous and had turned attention away from her for a change. For her part, Olive told me that she was ok with the criticism, but I could tell that it bothered her. She wasn't used to having her judgement questioned. Olive had always been, and deep down wanted to always be, a good girl.

I told my brother, Eddie, about Olive. He didn't think much of it. He was a safe person for me to tell. He wouldn't judge me too harshly. He'd always lived a far more...how do I say this? I could say that he'd been a bit of a slut before he met his wife, Samantha. But I'll just say he had been more promiscuous than I. He thought the whole thing was funny and teased me because he knew I was already way outside the lines as far as the rest of my family was concerned by having a child out of wedlock. In his mind, this was just a drop in the bucket of general familial disapproval. He might have been right, but I wasn't willing to test it. I didn't tell anyone else in my family about my relationship with Olive.

I most certainly didn't tell Luke's mom. I hid behind our signed custody agreement. In the custody agreement, Juliette and I had promised not to introduce Luke to any new significant-other prior to having been officially coupled for at least 6 months. This was done to ensure against a revolving door of pseudo-father and pseudo-mother figures in his life. I told Olive that I would tell Juliette about the relationship after we had crossed the 6 month threshold. I didn't want to upset the "Luke co-parenting apple cart".

Besides, I thought, first thing was first, Olive and I needed to tell our colleagues and friends at the Institute. The first people we told, the ones who knew us both best and cared about us deeply as friends, all greeted the news with cautious optimism. Blaire was outwardly the happiest about it. Flynn shook his head at me, but ultimately told me that he thought we could be good together. Jalen and Emilio teased me and called me a dirty dog, but also said they were happy for us. The rollout at work was going reasonably well.

Olive, wanting to be out with it all, had posted a picture of me in her apartment, on her couch, with her cat, on Instagram.

Between our targeted disclosures and her social media post, the actual news, if not assumptions and innuendos, soon circulated across the Institute.

Then, on a night in mid-March, Olive and a few female work colleagues had gotten together for drinks after work on an evening when I was scheduled to care for my son. After Luke had gone to sleep, I texted Olive to ask how her night with the girls had gone. She said that it had been "fine" and left it at that. The next night, over dinner, I probed a little more about how the evening had gone. Olive told me that Cassie, an associate scientist in another research group at the institute, had spent much of the evening opining about how her friend was so gross for dating a man ten years older than she. It was obvious to me that Cassie had put two and two together and was wielding the story about her friend to passive aggressively voice her displeasure with the fact that Olive and I were together.

I kept quiet about it, but I suspected that Cassie's comments and feelings were rooted in jealousy. I don't think that Cassie was jealous because she wanted to date me, though I suppose it is possible. Rather, I think she was jealous that anyone with the same title she had might have such an intimate relationship with a person so senior in the science ranks at the Institute. Cassie was and still is a climber. I think she viewed Olive's relationship with me to be a competitive advantage.

I let all of this stuff roll off of me. I didn't stress about Olive's family's response. In fact, I think I ultimately won them all over. Five years and a break up later, and I think they are all still pretty fond of me. I also didn't stress about my own family, though I should have. It says something about me and my unhealthy compartmentalization of some parts of my life that it didn't bother to tell my family, brother notwithstanding. They had no idea that I was dating a young woman with whom I was madly in love. And, finally, Cassie and anyone who shared her feelings at work could go fuck themselves. Feelings happen. Relationships happen. They happen between people with whom you interact most. Call me a hopeless romantic, but I thought sometimes you need to take a few risks for love.

So I was good with all of it. But I sensed that Olive couldn't stomach the lack of approval. Between her family's responses, my hesitation about telling Juliette, and now these shots taken by Cassie, Olive was having trouble. It gnawed at her and it gradually gnawed through the bonds of love and affection that she and I shared.