That Morning in Zagreb

Beryl woke up with her mouth tasting like a bus station ashtray and a headache that started behind her eyes and went all the way down to her teeth.

She did not open her eyes right away. She lay there and listened. Someone was breathing next to her. Slow, steady, definitely asleep. The mattress dipped on her left side and there was a warm patch of air that was not her own.

And then it all came back at once, or some of it did, in pieces, as if a plate had been dropped.

The train from Vienna. She had said yes to that part, at least. Bradley from upstairs, forty-one years old, the graphic designer she had exchanged maybe four hundred words with in two years of sharing a hallway, had knocked on her door on Thursday with a printed itinerary and a nervous smile.

"Long weekend. Zagreb. I booked two beds in a hostel room because it was cheaper than one bed in a hotel, and I figured I'd ask, because you said last month you wanted to shake things up. No pressure. I can go alone. I've done it before."

She had said yes before he finished the sentence. That was the part she remembered with total clarity, and it embarrassed her now, how fast she had jumped at it.

Then Friday night. The wine bar with the low ceiling. A little plum brandy a local at the next table kept pouring them, two small glasses each, no more. She remembered laughing so hard her ribs hurt. She remembered Bradley saying something about his ex from when he was twenty-seven, how it ended fine but just ended. She remembered the long walk back, and two glasses of water each at the hostel tap, and Bradley saying, "We've both had brandy. Ask me again in an hour, when we're sober, and I'll give you the same answer." She remembered sitting on the edge of her own bed for that hour, talking about nothing, clear-headed enough that she had watched the clock on her phone. And she remembered exactly what she said when the hour was up.

"I like you. I've liked you for a while, actually. Do you want to come over here to my bed, or should I come to yours?"

He had said, "Mine's against the wall. Come on."

And she had gone. That part was hers. She chose it. Some of the details had gone soft at the edges, the way details do after a long night, but the choosing was clear, and the asking, and his answer, and the condom she had asked about and he had produced from his bag, and her answer to his question halfway through, when he stopped and pulled back and said, "Is this okay? Tell me if it's not," and she had said "God, yes, don't stop," which was apparently a thing she said.

So. Okay. That was fine, actually. That was all fine.

She still did not open her eyes. Because there was a complication, and the complication was that she had woken up facing the back of a man's head and her first feeling, before the panic, before the hangover, had been something warm and stupid in her chest.

*That* was the problem.

She opened her eyes. Bradley was asleep on his stomach, face turned away from her, one arm hanging off the bed. Forty-one years old, the same as he had been when she last saw him upright, and the morning light coming through the thin curtain did him no favors and somehow made her like him more. She had a vague, half-formed memory of his shirt on the floor by the door. It was still there. Good. At least the room matched her memory.

Her phone said 9:14. Saturday. Her head said otherwise.

Beryl slid out of the bed with the care of a woman defusing something, found her underwear and her dress where they had landed, and got them on in the narrow gap between the two beds. Her mouth tasted like the bottom of the plum brandy bottle. She needed to not be in this room.

She made it to the hallway bathroom and shut the door and looked at herself in the mirror that had one corner cracked and a light bulb buzzing overhead.

Forty-three years old. Cook at a mid-range place, on her feet ten hours a day, a string of short dates over the past two years that went nowhere, nothing serious since she was thirty. And here she was in a shared bathroom in Zagreb, Croatia, in last night's dress, having slept with the neighbor she had known for two years and never once invited over.

"Well," she told the mirror. "You wanted to shake things up."

The mirror did not answer, which was probably for the best.

She splashed water on her face. She considered her options. Option one, go back in and lie there until he woke up and have the conversation lying in a hostel bed with her hair tangled and wild. Option two, stand in this bathroom until checkout. Option three, coffee. Coffee first, then face him. Coffee was the answer to most things and definitely the answer to this.

She went back in just long enough for her shoes and her purse. Bradley stirred but did not wake. She left the door unlocked so he would not think she had bolted, even though she had absolutely bolted.

* * *

The café on the corner was the kind of place with four tables and a television playing quietly and a woman behind the counter who looked at Beryl and said something long and welcoming in Croatian.

"Uh. Coffee? Kava? Two?" Beryl held up two fingers, then thought about it and held up two fingers more firmly. "Two kava."

The espresso was tiny and strong and cost almost nothing and was the best thing that had happened to her all morning. She was halfway through the second one when the door opened and Bradley came in, hair wet from the hostel shower, wearing the shirt from the floor, looking as if he had also done his math on the walk over.

"There you are," he said, and sat down across from her. "I woke up and you were gone and I thought, well. Either she's getting coffee or she's on a train back to Vienna."

"Coffee," Beryl said. "Obviously. Vienna is a big trip. I'd at least finish my espresso first."

He laughed. That was good. That was very good, actually, and it made the warm stupid thing in her chest do the warm stupid thing again.

"God," he said, rubbing his eyes with the heels of his hands. "How much did we drink last night?"

"That man kept pouring the brandy. I think his name was Marko. Or maybe we made up Marko."

"No, there was a Marko. He had the dog." He paused. "You remember the dog, right?"

"I remember a dog." She did not, fully. "I remember most of it, actually. Not all of it. But the parts that matter."

Bradley looked at his cup. Then he looked up at her, and he did not do the thing she was braced for, the joke or the shrug or the well-that-was-fun face.

"Okay, so I have to ask, because I've been going over it on the walk here and I can't tell. Was this a good thing or a mistake? Because I'll accept either answer, I just need to know which one so I know how to act in the hallway for the next two years."

Beryl put her cup down. Half-finished sentences had gotten them here; maybe a whole one would get them out.

"I liked it," she said. "I liked the whole thing. The train, the dinner, the brandy, the... the part after the brandy. I liked all of it, and that's what's scaring me, because I came on this trip to shake up my life, not to start feeling things about my upstairs neighbor on a Saturday morning in Croatia."

"That's," he started, and stopped, and started again. "Okay. Honest answer. I asked you on this trip because I've been trying to figure out how to ask you on a trip for about eight months. The Zagreb thing was already booked. The two beds were already booked. I just hoped you'd say yes fast enough that I'd never have to come up with the smooth version."

"You rehearsed asking me?"

"I rehearsed it in the mirror, Beryl. It did not go well in the mirror."

She laughed, and it came out louder than she meant to, and the woman behind the counter glanced over and smiled.

"God," Beryl said. "So the man who asked me to Zagreb with two beds in one room had a speech drafted."

"A bad speech. It had a bullet point list in it. Destinations. Pros and cons."

"I'm glad I said yes before the list."

"So am I." He turned his cup around on the saucer. "So. It wasn't a mistake?"

"It wasn't a mistake." She looked at him over the rim of her cup. "But I need coffee before I can have this conversation at full volume, and you need to eat something, and then I think we should go see this city and figure out what we're doing. Slowly. One thing at a time."

"One thing at a time," Bradley agreed. "Starting with, do they do breakfast here, or is it just espresso and regret?"

"Just espresso and regret, I think."

"Then espresso and regret, and then we find breakfast." He flagged the woman down with two fingers and a hopeful look. "Dva? Dva more?"

The woman said something back that had the shape of yes.

Beryl sat there with her second tiny cup and her big ridiculous hangover and the warm stupid thing in her chest, and thought, so far, so good.

They found breakfast at a bakery two streets over, a place with a glass case and a woman who pointed at things instead of describing them. Beryl got something with cheese in it. Bradley got two of them. They ate standing up at a little ledge by the window, watching trams go by, and it was almost easy. Almost.

"So the itinerary," Bradley said, pulling a folded paper out of his pocket, because of course he had the itinerary on him. "Today I had us down for the upper town, the cathedral, and then the Museum of Broken Relationships."

"The what?"

"The Museum of Broken Relationships. It's a real place. People donate objects from their breakups and there's a little card explaining each one. It's famous."

Beryl stopped chewing. "You want to spend our first morning after sleeping together walking through a museum of failed relationships."

"Well, when you say it like that."

"I'm saying it exactly like that."

He folded the paper halfway and unfolded it again. "It's not supposed to be sad. People say it's actually funny. There's an axe somebody used to chop up their ex's furniture. There's a whole thing."

"Bradley. I have a hangover the size of this city and I just found out you rehearsed asking me on this trip in a mirror. I am not spending today looking at other people's breakups and doing math about our odds."

"Our odds?"

"You know what I mean."

"Do I? Because I thought it was a museum. I thought it would be interesting." He was doing the thing with his jaw now, the tight one. "I did this trip alone last time, Beryl. I walked past that museum by myself and thought, next time I'll have someone with me. That was the entire plan. That's all it was."

"And you didn't think for one second what it would look like? Day one of whatever this is, and you're taking me to a building full of things people kept after it went wrong?"

"Or," he said, "it's a building full of things people survived. You know that's the actual point of the place, right? People donate the object, they let it go, they move on."

Beryl opened her mouth. Closed it. She hated when a person made a good point in an argument she was enjoying. "That's a very generous reading."

"It's the reading on the website."

"Well, forgive me for not reading the website of the breakup museum before my second espresso."

The woman behind the bakery counter said something sharp. Whether it was at them or at the radio, nobody could tell. Bradley put the itinerary away, all the way away, into the pocket with the zipper, and that felt worse than the argument somehow.

"Okay," he said. "No museum. We'll do the cathedral, the market, whatever. You pick."

"No, don't do that. Don't hand me the whole day like a peace offering."

"Then what do you want?"

"I want," Beryl started, and found she didn't actually know, "I want you to not have planned the day in April." That was the real thing, she realized, saying it out loud. She'd said yes to a man with a folded paper, and part of her had spent the morning wondering how much of the weekend was already decided before she got a vote.

He took that seriously, she could see him taking it seriously, and that almost made it worse. "The itinerary was for me. Alone. In case you said no. I had a version of the weekend where I did it by myself and tried not to think about my apartment two floors above yours." He shrugged. "I never updated it. I'll throw it out if you want."

"I don't want you to throw it out."