The Love Proof

by Madeleine Henry

  “Sorry I’ve been so MIA,” he said. “Yetsa…” Jake picked up his stream of consciousness where it had stopped at his computer. While they ate—prosciutto-wrapped cod, arugula salad with pears, with two chocolate croissants for dessert waiting under a white napkin—he walked her through the debacle. In a new nervous tic, he covered his eyes sometimes with his hand as he spoke. He mentioned he’d hired an analyst in India part-time.

  “I didn’t know that,” Sophie said.

  “Really? I thought I told you.”

  She shook her head.

  Jake stared at his empty plate.

  “What about you?” he asked. “What’s new?”

  “I accepted a job for next year.”

  Jake swiveled to face her head on.

  “Free People,” she confirmed.

  “Ah.”

  The sentence made him feel ill.

  He pushed his plate forward.

  “You need to go to grad school,” he snapped.

  “What?” she asked. In her vision of the future, Jake would get seeded when they graduated. They would move to Manhattan. Grad school did not fit in that picture. The best ones for physics weren’t even in New York, and she just wanted to be close to him. Her job was a means to an end, not a matter of heart and soul.

  “I’m going to be working all the time,” Jake said.

  “Where’s this coming from?”

  He gestured at the food. “Come on,” he said.

  “Jake.”

  “How long did this take you to make?”

  Jake had never worked so hard, making the changes in Sophie more apparent than ever. She’d lost all desire for more. It wasn’t right. She deserved so much more than she had—things she could only give herself. He’d been ignoring his doubts about her path for a while. Now, at his limit, he didn’t have the strength to hold them back.

  “You have a gift you’re not using,” he said.

  “Don’t tell me what’s important to me.”

  Jake slid his plate off the table into the wall, where it shattered.

  Neither one of them moved, the room noiseless as a vacuum.

  “Sophie, wake up,” he snapped.

  “What?”

  “What happened to you?” he asked.

  “I’m happy.”

  He considered this.

  “Maybe now, but you won’t be,” he said definitively. “You’ll regret this. Now’s the time to do something with your life.”

  “I am.”

  Jake felt too much of himself in that sentence. He pressed his lips together, frustrated, and remembered when Sophie asked him last year, “Do you know why lips are soft?” She traced the squished O of his mouth in their bed. Sophie had taught him that skin had three layers. The top one—usually thick, tough—was paper-thin on the lips, making them smooth. They had more nerve endings than any other body part, making them hypersensitive. They didn’t produce melanin, so there was no pigment to hide pink vessels in the dermis. All information she’d ever passed on to him was still inside her. But what good did that do if only he knew it was there?

  “Sophie, I love you,” he said, “but I won’t let you hide from the world.”

  “Jake,” she protested.

  “This relationship is killing you.”

  “Babe.”

  “No. Something isn’t right.” Jake grabbed his parka from the coat rack, rattling it like a leafless tree. He slammed the door behind him. Sophie sat alone at the table for two. The ghost-white napkin in the center still covered her croissant. It cooled and hardened as Sophie went to their room, lay in bed, and called her mom.

  Ringing.

  Sophie and Jake always kept their blinds open. The views used to prompt her tangents on constellations in front of them, but she hadn’t taught him anything in a while. Jake went to bed so much later than she did. Sophie stared at the snow-colored moon and felt cold.

  “Hello?” Isabel sat up in bed.

  “Mom.”

  “Darling, what’s wrong?” Isabel left her bedroom, where Sophie’s dad stayed asleep. She sensed it was about Jake.

  “Jake left.”

  Isabel walked into the library.

  “We got in a fight,” Sophie went on. “He said I need to go to grad school. He thinks I’m wasting my life. He just walked out. I don’t know if he’s coming back.”

  “Of course he’s coming back.”

  “I’ve never seen him so angry.”

  Sophie’s eyes pinched out tears.

  “Where are you?” Isabel asked.

  “In bed.”

  “Deep breaths.”

  “What should I do?” Sophie asked.

  Isabel had never given her daughter relationship advice. She had talked to Sophie about love, though, since it first appeared in her bedtime stories. “Life is about how deeply you love and let others love you.” She must’ve told Sophie that dozens of times under her square of skylight. Now, Sophie wanted specifics. She wanted advice about him.

  Isabel had first met Jake while picking Sophie up for winter break freshman year. Seeing them together—always with a point of contact between them—was like watching a heartbeat on an ultrasound. It was intense, indisputable aliveness. The force between them felt tangible, charging the air with something that pricked her lightest hairs. After Isabel met Jake, the intensity of their relationship made sense. He’d looked back into Isabel’s eyes with such a spotlight glare, with such purpose, that it almost stole her breath.

  It reminded her of—

  “Mom?” Sophie’s voice cracked.

  “I had my heart broken, too.” It was only when Sophie cried harder that Isabel realized she’d said that out loud. She wiped the sleep out of her eyes. “I don’t mean that’s what’s happening now. I just meant the pain. That pain… It’s familiar.”

  “What happened?”

  Isabel listened to her daughter quiet down. Information had always soothed Sophie. Jake seemed to have the same trait.

  “Well, I was about your age. We’d been together for a few years. Then, he left.”

  “Why?”

  “Nothing went wrong.” Isabel hadn’t told this story in decades. “It took time to understand. I still don’t know for sure. I think what happened was we stopped growing. We weren’t developing, together or separately.” Isabel thought out loud. “I think love, when you’re young, is possessive. It says, ‘You’re mine. We must be together. You must love me back.’ Or maybe that’s just passion.” Aidan had been a painter. He and Isabel had spent hours upon hours adding up to weeks walking through galleries together in New York City. When she passed an art museum, to this day, she sometimes dropped in as a way of being with him. After he left, Isabel tried to chase him with phone calls, letters, and urgent requests to talk now, did he have just five minutes anytime in the next two weeks. “It taught me you can’t force people to love you. Either someone chooses you, or they don’t. You can only control yourself.”

  “You don’t understand.”

  “What is it?”

  Silence.

  “Sophie?”

  Sophie started crying more desperately, making further conversation impossible. It was palpable hurt, as if someone had amputated her right hand. Isabel had come to believe that the smarter people were, the more deeply they felt. Sophie never withdrew because she was apathetic, it was because she felt too much. Now, as Sophie lay wounded—brilliantly so, her super-sensitized nerves reeling—Isabel wished she could feel her daughter’s pain for her. She resigned herself to the fact that the most she could do to help was listen.

  * * *

  Sophie woke up when Jake came to bed. Their mattress dipped under his weight, drawing her to him. As they hugged, his heartbeat sent vibrations through her chest.

  “I love you,” he said.

  “I know.”

  He touched the outer ridge of her ear, then her lobe. Sophie had never pierced her ears. She didn’t have a driver’s license. She didn’t drink alcohol becaus
e she didn’t like the taste. Once, freshman year, as they climbed Science Hill between candy-apple-red trees, she’d asked if he was going trick-or-treating without any apparent awareness that people their age didn’t do that anymore. He loved her details. But on his walk around campus minutes ago, he couldn’t shake the feeling that he was hurting her. He pictured her on the day they met: bright hair, magnetic mind, and for all of her potential and power, so humble in how she asked him about the ordinary parts of his life and cared about the answers. No one was as good as Sophie. He was passing Bass Library when he decided he wouldn’t hold her back any longer.

  “I mean it, I love you,” he said.

  “I know, Jake.”

  “Even if it doesn’t look like it, I do.”

  * * *

  Jake launched a final effort to lure Sophie back to her dream. He planted books—A Brief History of Time, The Time Paradox—in stacks hoping they’d ignite her. He subscribed to Physics World and left issues by her chair. When he emerged from stretches of pure focus, he hoped they’d reminded her of what she used to be like, too.

  His amount of work did weigh on him, but that was when he remembered his why: he wanted them to have everything. He imagined their future. Maybe the jokes about Fabio had gotten to him, because he fantasized about coming home to Sophie and their son. In his mind, he’d pulled up to their driveway thirty years from now over a hundred times. The way he saw it, the sun had set. The sky was pink. Their house was the kind Sophie had grown up in, surrounded by trees. Her silhouette shaded a yellow window in the library. Their son was just out of the frame, but present. She saw Jake walking up the front steps and smiled. That dream visited him with such clarity, Jake could count the trees on their lawn. It even had a temperature: warm. His fantasies had never had a temperature before.

  Looking ahead kept him going.

  But Sophie did not change.

  She had debilitating peace.

  Slowly, reluctantly, Jake realized he would leave.

  He felt soggy, weak.

  Imagining the future became deeply sad.

  From then on, their intimate moments were imbued with a sense of the last time. He could be distant when they were in their office, but when their bodies touched, without barriers or distractions, his superfocus showered her completely. Whether it happened slowly, or in fast, uncontrollable ecstasy, every one of those moments was etched with more details than weeks of normal life. He poured his heart and soul into them. He tried to memorize her.

  * * *

  The week before graduation, Jake was in his sleek chair on Friday night when the call finally came. Lionel’s name on his cell phone jolted him upright. Sophie crept over from her chair holding a copy of Neverwhere, an urban fantasy by Neil Gaiman, her thumb a bookmark. Jake’s Bloomberg window displayed the size of the portfolio: $238,800.13, up 19 percent since September—comfortably higher than the S&P’s 13-point rise. At last, Lionel promised to seed Jake. Sophie’s smile magnified the setting sun as they agreed on next steps, including Jake’s plan to rent office space across the hall from Padington itself.

  Jake hung up, stunned. Sophie forgot her book until it collided with the floor. She grabbed his arms and jumped up and down as he stood still.

  “Jake!” she exclaimed. “Oh my God!”

  She hugged him so hard that she pushed him into his chair. She fell onto his lap and kissed him up one side of his face, then on his ear an extra time, giddy and goofy with the incredible achievement. Jake was making his dreams real—didn’t that make him magical? Who else cared as much as he did? She’d never doubted him. Meanwhile, Jake didn’t move. His strong body was limp as he started to speak. Lionel had given him the green light to start when he wanted, so he would ramp up next week in New York.

  “Where should we live?” she asked, breathless.

  He paused.

  “I don’t know if it makes sense for us to live together.”

  “What?”

  “I’m going to be working all the time.”

  Her tone was still upbeat.

  “But if we don’t live together,” she went on, “then I’ll never see you.”

  Jake kept his arms around Sophie.

  The truth was, he would break up with her after they graduated next week. He couldn’t do it any sooner. Here, at their place, they saw each other so intimately every day, a breakup would be impossible to maintain. Besides, their home in Berkeley was too powerful to destroy. They’d grown too close here to reverse the momentum. This place would always be theirs.

  “It wouldn’t be fair. I’ll get home in the middle of the night, then work more, read. If I’m really in my head, I won’t notice if I’m lumbering around. Then, I’ll leave early.” It was all true, but it wasn’t the whole truth. “You deserve better than that.”

  “You’re serious, aren’t you?”

  He nodded.

  “I’m sorry, I won’t do that to you.”

  Sophie was blindsided. With her arms still around his neck, she tried to wrap her mind around this idea that they’d be apart. Did he really believe they’d stay away from each other? Even if they paid two rents, she imagined she’d sleep over at his place, he at hers. They’d keep clothes in each other’s closets, leave a toothbrush by the sink. They were only home when they were together. He was her safe haven from everyone else. Meanwhile, Jake said nothing. He seemed staunchly committed to this—and she trusted him.

  “This is a phase?” she clarified.

  His gut hurt.

  “Yes.”

  “We’ll live together when work settles down?”

  “Yes.”

  Eventually, she nodded okay.

  “I’m sorry,” he said.

  “I know.”

  * * *

  Jake named his fund Olympus Capital after the mountain on Mars.

  Sophie found a studio in Brooklyn.

  They texted plans to meet.

  That night, in late May, Jake wouldn’t be free until 9 p.m. He planned to work after, too, so they’d meet near his office. It was Tuesday. Sophie ate dinner at home in Williamsburg over a copy of The Ocean at the End of the Lane, another urban fantasy. She brushed her teeth before taking the subway back into Manhattan, up to 23rd Street, excited. They hadn’t seen each other since graduation, when he’d seemed sadder than she’d expected. He’d kept staring at her through the yellow tassel hanging off his graduation cap—over-nostalgic, uncharacteristically teary—when he was supposed to look at Isabel’s phone for pictures.

  She headed to Madison Square Park. The sky was black but the city illuminated, as if someone had stolen all of the stars and piled them inside the skyscrapers. She sat on a park bench on time and looked up twenty floors to Jake’s row of windows. She used to be in tune with what he was feeling. Thankfully, this was just a phase. He’d work around the clock for now, setting up his business, and then they’d find time to share. When Jake exited the building, she smiled. He jogged across the street between two waves of cars.

  Sophie stood.

  They hugged.

  “Hey,” he said.

  “Hi!”

  They sat on the bench with space between them.

  Sophie scooched toward him.

  “How are you?” she asked eagerly.

  “I’m okay.”

  For the first time since they’d met, Sophie didn’t believe him. He wrung his hands hard. He looked pale—he was never pale. For someone living his dream, he looked oddly pinched. She reached out to cup one side of his face. He leaned back.

  “I think we should go on a break,” he said.

  “What?”

  “I’ve been thinking about this for a while. I’m sorry, Sophie. You give too much of yourself up when you’re with me. You care too much about us.” His pace was slow, his words deliberate. “I keep thinking about you the day we met. I know we want to be together, but the cost to you is too high. I won’t take your dreams away.”

  Dead silence.

  “And this
isn’t even the issue, but the fact is we won’t see each other.”

  “We would if we lived together.”

  Jake loved her clarity. He ignored the temptation to agree and instead just looked at her. He’d been taking her in like this for weeks, knowing tonight would come. Her tee had a small pom-pom on the front like a rabbit’s tail. She’d had that shirt since freshman year. By now, the fluff had been washed out, reduced to wisps.

  “For how long?” she asked.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Are you asking for a break or are you demanding one?”

  “What?”

  “Because if you’re asking, I say no.”

  He said nothing.

  “What does a break even mean?” she pressed.

  “That we’re not together anymore.”

  Sophie started to cry.

  “I’m sorry. I don’t see another way.” He wrung his hands harder, pushing a patch of skin to limit of its elasticity. “Do you see how much time you’ll have for yourself now, though? Everything you wanted to do—things you still want, I know it—you can. This is a critical period for you, too. Now’s the time to set up the rest of our lives.”

  “Why are you deciding what’s right for me?”

  “Because I know you.”

  “Apparently not.”

  “Sophie. I’m thinking about you.”

  You. Sophie fixated on that word. Her mom had said it too when they talked about Jake senior year. “You can’t force people to love you… You can only control yourself.” But Sophie hadn’t thought of herself as separate from Jake since freshman year. Since then, he’d mixed with her. He was in all of her habits, likes, the people she knew, in her idea of self. She’d always assumed they’d stay together. You? Who was she alone?

  Jake explained his decision in different ways.