The Regrets

by Amy Bonnaffons

  There was a lot to discover. We’d both already lost our virginities, but only in the most technical of senses. Sometimes I got the feeling there was something impersonal and scientific about our sex: that she was using me as a kind of experiment, to game out her body’s various possibilities. It didn’t matter. I was smitten. The fact of her body, of my access to it, stunned me. I never got used to it.

  Over time we became a real couple, at least on the surface: we slept together several nights a week, spent breaks with each other’s families, talked about getting an off-campus apartment together our junior year. But I always had the sneaking suspicion that we weren’t really together. Sometimes it seemed as though these pretenses at couplehood were just her way of humoring me while she worked toward some other, mysterious end.

  Each step we took in our relationship was proposed by me: calling each other boyfriend and girlfriend, meeting each other’s parents, possibly moving in together. She never objected, but she never initiated either. When I said “I love you,” she dutifully repeated it back, but she never said it first. I came to suspect that she was approaching the relationship as a whole with the same attitude she had toward sex: a detached, clinical curiosity about what might happen next. I, on the other hand, grew only more obsessed, dependent upon whatever it was she gave me—or perhaps upon what she withheld.

  Sometimes I’d catch her staring into space, clearly elsewhere, but when I asked her what she was thinking about, she’d flinch, as if snapping awake, and then say “What?” as if she wasn’t aware she’d been gone. As her strange stories suggested, she viewed the world at a slant—as though she’d come from some entirely different realm, a curious alien in a person suit. For me—a premed student who spent his days looking through a microscope at the granular, visible motions to which life could be reduced—her attunement to some invisible register was endlessly fascinating. The longer I knew her, the more I wanted to see what she saw, to go where she went.

  So I was devastated, but not surprised, when she calmly informed me that she’d fucked her downstairs neighbor, and that she guessed that meant we had to break up.

  “Are you in love with him?” I asked.

  “No.”

  “Are you going to do it again?”

  “Probably not.”

  “Is there anyone else you want to fuck?”

  “No, not really.”

  “Then we don’t have to break up—do we?”

  She frowned; she seemed to not have considered this possibility—the possibility that I might forgive her, that we might be able to work things out. She didn’t seem opposed to the idea, but when I tried to get her to explain the reason for her dissatisfaction, she couldn’t. She mumbled something about “the daydream,” but when I pressed her, she couldn’t articulate what she meant.

  I couldn’t even bring myself to be mad at her. She seemed so genuinely confused, so baffled by her own motivations. It was only after she’d definitively broken up with me (still without an explanation), only after she’d stopped responding to my emails and calls, that I finally thought to myself, That was kind of fucked up.

  For months, I talked to whoever would listen—my friends, my mom, a counselor at student health services, random townies in Providence bars—about how unfair it all was. Hadn’t I been a good boyfriend, an attentive lover? Hadn’t she claimed to return my feelings? Did she even have feelings, or was she some kind of robot?

  Finally, one day, my friend Omar said, “At this point, man, you’re fucked up, and you can’t even blame it on her. That statute of limitations has passed. You gotta shut up about this.” I didn’t listen to him right away—I spent that night on the floor in my dorm hallway because I was too drunk to fit the key into the lock—but when I woke up the next morning with a massive hangover, I realized he was right. I stopped contacting Rachel. I started going to the gym for several hours a day. I began flirting with my lab partner.

  That lab partner turned out to be Ana, and Ana turned out to be, in a way, the reason I now found myself in this very library, where Rachel apparently worked—this library not five blocks from my new apartment, where normal people came in for normal reasons and interacted with her in normal ways, as if she herself was a normal person and not some apparition from the past, an incursion of some alternate reality into my tenuously ordered life.

  * * *

  I managed, somehow, to move. I walked to the back of the library, where I could calmly consider what to do. I watched Rachel from the corner of my eye while pretending to examine a row of books about Lyndon B. Johnson.

  I probably could have walked out right then, undetected. But it felt suddenly important to not avoid the encounter, even—especially—if that meant humiliating myself. Wasn’t this the lesson my life was trying to teach me? That I had to burn my old self up completely before something new might rise from the ashes?

  I went over to the test prep section, picked up a few GRE books, and walked purposefully to the counter. And there she was, sitting right in front of me: those big brown eyes behind the thick glasses, those bright-red lips, those smooth cheeks. I’d cupped that face in my palm so many times. I could have reached out and done it now.

  “Just a second,” she said, eyes on her computer.

  “Okay,” I said.

  She typed something into the computer screen, hit Enter, then looked up.

  The series of reactions that broke over her face was so legible it might as well have been subtitled. She met me with a distant professional gaze; then something snagged and caught. She frowned, her eyes widened—Could it be?—and finally her cheeks flushed bright red.

  “Oh,” she said. “Oh. Um…hi.”

  “Hi,” I said. Her visible loss of composure was more gratifying than I could have hoped. Despite myself, I grinned.

  “What—how are you? Do you live around here?” she stammered.

  “I do,” I said. “As of a few months ago. You?”

  “I just work here,” she said. “I live in Clinton Hill.”

  “Oh. Hmm.”

  I’d never known her to be so inarticulate. Her face had a tight, pained look, as though she was on the verge of tears. Somehow this emboldened me.

  “Listen,” I said, “it’s so crazy to run into you here. Why don’t we catch up sometime?”

  “Well…okay.”

  “Want to grab a drink when you get off work?”

  “You mean today?”

  “Why not? Or some other day, if you’re busy.”

  She shook her head. “I’m not busy.”

  “Okay then. When are you off?”

  I was halfway home before I realized I’d forgotten the GRE books. Still, I felt triumphant. I’d encountered a person who’d once had the power to destroy me, and I’d remained calm. Whatever happened next, I’d already won.

  Did that mean she had lost? She seemed to have lost something: she didn’t seem as self-contained, as clearly defined, as before. Had she, too, been buffeted and blurred by life, eroded by adult ambiguities, in the half decade since we’d seen each other?

  * * *

  When I got to Manhattan Inn at six on the dot, Rachel was already there, sitting at the bar with a half-empty glass of white wine in front of her, her chin resting on her hand.

  “You’re early,” I said.

  She turned and gave a faint smile. “I slipped out before closing,” she said. “I needed a drink.”

  “Rough day?” I settled myself on the stool next to hers.

  She shrugged, as if to say, No rougher than any other.

  I decided not to press. Instead, I ordered an IPA. Then I turned to her. “So,” I said. “Fill me in. You’re living in Clinton Hill, and you work at the library.”

  “Yeah. That’s about it. I went to library school right out of undergrad, and I’ve been working there ever since.”

  “Library school. Hmm.”

  “Yeah. I realized I needed to touch books.”

  “To touch them?”


  “I realized the world outside my head didn’t feel completely real unless I could touch it. I like to read the books too, of course. But I didn’t have the stamina to be a writer. Or an academic. You remember how I could never finish anything.”

  “I hope you still write, though? Even just for yourself?”

  She shrugged. “Kind of.” She traced a pattern with her finger on the surface of the bar, then looked up. “What about you? Are you, like, a doctor by now?”

  “Well. Not exactly.”

  “‘Not exactly’ like not yet?”

  “Like not at all. I kind of…changed paths. I’m working at the zoo now.”

  “The zoo? Like…taking care of giraffes?”

  I laughed. “They have an education department. We teach kids about animals and the environment. It’s something I sort of fell into.”

  “I bet you’re good at that.”

  I shrugged. “I mean, I’ve been doing it for a while now. For years I debated whether it was a good use of my biology degree. On the one hand, it definitely wasn’t; on the other, I liked it. So. Anyway, it was never supposed to be a forever thing. I’m applying to grad school now. Environmental science.”

  She nodded thoughtfully. “Doctors don’t really get it, anyway,” she said.

  “Don’t get what?”

  She made a fluttery gesture, indicating the space around us. “You know. It. The substrate of everything.”

  I had no idea what she meant, but decided not to pursue it.

  “So,” she said. “Now you live here.”

  “Yeah.”

  “With…?” Her eyes flicked down to my ring-free hand, then back up. “I guess I kind of figured you’d be married by now.”

  “No, not married.” I hesitated for a second. How did I explain Zoe? “But I’m—yeah, I guess I’m living with a girl. It’s complicated.”

  She nodded. “I’m in an it’s-complicated too,” she said.

  I waited for her to say more, but she didn’t. She just took another sip of her wine and looked down at her hands. She frowned, and I thought I saw that look come into her eyes, that distant gaze. I felt a familiar dumb panic: Don’t go.

  “I got engaged, actually,” I blurted out. “To Ana.”

  “Oh,” she said, looking up.

  “But we broke up. About six months ago.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “It’s okay. It’s better this way. It’s just kind of…disorienting. I’m not even sure I miss her, specifically. It’s more like…you don’t realize, while it’s happening, how much what a partner gives you is simply…context. Being on my own now is kind of like living in another country. Canada, maybe. Everything looks the same, and everybody understands the words I’m saying, and yet I feel kind of…”

  “Adrift.”

  “Yes.” I looked at her with surprise: she’d spoken eagerly, almost too eagerly, like a game show contestant ready with the correct answer. She stared at me now with an unfamiliar fixity, her eyes fastened on mine; she had the look of someone on the brink of a propulsive, unsolicited self-disclosure. I held my breath, trying not to startle the moment away.

  But then she leaned back, took another sip of her wine, and sighed. “So,” she said. “Who are you living with now? You were starting to say.”

  “Just this girl Zoe,” I said. “She’s sort of a friend of a friend. I moved into her house to get away from the situation with Ana. And now I’m—I don’t know. She’s kind of weird. It’s a little bit unsustainable. But I keep staying, for some reason. I guess because—”

  “Because you’re fucking her?” she blurted, a mischievous glint in her eyes.

  I paused, stunned.

  She giggled. “You are,” she said. “You’re totally fucking her.” Then she laughed again—a clear, hiccupy, infectious giggle—and I found myself laughing too.

  Then the whole story tumbled out of me: the tarot cards, the baby bats, the blitzkrieg sex. Rachel thought all of it was hilarious. At one point—I think the point when I described the baby bat in the terrarium—she laughed so hard that she practically lost her breath: her face grew red, her inhalations choked and wheezy. She finally had to put her forehead on the bar and clutch her stomach in order to catch her breath.

  When I finished the story, she shook her head from side to side and said, “Thank you. Thank you. That’s the hardest I’ve laughed in a long time.”

  “Uh, happy to oblige.” I didn’t even care that my life was the butt of the joke. I watched with satisfaction as she wiped away the small tears that had gathered at the corners of her eyes, as she took a restorative sip of wine, as her breathing returned to normal and her laughter-blotched skin regained its even pallor.

  “Okay,” I said. “Your turn.”

  “For what?”

  “I told you about my it’s-complicated, now I wanna hear about yours.”

  Immediately I wished the sentence back into my mouth. She flinched, as if struck; then she sat straight up and furrowed her brow.

  “Can I ask you something?” she said, her voice suddenly low and dead serious.

  “Shoot.”

  “Do you think your roommate Zoe is…for real? I mean, I know she’s kind of ridiculous, but do you think she knows what she’s talking about? Like, can she really…”

  “Can she really do what?”

  “I don’t know.” She shrugged, looked down at her near-empty wineglass. “Like, it sounds dumb, but is she really some kind of witch or something?”

  “I have no idea,” I said. “I mean, I wouldn’t know how to figure that out.”

  “Never mind. I just—I’m curious. Some weird stuff has been happening to me lately.”

  “What kind of weird stuff?”

  “I can’t really explain it. But—I don’t know. Do you believe in spirits? Ghosts?”

  “Ghosts like Boo?”

  She shook her head. “I shouldn’t have mentioned it. Sorry. Even the question sounds idiotic. I mean, you’re a scientist.”

  “No, no. I didn’t mean to trivialize…anything. Whatever it was you were gonna tell me.”

  She looked down at her wineglass. “Well,” she said. “It’s just—I know someone. Someone who died. And—”

  “Oh, and you want to…communicate with them? Like, with a medium? That kind of thing?”

  “No. Not exactly.” She opened her mouth, then closed it again. “Never mind,” she said. “It doesn’t really make sense anyway.” But she looked as she had when I’d first spoken to her in the library: tense, fragile, blurred. Her eyes started to glisten; she blinked, clearly holding back tears.

  “Hey.” I reached out and laid a hand on her arm. “Are you okay?”

  She jerked away from me, sharply, as if my touch had scalded her. Then she leapt off the barstool and took a step away from me, shrinking into herself.

  I opened my mouth to speak but was distracted by something: a sharp, tingly feeling had begun to play over my hand where it had come into contact with Rachel’s skin, as if the air around my fingers was suddenly fizzing like seltzer.

  She stared at her hand, then at me, then back at her arm. “I have to go,” she whispered.

  “Don’t go, don’t go,” I said. I reached out to try and hold her in place, but she ducked away from my grip and began clumsily pulling on her jacket.

  “This was wrong,” she said. “I knew it was wrong.”

  “What was wrong?” My voice sounded embarrassingly high. “I didn’t mean to scare you. I know you don’t want…” The sentence trailed off; what I really meant was You don’t want me, but I felt myself unable to speak the words, to make them true again.

  She gave me a weary look. “You don’t know anything,” she said. Then, without looking back, she walked briskly to the door, pushed it open, and disappeared.

  * * *

  I sat there at the bar for a long time, doing nothing, thinking nothing—only picturing her face as she’d pulled away, remembering the strange tingly feeling that ha
d played over my hand.

  Finally I settled up and left. But I couldn’t imagine going home. I started walking with no purpose other than momentum itself, crossing the street when I had the signal, turning the corner when I didn’t. As I walked, Rachel’s final words echoed through my mind. You don’t know anything. You don’t know anything.

  I found myself crossing McCarren Park, heading toward the big Russian church at the park’s southern edge. I’d noticed this church many times before; with its bulbous dome, its four onion-shaped spires, it was hard to miss. But I’d never taken a particular interest in it. Today, though, I found myself drawing closer, walking up the steps, gently pushing open the door and going inside. It seemed like a good place to sit and collect myself.

  No one was there besides a thin bearded man rustling around up front, doing some fussy kind of maintenance: rearranging Bibles or something like that. I sat down in one of the back pews and looked around. The space was cavernous, dim but expansive, with lambent stained-glass windows and soaring domed ceilings. The kind of place that both amplifies and diminishes your sense of self. I felt the calculating, reptilian part of my brain retracting like a blade, making room for some downier, more diffuse sort of consciousness. I sat there for a few minutes, just looking around and spacing out, feeling my adrenaline dissipate into the thin slanted light.

  Then something strange happened. A bell rang out, and as the sound hit my body, a dark emotion shot through me. I felt perforated, literally nauseous with sadness, as if I was going to be sick. I crumpled, leaning over and putting my head between my knees.

  I had no idea where the feeling had come from, or to what it referred—only that it was connected somehow to the light through the windows and the sound of the bell and the sense memory of Rachel’s touch. I felt as though I was going to cry, but I couldn’t. I even tried squeezing my eyes to release tears, but nothing came out.

  There was nothing I could do but shudder against the feeling, rocking myself slowly until it passed. I looked up. The church had grown dim. The man in front was still arranging Bibles; he’d moved a few pews back but seemed unaware of me. I got up and walked out into the cold darkening evening.