Besotted

by Melissa Duclos

  “You own a condo.”

  “I do.”

  “In Shanghai. You own a condo in Shanghai. That’s crazy.”

  Dorian shrugged. “Not that crazy.”

  “Have you told your mother?”

  “Not yet,” he answered. “I want to get it all set up and then send her pictures.” Liz nodded in agreement as though it was his choice of a sofa and not his decision to settle permanently halfway across the world that would matter to his mother.

  “Was it a hard thing to do? Buying, I mean?”

  Dorian laughed. “You heard what I had to go through. All the forms. The silent ‘partner’ they gave me.”

  “Right. Yeah. I guess I mean, though, was it hard to decide to do it? To commit to something so permanent?”

  “Oh, I don’t know. It’s kind of weird, but it wasn’t really one moment that I decided to do it. There was the moment I guess that I decided to look into it, but that wasn’t hard because I was only investigating. You know? Feeling out the possibilities. And then the wheels just started turning. It was just, submit this form, go here and stand in this line, that kind of thing. I just went through the process as it was laid out, and then I had a condo.”

  They both paused to think about this. Liz wouldn’t have pointed out the obvious connection, because she didn’t want to start talking about me again, but there it was: there was no moment when she officially decided that she’d be with me forever. She was only just investigating, and now here we were with a new apartment. A one-year lease would become two, would become four and suddenly we’d be 30-something, still going out every weekend, because that’s what the 30-somethings did in Shanghai—Liz had seen them—still spending their money on travel and expensive restaurants, the kinds of things that proved their lives were forever transitory and therefore exciting.

  “It’s just like anything else,” Dorian continued. “You just start the process without thinking too much about it, and before you know it, you’ve arrived somewhere you never thought you’d be.”

  “Before you know it,” Liz echoed.

  Dorian smiled and Liz waited for him to offer her more important life advice. Maybe he’d already given all he had though. She was on cosmo number four and couldn’t quite be sure. Instead of advice, he reached across the table and offered the tip of his index finger, tapping softly against hers.

  It was a kind of Morse code neither one of them could quite translate. Still they sat, finishing their drinks without making eye contact, allowing their fingertips to speak to each other through the drunken haze of disappointment in which they both felt trapped.

  “Do you want to get out of here?”

  “Yes,” Liz answered quickly, suddenly feeling like she’d spent her entire life in that bar.

  When they stepped out onto the sidewalk it was dark out. Liz couldn’t remember when that had happened. She felt unsteady on her feet and caught herself on Dorian’s arm. He put a hand on her waist. Before you know it, she thought, and then wondered how much of life was like this: a thing you said out loud first and then made come true.

  What happens next is hazy. There was a moment when she was aware of the span of his hand on the small of her back. When he reached to unlock the door, she wanted to put the keys aside and press her palm to his, to feel her smallness in the bend of his fingertips.

  There was hesitation, and then there wasn’t.

  “We don’t have to,” somebody said.

  “But we should.” Someone else.

  She’d have to tip her head up, not down, to kiss him.

  Love is not of the body. People remind themselves of this all the time, they do. They remind themselves and they forget; over and over again they forget. Love is not of the body and can only be found there if she is carried.

  There are scenes that don’t make it into my version of the story or hers, because I can’t bring myself to conjure them and Liz certainly didn’t photograph them.

  8.

  I woke up early, my hand reaching out in the dark searching the cool tangle of sheets on the other side of the bed for Liz, failing to understand why I found nothing. Maybe I lay there for hours, maybe not so long—the clock was still unplugged, my phone still off—but eventually I remembered. I stood up and walked to the windows, opened the curtains just slightly, allowing the hazy morning light to creep in. With it came an array of facts, marching into the room and lining up in front of the bed. Liz didn’t come home last night. Liz went to a language exchange yesterday and didn’t come back. Liz didn’t respond to any of my messages. Liz didn’t come see the new apartment. For facts, they told me very little. Nothing, actually. I had to get out of the apartment.

  When I started walking, I didn’t know where I was going. I certainly wasn’t looking for Liz; even I knew that would be foolish. There was a part of me that was nervous about leaving, wondering what would happen if she returned to the apartment while I was gone. I wondered if I should have left a note: You were gone, now I am gone, and soon we will both return and put behind us this idea of ever being gone again. Or just, Fuck You. I wanted to be forgiving and beautiful and angry all at the same time, unsure as I was what she was really looking for.

  Without meaning to, I walked to the closest Starbucks. How interesting, I thought as I found myself standing in front of the door, and then like a detective I stepped inside, aware it was the last place I knew Liz had gone. But remember, this is a love story, not a mystery. Liz hadn’t been dragged out of the establishment, her body had not been dumped in an alley. She was just hiding, but then maybe she always had been.

  There was no line; 8:30 a.m. was not a time the Chinese thought appropriate for coffee. I didn’t really want any either, but I thought ordering something would bring me closer to her, as though I could channel my lover through hot espresso and foam. I tried to order my latte in Chinese, but the boy behind the counter looked at me strangely, and I accepted that nothing that day was as it seemed.

  “A medium latte, please,” I said, knowing I wasn’t using proper Starbucks terminology. This, the boy didn’t seem to mind. He handed me a mug and I winced, as though the sight of it physically pained me. Then I turned and found a seat in the corner, an armchair with a small end table beside it. Before I sat down I shifted it, ever so slightly to the left and toward the wall. After I sat, I found that I could continue to rotate the seat, little by little. Sip, sip, shift. Sip, sip, shift. By the time I was a third of the way done with the drink I was facing the wall, my back to the door of the café. I slouched all the way down in the chair, held my mug between my thighs.

  One day I thought this would all be funny. I imagined us, telling and retelling the stories: Remember when you disappeared for 24 hours? Chuckle chuckle. I sent you all those text messages, and you just ignored them. Oh, I know, and I was sitting there wondering why you wouldn’t just leave me alone. Oh, God, and I went to Starbucks. That’s how desperate I was. Laugh laugh sigh. That’s how alone I was. Hilarious.

  I don’t know how long I sat there: long enough to drink half a latte, to let the remaining half grow cold. I knew I needed to get a handle on time, could not let it keep slipping away unobserved like this. I needed to get home. The feeling seized me suddenly and I rushed out of the coffee shop, leaving my armchair facing the wall. I hurried down the sidewalk, contemplated hailing a cab but decided that given the traffic it might actually be slower than walking. Liz was on her way home, perhaps already in the apartment waiting for me—how else to explain the desperate and inexplicable urge I felt to get back?

  I hopped up and down in the lobby of the building, trying to speed the elevator along with my mind. When I finally reached the apartment though, it was empty, just the way I’d left it. I sat down on the couch and cried, for five minutes, then 10, then 20, refusing to let time pass unnoticed any longer, even in my grief. After 25 minutes the tears dried up, and I understood that there was nothing left.

  “Okay, Liz, I get it,” I said aloud, as though we’d been
having a conversation over the past 24 hours. We had, really: I had said the things I thought were right to say, I’d feigned that everything was normal through a fitful night of sleep, I’d tried to conjure a lost connection to her. Liz’s response was the same after each of these attempts, and so I finally understood that there was nothing left for me to say.

  I was still moving out of the apartment in three days. Nothing Liz had done would change the lease upon which I had signed my name. I went into our room to start packing. But when I opened the drawers, I was faced with Liz’s clothes—her t-shirts and jeans and her old bras that I hated but also loved. I gathered it all in a ball—not everything she owned but enough—and carried it out to the small balcony off our room. I stood there for a moment, holding the bundle of clothes aloft, looking down at the driveway below.

  That’s when I saw her: the small figure walking in circles in front of the building, stopping and starting, sitting down and standing back up again. I held my breath, watching Liz walk to the end of the driveway, then turn around and come back. Finally, she walked close enough to the building that she was out of view. She didn’t return, and I understood that she had come inside.

  I stood frozen for a moment, still holding her clothes, unsure what to do with them. After a moment’s hesitation, I peeled one bra out of the pile and let it go, watching as it fluttered down to the pavement below. I needed to see what it looked like when it landed. Then I stepped back inside to wait for Liz.

  Love sat in the corner, squinting in the morning sunshine that streamed through the open curtain. She blinked slowly and saw shimmering dust motes dancing in front of her eyes. She held her breath and felt her pulse in her solar plexus. Exhaled. Held her breath again.

  9.

  There must’ve been a part of her that contemplated leaving without ever coming back to the apartment. Her clothes were replaceable, and wouldn’t it have been nice to have a fresh start. But then she remembered the piles of cash in the locked drawer and she spoke the address to the cab driver more loudly than she’d meant to. She probably didn’t understand any of this: her sudden need to flee from me, the pressure she felt, the slow sinking sensation. Her taxi crept through a tangle of Shanghai traffic while Liz tried to convince herself to feel something different. I can hear her thoughts in my head:

  It’s just a new apartment, she told herself first. It’s not really changing anything.

  Sasha loves you. She will continue to love you.

  You’ll find a new job.

  You don’t know what you want, what will make you happy, so how can you determine what is making you unhappy?

  She loves you.

  Sasha loves you.

  Even as the refrain echoed through her head, she must have wondered if it was still true. I had loved her, before she disappeared for over 24 hours, before she refused to participate in our future, before she slept with Dorian. The cab pulled into the driveway and Liz realized that she’d wasted the entire ride on thoughts that would have been more useful to her yesterday. Today, all of her decisions had been made. The only thing left for her was to determine what to say to me when she went upstairs.

  I’m just here for my money.

  I’m sorry and I love you.

  I’m sorry but I love you.

  I know you slept with Dorian. We’re even now.

  I love you, but I’m sorry.

  I have to go.

  She paced in the driveway. She sat down on the curb just in front of the door, then stood up again. She conjured hour-long conversations with me in which she herself said everything she’d always wanted to say and then forgot the words instantly. She cried for a moment and then stopped, feeling stupid and naked but still not ready to go inside. She pouted briefly and called herself an idiot. She thought of blaming me, of blaming Dorian, blaming Bryan, or blaming her parents and then she forgot the meaning of blame altogether, failed to see what good it would do her and dropped it in the bushes. She walked halfway down the driveway, determined to go sit in a Starbucks for the rest of the day, until her absence would speak louder than anything she could say, and then she turned around, realizing that had already happened. Finally, she came inside.

  She didn’t know what she would say, but she decided, as she pressed the button for the twentieth floor and ascended toward the apartment that was once hers but now wasn’t, that it didn’t really matter. There were only four words—I slept with Dorian—that were important; Liz held them in her mouth like a jawbreaker. She would wait for the moment to spit them out and it would be done.

  She opened the door to the apartment and was surprised to see me sitting at the dining table just a few feet away, staring at her.

  “Hi,” I said. Just like that. Liz must have thought of the days, months and months and months ago, before she knew the taste of me, the exact slope of my collarbone, when I was forever cooking and watching her. Should she have known something then? Did she know anything now?

  “Hi,” she answered.

  “Do you want to sit?”

  I know that she very much did not want to sit.

  But I wanted for us to trade our stories: Once upon a time, there was you and there was me. You thought that I was magic. We kept secrets from the world, and also from each other. We lied to everyone we saw. But lying was hard and soon we were just doing it to each other, and ourselves. Maybe I believed we could build a whole life like this, until you tried to run away. You looked back once to say goodbye, even though you didn’t want to.

  “I’m not going to yell at you, Liz,” I said. “Just sit down.”

  She sat. “Sorry.” This could mean any number of things.

  “I signed the lease.”

  “I know.”

  “It’s a really nice apartment.”

  “I’m happy for you.” I’m sure this was absolutely true.

  I paused for a moment, considering my next words carefully. “Why aren’t you happy for us?”

  “I slept with Dorian.”

  I nodded slowly. “Is this a cause or an effect, do you think?”

  I’m still thinking of the story: I thought we could build a whole life like this, and so you slept with Dorian, trying to run away. Or: I thought we could build a whole life like this. Meanwhile, you slept with Dorian, and so you had to run away. Either one worked.

  Liz wasn’t prepared for this question.

  “I know you slept with him, too.” It was neither cause nor effect: just another lie we told each other.

  For the first time since Liz entered the apartment, I was surprised. I stood up from the table, laughing. “He told you that?” More laughter, and Liz must’ve realized she’d been stupid.

  I walked away from the dining table, laughing and shaking my head all the way into the bedroom. Liz didn’t follow. She’d told her four-word story.

  10.

  I sat down on the bed, looked over at the clock and saw a blank face staring back at me. I’d never plugged it back in. Minutes were important though, very important; I needed a way to gather them up and hold onto them forever. The inventor of the hourglass must have felt the same way, must have leapt for joy at the idea that time could be counted like grains of sand, could be contained within smooth glass and turned over and over within one’s hand. He must’ve been giddy with that power.

  I didn’t know how many minutes passed. I didn’t cry, which was surprising. Or maybe not. After some minutes had passed, let’s say I heard the bedroom door click open and then shut. Let’s say Liz sat down beside me.

  “I thought we were more than this,” I said.

  “Sometimes we were,” Liz answered.

  “I thought we could handle anything.”

  “Why?”

  “Doesn’t everyone believe that? We can do anything together—isn’t that what everyone says?”

  “Most people are wrong. Divorce rates and all that.”

  “Oh. Right.” I didn’t tend to think about divorce in terms of percentages.

  We
sat in silence for five, maybe six grains of sand.

  “So how can you ever tell?”

  “Tell what?”

  “How can you tell when to stay and fight it out? Things get hard sometimes, and people stay and fight. All the time it happens. Everyday people wake up and look at each other sadly. They yell and scream and cry and fuck and wake up the next day and everything’s okay. Or maybe not the next day. Maybe it’s a whole year of waking up and looking sad and feeling scared but deciding to stay.”

  “That’s true.” Liz nodded. “Some people maybe do that for their whole lives.”

  “It wouldn’t take us that long,” I whispered.

  “It might.”

  “But it might not!”

  “You can’t force it like that.”

  “Force what?”

  “The yelling and screaming and crying and fucking and waking up tomorrow. It doesn’t work like that.”

  I looked down at my hands. “How does it work?”

  “We say goodbye.”

  “I still don’t understand why.”

  “This whole thing was a lie.”

  “If I were a man?”

  “It would still be a lie.”

  “It was true for me, though.”

  “Okay.”

  I inhaled then exhaled. Inhaled then exhaled. Inhaled and stopped. Waited. Waited. Exhaled. Because the bed beside me was empty. It’s impossible to say whether the conversation happened in my mind on that day, or for the first time right now, or maybe on a thousand days in between then and now.

  When I went back out into the living room that morning, finally ready to talk, Liz was gone.

  I stood there, looking at the air where she used to be. It was cool in the apartment and I shivered. I sat back down at the table and noticed the note. She had written on the back of an envelope, and so at first I mistook the paper for just another scrap of our lives, one more thing I’d have to deal with when I moved out. When I read it I laughed.