by James Gregor
He had always drawn a great deal of his self-esteem from his involvement with bickering ideas, ephemeral arguments, and paradigm shifts expressed in demure and now increasingly obscure forms of media. He was smarter than most, he’d always thought. But Anne no longer asked his opinion about what they were doing. She went up alone into a cloud of inventive scholarship and didn’t come down again until it was time to leave the library.
Their habit was, when they finished, they would go to her apartment and cuddle on the leather sofa, before getting into bed and launching into the latest ungainly but high-spirited sexual encounter. There was something innocent and adolescent in the novice character of their movements, the fits of athletic clumsiness broken by slumps of reevaluation in which they paused and reset their positions, asking each other what worked best. The bed was like a drafting table and they were collaborating on a big project. Though they directed and trained each other, they did not talk about it afterward. Anne said she had not told anybody yet. It felt too delicate and refined to put into words, a shared conspiracy that might evanesce if exposed. When he heard this, Richard was relieved.
During those times they were not at the apartment or the library—or when Richard wasn’t with Blake, under the guise of seeing his friends that Anne otherwise found conveniently intolerable—they went all over the city to eat, to places that were high on everyone’s list. They waited in line for an hour until their patience snapped and they hissed that to wait for so long was undignified. They went to franchises: Peruvian rotisserie chicken on East Ninety-First Street and burger chains that defied expectations, and they trekked out to distant neighborhoods on Staten Island and to Queens for famed slices of pizza and acclaimed dumplings. They had the duck at Mission Chinese, the blood sausage at Estela, the chicken-liver pâté sandwich at Saltie. They ate with the dedication of food pilgrims whose time was limited, frantic, and exalted.
Based on the photographic evidence posted online, this seemed to be how most of his friends and acquaintances spent their time, and Richard felt the reassurance of conformity. He had the impression that he had become one of those people whom he had used to meet up with back home when he was still living there, the people who had moved away and then would come back to visit, who had exciting metropolitan lives, with their tender condescension and their sympathy for his obscure, unfortunate singlehood, his residency in a backwater.
During these studious interludes and cuisine displacements led by Anne, Richard’s phone became, more than it usually was, an instrument of anxiety—like a sensor designed to warn of an impending social earthquake. Occasionally he forgot to put it on silent, and the beep of an incoming message from Blake punctured whatever meal, conversation, or kiss was at hand. If Anne asked Richard with whom he was texting, and she usually did, with the appropriate tone for such distraction and rudeness, Richard blamed Patrick or his father. For the latter, he evoked a suffocating figure, a hound of concern, a man who had never gotten over the departure of his son from the household (actually, Richard’s father was gently indifferent about what Richard was doing, now that their financial bond had been largely severed—his Unitarian tolerance was mixed with libertarian detachment). For the moment, this seemed to satisfy Anne’s curiosity and put her off, but it was getting more and more difficult to account for his time and to parse out his schedule, to explain and justify his worried diversion, his constant checking of his phone and the balletic skitter of his fingers across the screen as he dispatched another frantic blast of text to Blake, or sometimes to Patrick.
What he felt for both of them, for Anne and Blake, was like a warm solvent that dissolved an armor he hadn’t even known he was wearing. He felt soft, gentle, and undefended. His calendar had not been this full in years. It pulsed with precarious, often clandestine obligations, and the complications gave him a reassuring, bolstering thrill that he was an in-demand person, a desired, loved, and wanted individual. Like an addict, soothed by the chaos of heightened sensitivity, he was happy.
And beneath that, barely registered but inevitable, there was the threat, vague enough to be ignored or construed as a kind of nervous excitement, the tremor of guilt and fear.
He ignored any misgivings. Those glorious full months of early summer—he would remember how fine the weather was—were also filled with Blake. They too went all over the city. Blake was an enthusiast of the urban experience. He said that if you spent so much money to live in a place you might as well enjoy what it had to offer in the areas of food, culture, and recreation. They went to parks and movies or spent nonvocal hours together perusing bookstores, furniture stores, design stores, clothing stores.
This was not lying, Richard felt; it was not deception, spending time with Blake and not telling Anne, and the reverse. No, it was a kind of settling scores with his past, a long-delayed, retaliatory strike on the thinly populated years of his adolescence, the affective sparseness of his early twenties, the years of lying in bed alone at night while indifferent pornography played on the computer, the squalid spectator sport of watching friends and acquaintances drift in and out of love with the languorous motion of a dream techno dance, of tall sea grass swaying in a current. Like a defeated nation, surreptitiously rebuilding its arsenal, to strike back once and for all against the enemy that has cowed it, Richard felt he had been prepping himself for a great conquest of affection, the moment when he’d make his definitive stand against solitude and raid its most precious spaces. He’d been waiting for the moment when he would be the one to whom everything was given.
As for Anne and Blake, he gave back to both of them what they gave to him—friendship, romance, sex, or otherwise. No one was left out.
* * *
RICHARD WAS USUALLY PLEASED when Blake wanted to know something more about him—this was a sign of a growing connection, after all—but when, unexpectedly one day toward the beginning of July, Blake asked Richard to show him around the campus, Richard was taken by a sense of panic.
“It’s not that interesting,” he said, trying to indicate by his tone his profound disinterest in the idea, but not feeling quite comfortable enough with Blake yet to flat-out refuse.
“It’s kind of funny I’ve lived here as long as I have and haven’t once gone up to Morningside Heights, no?” Blake said. “Or maybe not. Supposed to be dull, but so many parks. I just want to see it because you spend so much time there.”
“Is this some kind of lawyer talk?”
“What?”
“Can I see your firm then?”
“Sure, of course, I’ll show you the firm.”
“That would be nice . . . I guess,” Richard said.
“All right, so, when to see the campus?”
That Saturday, Richard reluctantly found himself heading uptown on the 1 train with Blake. Wanting to know specifically whether or not she planned to be in the library, he’d texted Anne to see where she was spending the day. He thought he remembered, from a few weeks previous, her mentioning a golf date in New Jersey with her father, but he couldn’t be sure. As was her sulky habit these days when he said he couldn’t see her, she took a long time to respond to his question and then was noncommittal. He’d already refused her once that week, when she wanted to get together on Thursday, but having already promised Blake, he said an old friend from home was in town just for one night, and he couldn’t say no to drinks.
In a series of ensuing texts Anne told him outright that she hated when they were not together, detested that space between their meetings where he could be off anywhere doing anything. He had this habit of saying “See you” when they parted, she said, and rolling his eyes in a wistful, resigned, acceding manner, as if to say there really was no telling when they would be with each other again. She felt that he was changing and growing distant. Making plans, with him, was like the leap of faith that Kierkegaard described, she said, the image of running toward the waves as they curled backward out to sea, in the hope, inevitably and eternally deferred, that they would turn bac
k and embrace you.
The easy flow of Richard’s time with Blake stood in pleasant contrast to Anne’s analysis of their current dynamic, which felt annoyingly like a critical theory dissection of some obscure poet’s last desperate work, though with actual genuine feeling coursing through it. He and Blake were not collaborating on anything except their own time together. There was no “prize” to be won in the future, like the Clio, except the prize of Blake himself, of the two of them out and about in the city, and at home. With Blake, it was easy and spontaneous, give or take an unsettling trip to campus.
As the train screeched ever closer to their destination, Richard was troubled by a sense of impending calamity. He wondered melodramatically if this was how young soldiers felt as they prepared in the moments before the start of a battle to launch themselves across a minefield.
“You’re quiet,” Blake said, with the mellow, inquisitive look on his face that Richard was starting to love.
“I need some coffee. One is not enough.”
“We’ll find you some then.”
“There’s no good coffee up here,” Richard said, his nervousness giving his words a testy inflection.
Outside, the sky was paved over by cloud, and a slight breeze had arisen. The succulent emissions of a food truck formed a curtain through which they passed.
They walked through the gates and entered the campus.
“Well, here it is!” Richard said, like a game show host. “Satisfied?”
Blake looked around.
“How about coffee then?” Richard said, smiling anxiously.
“I want a few more minutes, mister.”
Was Anne somewhere watching from high up in a window? Richard scanned the vicinity. She must have a sixth sense of his presence now. He sometimes felt linked to her in this way. It was superstitious nonsense but he couldn’t deny the feeling.
“Where’s your building?”
Richard pointed over toward what he thought might be the Economics Department.
“I want to see inside.”
“It’s probably locked.”
“Let’s try anyway.”
Richard’s throat was drying out and he swallowed with difficulty.
“Wait,” he said as Blake forged across the quad. “It’s over there.”
Richard pointed in the opposite, accurate direction.
“Why did you tell me it was over there?” Blake asked, looking puzzled.
“It moved,” Richard said. “It used to be over in that building, but it moved.”
They walked up a set of stairs.
“Will anyone be here? I want to meet one of your colleagues.”
“On a Saturday? Probably not.”
With any luck, the department would be empty and they would be out of there in a few minutes. He hoped Blake would refrain from touching him, at least. They could otherwise pass as friends.
The first floor was quiet, yet Richard felt as though some high-pitched whine, the dangerous, glass-breaking bleat of a newly discovered insect, were consolidating all consciousness to its thin, vibrating form.
Down the hall, they turned a corner and approached the departmental administrator, Carol, who was seated at a desk opposite the elevators. She had a bleached-blond crew cut, a septum ring, and an aura of annoyance.
She didn’t look up from her texting.
“Is Anne here today?” Richard asked.
Carol shook her head.
“I haven’t seen her,” she said.
“Thanks.”
They continued down the hall.
“Who is Anne?” Blake asked.
“Anne,” Richard said. “Antonella. Sometimes I call her Anne. My advisor.”
“Okay.”
“I hear my name,” someone said.
Richard went a few feet forward, turned, and looked through an open doorway, into Professor Caputo’s office. Antonella was sitting in his chair, wearing a forest-green turtleneck.
“Hi,” Richard said. “You’re here.”
“Hi,” said Antonella.
“What are you doing here?” Richard asked. “It’s Saturday.”
“Dima’s away. I thought I would get some work done. My computer is infected with malware so I’m using Rino’s.”
Blake peered in from behind, his chin resting on Richard’s shoulder. Antonella nodded in his direction.
“Blake, this is Antonella Bolongaro. Antonella, meet Blake.”
“Pleasure.”
“Nice to meet you.”
“What are you doing here today?” she asked. “You should be having an overpriced brunch in Greenpoint or Fort Greene, whichever.”
“We already have,” Blake said, smiling.
“We’re just looking around,” Richard said, trying to maneuver his description into territory that was sufficiently vague but not over a cliff into conspicuous meaninglessness. He moved slightly to dislodge Blake’s chin. “I thought I’d show Blake the department.”
“What do you think, Blake?”
“Nice spot.”
Antonella nodded.
“It could use some paint though,” she said, looking disapprovingly at a dark spot high on the wall to her left, to which she pointed.
“Well, we’ll leave you to it,” Richard said, with manifest abruptness.
“So soon?”
He nodded.
“Before you go, I wanted to ask you something.”
“What’s that?”
Richard glanced at Blake, and Blake returned his glance with an even scrutiny. Was this the expression Blake employed in court when he wanted to intimidate a plaintiff?
“There was something familiar in one of the papers.” Antonella put a finger to her lips before reaching into a leather attaché case canted at a dangerous angle on the edge of the desk. She briefly rifled around. “I don’t think I have it with me.”
Richard was immensely grateful, in that moment, for Antonella’s disorganization. Someone with a firmer grasp on their papers might have noticed patterns and murky parallels between his work and Anne’s. There certainly existed algorithms one could employ to pinpoint these sorts of dubious similarities, but Antonella was also fortunately too low-tech for that.
“Can you remember what it was?” he asked, striking a pose of innocent curiosity.
“You haven’t recycled anything from earlier papers, have you?”
“Hmm,” he said with raised eyebrows. “I don’t think so.”
“I know it can happen. When you’re tired, you don’t even realize it.”
Richard shook his head.
“I really don’t think so.”
“You have to be very clear if you’re quoting yourself,” Antonella said. “I’m being direct. I know you know this, but just a friendly reminder.”
“Of course, I’ll be careful.”
“Especially for the Clio Prize submission,” she said. “Those judges won’t be as forgiving as me for that kind of mistake.”
“True.”
She was staring at him and he suddenly felt quite sure that she knew everything; she was communicating with him, but across a plane of no judgment, a smooth zone of acceptance. Perhaps she forgave him and dismissed the potential drama of catching him as too exhausting. They were allies, after all, united in their obsolescence. And she had enough on her plate—not just academic duties but administrative responsibilities. No one bothered to appreciate Petrarch anymore, adjuncts were turning to prostitution and sleeping in their cars; the people’s confidence in higher education had been destroyed; the philological method languished.
Richard’s heart was pounding. Maybe it was nothing. Maybe she suspected no one. But what did she mean?
“What was that about?” Blake asked, as they went outside into a breeze and Richard wiped a trickle of sweat from his forehead, trying to maintain his composure.
“I don’t know.”
They walked over to the Alma Mater statue and sat down.
“Why was she wearing a
turtleneck?”
Richard’s phone buzzed and he slid it out of his pocket.
ARE YOU ON CAMPUS? Anne wrote.
He stared at the screen, wondering if she and Antonella were now in a conspiracy of direct communication about him.
“It is very nice here,” Blake said, looking at the brick at their feet, a geometric pattern that extended out over the ground before descending into a shapely junction of cement paths and lawns, framed by a hazy sequence of Ionic columns.
“Yeah, it is,” Richard agreed distractedly.
DID YOU JUST TEXT ME? Richard wrote back. THE MESSAGE IS GARBLED.
He glanced back toward the department.
I’M IN THE DEPARTMENT. ANTONELLA SAID YOU WERE JUST HERE.
“Let’s go,” Richard said, standing up. “Come on.”
“Yes, sir.”
He took Blake’s hand.
“This way.”
As they walked, he texted.
YES, BUT I’M ON THE TRAIN NOW. GOING TO LOSE RECEPTION.
They turned a corner and he glanced back to see Anne emerge from the department building and scan the immediate surroundings with rapid-fire jerks of her head.
“This is taking us away from the subway,” Blake said.
“I want to walk for a bit.”
Anne texted again.
ANTONELLA SAID THERE WAS SOMEONE WITH YOU. WHO WERE YOU WITH?
Richard put his phone away.
“That’s the law library,” he said to Blake, pointing to an imposing and dreary concrete structure. They passed brusquely out onto Amsterdam Avenue.
WHAT ARE YOU DOING? she wrote again. Richard turned off his phone. They took a circuitous path up to 125th Street, where they got onto the A train. His right eye twitched and fluttered, as if a speck of dust had landed in it. He felt awful.
“Where are you taking us?” Blake asked, his voice amused, sensing how flustered Richard was. Perhaps Blake attributed it to Antonella’s suspicion, which was partly its cause, though it was heavily compounded by the guilt Richard felt at abandoning Anne.
“I just haven’t walked up here in a while.”
The train heaved loose and began to travel south.