by James Gregor
Richard momentarily considered, then decided against describing recent events. What would he say, that he’d driven away all those people he cared about most in New York—Blake, Anne, and, as Barrett surely now knew, Patrick? Barrett was a straightforward person, averse to pointless complications. Like Blake, he would become a useful instrument of adjudication, massaging disputes with the pressure of abstract rules, breaking disagreements, allocating blame and money, and not wasting his time discussing the vague pap of the human imagination. Also, Richard was afraid of how close Barrett and Patrick had become. Perhaps Barrett already knew everything; perhaps Barrett knew about Richard’s deceptions. But this worried him strangely little. It was much more that Richard did not want to start a discussion that might reveal Barrett was aware of developments in Patrick’s life of which he, Richard, was now ignorant.
“I moved out of my apartment,” Richard said. “I’m living with Blake now.” Richard’s formally moving in hadn’t been discussed yet, but it was the de facto state of things, and this rounding-up was easier than explaining the fuzzy middle ground that they currently occupied.
“Congratulations. Where’s the new place?”
“Clinton Hill.”
“You should have a housewarming.”
“Maybe we will.”
Even as he said this, Richard somewhere knew it would never happen.
“Amir and I just took in his cousin. He’s working for some demented producer who keeps throwing leather backpacks at him. He’s so worried they’ll fire him he goes into Ambien comas and posts gibberish on Facebook. Are you in therapy?”
“Not yet.” Richard sipped his beer. “Does it help?”
“Can’t say. I usually always feel the same.”
“Me too,” Richard agreed grimly.
He ran his hand along the pitted surface of some worn oak molding. “You’re the perfect type to go,” Barrett said. “I always kind of picture you in a bean bag chair with your legs tucked under you, books, and you like eating Kraft Macaroni and Cheese Dinner or something.”
It was a dubiously accurate image.
“Did Patrick tell you that?”
“Not exactly. Well, yes.”
“I wish he would shut his mouth sometimes,” Richard said. He felt a gratifying blast of anger along his arms.
“It’s always affectionate.”
“I’m sure. What else did he say?”
“He said you’re polite on the outside and scathing on the inside; full of one-liners but too polite to use them until afterward.”
Barrett poured himself another glass of beer. Perhaps Barrett didn’t know the details of Richard’s break with Patrick. It was after all a characteristic of Patrick’s maddening dignity that he would keep this salacious information to himself.
“What have you heard from him in San Francisco?” Richard asked.
“He seems to like it.”
“They all do.”
“Vladimir has been out there a few times. It’s pretty annoying.”
“I haven’t heard from Patrick in a while.”
“He said you haven’t been in touch.”
“I haven’t been in touch?”
Barrett shrugged.
“Maybe I should get in touch and tell him what an asshole he is,” Richard said. The moment the word left his mouth, he regretted it.
“Why would you do that?”
Richard looked toward the bar, his face burning. He shook his head.
“I wouldn’t do that. I would never do that.”
The waiter returned and passed Barrett the bill. There was a phone number written on it in red pen. Barrett tilted his head to one side and sighed heavily.
“I’d sit on it,” he said. “But just for tonight.”
When Richard got home, he could tell that Blake was in a bad mood. The apartment was dark except for a light over the table. Blake was sitting there with his laptop and a stack of documents.
“You smell like smoke,” Blake said. His hands were poised on the keyboard.
Richard took off his shoes and walked into the kitchen. He leaned down and wrapped his arms around Blake from behind.
“I did smoke a cigarette.”
“Who with?”
“Only one though. With Barrett. I saw him on campus.”
Richard stood up straight and rubbed his face with both hands.
“I didn’t think you were going to be so late,” Blake said.
“Neither did I.”
“Are you tipsy?” Blake asked.
“I drank some beer. I guess I’m a bit drunk. Nothing some bread and water won’t fix.”
“There’s part of a baguette left from the meal, which of course I ate alone.” Blake’s voice was taut.
Tired from the beer, the agitation of his meeting with Antonella, and the long day in general, Richard sighed.
“I’m sure I told you I might be late.”
“I still had to eat alone.”
“What should I say?”
“It’s depressing coming home to an empty apartment.”
“I know, I’m sorry. Didn’t I say that already?”
“Then, you know—why not be here? It would be nice to eat together, you know?”
Richard swallowed as he imagined this scene replaying itself, the stress of watching the clock wherever he was, of cutting short any spontaneous engagement and rushing home through the twisted intestine of the transit system, worried that he would find Blake sitting at this very table, illuminated by the overhead light that cast the rest of the kitchen into darkness, like some interrogator in a basement jail. It was not a scenario whose gloomy power was neutralized by his love for Blake. It was a goal imposed on him that he would never reach, a test that he was compelled to take repeatedly but would always fail.
“Yes,” he said, exhaling. “I understand that.”
“At the end of the day I want to see you.”
“Can’t I have a drink with a friend?”
“Oh my God—don’t make me feel like I’m holding you hostage.”
Blake stood up and went to the kitchen. He had an agitated expression on his face.
“Are you hungry?” he asked. “I’ll make you something.”
What is he doing? Richard wondered with annoyance.
“You don’t have to do that,” he said.
“I’ll make you a fried-egg sandwich.”
“No, don’t.”
“I want to.”
Blake opened the fridge and leaned into the beaming chill. Richard poured himself a glass of water and sat down with it at the table.
“Do you need me?” Blake asked.
Richard tensed. The question was insurmountable. It was impossible to arrange the potential responses in their proper order. They all struggled at once to get out and in the process choked off any escape, like people trying to flee a burning house. What was the symmetry that would explain everything? What was the design that would leave Blake unhurt—only crediting the rightness of the answer? Yes, he needed Blake; yes, he felt as though he wanted to get up and leave.
Blake turned on the burner and cracked an egg into a frying pan, where it sizzled and bubbled.
“Yes, I need you,” Richard said. Blake sliced two pieces of bread and inserted them into the toaster. “Why are you so needy today?”
“I’m not needy. I just want you there.”
“There?”
“There,” Blake said impatiently. “With me.”
“When am I not there? I’m there. I’m here right now.”
“You’re not open. You’re opaque, actually.”
Blake was shaking his head, and Richard frowned. He raised an eyebrow, staring at the table.
“Is this about your friends?”
Blake flipped the egg and sprinkled it with pepper, not answering. He put the two pieces of toast on a plate, and then angled the fried egg on top.
“Why are you cooking? Is this another dig at me?”
“Sometime
s I think you’ve never heard a single word I’ve said to you,” Blake said, putting the plate down in front of Richard. With a knife and fork, Richard began slicing up the fried egg sandwich. The yoke burst and spread across the plate. “Are you unsatisfied?”
“Everybody is unsatisfied,” Richard said. “Everybody around here anyway. Everybody in this city.”
“Not everybody,” Blake said. “Jeff and Ramon aren’t unsatisfied.”
“They don’t live here. And they probably are.”
“I don’t think they are.”
“They were unsatisfied with me. They were judging me. So were you.”
“Why are you doing this?”
“What do you want?” Richard asked, putting the knife and fork down on the plate.
“I want what they have—what Ramon and Jeff have.”
“That awful kid?”
“Not the kid. Maybe the kid. Whatever it is they have. The peace.”
They stared at each other across the thickening neutrality of the table.
“I thought you wanted that too,” Blake said.
* * *
IN THE QUIET THAT followed their argument, Richard said he was going to sleep at his place. He washed the dish and put it in the drying rack. Blake sat down with an air of rumination at the kitchen table, his computer and a stack of documents at hand. He told Richard to text when he got home. Richard kissed him on the top of the head and left.
He walked the entire way, the sidewalk piebald with shadow. Save for a lone young man who went along the curb with his phone close to his face, a gleam on his bearded skin, Richard’s street was deserted when he arrived. But there were lights on in the building.
He went inside and climbed the stairs to the apartment. Their door closed, a fan rotating audibly inside the room, Leslie and Courtney were already asleep. He got into bed and turned off his light, spreading his limbs out in the empty bed.
He didn’t respond to Blake’s message the next morning asking if he’d arrived home safely, and he didn’t answer any of the other more worried and impatient texts that continued to arrive intermittently throughout the day. If he answered, a predictable conversation would follow: he would have to explain why he hadn’t yet acknowledged and replied. They would need to address their conversation from the night before. It would mean Richard would have to admit he had no clue what he wanted anymore.
Until Blake had calmed down, until there was some air to breathe between them, he would leave it a little while longer.
His phone rang several times, but he didn’t pick up. An email came to his inbox. He left it unanswered. It went on like this for several days, as Richard deferred to an equivocal but considered neglect. His guilt increased, but he also felt distant from any move to respond. Finally the guilt seemed to reach a plateau, and then to settle. As he realized he was not going to respond, it was accompanied by a feeling that he identified as relief.
The messages eventually stopped, but then after a pause of several days, in which it was starkly obvious to Richard what a terrible thing he’d done, another text from Blake arrived saying:
I SEE YOU’RE ACTIVE ON FACEBOOK SO AT LEAST I KNOW YOU’RE STILL ALIVE.
But no more texts came after that.
TWENTY-FOUR
Orientation was over and the semester was under way a week later.
That week—which had started slowly and densely, like the inertial rumble of an old locomotive gripping iron tracks—accelerated and became headlong and reckless as the second and final Clio deadline arrived. The air of the campus seemed to twitch and plunge with the excitement and promise of the freshmen students. It was the optimistic end of school: the beginning.
For Richard, there was little point in being on campus. He could have done this—his ritual of sluggish stagnation—anywhere; he could have been at home, in the irritating nest with Courtney and Leslie. He did not admit to himself that the reason had to be the possibility of running into Anne. Of course he had not reached out to her at Antonella’s behest. And now that she’d submitted her Clio, she was probably taking a break, had other things to do, or she had decided to avoid the library because she didn’t want to see him. In any case, there was no sign of her in the streets, in the library, or on his phone, though she took her place in the throng of ghosts that drifted around the campus now—a clutch of notables, the wraith of Patrick, the looming specter of Antonella, Richard’s own ectoplasmic prolific former self.
Maybe it was best that she wasn’t there. Even though Anne had observed him for months in his inert, parasitic mode, he felt that he must look worse now, more frustrated and impotent, flat and beset, sitting there all day in the light of the computer screen, running his hands through his hair with nervous flicks. He rarely typed a word, though his curled index finger hung just above the keyboard for long stretches.
Then one day she appeared on the other side of the table as Richard stared futilely off into space. Her presence was so familiar, he did not immediately react. When he looked up he expected it to be one of the new undergraduates who had begun colonizing the library and crowding him.
He straightened up in his seat.
“Hi,” he said.
“Can I sit here?” she asked.
“Go ahead.” He nodded.
“I’m not disturbing you?”
“No,” he said.
She pulled out her laptop. He wondered if she was there to talk but soon the familiar look of gathered focus entered her eyes. He wondered if she had come with the express purpose of interrupting him, of spreading a wrecking static into the room. They sat there not speaking for a long time, and though Richard was now doubly unable to concentrate, the familiar sense of reassurance, the comfort at having her across the table from him again, returned along with her presence.
Eventually, when he couldn’t stay there or silent any longer, he suggested they get coffee. A moment of hesitation was evident, but she agreed. They went to Starbucks, paid separately, and brought their iced Americanos back to the steps of the library. They looked out over the campus, where a humid film had settled.
“How are Erin and Alicia?” he asked.
“They’re fine. Still in Queens. I see them once in a while. How are Leslie and Courtney?”
“They’re fine too. Her belly keeps growing. I’ll have to move soon, but I haven’t done anything about it.”
“I’m not surprised.”
“You’re not?”
“Not really.”
“Yeah, well.”
He thought he saw her conceal a smile. For a moment, they sipped their coffees in silence. A group of slim, sinewy runners went past in a pneumatic trance.
“What are you working on these days?” he tried.
“I had an abstract accepted to a conference in Houston. Pietro Aretino.”
“Ah, interesting.”
“What are you working on?” she asked, though he was sure that she knew the answer. They were doing a dance.
“I’m still working on the Clio submission,” he said. He glanced at her to gauge her reaction.
“And?”
“I’m already late, but I got an extension. I’m going to be late again.”
She nodded but didn’t say anything.
“I’m trying to use that idea you had about the Modistae and jump off from there. I hope you don’t mind.”
She sighed. “I don’t mind, Richard.”
* * *
THAT NIGHT HE LAY in bed absorbed by what it was like being there with her, in the library, what an odd, out-of-date person she was, how she remained indifferent to the tragic—or entertaining—distraction of the present. Maybe he’d been wrong in thinking that what Blake did was so noble, the defense lawyer guaranteeing a fair chance for the persecuted, and that what he and Anne did together was so pointless.
He decided to text her.
IT WAS GOOD TO SEE YOU TODAY.
He hardly expected a response, certainly not one in the middle of the night, but sh
e replied almost immediately.
I CAN’T SLEEP.
NEITHER CAN I. WHY CAN’T YOU SLEEP?
NOISE.
I FORGOT TO TELL YOU THAT I SAW ANTONELLA. SHE TOLD ME YOUR CLIO SUBMISSION WAS A MASTERPIECE.
THAT’S NICE OF HER TO SAY.
Richard hesitated.
I MISS YOU, he wrote.
She didn’t reply.
MAYBE I’LL SEE YOU IN THE LIBRARY AGAIN. I’M THERE ALL THE TIME.
IT WAS GOOD SEEING YOU.
He decided to be direct.
I NEED YOUR HELP, ANNE.
?
THE CLIO. CAN I SHOW YOU WHAT I’VE WRITTEN?
He put down his phone, then picked it up again. He scrolled back to the beginning of their conversation and read through it once more. He was happy to be texting again; it felt good to be in a back-and-forth with someone he cared about, to be connected in the city, in the austere silent middle of the night.
SEND ME WHAT YOU HAVE AND I’LL TAKE A LOOK.
THANK YOU.
And suddenly there they were: back at the library in their usual places. He brought out his laptop and for a while sat there in silence across from her as she worked with a glare on her face. He thought about getting a newspaper from the rack of world newspapers—they seemed to have everything—but then decided just to sit and wait in silence, like a penitent.
When she began her critique she was initially cold, almost scolding him, but her arctic formality eventually softened.
“There’s a lot of good stuff in here,” she said, not able to fully suppress her enthusiasm and, he found himself hoping, her affection.
He came around and sat beside her, listening with flattering scrutiny as she outlined a revised structure for the submission. She even praised some of the points he’d made.
Maybe she did think he was stupid, he thought, but that was okay. He was stupid, compared to her. She did not mean, and had never meant, to hurt him. She abhorred the idea of doing harm to anyone; she was practically a Jain in this respect. It was miraculous that she even tolerated his presence after what he’d done, let alone agreed to help him.