Imagine Me Gone

by Adam Haslett

  I’d experienced this before, but only while still drunk. If my high happened to dissipate gently enough, I could sometimes make it back to my shower and bed before the soreness caught up with me. But hooking up most often meant knuckling through a contraction of hope the following morning. A rescission of the pleasures of a few hours earlier. It drew down my workaday armor—the belief in the worthwhileness of ordinary things—leaving me raw and tightened against the rawness. But not this morning. It seemed as if a glaze had been washed from my senses, brightening the sound of the traffic up ahead on the avenue, separating the bus’s pneumatic brakes from the bass chug of the delivery-truck engines and the whir and bump of gliding taxis.

  I had nothing to read on the subway and I didn’t want to listen to music that would displace the echo of the song Seth had played me. I looked at my fellow passengers instead, taking in their shorn, wary affect, the aspiration to undisturbed nonpresence guarded by newspapers, gaming devices, books, and headsets. They avoided my open gaze as they would a beggar or lunatic. Normally, I would be full of tiny aversions, or avarice for other people’s lives. The absence of all that disoriented me. That I could stand there swaying with the motion of the train, badly late to work, in a state of such democratic calm, almost affectionate toward my fellow riders—how sappy! But even my cynicism didn’t last more than another stop. The heedless goodwill stayed with me all the way home.

  By lunchtime, Seth had texted and we had made a plan for dinner the following night. I hadn’t dreamed it. Something had happened.

  The next evening, he showed up at the restaurant dressed for a date. He had shaved and put on dark fitted jeans and a blue oxford shirt. I stood up from behind the table, and awkwardly put my hand out for him to shake. The obviousness of his nerves took the edge off mine. He clearly wanted to be here. And I wanted us to skip over comparing notes on life in the city and dive right back into where we had left off. But that would risk a look of incomprehension on his face, an indication that I had, in fact, been alone in the moment I thought we had shared. That I was the corny, besotted one who needed to grow up and take it easy. I had picked the restaurant because it was quiet, but I regretted that now, wishing for the distraction of voices and music and waiters squeezing past.

  Soon I had fumbled into a question about what kinds of things he designed, falling right into the script of the Internet date I had wanted to avoid, that face-off across a table stripped of all context and fellow feeling, and supported by nothing more than the mutual assumption of loneliness, a social form that had always struck me as rigged to fail. It didn’t matter to me what he designed so long as he would go home with me after dinner.

  He talked about graphics and websites. I wanted to stop him and say, Wait, not yet. But I said nothing, and he went on, about album covers, freelance work, and projects of his own. Caught in the train of it now, I asked more questions, realizing as I half listened to his replies that the relief his nervousness had allowed me was being replaced by a sense of deflation. He had put some kind of gel in his hair to keep its mildly disheveled look in place. His lightly freckled skin was scrubbed and moisturized. He had prepared for tonight, he had considered carefully what to wear, trying on different outfits, looking at himself in the mirror, keen to make a good impression. How could this person, who had seemed to have none of this self-consciousness before, take us back to where I thought we had been? Had he just accidentally opened a vein in me through which that song had entered? Did he even register the difference between this moment and that?

  He asked if I’d like to share an appetizer, and what wine I preferred. He was tangled up in politeness, which by default I matched and parried, moving on to social autopilot.

  I wanted the evening to start over. I wanted to whisper something suggestive in his ear as soon as he arrived, preserving the mystery by ushering us back through the curtain again into the vaguer, richer world of romance. None of this disastrous self-reporting, this checklist discovery of “things in common.”

  He asked about my journalism, and I retailed a few stories about the more colorful characters, and the excesses of the political fund-raising I covered. It was easy to impress people from outside that world with the extremity of it, trading on the insiderism my reporting was meant to pierce.

  The chitchat got us through our entrées, and I resigned myself to the idea that this would be it, another little shot of false hope, a perfectly decent date, followed by a dwindling e-mail thread. Then, out of nowhere, as we were sharing a piece of almond cake, with the date all but over, he said he liked the way I talked.

  “The way you use words,” he said, “I like it.”

  Thrown off, once again, by his guilelessness, I didn’t know how to respond.

  His eyes were green. I rarely noticed the color of people’s eyes, and found it implausible when it came as one of the first descriptors of a person in an article, as if from yards away people picked up the color of two dots in the head. But our faces were only about two feet apart, and he was looking at me with unnerving directness, and I saw that his eyes were definitely dark green.

  “Did I say something wrong?” he asked.

  “No.”

  He put down his fork and rested his elbows on the table. “I know it’s too early to ask this,” he said, “but do you have a boyfriend?”

  Just like that the nattering in my head ceased. “Not at the moment,” I said, monitoring his expression, wondering if my nonchalance had hid well enough the full answer: that I had never really had one, not for more than a few months.

  “What about you?” I asked.

  “Not at the moment,” he repeated after me, smiling, as if maybe he had seen through me but didn’t care.

  The last thing I wanted to do was lurch onto the subject of past relationships. So I don’t know why I said, “There’s been someone, though?”

  “We were in grad school together,” he said.

  What I detested most about my jealousy for other people’s pasts was how it yoked me to Michael. In the solitary years since Bethany, he’d edged toward bitterness. I was determined not to let myself do that. Still, I couldn’t help but picture Seth and his boyfriend drinking with friends in student apartments, sitting on the floor at parties holding hands, knowing without thinking about it that later they would be naked together in their bedroom, the flow of sex between them running into their work as well, which they would have shared, too. For Seth it was a memory now, and all the more glamorous for being just that—an assumption, like wealth to the heir.

  “But that was a while ago,” he said. “What about you?”

  “It’s been a while, too,” I said.

  He smiled again, broadly this time, as if we were already coconspirators, as if my response were a seduction, not a cover. He was doing it again, making intimacy out of nothing more than his own passing pleasure. And just like that, he caught me up in it.

  “I probably shouldn’t tell you this,” I said, “but I downloaded that song you played me. And I probably shouldn’t tell you how many times I’ve listened to it, either.”

  He blushed. “You can tell me that,” he said.

  He slid his hand across the table and turned it open to me. The skin of his palm was damp.

  “So,” I said. “I have an apartment…”

  “Really? How unusual.”

  “I mean—”

  “Yes,” he said.

  I had grown used to sex as a short burst, a onetime thing, the pleasure keyed to the danger, but leashed by fear. It was easy when everyone did the same, exposing themselves for the quick high. Like the occasional seizure of an otherwise controlled body, flagrant but brief. But there was nothing flagrant about standing perfectly still in my bedroom with the lights off, letting Seth, in no kind of rush, unbutton my shirt, or in feeling the warm contour of his ribs with the tips of my fingers. The script called for speed and gruffness, for the porn-like boasting and debasement of locker-room jocks getting off on themselves and each othe
r, that fantasy toughness meant to ward off exactly the confusion I was in now, unsure what to do and trying not to shake.

  Seth leaned in bravely and kissed me on the lips. I drew him closer, as if to shield him from his own frankness, until we were hugging. There was still nothing to this. He could be anyone at all, and gone tomorrow. I knew that I should probably play it cool. But he wasn’t playing it that way. For whatever unknowable and maybe even fucked-up reason, he wasn’t sticking to his side of the line. It was strange to realize that we were kissing and half undressed but hadn’t started the clock yet, hadn’t set the pace toward coming. When I touched him I actually experienced what I touched. For once, each of his features—the little curve at the base of his spine, the slope of his shoulders—wasn’t separated out by my camera’s eye, exported into pornography, and graded for hotness.

  I kept motioning us to jump ahead, to speed up, and he kept letting me know it was okay, that we could go slowly. When he stopped my hand going into his jeans, I had the urge to say, All right, already, let’s not get reverential about it, but then his other hand brushed down my back, and I shivered.

  It occurred to me that he might be less neurotic than I was. That he might know himself decently well. Which made me think that if we were going to fuck for the first time tonight, I should do the fucking, so things didn’t get too out of balance.

  Eventually, he got us naked and under the sheets together. And still we just kept kissing and running our hands over each other. If only I’d had that third drink or a hit of pot, I might have been able to drift. But I was stuck in the moment. He began kneading my ass, but I leaned away from the touch and untangled myself, rolling onto my back.

  He waited a few moments, then asked if I was okay.

  “I’m great,” I said.

  “We don’t have to do anything more. This is fine.”

  “I just need to keep it together,” I whispered. I hadn’t meant to say it aloud. But I couldn’t reel it back in.

  He turned onto his side, facing me, and rested a hand on my stomach. “What do you have to keep together?” he said.

  He wasn’t my confidant. I couldn’t pretend we had any basis for that. “It’s nothing,” I said. “This is good.”

  “Yeah. It is. So is talking with you…What’s up?”

  “I’m usually not like this. Actually, I hate it when guys are like this.”

  “Like what?”

  “Nothing,” I said. “I’m not used to the slow thing.”

  “We can go faster,” he said. “I’m just enjoying the ride.”

  A framed Ansel Adams poster hung on the otherwise bare wall facing my bed. I had tidied the dresser beneath it before going out, and my desk as well. This was the furniture I’d lived with since the year after college, and for all the years I had now managed to afford this apartment. Friends and dates had come and gone, admiring the light and the view. I had been glad for the security of their admiration. But seeing it through Seth’s eyes, I was reminded how little I had done to make it my own. I hadn’t wanted to interrupt the clean white lines or clutter the open space. Which had left it sterile. One of the thousands of adult dorm rooms in Manhattan, where credentialed children performed their idea of adult lives.

  “It’s ridiculous,” I said. “To be telling you this. I don’t know you. But what the fuck? I haven’t felt normal since the other night. Since we met. You don’t know anything about me. But I have a brother—an older brother—and he hasn’t been with anyone for a really long time. It doesn’t usually hit me like this. But he’s alone—and I’m here. And I feel guilty. Really, though. I’m not usually like this. I don’t think about it all the time, I promise. I’m sorry. I’m fucking this up, aren’t I?”

  “No,” Seth said. “Kind of the opposite, actually.”

  I got hard again when he said that. I wasn’t thinking about sex, but I was as stiff as I’d been all night.

  “It’s too early to say this, too,” he said. “But I think you’re beautiful.”

  He reached across me, put a hand under my back, and pulled me on top of him until we were chest to chest.

  “I want to keep talking,” he said. “But first I want to fuck you. Is that okay?”

  For a moment I thought he was trying to divert us back into the safety of porn, putting on the uniform of machismo to get us out of this jam. But that would require speed—to gin up the scene and keep it moving—and he didn’t speed up. He went as slowly as before, kissing and massaging, as if he’d walked out of some Eden of time, where no one had thought to even measure the stuff. He took me on my back, kissing me as he went, moving at such a gentle pace it seemed to have nothing to do with domination or control, or even orgasm. There was just the sensation of it.

  A sudden, fierce pain pulsed at my temples and then let go.

  I almost always role-played it, acting the stud giving it to the boy, or playing the shameless boy myself. But Seth wasn’t playing. He didn’t mutter anything in my ear, he didn’t harden into self-regard. He kept his eyes open, his dick firm inside me, but the rest of his body almost lax, as if we were cuddling. It should have turned me off—neither of us being in charge—but the lack of a story set me afloat, leaving me light-headed and close to joy.

  For the first few months we kept up the pretense of scheduling dates. It was a way to flirt, to be coy, as if one of us might say no. We’d choose a restaurant, or plan a meal, and at the end of the evening Seth would ask if I’d like to spend the night together, and I’d pretend to consider.

  I kept waiting for him to disappoint me, by not calling or texting, or by calling or texting too much, but he didn’t. Which left me trying to disqualify him on other grounds: his apartment was too gayly neat; there weren’t enough books in it; he wasn’t a political junkie; his voice got queeny with his friends; he watched sitcoms, liked animated movies, owned a cat named Penelope. But I actually found the tidiness of his apartment reassuring, and he did in fact read the news, if not all the polls. And when he bantered with his friends he seemed to be having fun.

  I’d always pictured myself with someone serious and austere. Someone preoccupied by serious work. His remoteness would captivate me. He’d be handsome, of course, but unselfconscious about it. And he’d love me undemonstratively, with the matter-of-factness of authority. And then there was Seth, who held my hand in public, kissed me in front of his friends, and thought I should wear brighter colors. I’d been looking for a suit who preferred men, not someone who enjoyed himself.

  I decided the way we’d met would catch up with us. One of us would get bored on the Internet and decide to hook up with someone else, just for fun, and there would follow an awkward coffee date and that dwindling exchange of e-mails I’d anticipated the first night at the restaurant. It would have been a kind of relief. To get back to normal. But the months went by and it kept not happening.

  The journalists and political staffers I spent my days with were mostly single or divorced. They either slept with each other or dragged around convoluted stories of people in other cities who they were trying to figure something out with. On the road, we drank together in hotel bars. It was the communion of diehards I’d dreamed of being invited into four years earlier, leading into the Bush and Gore campaigns, and now had the assignment to join just as the early positioning and fund-raising in advance of the primaries were getting started. And yet whenever I traveled, I found myself making excuses to go to my room early to call Seth.

  “I think someone has a boyfriend,” he said when I phoned him for the third night in a row from Des Moines.

  I could picture him sitting in bed watching a movie, under the clean pine shelves he’d built and installed himself, his knees raised up under the covers, laptop balanced on top of them, all his laundry folded and put away. I’d never been with a man long enough to yearn not just for sex, or not even for sex, but for the mere presence of him.

  “I want to stop using condoms,” I said.

  “You make it sound like a
heart attack.”

  “I’m serious,” I said.

  “I can tell.”

  Something about his even-tempered nature made me feel like a child, which infuriated me, and meant I had to stay with him to prove that I wasn’t.

  “Are you alone?” I asked.

  “No, my other boyfriend is here, but he’s very understanding.”

  “What if I thought that I might love you?”

  “Now there’s a question,” he said. “What if, hypothetically speaking, you thought there was some possibility that you might love me? That’s what you’re asking? Like, what would my advice be?”

  “Sorry, that’s unfair.”

  “It’s somewhere between unfair and charming, but we can go with charming.”

  I didn’t know why I kept getting hard when he said things like that, but I did. I wanted to slap him.

  “I think I love you,” I said.

  “Are you drunk?”

  “No! I’m not drunk. I love you.” Take that, I thought, waiting for his retort.

  There was a pause, and then he said, “Can I ask a favor? Will you say that again when you get home?”

  “Okay,” I replied, grudgingly.

  “Good. Because I love you, too.”

  I barely took in what he’d said, wanting so badly to keep going myself, to confess that this was the first time I had ever spoken these words to any man, that I was ashamed to be thirty-one and never have reached this point before, that I was afraid my loneliness was a leprosy, a disfigurement, which, if he ever saw it, would repulse him.

  “Lucky me,” I said, instead. “How’s your other boyfriend going to take the news?”

  “He’ll be all right. I’ll let him down easy.”

  Such lightness. It left me giddy. But right there, riding up the back of that swell of happiness—the thought of Michael. I saw him at his computer, filling out another dating-site questionnaire, trying to choose a picture, disliking every one. My brother—the perfect kill switch. So very reliable. The same switch thrown every time I reached the point of stepping outside myself.