The Lights

by Brian McGreevy

  A few minutes passed with no reply. I was in a STATE. Unless his phone had died in the interim there was no reason I could imagine that would prevent him from taking a couple of seconds to reply to my clearly dashed-off ha ha message communicating that it was NO BIG DEAL he was flaking on our movie date—not that “date” was the right word—but how about some MANNERS. Then a thought crippled me: he may not have actually gotten the inside joke on which the comedic inflection of my message hinged, compelling me to send an even more self-effacing follow-up clarifying the tone of the first one. I felt like I was cutting my own hair and making it worse but with every attempted correction, unable to abandon the pathology it was salvageable.

  But srsly: NBD!! I sent.

  An hour later I broke down and called Harry. There was suspicion in his voice. We were certainly not chatting on the phone with any regularity, but I spent a few minutes pretending to solicit his input on classes for the next term on the assumption that listening to himself give advice would lower his guard before ever so casually asking if he had spoken to Jason that day.

  “The man cub?” he said, the suspicious tone instantly returning. “Not recently. Why?”

  “No reason,” I said.

  There was silence on the line.

  “We were supposed to hang out today,” I blurted, at least refraining from specifying our movie date (not a date!), “but he bailed under, like, mysterious circumstances, and I just wanted to make sure nothing was up.”

  “I haven’t talked to him,” said Harry.

  “Not that it’s a big deal,” I said. “It’s not a big deal at all, I just thought I’d, you know, check in.”

  “…Okay,” said Harry.

  “Anyway, I’ll let you get back to having a tea party with your guns, or whatever it is you do with your time.”

  “… Okay,” said Harry.

  There was silence on the line.

  “Is he mad at me?” I blurted.

  “Why would he be mad at you?”

  “I don’t know, he got mad at me before.”

  “He got mad at you because you got mad at him.”

  “Well I’m not mad at him!”

  There was another silence.

  “I haven’t reached eight hundred words yet today,” he said.

  “Fine, fine, fine!” I said. “This is totally fine.”

  I hung up, in a shame spiral over the actual reason I was hemorrhaging so much dignity: the crashing disappointment I wasn’t going to get to sit next to Jason and watch perv-y sex scenes, as I had been looking forward to for weeks.

  At this point, more as an act of masochism than a genuine attempt at communication, I texted Jason: Are you mad at me?

  His reply was nearly immediate: ? Just swamped. Lemme know how the movie is

  I swung from self-pity back into irate exegesis:

  ?—as though there was not yet another stupidly maddening mystery contained within the speed of his reply, implying he’d had his phone on him THE ENTIRE TIME and was intentionally not responding.

  Just swamped—with WHAT, exactly? I knew he worked as regularly as a metronome in the mornings, imitating Harry’s imitation of Hemingway, intentionally filling his schedule with Mickey Mouse classes as well as writing comments on classmates’ stuff during workshop itself to keep his non-writing schedule as idle as possible. It was a recurring joke within our Hogwarts circle being that he was the world’s youngest retiree. So this was not only a lie but a lie that he knew I knew was a lie, as opposed to, say, CAR TROUBLE or TOOTHACHE or any of the endless polite excuses if he was not subtly insinuating this was a blow-off.

  “Lemme know how the movie is”—confirming this was not a rain check; he was just as happy to see OUR movie in his own time with someone else and would probably use the smutty stuff as way to start pontificating on the eroticism of transgression or whatever intellectual peacocking to get a nineteen-year-old communications major let him feel her up.

  I commanded myself to think about other things, but for the entire weekend thought of little else, turning around the dozen or so words from this message with rabbinical fervor.

  

  Mark and I went to the movie ourselves. It turned out to be a boringly unhot disappointment and I was an incorrigible bitch to him all night.

  

  On Monday after class I saw a letter in my school mail slot. The envelope was unmarked except with an L. My heart raced irrationally; my brain attempted to calm it like an unruly pet. I stepped out the back way to avoid the smokers’ circle in front and removed the letter. It was a single line:

  I’m in love with you, for the record. J

  I folded the letter back into thirds, put it back into the envelope, and joined my classmates for the customary lunch, politely dismissing comments about my distraction and lack of appetite. At home I placed the letter in the middle of a Norton anthology I could not imagine Mark opening but thought better of it, then slipped it in my files among previous years’ tax returns, but again what if troubled me, so finally I took a small ball of sticky tack and fixed it to the inner wall of a crawlspace full of cleaning supplies.

  The front door opened unexpectedly and I grabbed a bottle of window cleaner and closed the door of the crawl space.

  “Hey,” said Mark. “Client canceled last minute. I can make myself scarce if you’re working.”

  “Oh no,” I said. “It’s okay.”

  “What? Why are you smiling?”

  “I’m just having a really nice day.”

  

  “It’s impossible,” I said.

  Jason smiled with defensive impatience.

  “I didn’t need you to tell me that,” he said.

  It was afternoon and we were sitting in a booth at a circus-themed dive bar adjacent to the city’s less affluent mall. It was a sufficiently random meeting place that the chance of being interrupted by anyone we knew was minimal, and the run-down fiberglass animal gothic was gaudily, tragically romantic.

  “This was a really good choice, incidentally,” I said. “You have very cinematic instincts for curating moments.”

  Jason shrugged with self-satisfaction, the vanity of artists susceptible in any situation.

  “You’re still crazy,” I said. “You’re crazy, you know that? You’re twelve years old, you have very shapely effeminate lips, I’m flattered—don’t get me wrong, this temporary insanity is highly flattering—but it’s impossible.”

  “What if we take for granted that I’m not the kind of guy who tries to bird-dog someone else’s girl, and that I wouldn’t even have told you in the first place except I had had a realization, and it was that I have lost almost all interest in having a conversation with anyone who isn’t you? Which is deeply annoying because I really, really like talking.”

  There was a joyful sensation in my stomach that wanted nothing more than to tell him I felt exactly the same way.

  I shook my head and said, “Silly boy.”

  He looked capable of murder and I could hardly have held it against him.

  “Don’t play it that way,” he said, making eye contact with the almost scary firmness he was capable of at times, and which was highly becoming on him.

  “Okay, simmer down,” I said.

  I poured bourbon into my glass. This was the kind of bar that didn’t have a liquor license so you could bring your own and they would furnish the set up. I regarded the Diet Coke in my hand.

  “Ugh, aspartame,” I said. “My mother always said everything either gives you cancer or makes you fat. But being fat makes you more likely to get cancer, so.”

  I added Diet Coke to the drink.

  “I don’t mean to trivialize what you’re telling me,” I said. “If it seems like I am, it’s a nervous reaction to what you’re saying.”

  “I know,” he said.
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br />   “Assumed! I assume when you look at people you don’t see flesh and blood, you see a sort of cloud of ones and zeros in a humanoid shape. No one is questioning your cleverness—though your judgment is a different story.”

  “Meaning what.”

  “You’re crazy. I’m old enough to be your mother, practically, and I’m pretty much married.”

  “You’re three and a half years older than me.”

  “Which is decades in girl years.”

  “And when in the history of romantic love has unavailability been a deterrent?”

  “You don’t even know what love is! Love is not letting go. It’s not letting go just because things are different than they used to be, they’re not as exciting as they used to be, they can never be exciting as something new that comes along. But you remember the good things, you look for the good things with a microscope, and you don’t throw away all the years you’ve spent…refusing to let this fail.”

  “I think that’s a narrow definition.”

  “Who asked you?” I said, with an intended flippancy that came out caustic.

  “I didn’t mean that in a judgy way,” he said.

  “I know you didn’t.” I exhaled. “You’re quite sweet, actually. I just get moody sometimes. You should know I’m no prize. I’m unpredictably moody and I’m short without being petite or having big tits and you’d be sick of me so much faster than you realize.”

  “Just to clarify,” said Jason, “the reason this is an impossible situation is Mark, and not because it’s one-sided.”

  “If the question is if I happened to have a younger sister would my heart burst like a Jewish grandmother’s over the match, then yes, it would burst like a Jewish grandmother’s. If the question is if we would ever sleep together in a thousand years, I’m sorry, I just don’t feel that way about you.”

  “I’m trying to decide if setting me up with your imaginary younger sister is more or less insulting than if you’d said you think of me like a brother.”

  “I assume you have perverted ideas about the eroticism of transgression and I’m not sure saying you were like a brother would convey how asexual my feelings for you are.”

  He regarded the carousel behind the bar. Then he said, “Did you throw it away?”

  I pretended I didn’t know what he was talking about.

  “Did you throw away the note?” he persisted.

  “No, I didn’t throw it away.”

  “Why didn’t you throw it away?”

  “Because what I do with my mail is my business.”

  “Why wouldn’t you throw it away when Mark might find it?”

  “How do you know I didn’t show it to Mark already?”

  “Because you didn’t.”

  “It’s none of your business either way.”

  “Throw it away.”

  “No.”

  “Throw away the note.”

  “It’s mine, you don’t get to tell me what to do with it.”

  “Give it to me. I’ll rip it up and throw it away myself.”

  “No.”

  I let my head lull backward with an exasperated groan.

  “I’m a woman, Jason. I’m not the world’s most desirable woman, but even I know how easy it is to confuse flattery with opportunity. But I respect you too much to lead you on, and I will never sleep with you.”

  “You do realize the more times you say that the less likely it is to be true.”

  I looked down at the table, trying to hide my pleased smirk.

  “Do you know what a satellite male is?” he said.

  I didn’t.

  “In biological terms a satellite male is the guy who orbits the prospective female until she lets her guard down long enough for him to mate. Of course it is customary for a female with market value to have any number of satellite male friends who make a big thing of how sensitive and understanding they are but are actually waiting for the slightest moment of vulnerability to make impact. If this is what you want, by all means find yourself a Europa who will go shopping with you and listen to your relationship problems and every once in awhile if you’re feeling drunk or daring you might cuddle with. But that won’t be me.”

  “That’s so romantic you think I’m ‘a female with market value,’” I said.

  He said nothing.

  “It really changes now, doesn’t it?” I said. “It’s not going to be able to go back to how it was before.”

  “You mean you’re not going to be able to keep having your cake and eating it, too?”

  My stomach was in knots, suddenly. It was grief, my unreadiness for this friendship to end and the knowledge that this wasn’t the sort of thing a friendship survived, not really. I didn’t want to lose him, even less than I wanted to admit the impossibility of holding onto a deception once it has been named, once he has opened his stupid mouth and called it by its name.

  “Is that too much to ask?” I said.

  

  It did ruin things after that. Following our conversation at the bar I convinced myself that the visceral sense something was over had been false, and all I had to do was give him a few days to get over it. But when I messaged him a few days later to hang out in some innocuous context he responded simply with: I am not a Europa.

  Angry that he was not over it already, I replied: No u r URANUS.

  There was nothing more from his end, and when I realized nothing was forthcoming it felt like no amount of inhalation could provide enough oxygen. One of my first visits that semester had been to Student Health for a Xanax prescription, but because of the meagerness of the university insurance had been sheepishly advised by the counselor in the event of an anxiety attack to run, run just as fast as I can until it went away. I stared at the counselor, wondering if she had ever encountered another actual person in her life. My phone lay on my writing desk blackly and silently sucking all the oxygen from the room and I childishly flicked it away as I was overtaken with convulsive sobs. It was the opposite of the feeling of exorbitant potential I had been swept by in the first stage of my friendship with Jason. I could not understand how you could go from that to this feeling of everything being so impossible.

  For his part, Jason began snubbing me at group outings. Not actually snubbing, the weapon he used against me was far worse: civility. He was civil with me but gave me no special attention, and conversed with others as though it was all the same as talking to me. At a reception for a visiting writer, he spent altogether too long in conversation with the most boringly nice Connecticut divorce fiction writer at Hogwarts, someone my own threshold for was under ten minutes and I was substantially more tolerant of boring niceness than Jason, who was talking one-on-one with her at length about the frustrations of putting together Ikea furniture for no other reason than to spite me eavesdropping on it. When it became too much I went over and threaded my arm through his and “borrowed” him.

  “I am amused, if you’re wondering,” I said. “I do find it highly amusing.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “There are less childish ways to go about this, you know,” I said. “There is a way to handle this like reasonable adults.”

  “Is there a reasonable adult way to inform someone they’re being fucking crazy?”

  “I’m crazy. Oh, I’m being crazy. Well, it’s part of why you’re so fond of me.”

  “I’m not fond of you, I’m in love with you.”

  “Lower your voice.”

  “You started the conversation.”

  “Because you’re being unreasonable.”

  “What exactly do you want from me?”

  “Simmer down,” I said. “I want to go to a movie with you. What’s opening this week?”

  “We don’t go to movies anymore.”

  “Why not.”

>   “Because I’m in love with you.”

  I hit him. “Shh! Why don’t you put in the newsletter?”

  His eyes flared and he was about to reply when we were approached by a mutual friend who did not realize this was a private conversation.

  I took the newcomer’s arm and indicated a Borges collection on the shelf.

  “Settle an argument. Is it Bor-hayz or Bor-heez? He is in an absolute lather about it.”

  I indicated Jason, his face a shell so brittle it seemed like you could crack it with the round end of a spoon. I bit the tip of my tongue to prevent myself from laughing with pleasure, knowing the sight of a person preventing themselves from laughing was so much worse.

  So it went: Jason torturing me with civility and me torturing him with being a little bitch. Maybe that seems unfair on my end, but in case there is any doubt let’s be clear that Jason, even at that age, was one of the most manipulative people I’d ever met. He never didn’t know what he was doing. He was aware what a shock standing me up would be, followed by the confession, and then the friend-dumping all in succession. He was aware that saying he wouldn’t chase another man’s girl was nonsense—his sense of Darwinian entitlement was far too great—but that it romanticized him and offended my ego: what was stopping him? And he certainly knew the power of indifference: had he started being actively shitty to me after the friend-dumping I could have tolerated it, but civility I could not.

  I texted him drunkenly: I think u r actually a fucking sociopath.

  He replied: I miss you, too.

  At this point in the exercise it can fairly be asked what was going on in my head at the time. Or what I thought was going on. Looking at the person I was then, at the meteoric inanity of my own behavior, here is what I have to say about it: men will have you believe they have the market cornered on compartmentalization, but this is not the truth. Say that my brain at the time was a house with many rooms, and that I found myself in the room with the truth in it, but what I wanted was in the next room. I went to the next room. I possessed the liar’s greatest power, which was to believe her own lies. It is a feast of crows to admit this, confirming Harry’s cosmology, but now I don’t tell lies anymore just as I don’t drink, as relentless as both make facing the day.