You were supposed to meet him in Paris for a few days at the end of the summer. He’d stopped calling you once the credit card fraud had been discovered, and you kept waiting for him to write and let you know when and where in Paris he wanted to meet, but no letter came. Did he still love you? Of course, he said when you were both back in America. Things had gotten complicated and busy, and he’d lost the address. Of course he’d wanted to see you. It had all just gotten away from him. Relax, why didn’t you?
To be talked to that way. To have caused someone to talk to you that way. It was a chicken-or-egg question: which came first, your anxiety or his evasive brusqueness?
Just tell me, you kept saying, and he said: There’s nothing to tell. He had bought a car and liked to drive it, very fast, up and down the East Coast. On this particular weekend, he had picked you up in New York and was driving you down to the house where his dead grandparents had summered in Maryland. Please, you said again, late that night at a rest stop in New Jersey, I know something’s wrong, just tell me. And he told you: He’d fallen in love with someone else. Your mouth was full of mashed potatoes, which you struggled to swallow. You cried, you asked questions, and he answered with a monosyllabic reticence that seemed partly an attempt (futile) at chivalry and partly self-importance. She taught the calisthenics class he had started taking last spring. No, nothing had happened back then—he’d noticed she was attractive, that’s all. She was forty-one. She rode a motorcycle. Divorced, with a nineteen-year-old son. Yes, he knew he and the son were the same age, and yes, he agreed it was a little weird. No, nothing had happened even now, but he could tell that it was going to. Then you were out in the parking lot and he had his arms around you—ssssh, ssssh, stop, it’s going to be all right—but you couldn’t stop, and you didn’t want him comforting you for this thing that he was the cause of; but without him there was no comfort; you clung to him and soaked him and scared the hell out of him, and scared the hell out of yourself, out there under this big dull sky in the sulphur-smelling middle of nowhere.
In the grandparents’ empty, cold house, you insisted on a guest room, not the big bedroom where he wanted you to stay with him; but then you fucked him on the narrow guest room bed, as if that could hold him or remind him of what he would be missing. It was a plea, and a deeper excursion into self-abasement; but you did it again in the morning. In between you stayed awake for most of the night, alone in the mothball-smelling guest room with its ancient silvery-gray carpet stained white in places by the old messes of long-dead pets, reading a warped, swollen paperback you found in a shelf, an account of soccer players surviving after a plane crash in the Andes by eating the flesh of their dead teammates. In the morning you had a headache and your eyeballs hurt from crying. You told him not to call you again. Even if nothing happened with the calisthenics teacher, you were through.
You proved to yourself that you meant it by seducing Boy 22, an act that was barely premeditated; he was known as someone who had a lot of casual sex, and you went to his room one afternoon with an apple, took a bite, and then held it out so that he could take a bite. Afterward, you and the sheets were littered with black hairs. When you were dressed again and ready to leave, he said, “Well, it’s been real,” and you thought, yeah, exactly. Casual sex was too casual for you. It had been purely factual, like your old notions of insertions and angles, no longer alarming the way it would have been once, but also uninteresting. The job had gotten done, but you could do that job by yourself at your convenience without involving another person.
This was where things stood when Boy 19 called you again. You’d been alone for several months by then. For the first time ever, you had no one in your sights. Your romantic education, at once so eventful and so tame, seemed exhaustive, complete. You couldn’t imagine, nor did you want, further permutations. [You were feeling the way you would later in your life every January, with the blaze and clutter and over-richness of Christmas over, the children back in school, the ornaments back in the basement, the tree lying on the curb, nothing on the calendar: a little bleak, but also peaceful, clean, looking out at a landscape of packed ice and bare black trees.]
So you were surprised, but not otherwise moved—not angry, not thrilled (well, maybe a little gratified)—to hear from Boy 19 late in the fall of your sophomore year. He said he missed you. You asked about the calisthenics teacher, and he said yes, he’d been seeing her, but, he repeated, he missed you. Then he made a comparison between her and you that was crude and unsporting and morally bankrupt—you felt compelled to defend her, pointing out that she had given birth—but that also, shamefully, turned you on; and when he said again, lowering his voice almost to a whisper, that he missed you and wanted to see you again, you didn’t say yes, but you didn’t quite say no. There were more phone calls in the weeks after that, and eventually he came down to New York, and you went up to Boston once more.
In some ways those were the best weekends you ever had with him: pleasant, free, a little melancholy, not looking forward or backward. You both knew you wouldn’t stay together. [You didn’t know that you were about to meet your husband, who never felt like Boy 23; he felt like your husband almost at once. He had had his own odyssey, before he got to you. He wasn’t there, and then he was, sitting on the floor next to a couch you sat on at a party you hadn’t really wanted to go to.] You spent the time in bed. Sometimes he would stroke your hair while you lay with your cheek against the hollow just below his rib cage. But sometimes he would say something that would make you wonder why you were doing this—why you had done any of it, all that yearning and energy and self-reproach spent on people who seemed central and then didn’t really figure at all, and why you were seeing him, even temporarily—like the time he said he would have to ask his analyst (he had started seeing one after you and he had broken up the first time) to explain why he was now able to let himself come in your mouth when, no matter how much he might have wanted to, he never could before. You were still lying next to him when he said it; you had never felt lonelier, but you could not figure out how to answer him: how to begin to say what you meant, or where it might end.
ALSO BY
JOAN WICKERSHAM
THE NEWS FROM SPAIN
The author of the acclaimed memoir The Suicide Index returns with a virtuosic collection of stories, each a stirring parable of the power of love and the impossibility of understanding it. Spanning centuries and continents, from eighteenth-century Vienna to contemporary America, Joan Wickersham shows, with uncanny exactitude, how we never really know what’s in someone else’s heart—or in our own.
Short Stories
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