The Romantics

by Galt Niederhoffer

  Assigning degrees of blame to betrayal is a difficult project, much like deciding which of two murderers has the more wicked heart. With murder, there are tangible distinctions. First degree is intentional; second degree, irresponsible; third degree, accidental. But with crimes of the heart, the distinctions are more subtle. Who is to say when a secret turns into a sin? With a daydream, a kiss, a confession? Who is to say which transgression is worse: sexual or emotional, coveting or carressing?

  Fortunately, Laura was in no position to assign blame to anyone. For years now, she had actively loved her best friend’s boyfriend—accepting the title “maid of honor” was grossly hypocritical. Even as she acknowledged this, she indulged a more wretched thought: If Tom were not found alive tonight, part of her would be relieved. It was almost better that no one have him. But as soon as she’d given shape to the thought, she condemned her own depravity. She longed for the safety of her bedroom—the abundance of pillows, her dim bedside lamp, her view of the East River. What would happen if she caught the first ferry in the morning and simply skipped the wedding?

  Amused by the thought, Laura fixed her eyes on a massive slanting oak. Its leaves rustled audibly as though they were trying to drown out the sound of the wind. And its branches swayed gently. Was the wind picking up or subsiding? As she stared, a strange facet of the trunk caught her attention: It diverged as it rose from the ground so that it resembled two trees emerging from the same root system.

  A sudden shift in the base of the trunk stopped her in her place. As she stood, she considered her limited options: turn and sprint for the Hayeses’, or distrust her perception and keep walking. Before she could act on either alternative, one side of the trunk shifted again, this time folding over itself like a crumpled handkerchief. Her body knew before her mind gained full comprehension. “Tom,” she said.

  He looked up from the grass, his eyes large and nervous. “Tom,” she repeated.

  He seemed to nod—it was too dark to tell.

  For a moment, it occurred to Laura that Tom intended to keep his silence. Enraged, she opened her mouth to yell to the group that he’d been found. But she lost the urge as she gained a full glimpse of his face: His hair was wet and matted; his eyes betrayed his broken spirit.

  “Laura,” he whispered.

  “Tom?” She took another step toward the tree. His shoulders were shaking. “What are you doing here? Everyone thinks you’re dead.”

  “That would be preferable,” he said.

  She was suddenly overwhelmed by the urge to touch his face. But she quickly checked the sentiment. Remembering her pride, she waited for an apology, an excuse—any explanation. When none came, the anguish of the last year flooded her memory, and she resolved that forgiveness, however tempting, was simply too pathetic. “I better round up the troops,” she said. “Tell them to stop looking.”

  Tom looked back with utter terror. “Please don’t,” he said. “Not yet.”

  Her relief was followed by a series of disheartening realizations. Tom was alive; therefore, he had not changed his mind; therefore, he would marry Lila tomorrow.

  “I have to go,” she said.

  “No, please don’t,” he said.

  She paused for a moment but finally rejected the possibility of staying. She turned and set off toward the Gettys’, renewed in her determination.

  “Wait,” he called.

  Laura stalled, turned around.

  “I’m sorry,” he called. “I had no choice.”

  This was far from the plea she had scripted for him. In fact, it was deeply unsatisfying, bordering on insulting.

  “I had to move on,” he said. “I couldn’t be confused anymore.”

  Laura considered this for a moment. His volume and diffident tone made it clear that it was a defense. But the defense, valid or not, was miles from the apology she craved—and deserved. “Everyone’s really worried,” she said. “We need to tell them to stop looking.”

  “Yeah, that would be good,” Tom scoffed. “If we showed up together.”

  His flip tone took her off guard—and his mockery. She had two choices: degrade herself or walk away. She started toward the Gettys’, this time with purpose.

  Tom let her walk several paces.

  The wind picked up from a dull rasp to a high-pitched hiss. “Don’t go,” he called. Then softening, he tried the affirmative. “Please stay.”

  For Laura, the difference was crucial. It stopped her in her path. Tom loved her most the moment that she turned away. She knew this, and even still, she could not keep walking.

  “No one knows where I am,” he said.

  Laura stood still as she deciphered his logic. The state of being lost, he seemed to imply, granted him a kind of freedom. And the task of searching for him, in turn, granted her invisibility and an alibi. She thought of a story she’d heard after September 11: A woman discovered her husband’s affair minutes after the towers went down. She had called his cell phone to make sure that he was alive and he, oblivious to the tragedy, had betrayed himself right away, explaining that all was well, that he was at work, safe and sound.

  But Laura preferred not to think of Tom in the same category of morality. In the same moment, it occurred to her that Tom had designed the whole ruse—the raft, the swim, the “drowning”—to create the time and space for them to be alone together.

  Once again, she walked back to him—for and in spite of herself.

  FIFTEEN

  Tom’s breathing sped up as Laura approached. The reality of her was so different from the version he had invented to replace her. The intensity of her eyes, the curve of her legs, the fall of her dress struck him all at once, and he felt as he had as a teenager after listening to very loud music. What an ass he had been—and an idiot—to treat her so badly. How on earth had he gone one day without seeing this beautiful woman?

  In some ways, she had never seemed very far away. Those first few weeks, a thought did not pass that was not consumed by her. She inhabited his brain, hovering above his consciousness like a cloud. Every musing observation was halved by—haunted by her face. In the first confused moments of morning, he said her name involuntarily, repeating it out loud as he lay in bed, as water soaked his hair in the shower.

  Forgetting would be impossible, he realized, so he applied a new strategy. If he could not expunge her from his memory, then he would attack the memory at its root. He launched a steady campaign to reimagine her, hacking away at her image with spiteful thoughts. With new resolve, he itemized and exaggerated her worst qualities. Her lips, though lovely, were too thin; her eyes, though intense, too closely spaced; her legs, though sensual, too bulky; her breasts, unimpressive. Her recklessness, though appealing at times, was ultimately a liability.

  Just like this, he replaced Laura with a phantom version of herself. Mercifully, the new version was easier to dismiss. In his mind, Laura morphed into a wholly distinct creature, a hologram of her worst qualities, a composite of his worst fears about women. She embodied at once his mother’s temper, his first love’s cruelty, his second love’s histrionics, his first-grade teacher’s disinterest, and the guilty pornographic notion of sex common to all Catholic boys.

  And though the project did not in itself cure the obsession, it succeeded at least in turning its object from a coveted to a threatening thing. When she wrote, Tom only grew more irate, his image of her more unflattering. Her prostration was a burden, her weakness, totally repellent. The idea that he should be blamed for this was utterly infuriating. Guilt and pity did their part to squelch any remaining affection.

  But just as soon as he’d succeeded in expunging her from his heart, he yearned for her again, even more intensely. He fought the urge to call her, to reread old e-mails, to camp out just beyond her apartment door and accost her, ashamed and contrite. He got off the subway at her stop and wandered by her stoop, circled the block, hopeful that she might happen to walk out. Somehow, a chance encounter would be easier to forgive. Hating he
r and coveting her were equally painful.

  But gradually, her absence proved to be a relief. Living between two loves—and two lives—had been its own brand of torture, fracturing his heart slowly like a window with a hairpin crack. At all times, he was torn between Lila and Laura, Boston and New York; he was an angel and a devil, a sweetheart and a cheater, and the paradox, despite its ephemeral perks, was too much to bear. It was preferable to associate pain with Laura than to remember the full spectrum of feeling she inspired. That he had once felt a giddy thrill in her company—well, that was just too bad. In its place, he had gained peace of mind. It felt like a fair trade.

  “So, is this all you hoped it would be?” she asked. She sat with her back against the tree as though it were a cozy armchair.

  “What? Seeing you?”

  “No, stupid. Your wedding.”

  “Oh,” Tom said. He sighed and extended his legs, resting his head on his arms.

  “You looked a little freaked during the rehearsal.”

  “Have you ever felt Augusta’s grip?”

  “Well, at least you have the rest of the family,” Laura quipped. “Chip is a reassuring presence.”

  “He outdid himself tonight,” said Tom.

  “That was nothing,” said Laura. “You can look forward to performances like that for years to come.”

  “That’ll be enough,” said Tom.

  “No, really. I think you two will grow very close. And if you don’t, you’ll always have William.”

  Tom dismissed the dig with a smile.

  “What?” Laura said. She widened her eyes. “I’m just trying to picture your future.”

  Annoyed, Tom lifted his head from the ground and rotated his body, then replaced his head on Laura’s lap as though a pillow had been placed there for him.

  “Hey,” said Laura. “Your hair’s all wet.” She lifted his head and placed it on the grass.

  “I’ve been sitting here in the rain,” he snapped. Then, more softly, “Waiting for you.”

  But Laura didn’t take the bait. “Please,” she said. “From the looks of it, you weren’t waiting. You were escaping.”

  “You act like I’m here by default,” Tom barked. “I chose this. This is what I wanted.”

  Laura bristled at his directness. It was jarring to jump from sarcasm to sincerity without warning. Of course, she knew he chose Lila over her. She didn’t need to be reminded.

  “I don’t question that you chose it,” said Laura. “What I don’t understand is why.”

  Tom sat up suddenly and turned to face her, his eyes wild and defiant. “You think you’ve got a special gift for knowing what’s in my heart. Did it ever occur to you that I need a woman like Lila?”

  Laura flinched, this time more visibly, said nothing for several seconds. “What kind of woman is that?”

  “Someone happy.”

  “Meaning simple.”

  “Someone ambitious.”

  “Meaning busy.”

  “Someone confident.”

  “Meaning rich.”

  “Someone who doesn’t need to tear people down in order to build herself up.”

  Laura paused and fought the urge to stand. But she knew she had no grounds for offense. She was undeniably critical—at best, a bad friend, at worst, a hypocrite. But she was more insulted by Tom’s first comment. When he said “happy,” he meant someone less emotional, someone more stable. And this attack to the core of her temperament made her feel raw and exposed. “So someone very different from you?” she sniped. Lashing out when she felt weak was a reflex.

  “I guess you could say that,” said Tom. He turned and lay down in the grass again.

  “I never bought the idea that opposites attract,” said Laura. “Different usually means boring.”

  “Boring is better than maddening,” Tom said. “Maddening gets old really fast.”

  “It works for some people,” Laura said carefully.

  “But it nearly kills them,” said Tom.

  It dawned on her that she was losing the argument. “Then I suppose I’d rather be dead,” she said.

  Laura sighed. When had this conversation become a court battle and she, her own defender? It was so like Tom to turn a question of love into a theoretical discussion. He would always win in this realm; his mind was simply more logical. “Besides, I don’t think I have some special gift for knowing what’s in your heart. I think we both do.”

  Tom looked up, now truly attentive, as though he wanted to be persuaded.

  “For each other,” Laura said.

  Laura kicked herself. All these words were so trite, so horribly clichéd. But the right ones were even worse. What could she say? That even now, on the eve of his wedding, she yearned to feel his skin, to taste his lips, that every day without him had been unbearable, like a day without water?

  “If it makes any difference, it was an accident,” said Tom.

  “What was an accident?” said Laura.

  “Sophomore year. When Lila and I started dating. It just sort of happened.”

  She sat for a moment, digesting the claim—it was absurd on so many levels. “Do you honestly think I’m still hung up on what happened when we were nineteen?” she scoffed. She reached down to the ground and absentmindedly unearthed a large clump of grass.

  “No,” said Tom. “I’m just saying …”

  “But how exactly do you end up in someone’s dorm room by accident?” She separated the clump and began hurling single blades at the ground.

  “I came back for you,” Tom explained. “To tell you I’d made a mistake.”

  “Oh please,” said Laura. “I did,” said Tom.

  “And then what? You changed your mind again?” Exhausting her supply of grass, she removed another chunk from the ground.

  “I guess it doesn’t make a difference,” Tom said.

  “No,” said Laura. “It doesn’t.” She dispensed with the clump in a single hurl.

  They sat for a moment in silence.

  “Did the same thing happen when you proposed? You dial the wrong number?”

  “I hate how you do this,” Tom snapped. “I share something personal, then you use it as a weapon.”

  “What you do is hardly better,” she said. “Rewriting history like a politician.”

  For a moment, they remained united in mutual irritation. But as always, the distance between them gave way to a need to be closer.

  “I’m sorry,” he said.

  “I’m sorry,” she said.

  “No, you’re not.” He smiled.

  “You should be,” she said. “A single digit, and everything would have been different.”

  They laughed, bonded more closely now by their shared regret. The feeling weakened Laura at her core, and she suddenly felt as though every muscle in her body had gone slack. Giving in, she extended her legs and lay down at Tom’s side. As they lay, they stared up at the sky, as though trying to locate the stars beyond the mass of clouds.

  “I remember when I moved to Brooklyn,” he said. “I was very confused by the view. I’d expected the sunset to be farther away, blocked by all those skyscrapers. For some reason, I thought it would set behind Manhattan’s skyline. But it was just as close.”

  “The skyline?” Laura asked.

  “No, the sun,” Tom said. “Just as close as it was in Manchester. As close as it was in New Haven.”

  “You wanted evidence of change.”

  “No,” he said. “I wanted evidence of distance.” Laura smiled and nodded.

  She settled into a more comfortable position and indulged in a moment of nostalgia. “Remember that paper sophomore year? The one that inspired your thesis.”

  “The Hopeless Romantics,” Tom said, smiling. “Chronicles of a Failed Movement.”

  “Only you could start a fifty-page paper the night before …”

  “And still get an A minus,” Tom said slyly. “Only because I wrote it,” Laura said.

  “Hardly!” said
Tom, mock offended. Then, he smiled. “Okay, maybe half of it.”

  They sat in silence for a moment, enjoying the memory of that night—the anxiety, the exhaustion, the importance.

  “I do feel sorry for them,” Laura said.

  “Who?”

  “All those distraught poets.”

  “How could you feel sorry for a poet,” said Tom. “Is there anything more useless and indulgent?”

  “Oh no,” Laura said. She turned to face Tom, insistent on eye contact. “They were radicals, revolutionaries. More influential than Newton and Darwin. Without them, there would be no point-of-view, no ecstasy, no heartbreak, no novels.”

  “The Romantics cannot be credited with the birth of emotion,” Tom said.

  “No, but maybe, without their work, we wouldn’t know how to express it.”

  “That doesn’t mean we wouldn’t feel it,” Tom said.

  “Who knows,” Laura marveled. “Maybe we wouldn’t experience those sensations if they hadn’t defined them.”

  Tom paused, mesmerized, considering Laura’s assertion. There was no one—nothing else in the world—that had this unbelievable effect on him: thrilling electrification. But just as soon as he acknowledged this gift, he sought to destroy it.

  “People dreamed before Freud,” he said. “Maps existed before Copernicus.”

  “But no one knew to interpret,” she said. “And the maps were ridiculous.”

  Tom shook his head, refusing to acknowledge Laura’s argument. “They were nothing more than the lucky witnesses of a crumbling religion.”

  “No,” Laura said, whispering. “They were the reason religion crumbled. They were inventing a new one.” How had she found herself, once again, arguing with the same intensity as a lawyer defending a man set for execution?

  “They were just confused kids,” Tom said conclusively. “A bunch of freaks and depressives.” He turned away, signaling his loss of interest. “Love and hysteria are easily mistaken.”

  “You would look at it like that,” Laura said. In the past, an idea like this would have marked the launch of a sparkling new conversation. But now, it sputtered to its death, estranging them further.