by Laurie Boris
A man who never stopped loving her, not even when he wanted her set upon by the Seven Plagues of Egypt.
“Even the boils?” Rashid said, aghast.
Emerson leveled a gaze at him. “Especially the boils.”
He took the problem to the infirmary, and as he went about the evening’s tasks, Emerson convinced himself his expectations had been a foolish fantasy stirred up by Dirk and old, sleeping desires she’d awoken in Boston. When she got back on her feet, she wouldn’t need him anymore. Once again he’d become a big pillow she could take out of the closet to cry on when someone broke her heart. A sexless thing with no emotions and no expectations, its history erased.
“How’s my girlfriend?” Charlie asked him.
Emerson grunted.
“That good, huh.”
“Just take your medication, Charlie.” He didn’t relish this part of working second shift, helping the nurses dope his patients into dreamless sleep, but in this case, he’d make an exception.
Charlie eyed the candy-colored pills in the Dixie cup. “You gonna get off your ass and do something about that or what?”
Emerson looked out the window and shrugged his shoulders. What could he do? She didn’t want him. He couldn’t make her want him. He’d just have to get over it.
“Hell,” Charlie snorted. “If I was you—a young guy with working parts—I’d be beating her door down.”
So would Dirk. He did it every night in Emerson’s dreams. “Well, you’re not me.”
“Okay, you don’t have to get hot over it. Just seems a god-awful waste, moping around here when you got paradise just across the hall.”
“Charlie—”
He waved the cup around. “I didn’t mean it dirty. I’m talking about the real magilla.”
“You mean love.”
Charlie smiled. “I ain’t always been old, you know. I’ve seen that look on a young lady’s face before.”
“On Sarah?” Emerson sneered. “She looks at sick dogs the same way. That’s not love. That’s pity.”
“You keep telling yourself that,” Charlie said. “And you’ll wind up a bitter old fart in a place like this, with nobody to give a damn about you. Except some long-haired orderly who’ll make you crazy ’cause he’s too chicken to live the life God gave him.”
“Good night, Charlie,” Emerson said.
Charlie tossed back his medication. With a smile and a twinkle in his eye, he lifted a cup of water to Emerson, in a toast.
* * * * *
With Emerson still on second shift, and Indian summer offering mild, sweet-smelling evenings, Sarah couldn’t pass up Rashid’s invitation to accompany him on a stroll around the neighborhood. Once they reached Westcott, however, Rashid appeared to be lost in thought, and they ambled along a while without speaking.
“I have decided something very important,” he said finally.
She stopped in front of the bookstore. So did he. She prepared herself for big news. He’d been spending a lot of time in the lab, even on Sundays. She imagined it was about his research. Or his fiancée. Or similar plans about his planned-out future.
He clasped his hands in front of his belly. The gesture made him look a little taller, a little older. “If you find that you need to move out before you have enough saved, I am willing to lend you the money for your first month’s rent and security deposit.”
Sarah stared at him. So what if he’d caught her looking in the classifieds at apartments. It was only to get an idea of how much living space she could afford. And he’d said his piece about her saving habits. Why the continued obsession?
He sighed and dropped his gaze to his feet. “I have insulted you. It is just as I had feared. I knew it was not my place to start this conversation. But I felt I must. Because he would never.”
Fear crept through her. Maybe Emerson wanted her to leave and didn’t have the heart to say it. “Why, um, why would I need to move out?”
“I just thought...that if...” Flustered, he fussed with his hands. “If things are not going according to original expectations, I could be offering you a way to regain your dignity.”
Probably an Indian thing, she thought, and continued walking. Usually when she didn’t answer he repeated himself in a way she could eventually understand.
“I expect nothing in return.” He followed after her. “If you aren’t happy and it is only your financial situation keeping you with us, then you shouldn’t be made to stay.”
“I’m happy.” But she was more puzzled than ever.
“This is not what I have been seeing. It’s tense there. Have you noticed this tension?”
“Between you and Emerson?” Sarah said. “Well, now that you mention it...”
“No, no. I am meaning you and him.”
She stopped.
He seemed so earnest that she wanted to turn around and run.
“This is what I am saying. I am his friend, and he would be angry with me for telling you this, but you are my friend too. If you do not want—what he wants—” He fussed with his hands again. “Then you should not have to stay.”
“What does he want?” Sarah asked, her voice small.
Rashid’s eyes flew open wider than the night and he took a step backward. “Already I have said too much. It’s my mistake. It’s nothing. I am spending too much time staring into the microscope and seeing things that aren’t there.”
Her pulse thumped in her ears. If it were truly nothing, then Rashid wouldn’t be so upset. She wanted to walk away, not listen, not know.
But she stayed.
Waiting.
“He will be very angry with me.”
“Does he want me to leave?”
“No. Absolutely that is not his intention.”
She swallowed. It could only be one other thing. “Then he wants to have sex with me.”
His mouth rounded with surprise. “Never would he use words such as those!”
“Then what words does he use?”
The sarcasm eluded him. He looked away, and back, as if in that moment of reflection away from the razor of her stare, he had decided something new. “You must promise never to tell him I’ve said these things to you.” He took a deep breath and let the words out in a rush. “He believes you moved back here to be closer to him. Because you had tired of dating goondas and perhaps had reached a point where you could return his...romantic feeling...and would once again want to be his...his...”
He fussed again and then gave up. The air had never been so still, the sound of one unsaid word so loud. It zinged around Westcott Street. Off the pizzeria window. The coffee shop. The Laundromat. She could see it big as day, in a fat cartoon font, lipstick red, making kissing sounds as it bounced from surface to surface. “His girlfriend?” she said, a tremble in her voice.
Rashid took another step backward, eyeing her. “Or at least with your being without a man, he would stand a better chance. This is why I think he’d scolded me for being too friendly with you. Perhaps—wrongly, I might add—he believed I’d been interfering.”
Sarah was no longer listening. She wanted to march over to the infirmary and punch Emerson in the stomach. “So all this time he’s just been waiting for his turn, like I’m some kind of deli counter?”
Rashid pleaded with his hands. “No, no, I’m sure it’s not like that. He loves you very much as a friend. And…more. Always he has, even when he wished you covered with boils. Often he has told me that if only the two of you didn’t live so far away and you could spend more time with him and see how he has grown up and changed...no. I’ve said enough already.”
“Yes, you have. You both have.” She whirled on one heel and stormed away.
He followed. “Sarah. Please wait.”
“Don’t talk to me.” She felt tears starting and threw off his attempts to catch her. She couldn’t go back to the house. Emerson would be there soon. So she headed the other way, toward the university.
Chapter 20
Sarah pou
nded her anger against the sidewalks. As she headed down Euclid toward Comstock and the quad, she remembered a different Indian summer night, when she’d been a student. She’d had the same feeling in her stomach, of disbelief and a drive to escape. But this time she was fleeing something more sinister than a frat boy’s clumsy groping. She had trusted Emerson: with her friendship, with her loyalty, with things she didn’t give as easily as her body.
Yet her body was what Emerson expected she’d come back to give him, confirming her suspicions as to why he’d accepted her friendship in the first place, all those years ago—so he might be around in case she changed her mind. Apparently, for some reason, he thought she had. For him it could be anything. Because she moved in across the hall? Because she wasn’t sleeping with anyone else? Because she happened to touch his arm or look into his eyes a moment longer than she was supposed to?
God, he takes everything so damned seriously.
Not until she reached brick buildings did she slow her pace and notice her surroundings. The concrete walkways looked freshly patched for the new school year. Structures that hadn’t existed during her last visit had sprung up like weeds. But in the darkness and in the place where Rashid had thrown her, she was lulled into thinking all was just as she’d left it. She remembered Hendricks Chapel. She remembered the auditorium where Emerson had caught a nine o’clock movie and happened upon her afterward as she lay on the grassy quad, half drunk and spent from escaping a frat party where a brother had tried to trap her in his room. The world had been spinning a little, and she’d looked up to see pieces of a curious face, glasses, and straw-colored hair.
I’m Emerson, you’re in my Art History class. Do you need help?
Then like a twist in the gut, she saw the Arts and Sciences building, bell tower and arched windows out of a Hitchcock film, where she had caught Emerson following her after they’d broken up. He’d been in sore need of a shower and a change of clothing. His eyes had radiated a whipped-puppy hopefulness that with a few simple words, she could put his entire crumbled universe back together. Waiting. Always waiting.
Still waiting.
She stood in the same spot where he had stood, on the sidewalk, just before the stairs. She pictured him then, at eighteen, emotionally wounded and desperate to be loved. How it must have gored him clean through to hear her say that she wished they’d never been more than friends.
Then, over time, wish became reality, and he allowed her to reinvent their relationship the way she had wanted it. Just friends. Like the sex had never existed. Like they hadn’t sought refuge from the bumps of young adulthood in each other’s narrow dormitory beds.
Like they’d never fallen in love.
Only she’d gotten up, and he hadn’t.
Coming this way was a really bad idea. Sarah pulled her cardigan tighter, tucked her head down, and kept walking.
* * * * *
The steep drop to Van Buren Street at the far edge of the quad used to look like the end of the earth. There was a staircase, built into the hillside, covered with bleached wood planks and lit with a string of naked bulbs, half of which were usually out at any given time. Just to the right of the stairs, a grassy ledge overlooked the rest of the city, beyond that the rolling plain between the Adirondacks and the Finger Lakes. More importantly, it stood watch over the dormitory she and Emerson had called home during their freshman year.
The wooden stairs had been replaced with concrete, covered by a series of annoyingly modern Plexiglas arches; the grassy ledge had been absorbed into part of a law building, but the view was still the same.
In her mind, though, it was no longer night. She saw but didn’t see the orange glow of the city, the lights of the MONY tower, the marshmallow spectacle of the Carrier Dome. She saw a stretch of time in early spring, after Emerson’s mother had taken him out of school. When Sarah would stand on the ledge at the end of the day and watch the descending sun spill gold into the far-off sliver of Onondaga Lake. She’d counted the days, hours, and minutes until she too could go home. To a change of scene, a summer job, and a place where she no longer saw Emerson everywhere she looked.
For a long while, Sarah couldn’t make herself move from what was left of the grassy ledge overlooking so many of her past mistakes. Automatically, her toes curled into the soles of her sneakers, body set as if contemplating a dive. She could almost feel the gritty surface of the springboard beneath her feet and see the ripples of water below. She imagined what it would be like to step off, to fall. Not the planned, muscular leap of a dive.
Just fall.
Plunge.
Let gravity take her.
She wondered if Emerson, leaning out his eighth-story window all those years ago, had imagined this same feeling.
She wondered if he still did.
Finally she forced her attention on the dormitory. It didn’t look any different, those twin pillars of architecturally uninspired glass and concrete—girls in one tower, boys in the other—joined in the center by a common lobby for a moat.
Habit, sense memory, or unfinished business pulled Sarah down the long staircase, two blocks down the street, and through the glass doors. She was no longer a student and didn’t belong there, but no one stopped her. Maybe because of the way she was dressed: jeans, sneakers, T-shirt, cotton cardigan, no makeup, hair down.
And because she looked so young.
She crossed the lobby to the girls’ side and stepped into a waiting elevator. She pressed the button; the doors slid shut. On the night of Emerson’s eighteenth birthday—he’d just returned from Thomas’s funeral—he’d kissed her in this elevator, all the way up to the seventh floor. She could still feel his body against hers, so ready, in her imagination, to be delivered from his pain, if only for a while. Nothing had felt more natural than to invite him to spend the night. While they kissed, his hands rested softly on both sides of her face. She’d never wanted that moment to end, of anticipation, of someone she liked and trusted—and maybe loved—desiring her, needing her, with such intensity. When the doors finally opened, Sarah and Emerson still locked together, half of her floormates were in the lounge, waiting to take the elevator down.
Emerson told her later that he had no idea girls could be so crude.
Sarah squeezed her eyes shut. The elevator stopped and opened on the seventh floor. She almost expected to see the same group of girls standing in the lounge, making animal noises and rude remarks. But all that faced her were the pea-green walls of her student days, the smell of fresh popcorn and old pizza, and the same institutional furniture.
On a mud-brown sofa near the window sat two young women dressed in black leggings and brightly colored, oversized T-shirts. Cans of diet soda and textbooks were spread on a square white table before them. As a unit, they turned to her.
“You must be Daisy,” one of the girls said, in a pinched, nasal voice. Black-lacquered toenails peeked from open-toed sandals. “Cat said she’d meet you at the poetry slam and you owe her a martini.”
Suddenly Sarah was conscious of no longer fitting in. She didn’t know what a poetry slam was, thought the black toenails looked like her feet got caught in a car door, and she wasn’t aware that anyone under sixty drank martinis.
“No, I’m... I’m Sarah, and, well, I used to live here and wanted to come visit.”
The girl gaped. “Why’d anyone want to come back to this dump?”
“Don’t be such a bitch, Gwendolyn.” The other girl’s accent was similar. Long Island, probably. She smiled at Sarah. She looked younger, and pretty, though not in such an obvious way as her companion. Still, her nails, finger and toe, were painted a bilious shade of green. “How long ago were you here?”
“I graduated, oh, a while ago,” Sarah said. “I’ve just moved back to town. Guess this is...” She shrugged her shoulders, mind slowly catching up with her body. Why was she there? Running away from Emerson by running right back to him? “I don’t know, just a little nostalgia tour. Look, don’t let me distur
b you.”
“Please disturb me.” Gwendolyn flipped the book closed. “This is completely irrelevant to anything I hope to be doing for the rest of my life. Tell me why a marketing major needs to know anything about dead white European philosophers?”
Sarah knew that as an alumna, she was supposed to say something encouraging. But except for the occasional game-show question or bizarre discussion with Emerson, when had she ever been called upon to know the difference between Calvin and Hobbes?
“Oh, shit, Izzy,” Gwendolyn said. “The toad. It’s back.”
Izzy twisted toward the lounge window. Sarah followed her gaze and saw a smallish, roundish young man waving from the lounge window of the corresponding floor on the boy’s side.
“Don’t look, you’re just encouraging him!” Gwendolyn said.
Izzy gave the boy a little wave and half a smile. But her reflection in the window looked sad.
Gwendolyn turned to Sarah. “I swear, he has no self-respect. Like some stupid puppy, the way he chases after her.”
Sarah wondered if the boy across the way would try to kill himself over Izzy when she finally rejected him. If he would have a roommate who’d come back unexpectedly and stop him.
Gwendolyn glared out the window. “Damn. He’s getting on the phone. He’s calling here, I know it. Come on, Izzy, let’s go to your room. You, too,” she said to Sarah.
She herded Sarah and Izzy toward a room off the lounge that in Sarah’s experience, used to be the floor’s kitchen.
The lobby phone rang. Izzy turned toward it.
“Don’t pick it up,” Gwendolyn said.
It rang again. Izzy bit her lower lip. Sarah could see the divided loyalty on the girl’s face. Perhaps she was already involved with this boy. Perhaps she wasn’t sure if she’d done the right thing.
Been there. Done that. Still doing that.
Another ring. Gwendolyn held the door to Izzy’s room open, her mouth a tight slash.
Izzy looked at Sarah, hopelessness in her eyes.