Still in Love

by Michael Downing

  “Are you not saying anything because I should’ve said I wondered what you think about I being in there? Or is it my being in there? See, this is exactly what happens to me like ten times a day now, thanks to you,” Anton said, and he quickly added, “and I don’t mean that in the good way that happens while we’re all together in class and you feel like you’re supposed to be confused, or not so sure of your opinions or—I think you called them reflexes, which, by the way, I totally agree is what I have all the time instead of real thoughts—genuine ideas, as you like to say—so I guess my point is that I’m afraid it’s only going to get worse with that new Technical Exercise you gave us today, forcing us to use so much grammar for that one long sentence.”

  Mark pointed to the chair beside his desk.

  Anton said, “Are you saying sit down and maybe shut up for a minute?”

  “It’s worth a shot,” Mark said.

  Anton sat down.

  Mark sat down and said, “Hello, Anton.”

  Anton said, “Hello, Mark.”

  Mark nodded. “This is starting to resemble a normal conversation. What brings you here today?”

  Anton narrowed his gaze. Maybe he was suppressing a smile, maybe he was biting his tongue. “So, now I’m not sure what I want to say.”

  “Okay,” Mark said.

  Anton leaned forward in the chair, clearly expecting Mark to say something more. His interest slowly faded into a wry smile. “I know it’ll just make you happy if I say I’m nervous or confused about anything. Right?”

  Mark nodded. “Sounds like me.”

  “See, it’s like I can hear your answer to everything I’m about to say.”

  Mark didn’t say anything.

  Anton ducked his head and coughed, or maybe he giggled. He was smiling broadly when he said, “All I can think about now is that long sentence I have to write.”

  “I was thinking about that, too,” Mark said. It was true. “Do you remember what you said when you first got here? All that ten-times-a-day business and reflexive thinking?”

  Anton winced. “Can we maybe agree just to forget I said all that?”

  “If you counted, I think you’d see that sentence was almost 125 words long—and perfectly grammatical.”

  “I should’ve been taking notes,” Anton said. He stood up. “I’m only leaving because I have an appointment. But you don’t mind if I just come by again without an appointment or anything?”

  “I’m already looking forward to the next time.”

  “I bet,” Anton said, and waved on his way out, and then he turned from the hall and said, “It was really grammatical? What I said?”

  Mark said, “Perfectly,” and then Anton nodded and disappeared.

  Although there was nothing else for him to do in his office, Mark felt obliged to wait for Karen to return—they’d known each other for years, and hadn’t seen each other since the blowup last semester—so he checked his phone.

  Paul was there.

  Mark sat down. He had four emails, many texts, and a video. He immediately put his phone to sleep, tucked it into his bag, and decided to spend the night in Cambridge with Paul.

  The door swung open. “I thought you’d be gone.” Karen seemed more disappointed than surprised.

  “I’ll get out of your way.”

  “It’s a union meeting. In here. I’m on the steering committee, helping to organize before the vote in May. I hope you don’t mind.” She pulled a pair of red-plastic reading glasses from a desk drawer.

  Mark said, “It’s your office as much as it is mine,” though when Karen sat at her little desk, Mark did feel she ought to be taking dictation or lighting his cigar.

  “I don’t want to leave things where we left them last semester, Mark. I know you honestly feel strongly about the tenure system. I respect that. But it does seem wrong to oppose the union because white-collar workers aren’t laborers, or simply—”

  “I’ve never spoken publicly against the adjuncts unionizing. And the white-collar business—that came from some dean or vice president, not from me.” He had noticed that there were usually ten or fifteen full-time union job openings on the Hellman food-service and groundskeeping staffs, but he didn’t suggest Karen or her colleagues submit applications. “The thing is, Karen, unlike you and almost everyone in America, I think what really matters here is what happens in the classroom. I don’t think it will survive unless it’s protected. It’s fragile. It’s available nowhere else in the world. And I don’t want a union organizer at the table when decisions about the classroom get made. It’s that simple.”

  Karen held her glasses in front of her face, as she would a magnifying glass, or a rifle sight. “But doesn’t it also matter that half the people who teach here can’t afford to pay 85 percent of the premium for the college’s gold-plated insurance plan so they go without any health insurance? While you get 85 percent paid for? It’s a simple inequity.”

  “Unalike does not necessarily mean inequitable,” Mark said, but that sounded more didactic than conciliatory. “Anyway, whoever is right here, it can’t be a good thing that you and I are left feeling like opponents. I regret letting that happen. I haven’t got a surplus of friends.”

  “And I don’t think you’re a partisan for the administration—I know you’re not—and I really regret most of what I said the last time we had this argument.”

  Mark noted her most. “I hope we don’t end up feeling like opponents when the vote carries. I do believe it will carry. There will be a union.” He headed to the door.

  “Hey, I didn’t even ask about your classes,” Karen said. “Are they okay?”

  “You know me. I’m a sap. I just love time in the classroom.” He waved and closed the door as he left, and he didn’t turn around. He didn’t go back and remind Karen he had a full-time, tenured position, with full benefits, a full-size desk and chair, and was teaching only one class this semester.

  4.

  Mark had to make three trips from the parking spot he found a block away from Paul’s place with the groceries he’d bought, and after he’d shoved all but two bags into the elevator, the door closed and he was stuck waiting for whoever wanted to come down, who would also be stuck if they objected to standing on orange peppers, canned tomatoes, and the other makings for two or three weeks’ worth of dinners. The walking back and forth, the heavy bags, even the wait for the elevator that was starting to seem sort of excessive—all of it was adding to his anticipatory pleasure, elongating the period of delayed gratification he’d planned since he first saw and didn’t read the many messages from Paul on his phone.

  They spent a lot of time apart, but this time, Paul had almost slipped away. It happened occasionally—how or why, Mark didn’t understand. There was never a single precipitating event or an emotional upheaval that occasioned the near loss of him. From the moment Mark first laid eyes on Paul—which immediately provoked an absolutely mutual and absolutely urgent need to get every other body part involved in the introductions—knowing Paul was loving Paul was being with Paul. Distance, disagreements, discouragement, even apparent disasters didn’t alter the degree or intensity of the desire, the need to be together. It wasn’t variable because it wasn’t a quantity or a quality.

  But then there would be that breath Mark couldn’t catch, the beat that ought to follow on the last one but didn’t come when the muscles of his heart inexplicably froze. For how long this time? Time enough to feel the vast hollowed-out cavity of his chest, the futility of himself.

  The elevator door slid open. The grocery bags were gone. Dennis Blake said, “Be brutal. How do I look?” He was wearing a tux.

  “Spectacular.” It was true. “Wherever you’re going, you’re gonna ruin the night for a lot of other guys,” Mark said. This was true, too. Every man who put on a tux believed he looked like Dennis, and evidence to the contrary wouldn’t be welcome news.

  “Paul has this code.” Dennis punched the code into the elevator keypad to keep the d
oor open. “I put the groceries near your front door.”

  Mark had memorized and forgotten the code a dozen times. “How did you know they were mine?”

  “Ipswich Seafood canvas bags. Wild guess. I really look all right? You’d go home with me?”

  “I’d let you buy me a drink,” Mark said. If Dennis’s head got any bigger, he’d never get out of the elevator.

  “I wish you’d told me you were here this weekend. We’re going to the Vineyard tomorrow for some unknown reason.” He tugged at his sleeve to consult his platinum dinner plate of a watch. “By now, food is being served and Diana is not speaking to me. Ten-Eleven. The code.”

  Although it was still locked in place, Dennis held the door while Mark tossed the other bags into the elevator. To reassure him, Mark said, “Ten-Eleven.”

  “Easy to remember,” Dennis said. “It’s my birthday.”

  After he shoved the last two grocery bags onto the kitchen counter, Mark set himself up at Paul’s desk in the bedroom, emptied out his bag, and immediately printed the emails and texts from Paul. He didn’t read them. He did read and respond to four student emails, an urgent request for an RSVP to an English Department meeting at noon on Monday, and he saved a few invitations to readings and dinners that were far enough in the future that Paul might want to attend.

  At midnight, he packed the last of a dozen orange peppers stuffed with mushrooms and ground turkey, swimming in a stew of San Marzano tomatoes and caramelized onions, into Paul’s freezer. The two quarts of Empire applesauce he’d made were already hardening in the way back. And the vat of brown rice was cool enough to go into the refrigerator alongside three garlicky pork tenderloins he could feed off for a week or two, with the addition of lemon and capers, which Mark considered a green vegetable.

  He poured the dregs from the coffee pot into his old McClintock College travel mug and went up to the roof for a cigarette. He sat in Dennis’s chair and balanced his mug on the arm of the other chair, his chair. The snow cover had melted up there and everywhere down below except the edges of the paths through the Cambridge Common. A thin spread of clouds had slipped in above, a curtain drawn over the waning moon and its attendant stars, those radiant hieroglyphics people had been reading for centuries. The night air was deep and dark.

  Paul had found and preserved the old travel mug Mark had lost for months somewhere in the Saab. Paul was there. This was Paul’s place.

  Paul wasn’t going anywhere. It was Mark who was slipping away. His love for Paul had not waned or wavered. But Mark had never been able to disentangle his passions and his ambitions, and with Paul so far away and so long gone, Mark was letting so much of himself go that he wasn’t sure he could ever collect it all again, get a handle on who he was. He felt he was living in a little avalanche of undoneness and postponements and disinclinations—the chairmanship of the English Department he was doing his best to dodge; the NEPCAJE report he did not want to write; the friends and colleagues he didn’t want to see; the week of spring break he didn’t want to spend in Italy with that report not written; the ten days of the winter break he hadn’t spent skiing in Utah with Paul and five of their friends so he could roam around his little house in Ipswich and occasionally stop at the threshold of his office to stare accusingly at the stack of sixty-five double-spaced pages of the novel he had abandoned. Unable to make himself write anything, Mark had called his loyal and long-suffering editor to complain that only one of the books he’d written was still yielding any royalties, so what was the point anyway? His editor said one perennial seller was one more than most writers could claim, and followed up with an email outlining several plausible op-ed topics to boost sales again, along with a list of periodicals likely to publish the pieces. Mark responded by devoting the remainder of his winter break to revising and refining the spring syllabus and Technical Exercises for the creative-writing class.

  You could call this fear of success or fear of failure. You could say that Mark was embarrassed by his ambitions or unequal to them. He had diagnosed himself a dozen times but had not come up with a cure, except in the classroom. There, the Professor provided a potent remedy. The Professor’s unapologetic, often punishing ambitions for the course and for the students’ stories freed Mark to cultivate a relationship with each student, to identify this one’s peculiar deficiencies and that one’s idiosyncratic skills, to devote himself entirely to making room for them, even when it required shutting the Professor up or shoving him out of the way.

  Dennis appeared on the roof in his tux. “Don’t say a word.” He eased down into Mark’s chair, picked up the travel cup and took a swig. “Coffee. That’ll help.” He took a second, longer pull and then offered it to Mark.

  “The back hall smells great,” Dennis said. “What did you make?”

  “Pork for me. Peppers for Paul.”

  “His favorite.” Dennis didn’t know it, but he knew more about Mark and Paul than most of their oldest friends and all of their many colleagues at work. The weeknight meals Mark made every Sunday, the four times of day they phoned each other, Paul’s meticulous accounting and investment strategies on both their behalves, and the apparently astonishing fact that they still slept in the same bed.

  Mark said, “I made a lot of applesauce if you want some.”

  “Frozen?”

  Mark nodded.

  Dennis said, “I’ll wait till Paul gets back. But look what I have for us.” He pulled a black box out of his breast pocket, about the size of a coaster. “From Russia. Genuine Sobranies.” He flipped up the top and pulled out two black cigarettes with gold filter tips. He lit one, handed it to Mark, and lit another for himself.

  Mark took a couple of long drags. The tobacco was dark, loamy. “It tastes like a peat bog. It’s fantastic.”

  “It does feel dirty,” Dennis said.

  “Illicit,” Mark said.

  Dennis said, “I’d quit for good if I could just smoke a couple of these every day.” He handed the box to Mark.

  Mark said, “They’re really called Black Russians.”

  “They’re yours, comrade. I got a carton from some realtor who’s trying to sell me something.”

  Mark held up the box. “Do you know what this means?” Reverse-printed in Cyrillic on a white background were two words: КУРЕНИЕ УБИВАЕТ.

  “Smoking kills.” Dennis extended his arm and held his cigarette at an admiring distance. “Here’s hoping.” He took two more drags, and then he followed Mark down to the landing, where they went their separate ways.

  Back inside, Mark put on Paul’s bathrobe and lay on the bed. The subject line of the first and every subsequent email from Paul was “Ten Percent.” Perfect.

  Paul had resurrected that subject line from years earlier, when Mark was still at McClintock College, writing a book to beef up his tenure box. Mark’s plan to spend a few weekends doing interviews and research in San Francisco had turned into biweekly trips to the West Coast that fall. And months later, three weeks into his winter break, alone in a tiny little room on the top floor of a brothel with a disco bar near Union Square, he was still not done. Paul reassured him, loyally read every page Mark wrote, every day assuring Mark that he would cross the finish line. But that was precisely what had unnerved Mark. He knew he would stick it out, write the book, and get tenure, even as he felt Paul slipping away.

  Paul repeatedly said he wasn’t going anywhere.

  Mark repeatedly said that wasn’t exactly the point.

  And then Mark wrote Paul an insane and insanely long email, a nearly verbatim transcription of his thoughts about Paul, about tenure, about writing, about how many times the same drag queen had knocked on his door and yelled Room service! He sent it with the subject line “One Percent.” And then he wrote a follow-up email to explain that the previous email represented 1 percent of the thoughts and ideas he had hatched and not expressed to Paul in the last hour or so.

  Paul answered immediately, under the subject line “Ten Percent.”
Mark had preserved the email, transferring it to every device he ever owned, the only item in his Paul file.

  You have at least ten times more thoughts per minute than I do, so this will seem pathetically brief. I am here. I checked—I tapped my head, and I definitely felt my hand on my head. And if I am here, I am there, because I am the Paul you make possible.

  In the fullness of time, we were always together.

  5.

  After reading through Paul’s latest texts and emails a few times, Mark managed to paste together a reasonable version of the story on the European front. The administrative processing center and refugee camp on Lesbos where Paul had hoped to set up operations was overrun and overwhelmed. He’d quickly determined that the time required to coordinate the ongoing efforts with new staff brought in by the Paean Project would be counterproductive. Plus, many of the smugglers were now dumping their human cargo in smaller ports and bays where there was no police presence to interfere with their lucrative business. So Paul and two doctors had hired a fisherman to ferry them around the Aegean for two weeks to identify a couple of coastal towns that could be cajoled or bribed to serve as satellite bases where refugees could be transported for medical treatment beyond the emergency aid available at most of the established camps.

  Paul promised to write something every day and hoped he would land somewhere with cell service at least once or twice during the adventure to send it all along. The video was a twelve-second view of a forty-foot trawler and two shirtless guys with ponytails mugging for the camera. The crew? The doctors? Paul’s baggage handlers?

  When he woke up on Thursday morning, Mark sent off the first of the daily One Percent emails he had resolved to write every morning till Paul returned. He also forwarded the video to Paul’s great friend, Sharon, the nurse who had Paul’s car, and asked if she was free for dinner next week. This was progress. He was getting hold of himself, and he hadn’t even had a coffee yet. Mark was on the way back. He read an email from the dean organizing the NEPCAJE meeting at Amherst, one week from Saturday, which threatened to derail his progress. Two of the four people scheduled to join Mark on the featured panel had pulled out. Did Mark have a colleague he could bring along?