Heart the Lover - 2

I

Y ou knew I’d write a book about you someday. You said once that I’d dredged up the whole hit parade minus you.

I’ll never know how you’d tell it.

For me it begins here. Like this.

T he professor is holding up two neon-orange pieces of paper.

‘Despite its vulgar packaging,’ he says, waving a page in each hand like a flagman at Daytona, ‘I feel compelled to read this one aloud.’

The assignment had been to write a contemporary version of Bacon’s essay ‘History of Life and Death.’ I’d waited till the last minute to write it. The only paper we had in the house was this thick stuff left over from our Halloween party. And it wasn’t easy, feeding that cardstock into my typewriter.

The professor doesn’t read it as much as perform it. He gives it far more life and humor than I imagined it had.

There are two smart guys in the class. They sit up front together and I see only the backs of their heads, one with coppery brown hair and the other with a thick black ponytail. The professor runs things by them so often I assume they’re his grad school TAs. When my essay gets passed back to me, they both turn to watch where it goes.

After that day, the copper-haired one begins migrating back. Three classes later, he takes a seat beside me.

Soon he is walking me across campus to Modern Furniture, the only art history class that wasn’t full by the time I signed up. Our seventeenth-century lit class has only about thirty people, but Modern Furniture is held in an auditorium with cushioned seats set on a steep slope down to the professor at his podium. Behind him is a big screen that flashes pictures of Corbusier’s B 306 chaise longue and Bauhaus nesting tables. I catch up on a lot of sleep in that class.

Sam has short halting steps and speaks in fits and starts too, little articulate bursts then a good bit of silence. We talk exclusively about the class.

‘He’s not focusing enough on Cromwell,’ he says, ‘and how resistance to him galvanized the imagination of this whole generation of writers.’

I agree. What else can I do? I am a mere student, and he is a scholar. That much is clear right away. I’ve never met a scholar who wasn’t a professor. And Sam isn’t even a grad student. He’s a senior, like me.

Later I go to the library and read about who Cromwell was, and the next time we walk to Modern Furniture I make a very small joke about the Rump Parliament. Sam’s laugh is soundless, more like panting.

He asks me if I’ve seen The Deer Hunter and I say yes and I figure he’s going to make a comparison somehow with Venitore, the hunter, in The Compleat Angler . Instead he asks me if I want to see it again, with him. It’s playing on campus Friday night.

We meet at the Student Union. He’s already bought my ticket. They’ve set up rows of metal chairs and a screen on a stand. We sit and wait for the lights to go out. My roommate, Carson, passes us with her boyfriend, Bud, a Green Beret who drives up from Fort Bragg every chance he gets. They’re arguing as they sidestep to empty seats three rows ahead of us and then, once settled, start groping each other.

The movie starts. It is long and brutal. I have to look down into my lap for half of it. Sam sits like a stranger beside me. Finally they sing ‘God Bless America’ at the dinner table after Christopher Walken’s funeral, the frame freezes, and it is over. Sam gets up as soon as the credits roll, and I follow him out of the Student Union.

We head down a campus path that isn’t in the direction of my room on Pye Street or toward town, where I thought we might get a drink. He points out his dorm from freshman year and I point out mine the next quad over. The movie has made these buildings, these quads, these years of our lives seem unbearably naïve. I want to say something about it, but that feels naïve, too. Instead I start to say that I have to get up early and he asks if I’d like to get a beer.

We walk toward the bars, but he veers onto a side street then through the gate of a white fence and up a stepping-stone path to a front door lit by an overhead light.

‘Where are we?’

‘My house.’

I can tell he wanted to show it to me, knew it would be a draw.

It is.

He turns the knob—the house is unlocked—and holds the door open for me. I step into a small vestibule with steep stairs off to the left. To the right is a little table with a lamp and a pad of paper with a pen on top. Through an open door is a living room painted navy blue with a striped couch and a wall of books.

I remark on the number of books.

‘That’s just the overspill,’ he says. I follow him through the living room into a large study out of an old movie—four walls of floor-to-ceiling books, a big, thick-legged desk, and a leather chair before the fireplace.

‘Is this where you smoke your pipe in the evening?’

With a small smile he pulls open the top drawer of the table beside the leather chair to reveal four old pipes nestled neatly on a wooden rack.

I laugh and he pants.

‘Whose house is this?’

‘Dr. Gastrell’s. Did you ever have him for Chaucer? Or his seminar on Milton?’

I shake my head. I’ve heard of Gastrell before. ‘Gastric,’ people call him. Stay away, I’ve heard, he’s notoriously hard. Can undergrads actually take seminars?

‘He’s on sabbatical, doing research at Merton.’ He sees my lack of recognition. ‘At Oxford. He asked us to take care of the place for the year.’

‘Us?’

‘Yash and me.’

Yash?

There’s so much he expects me to know.

Neither of us is sure what to say after that. Sam shuts the drawer with the pipes and I ask where the bathroom is. He points to a sloped door beneath the stairs. I don’t really have to go. I just need to be alone for a minute. The toilet bowl is deep and the tiny bit I pee makes a loud sound when it hits the water, so I stop. The mirror above the sink is an oval fixed high on the wall. I can see half my forehead at a time, one eye or the other, if I stand on tiptoe.

The hallway is empty, the door out to the street a few steps away. In ten minutes I could be back in my room on Pye Street. But Carson and Bud will be there going at it in one way or another. A refrigerator opens and I follow the sound.

We sit with our bottles of beer on the striped couch in the navy room. Its cushions are stiff and we are stiff and he isn’t a guy who’s afraid of the long pause. We pick at our labels and speak sporadically. He asks if I have a lot of work this weekend and I say I have to write a short story.

‘Why?’

‘For my fiction class.’

He nods slowly, full of some thought he’s decided not to share. ‘What will you write about?’

I look around the room. ‘Tonight, probably.’

He looks alarmed. Then he pants. ‘Good one.’

The front door opens and slams against the wall.

‘Fucking fucking hell,’ says a voice from the hallway. The door shudders shut. ‘I’m locking it in case she followed me.’ A whoop-laugh. ‘You here? How was the daisy?’ He swings into the room, the other guy from our class. Yash. ‘Oh my. If she isn’t right here before us.’

His hair is out of its ponytail, thick and black, just past his shoulders. He is trying hard to stop laughing.

‘The daisy ?’ I say.

‘Date, daisy,’ he says. ‘We call all our dates daisies. And my daisy tonight was a doozy.’ He smiles wide and comes closer. I glance at Sam, worried that he’s going to kick him out, but he’s got a little grin on his face I haven’t seen yet. He’s as relieved as I am that there are three of us now.

‘What happened?’ he says.

‘Well, I go and pick her up at Kappa,’ Yash says, standing in front of the coffee table facing us. Sam and I lean back at the same time, as if we’ve turned on a TV. ‘You have to sign in and give blood and take a vow of chastity and then you have to wait in a fucking parlor with doilies on all the tables for twenty minutes with all the other pathetic dudes. God, that guy Ian was there—the one who quoted Victor Hugo’s last words.’

Sam chuckles. ‘I see black light.’

‘I saw black light at Kappa for sure. It’s creepy in that room, and sort of smelly too, like if I get a whiff of my mother’s fingers, all the stuff she’s poked her fingers in during the day.’ He looks at me and jabs a finger in the air a few times. ‘My mother is a real poker,’ he says. ‘Finally we hear steps on the stairs and these girls all come down together and they look kind of alike and now none of us remember anymore who we’re taking out because we’ve been stuck in that playpen all night. However, someone identifies me from the lineup and we get the hell out of there. I take her to Pip’s, we talk about her father, who has some rare ghastly disease, and her brother, who sounds like an a-hole, and I order something that should have been called maroon glop over dirty sponge and bring her back to Kappa. She wants to show me something back in the playpen, which is now empty and very dimly lit, and I have to look at some god-awful Confederate musket on the wall, which she reveals belonged to her grandfather , and I head fast for the door, but her legs are suddenly ten feet long and she gets there first and presses me up against some coat hooks and unhinges her jaw like a snake. It was terrifying. I make a break and manage to get the screen door between us’—he holds up the imaginary door like a shield—‘and say goodnight politely and run.’

Sam is laughing so hard he makes sound.

Yash snorts and apologizes and wipes his eyes. He straightens up and wiggles his fingers at us. ‘I hope this is going a little better.’

‘It’s a little awkward,’ I say, and they both laugh.

‘It’ll get better. Sam is an acquired taste,’ he says. ‘Bonne nuit.’ And he clomps up the stairs.

Sam gets up and shuts both doors to the living room. When he sits back down on the couch, he’s closer.

‘The daisy? Please tell me not as in Daisy Buchanan.’

‘In a good way,’ he says, and kisses me.

On Monday Sam walks me to Modern Furniture, and when I get out fifty minutes later he’s waiting.

‘Want to come over for lunch?’

We eat turkey sandwiches and make out on the couch again. He doesn’t rush things. We kiss and kiss until I have to go to Logic.

I walk across campus a little lightheaded. I keep bursting out laughing, thinking about making out on Doc Gastric’s couch on a Monday in broad daylight. All the awkwardness dissolved when we were kissing. He said little things and I said little things and we made each other laugh on that striped couch.

Could he tell how little experience I’d had? Only one boyfriend so far, Jay, the year before. We met in the fall and I brought him home for spring break and fell out of love with him in my mother’s kitchen. I told him on the plane back to school, which is a terrible place to break up. He cried and thrashed around but wouldn’t get up and go to the bathroom to pull himself together. The conversation started quietly enough, with him saying what he often said to me, which was that I bottled up my feelings until they came out like a fire hose, that if I didn’t withhold so much we could reach each other better. But as he slowly realized that he wasn’t going to be able to talk me out of my decision, his recriminations got louder. He’d paid for our flights . He could have gone to Key West with his friends instead of a shitty town in Massachusetts . His mother thought I was lesbian . ‘I taught you everything I know about sex!’ he hollered all the way down the aisle into the cockpit, which had no door back then. It was true. He had. I’d been a virgin and he’d been a fun and loving guide. I’d had nothing to compare him or our sex to at the time, but now I know that he was particularly uninhibited and passed along that attitude to me. He did not like that now I was going to pass it along to someone else. He got very hung up on that fact. It was the longest flight of my life, and I was grateful when the wheels hit the runway and my freedom was near. After Jay, I made out with the bartender at the restaurant I worked at, with a guy at the senior pig roast at the start of the semester, and most recently with a friend of Carson’s who had also dressed up as Cyndi Lauper for our Halloween party.

Sam invites me for dinner on Friday. I imagine having the house to ourselves, Dr. Gastrell’s candlesticks lit in the dining room. At the door, I hand him a bottle of wine.

Sam looks at the label and puts his arm out for me to go into the living room.

‘We’re pairing a 1987 Riesling with the pepperoni this evening,’ he says behind me to Yash and a guy I don’t know on the couch. This guy has a mat of ginger curls six inches thick on top of his head. He has short legs and big sneakers splayed on top of Dr. Gastrell’s polished coffee table. Beside the sneakers are four boxes of pizza. Yash goes to fetch some wineglasses.

Ginger guy points at me. ‘Freshman year. Stranger mixer. You went with Dale Greensmith.’

‘This is Ivan,’ Sam says.

Ivan shuts his eyes. ‘Red dress. Black buttons.’

‘Well you’re freaky.’

‘I’m right, aren’t I?’

‘About the dress. The date I don’t remember.’

They laugh like I’m lying, like you could never remember a dress better than a guy.

‘In Riesling veritas,’ Yash says, pouring the wine into small, impossibly thin glasses the shape of bluebells. ‘We’ll get to the truth about old Dale Greensmith before the end of the night.’

Sam and I sit in the armchairs across from Yash and Ivan. The wine is sweet and foul, but I love holding the fragile little glass in my fingers.

Ivan is another English major I’ve never met before. ‘Tell me everything, bar-none everything, that comes to mind when you think about James Joyce,’ he says.

Fortunately my high school English teacher was a little obsessed with Joyce. ‘Stream of consciousness, onomatopoeia, epiphany, yes I will yes I said Yes, and falling softly, softly falling on the living and the dead.’

Ivan presses the heels of his hands into his eyeballs and rocks his head back and forth. ‘ “Falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.” I’m so fucked,’ he whines.

‘He’s writing his thesis on Finnegans Wake ,’ Sam says.

Ivan parts his hands to look at me with a last shred of hope. But I’ve never heard of it.

‘Are you writing a thesis?’ I ask Sam.

‘You have to, in the honors program.’

‘Oh, right.’ The honors program. I feel like I go to a different college, and they know it.

‘Who have you taken?’ Ivan asks.

It was that kind of thing. They don’t ask what classes but which professors.

I strain a little to think of some names. ‘Brody, Iyengar, Doukas.’ They were the only ones that came to mind.

No recognition.

‘They teach creative writing.’

‘Those poor fucks,’ Ivan says. Sam signals something to him. ‘I just mean, what could be worse than reading crappy stories all semester?’

‘They’re not crappy anymore. I’m in advanced.’ You had to take 101, 201, and 301 to get into advanced.

‘Oh, advanced .’ Ivan laughs.

‘I took a creative writing class freshman year,’ Yash says.

‘No you didn’t,’ Sam says.

‘I did. With Iyengar.’ He looks at me. ‘She hated my story.’

‘That is not true,’ Sam says.

‘ Hated it.’

‘There were little checkmarks and a nice comment.’

‘Two checkmarks in fifteen pages, and the comment was patronizing.’

‘It wasn’t.’

‘This shows future promise.’ He grimaces.

‘It was probably the first paper you’d ever gotten back without the word “genius” or “ incandescent , ” ’ Sam says, ‘at the bottom.’

‘It’s not that. It isn’t. But “future promise”? Like someday far from now I may show the faintest flicker of talent?’

‘So you never took another one?’ I ask.

‘No.’

‘He didn’t even take that one,’ Sam says. ‘He dropped it after three weeks.’

‘None of the writers I admire ever took a class in creative writing,’ Yash says. ‘I think I’ll be okay.’

Ivan passes me a slice of pizza on a delicate white plate with a gold rim and a cluster of rosebuds in the center. ‘Apart from the night of the red dress, why have we never seen you before?’ he asks me. ‘Where have you been hiding?’

I wasn’t in a sorority and I didn’t go to frat parties and I worked at a restaurant three nights a week. ‘I don’t know. I was on the golf team for my first year, so I traveled a lot.’ This is stretching the truth a bit.

‘You were on the fucking golf team?’ he says. Our university has a very good golf team—ACC Champions eleven years straight.

‘Freshman year. Then I quit.’ I quit the first week.

‘Damn. You were a recruit.’

‘Everyone’s a recruit.’ Did he think it was 1920? No one walked on anymore.

‘She’s not Daisy Buchanan, she’s Jordan Baker,’ Yash says, then bends an ear toward me. ‘Does your voice sound like money?’

‘No. It sounds like someone who gave up her golf scholarship.’

I can tell they all like me better once they’ve changed my name to Jordan. They use it a lot.

Yash carries the empty pizza boxes into the kitchen and comes back with cards. ‘Surely Jordan knows how to play hearts.’

I don’t, but I love card games and am a quick learner and shoot the moon in the second hand.

‘Jordan. Sly J. Watch out there, Sammy.’

Sam glances quickly at me, that little smile above his fan of cards.

‘Well,’ says Sam after we play six hands, gathering up all the cards and not dealing them out again.

‘Time to show her your etchings?’ Ivan says. ‘There are actual etchings in his room. God’s truth.’

‘Have a look?’ Sam is blushing and also asking me with his eyes.

Yash is loading the dishwasher in the kitchen.

I nod.

In the hallway he takes my hand and I follow him up the tight steep staircase. There’s a turn at the top then two more steps. He reaches for a switch on the wall. An old sconce comes on after a delay, dimly. He leads me into the front bedroom. He doesn’t turn on the overhead and we don’t look at any etchings. He pulls me onto Dr. Gastrell’s tall double bed.

We kiss and wrap our legs around each other and he says he’s been wanting to get me up here all night. We press hard against each other and I feel like I might come before I get my jeans off. We laugh because my fingers don’t seem to be working but I get them unzipped and he reaches for me as soon as I kick them off and he makes a sort of low growl when he feels how wet I am. I feel him, too, straining against the zipper of his jeans. I reach for his belt and he says something that sounds like no. I can feel his pulse through the fabric, the shape of his tip. It takes all my strength to remain still. He kisses me and starts to finger me and doesn’t explain why I can’t touch him.

I sit up and pull my pants back on. The desire is still careening around inside me, irritatingly, like being drunk when you need to be sober.

‘Please don’t take it the wrong way,’ he says.

I can hear Yash and Ivan arguing downstairs, a few thuds, then Yash laughing. I feel mortified, like the two of them already know what has happened. Ivan sent us up here. He knew how it would play out. I have a paranoid streak and I need to get out of here.

I put on my shoes, adjust my bra, and open the door.

‘Jordan.’ Sam can move very quickly. He touches my arm, my hip. Lifts my shirt and strokes it with his thumb. ‘Please stay. Please, please, please. I can explain.’ His lips in my hair, his thumb moving over my hipbone. I don’t want to go downstairs and see Yash and Ivan on my way out. Eventually I relent.

We get under the sheets. We keep our shirts and underwear on. He spoons me and kisses my neck and my ear, and my body is in a riot. I need to leave. I need to stay. I can feel him hard against me. I never felt anything like this for Jay. He falls asleep way before I do and does not explain.

I wake up early. I need to go in search of a bathroom. I slip off the bed without waking Sam. Once more I put on my jeans and open the door. The sconce is still on and there are two doors at the end of the hallway. Both shut. My guess is that the bathroom will be above the kitchen because of the plumbing, so I open the door on the left slowly, just a crack.

It’s not a bathroom. It’s Yash in a twin bed under a yellow bedspread. He is surrounded by books. Books in piles along the walls and all around the bed, and a few beside him on the yellow bedspread. He’s on his back with a concentrated, serious expression I’ve never seen before, as if sleep were very hard work. I shut the door and go into the bathroom across the hall.

Sam is awake when I come back. I get in beside him and there’s a lot of kissing and pressing together. With Jay I never liked sex in the morning, but sexual frustration in the morning is even worse. I try to distract myself by looking over his shoulder at the spines of the books on his bedside table. Confessions of Saint Augustine , Paul the Apostle , Mere Christianity .

Oh.

‘I’m hungry,’ I say. ‘I should get going.’

‘I’ll make you breakfast.’

We go down to the kitchen.

It’s a neglected, old-fashioned kitchen with a chipped ceramic sink and big black and white tiles on the floor. There’s a back door with a glass window and a little yard outside with one sad chair perched in the overgrown grass. I sit at the small table against the wall beside the old fridge. Sam makes coffee in one of those percolators with a plastic cylinder at the top that shows the coffee splashing around. He keeps his back to me even while he’s waiting for the water to boil.

He fills the cups and asks me if I take milk. I don’t take coffee so I say no, and he says good, we don’t have any milk, and pants out a laugh. He sits down opposite me at the table and takes long pulls of the coffee with his eyes closed then gets up for a second cup. To me coffee is gross and only parents drink it. I keep thinking I should go but don’t get up. After his second cup he remembers food. He pulls things out of the fridge and I offer to help but he tells me to sit. My body is all out of whack. I don’t remember this kind of silence with Jay. I don’t remember ever wondering what to say or noticing any gaps. I miss him then, for the first time since we broke up. I ask Sam how he and Yash got the house and he says they’d been coming over here for dinner since freshman year when they had Gastrell for Late Medieval Lit. That’s how Yash and Sam met, in that class. Gastrell got Yash a research job at the Sparrow, Sam says. Whatever that is. And, Sam says, he lets Ivan use his study in the faculty club.

‘He’s just really generous to his students. It’s too bad you never had him for anything.’

I’m a good student in English. I get A’s and A-’s and nice words at the bottom of my essays. But I’ve never made friends with any of my professors, all men except for Iyengar. No one has ever given me a perk or suggested a seminar. I waited on Professor Wyler at High Five once, I’d had him for Modern Poetry sophomore spring. He was alone and drank three bourbons and asked me what time I clocked out. I don’t think he was planning to tell me about the honors program. If I’d had Dr. Gastrell, maybe I’d have gotten to see his green bedroom, but I doubt he’d have given me this house for the year for nothing.

Sam makes toast and eggs over easy. He sets the plates down on the table with a ketchup bottle and I feel heavy as lead. I force myself to take a few sips of the black coffee.

I hear Yash coming down the stairs.

‘What’s for breakfast, good people?’ he calls before he comes in. Somehow he knows I’m still here. ‘Morning. Morning.’ He stands at the table, looks down at our plates. ‘No, no, no. How many times must I say it?’ He removes the ketchup and replaces it with red and orange and yellow bottles from the fridge. ‘You must never let Sam make you eggs. It is an exercise in Baptist blandour.’

‘That’s not a word. Even in French.’

‘Blandiosity. Blanditas.’

I pick up the yellow and the orange and sprinkle a few dots on top of the fried eggs. Yash grabs the third bottle and splashes red all over them. The labels are faded and I can’t tell if the sauces are from India. Sam told me Yash’s dad had come to this country alone from Delhi when he was nineteen. He said that Yash’s dad liked to say he stepped off the plane and the first thing he did was get the craziest girl in Tennessee pregnant.

Sam and I watch Yash make his breakfast. He bounces around from fridge to sink to stove. He puts a kettle on and I’m relieved when he replaces my coffee with a cup of tea. He sits down between us, on the side facing the wall, and starts eating fast.

He looks up after a few bites. ‘Sorry. I eat like a jackal.’

‘Older brothers?’

He shakes his head. ‘Only child. But my mother needed to clean the plates as soon as she served the food. You have siblings?’

‘A brother. And steps.’

His eyes widen. ‘Divorced parents. Yay.’ He looks at Sam. ‘Two heathens against one saint.’

He definitely knows what happened in the bedroom.

Sam takes his plate to the sink. ‘One of her parents might have died, Yash.’

Yash looks at me.

‘Divorced,’ I say.

‘Evil stepmother?’

‘Satan’s sister.’

Sam stays at the sink, rinsing his plate for longer than it takes. I’ve known a number of religious people and for a while my mother took me to Mass because she was in love with the cantor, but I’ve never known the kind who sleep with Saint Augustine and Saint Paul by their bed. Sam pours himself another cup of coffee. Number four.

Yash sees me notice. ‘I hope you can stomach the smell of that stuff.’ He looks at Sam. ‘Can I tell her?’

Sam shakes his head weakly.

‘Do you know the Valkyrie?’

‘Who?’

‘Valerie Hayes?’

‘No.’

‘Sam’s old flame. Coffee made her gag. He stopped drinking it for her and he was a beast and that’s a whole different story, but one weekend Sam’s parents came into town and took us out to a lovely brunch and we’re eating our benedicts and Sam’s dad takes a sip of coffee, leans a little too close, and Valerie spews up her eggs so fast no one has time to duck. No one is spared.’

‘It wasn’t that bad.’

‘It was that bad.’

‘My parents loved her.’

‘His parents loved her. Even after that. Good people. Good country people.’

‘Shut up, Rooster.’

‘They’re a tad religious.’

Sam pants. ‘A tad.’

‘A speck. Sam is the rebel. Can you imagine? This is what a black sheep looks like in the Gallagher household.’

Sam is unreadable, looking down into his coffee cup.

‘I have to go,’ I say. ‘Unlike you overachievers, I haven’t even started Dryden’s essays.’

My sweater is upstairs by the bed and I think about leaving it, but my mother knit it for me in high school. I go upstairs. Sam’s in the hallway when I come back out with it. I can hear Yash clanking things around in the kitchen. Sam puts his hands under my shirt and slips them down the back of my jeans. He tastes like the coffee percolator and moves me back into the bedroom. He shuts the door. We don’t make it to the bed. We slide down to the rug and I have my back against the door and he pulls off my jeans and his tongue isn’t on me for more than half a minute before I come and he rocks me with his hands beneath me and does not take his mouth off me and I come some more and I can hear the door banging a bit and I try so hard to be quiet but I can’t do anything but let it out.

He was very good at that.

‘You’re very good at that,’ I say.

He grins up at me. ‘There are some advantages to abstention.’

‘You really haven’t had sex?’

He doesn’t answer.

I know I should ask more questions but I reach for the button of his jeans—no belt today—and he doesn’t stop me.

Everything but, we used to say in high school. Sam and I get really good at everything but.

C arson and I share a room in a house with eleven other people. We pay forty-four dollars in rent each month. There’s no heat and at the end of November we all pitch in and buy a large propane gas heater we call Mavis and keep her in the living room. To be warm in that house in winter you are either asleep under blankets or draped over Mavis. I start spending more and more nights at the Breach House—Dr. Gastrell named it after D. H. Lawrence’s childhood home—where there are tall radiators in every room that crack and sizzle with real heat. Utilities are included in their free rent, so they keep the thermostat cranked. The first time Carson comes over she cannot stop talking about the temperature. She sheds layers, piles them on an armchair. ‘I feel like I’m going to get malaria in here.’ She strips down to a T-shirt and twists her raised arm around. ‘I have not seen my elbows in weeks.’

‘You don’t shower?’ Sam says.

‘God no. You can’t shower on Pye Street in winter. You would die. I shower at the gym.’ Carson was on the volleyball team. ‘Fast. All my teammates want me.’ She flashes Sam her big smile.

I take her upstairs.

‘It’s even hotter up here. Jesus.’

‘Don’t take the Lord’s name in vain in this room.’

She looks at the bed. ‘So this is where you don’t fuck.’

I shush her.

She looks at the books on the bedside table I’ve told her about. ‘It’s not going to end well.’ She shakes her head. ‘But the heat.’ She flaps her bare arms around. ‘I get it.’

Ivan teaches us a new card game called Sir Hincomb Funnibuster that some girl from Connecticut taught him. He removes the fives, sixes, sevens, and eights from the deck and with the remaining cards explains that each suit is a family, every king the head of his family: Spade the Gardener, Club the Policeman, Heart the Lover, and Sir Hincomb Funnibuster, who is the king of diamonds. The remaining cards are different members of each king’s family. The first person to collect a full family wins. All the cards are dealt out and the only way to obtain cards is to ask another player for one, but each request has to be spoken with the exact same polite phrasing, and you must say thank you before you touch a card someone gives you. If you mess up, the first person to scream ‘Sir Hincomb Funnibuster!’ gets your turn.

‘Sam?’ Ivan says.

‘Yes.’

‘May I please have Spade the Gardener’s twins?’

‘Yes, you may.’

Sam slides the two of spades across the table.

‘Thank you,’ Ivan says, but too late, after he touches the card, so we all scream ‘Sir Hincomb Funnibuster!’ as loud as we can. Then we argue about who started screaming first.

You have to pretend you’re not looking for the suit you want, and you’re always trying to disrupt others from getting what they’re looking for. There is ganging up and subterfuge. We all have our tics and tells. I always ask for the parrot—the three—of the suit I’m pursuing. Sam always asks for the eldest son. Ivan never learns to say thank you before touching the card he’s asked for, and Yash always forgets about the donkey. Sam cannot scream ‘Sir Hincomb Funnibuster’ without leaping up and knocking things over. When I scream, Yash says my eyes look like they’re going to pop off my face like buttons.

It’s deeply satisfying to win that game, to fan out a whole family before anyone else does.

In bed that night after a few hours of Sir Hincomb and then our celibate sex, Sam tells me about his relationship with Valerie. She was Baptist like him, very pious, he says, and made it clear on their first date that she would not have sex before marriage. They fell hard in love and were together for months until they lost control one night and did it. He covers his face. ‘We prayed, we went to each other’s ministers, we stopped receiving the sacrament. But it ruined us.’

I do not say, you ruined it by believing in this man-made bullshit. I say, ‘You were in love. It was a natural impulse.’

‘I will never forgive myself for that. For doing that to her.’

‘Sounds like you did it together.’

‘It was my fault.’

‘Why?’

‘Because it’s always the man’s fault.’

‘Why? Did you rape her?’

He glares at me.

I laugh. I’m incapable of understanding his dilemma. It feels completely made up to me. I’ve noticed that about people who had stable childhoods. They like to create their own problems.

‘Why couldn’t you apologize to each other, just say oops, that was a mistake, and move on? Isn’t the whole point of Jesus about forgiveness?’

‘We tried, but . . .’ He struggles for a while to find the words, then says, ‘We are all our sins remembered.’

‘What the fuck, Sam. That’s Hamlet , not the Bible. And it’s a load of crap.’

He’s angry after that and rolls over and won’t speak. After he falls asleep I go back to my freezing house. On Monday morning he walks me to Modern Furniture like nothing happened.

My favorite nights are staying in and helping Yash pick out a shirt for a date, seeing him off, making dinner with Sam, and watching a movie or reading until Yash—and often Ivan—come back from their dates and tell us everything.

Ivan is all about Ivan. ‘I was tremendous,’ he says after an encounter on a waterbed with a med student. ‘She’ll never have it better than that.’

Sam laughs. He doesn’t judge their behavior, though Yash doesn’t seem to be having any sex at all. He comes back a lot earlier than Ivan and makes every evening sound like a complete fiasco. He takes a lot of girls out but never the one Sam says he has a real crush on. Lara Mertens. She’s Austrian, with an accent so mild you have to listen closely for it. She was in a Japanese history class with me a few semesters ago, very stylish, a little sad, putting up with all the Americans. They call her the goddess. She doesn’t seem right for Yash. I can understand the appeal—the beautiful skin, the pouty disdain, the tailored jackets—but she doesn’t look like she has any fun. He’s so sharp, so quick, so eager to make a fool of himself. He needs someone who gets him entirely.

A few weeks before I met Sam, a girl I knew had been killed off campus, stabbed to death, the school paper said in the only article they wrote about it. No one I knew knew her. Carson had gone home for the summer and I’d cobbled together a few sublets before we moved into Pye Street together in September. In August I ended up in Franklin Terrace for a few weeks and so had she, this girl from Iran. She was going to be a sophomore and took summer classes during the day. I was working at High Five at night, so we didn’t see each other much. I only remember a few real conversations. She told me her father had worked for the Shah and they’d left Iran when the Shah did, nine days after the start of the revolution, when she was nine. She had the most delicate and pale skin I’d ever seen, as if a ray of sun had never touched it. She had a crush on the boy in the apartment next door. He was going to be a sophomore, too. When she told me he’d asked her out, she leapt around the apartment like a deer. She was a virgin, she told me. She’d never had a boyfriend before. We lived together for three weeks. I don’t remember saying goodbye. She wasn’t there the day I moved out. I didn’t see her on campus after that. A month later she was dead. That boy’s roommate had raped her and stabbed her sixteen times in the apartment next to ours. I heard the news on the college radio station the morning after it happened. I went to the funeral alone. I didn’t talk about it. But sometimes I woke up in the dark in Sam’s bed and thought of her—Cyra was her name—and her small upturned nose and that tender skin.

One day in January, after we’ve come back from the holiday break and our schedules are all different, I go over to the Breach thinking Sam will be there, but I find Yash alone, smoking a pipe in the study.

‘Is this what you do when no one else is home?’

‘It is. Sam doesn’t think we should touch them. He says they’re antiques, but it just makes you feel so’—he holds the pipe by the bowl and takes three exaggerated squint-eyed puffs—‘Lord Mountbatten.’ He opens the drawer. ‘Here. Sit. I’ll fix you up.’ He lifts an ivory pipe from the holder, stuffs it with tobacco, lights it, and passes it over.’ This pipe has a spectacular downward curve to it. The stem is a little wet from where Yash put his lips.

‘Do you inhale?’

‘No, no, I don’t think so.’

We puff together and laugh at our poses.

Then he takes the pipe out of his mouth. ‘I need to tell you something, Jordan. I feel like I should have somehow mentioned it sooner.’

I stop puffing too.

‘I was at the funeral. For Cyra. I saw you there. I recognized you from class and I wanted to say something to you—you looked so upset and you weren’t there with anyone—but I didn’t and I’m sorry. I was there because I knew the guy who killed her, and I didn’t want to tell you that.’

‘You knew him?’

‘His older brother was on my hall freshman year. The police found a sweatshirt with my name in magic marker—my mother labeled all my clothes in magic marker—in that guy’s apartment. His brother must have swiped it from me and he ended up with it. They questioned me about him and I didn’t know why, then I saw the article in the paper.’

‘The one article.’

‘Yeah.’

‘How did they keep it so quiet?’

‘I don’t know. Because she was foreign, probably. How did you know her?’

I tell him about the sublet and everything I remember about her. He listens and his face looks like it did while he was sleeping. The grandfather clock strikes three. Sam will likely be home soon. I follow Yash to the kitchen and we wash out the pipes and put them back in their rack.

I want to say more about Cyra but I’ve run out of memories. I barely knew her. ‘Are you religious?’

‘No, I don’t think so. I’m something, but it’s not religious.’

‘Spiritual?’

‘Maybe.’

‘Seeking?’

‘Somewhat. A weak seeker. Not for God or gods, though.’

‘Sam wants me to read The Confessions of Saint Augustine .’

He smiles.

‘You’ve read it.’

‘It’s sort of required reading to be his friend.’

We hear the latch of the gate outside. We move quickly from the study into the living room.

Sam comes in the door.

I’m on the couch, Yash in the chair opposite. I call out a hello and Yash says, ‘We’re in here,’ and neither of us sounds like ourselves.

Sam doesn’t notice.

‘Hey.’ He drops his books on a side table and sits beside me. ‘No one told me how boring Stubbs is.’ He makes a face. ‘It smells weird in here.’ He sniffs me. ‘You smell gross.’

Yash and I look at each other. ‘We tried out the pipes,’ he says.

Sam shakes head. ‘You both reek.’

‘I feel sort of sick,’ I say.

‘Me too.’

‘Children,’ Sam says.

In February Sam and I drive down to his parents’ house outside of Atlanta. They are kind, serious people and though they call him Sam Bam most of the time, they take his life very seriously. I can’t quite believe the attention they give him, the questions not about what classes he’s taking—they already know his whole schedule—but whether he decided to write his take-home essay on Cicero’s ‘De Fato’ or his letters to Brutus, and if he was still having trouble with Hume. His mother has a new pillow for him because he had mentioned a crick a few weeks ago. The crick was from a strange position we’d gotten into, but he doesn’t even give me a side glance as he accepts the gift. Sam’s younger brother and sister barely speak. They behave like the governor has come to lunch. I’m given the guest room off the living room. Sam will sleep upstairs in his old bedroom.

That first afternoon Sam is tired from the drive and says he’s going to go upstairs to take a nap before we go to some neighbors’ for drinks, then on to dinner at a new restaurant nearby. I’m not a napper and I’m definitely not welcome upstairs. I read on my guest bed. At five thirty I stick my head out into the hall that leads to the living room and hear no sounds. I don’t know what time we’re expected for drinks but I start getting ready. I change into a dress and tights and new gray boots I’d gotten for Christmas. I’m putting on a little mascara when there’s a knock and the door swings open.

‘We’ve been waiting for you for a half hour,’ Sam says. ‘What are you doing?’

‘I’ve been waiting for you to come down and get me.’

‘Why didn’t you come out?’

‘I did. No one was around.’

‘Because we were all waiting for you in the foyer.’

‘Well, I’m sorry I didn’t know to look in the foyer .’

When we join the others, I assume Sam will explain the situation. He says nothing.

‘I’m so sorry,’ I say. ‘I didn’t know you were waiting.’

Their smiles are thin and they move quickly to the car.

I feel self-conscious about the mascara. I only put it on because I was bored, waiting for Sam. And they think I’ve held them up deliberately because I was primping.

When his father orders coffee after the meal, I promise him I won’t projectile vomit, but no one laughs.

It’s a bad visit from start to finish.

Back in the car the next day I think we’ll laugh about all the terrible moments, but Sam finds nothing about the visit amusing. He’s angry. He thinks I’ve been disrespectful and impertinent.

‘Impertinent? What am I, six?’

‘If the shoe fits.’

‘How was I impertinent?’

‘The things you think are funny are rude. “I promise I won’t throw up.” Why would you bring that up? Why would you want to humiliate Valerie in front of my parents?’

‘I was not humiliating Valerie, because Valerie was not at the table.’

‘You were mocking her in absentia to elevate yourself.’

‘I was just trying to break the ice in presentia to add a little humor. It was all so stiff.’

‘It was stiff because you threw everything off schedule. We were late to drinks, late to our reservation.’

‘Because you did not tell me when we were leaving!’ We’d already been round on this ten times by then.

‘Why didn’t you come out of the room?’

‘Why didn’t you come get me? Were you not even allowed to touch the door of the guest room in case I lured you with my sexy wiles into mortal sin?’

His list of complaints is long: the mascara, the tall tight boots, holding the door for his father, cynical jokes, revealing that my father was fired from his job. ‘You create unnecessary drama.’

‘At least I didn’t say what he got fired for.’

‘Please don’t tell me.’

I tell him he is a prude in the very worst sense of the word, the most incurious, self-righteous, unchristian sense. He basically says I’m an unwashed heathen who seeks attention through my embarrassing depravity. It’s a brutal fight and we say awful things in that car. We drive through some snow flurries, light flakes that don’t stick on the windshield and have stopped falling by the time we get back to school. I ask him to take me to Pye Street but he won’t. He wants to keep fighting. When we get to the Breach it’s empty—Yash has gone up to UVA to see a girl he went to high school with—and he grabs me and presses me against the front door. Soon our clothes are pulled down and fueled by the fury of our fighting we have sex, real sex, right there in the hallway on the bare floor, the little table with the notepad teetering above us.

Sam seems fine about it afterward. We bring our overnight bags upstairs and we go down again and make some sandwiches and sit on the couch with our schoolwork. He reads Horace and I read Whitman. He makes coffee and brings his cup into the living room and says, ‘I am glad it doesn’t make you vomit,’ and we laugh and I lean against him and we keep reading. It’s very quiet, without Yash coming in to say he’s making some popcorn or a pot of tea. I wonder how his weekend at UVA is going, if he and the girl from high school are more than friends. I’m a hundred pages behind for tomorrow, but the words swell and I realize I’ve fallen briefly asleep.

‘I’m going to go up,’ I say. ‘I’m beat.’

Sam lowers his book. It takes him a moment to look up at me. ‘Could you,’ he says, rubbing his thumbs along the edge of his textbook, ‘go home?’

I go upstairs and retrieve my things, everything I ever brought into that room. My bag won’t zip and my backpack bulges. At the top of the stairs I look at Yash’s door, partly open. If he were here I’d start crying. But he isn’t, so I teeter down the stairs with my bags and go straight out the door without a word. Sam doesn’t come after me. It’s started to flurry again. On the sidewalk I can see him through the window on the couch. I don’t know if he’s pretending to read or actually reading. After a few minutes, after he thinks I’ve walked away, he lifts his face toward the window. He looks scared, like something out there is more menacing than the snow falling faintly, faintly falling on the living and the dead.

T he house on Pye Street has gotten colder and my twin bed feels smaller and Carson’s snoring is a bit more piercing. Different people live here now. Athletic Joe has been replaced by Irish Maxwell, and PhD Jenny had dumped her fiancé and begun a needy, gropey relationship with sports medicine Caroline. They’ve sealed the windows with blue plastic to conserve heat so there’s an aquarium feel to the place during the day, but you still have to vie for a spot around Mavis in the frigid mornings. Maxwell and Caroline are recovering from religious childhoods and reassure me that I’ve done the right thing by walking away and being through with that lubberwart, as Jenny, who is getting her doctorate in Medieval Studies, calls him. On the phone my mother tells me he has a Madonna-whore complex.

‘All men have it,’ she says. ‘His is a little more pronounced.’

‘Maybe he’s just being honest?’

‘There’s nothing honest about the degradation of women. It’s a power move and it’s been working for a few millennia.’ She’s a better feminist than I am.

She sends me an orange sleeping bag with a little hood for my head and it’s cozy. I mention to her that Carson uses it when I’m in class and she sends one to her, too. She has lived on a tight budget since the divorce, but that has never impeded her generosity.

I don’t run into Sam on campus, but I pass Yash once in the crowded corridor of Tate Hall between classes. I spend the rest of the day analyzing the nature of his surprise at the moment he saw me. That night I lie in my sleeping bag and feel sad that he can’t be my friend now. I’m aware that I had ideas about the future that I hadn’t discussed with myself. I figured Sam and I would go on separate paths after graduation, but I hoped Yash and I would stay friends, that we’d be friends for life. Now that seems a lot less likely. And this is the thing I’m most sad about.

Sam comes to Pye Street eleven days after he told me to leave. He hands me a short letter and watches me read it. It is dry and unspecific for an apology. At the bottom he has signed it ‘Heart the Lover’ and that makes me smile. He kisses me before I can speak and, after a talk in my freezing bedroom, we go back to the Breach, where Yash and Ivan actually woo hoo when I come into the living room.

The next morning is Sunday and Sam goes to church. He hasn’t gone since I’ve known him. He told me he didn’t like the new minister. But last night he said he was going to give him another try.

When he gets up in the morning I keep my eyes closed. I’m not sure how I feel about being back in the green bedroom. I was giddy playing Sir Hincomb last night. I faked them all out and ended up getting two full families, which none of us had ever done before. Yash made me a crown out of a pizza box and Ivan pulled me up and spun me around the room. In bed Sam and I tried to talk and we tried to cuddle but those weren’t our strengths together. The talk involved a lot of fancy footwork around the fact that he thought we had both sinned in that brief moment in the downstairs hallway and I did not. We didn’t have actual sex after that, but it came closer than you’d think given our animosity and all our avowals not to.

I hear Yash go downstairs. Ten minutes later the house smells of sautéed onions and garlic and I know he’s making hashbrowns to go with his scrambled eggs. If I get down there quick enough he’ll make enough for me.

The potatoes are crackling in the cast-iron pan and he doesn’t hear me come down. I stop in the doorway and watch him scrape and flip with a spatula. He’s got on gray sweats and a fraying blue Allman Brothers T-shirt. His hair is wet, the front part in a great loop high above his forehead. This is why Sam and Ivan call him Rooster, this way he has of drying his hair. I’ve never seen it before.

I don’t know how to not startle him. ‘Mmmm,’ I hum softly. ‘Smells yummy.’

He jumps. A few potatoes fly off the spatula.

‘Jesus, Jordan. I thought you guys went off somewhere.’ He looks mad but also very funny with his hair looped up like that. He sees me see it and I see him stop his hand from trying to fix it. ‘It’s not funny. My heart is going a hundred miles per hour.’

‘I’m sorry. Here, you sit.’ I pull out a chair for him. ‘And I’ll stir.’ I take the spatula from him. He actually does as he’s told. When I turn around again he’s tousled his hair back to normal.

‘Sam go to church?’

I nod. ‘Should I scramble some eggs?’

‘Sure.’

‘You do the cheese,’ I say and fetch him the cheddar and a grater. We are used to cooking together. Sam is happy with a PB&J and Ivan only likes takeout. But Yash and I cook chicken legs and fresh vegetables. I often make my mother’s picadillo and he makes his grandmother’s butter chicken. But we’ve never been alone in the kitchen together for this long. We’ve never cooked for two. I crack the eggs into a bowl and froth them with a fork. I divide the potatoes on two plates then pour the eggs into the pan and scrape up the browned bits of potato and onion into the scramble. The eggs don’t stick, and cook quickly in nice chunks, not pebbly like they get in the cheap frying pan on Pye Street. I sprinkle on the cheese just before taking them off the flame.

‘God, those look perfect,’ he says when I bring them to the table. He’s set it with green cloth napkins I’ve never seen before.

‘This is so nice,’ I say, sitting at my place across from him.

We both look at the clock at the same time.

We take a few bites and compliment each other on our parts of the meal, then we eat quietly. It isn’t the kind of silence Sam and I have, where each of us will say something if we can think of it. With Yash I can say anything and it will turn into a conversation. We could talk about the green napkins—where he’d found them, what they remind us of, who ironed them—for a half hour. But I want to make it count. I missed him during those eleven days. I thought we couldn’t be friends anymore. I can’t say that but it’s all heavy in my mind. We have less than a half hour before Sam comes back. We need to talk about something big, something that will secure our friendship forever. It’s a lot of pressure to put on twenty-five minutes on a Sunday morning. I glance over at him when he’s putting both eggs and potato on his fork with a knife. He eats in that British way his father must have taught him, the knife so active, not just for cutting. He has a very small smile on his face, as if he doesn’t notice we’re not talking, or as if we are.

He catches me looking at him and the grin spreads. ‘Glad you’re back.’

‘Me too. I missed this place.’ I look around the room, as if that’s what I missed, then point to a copy of The Inferno on the counter and ask what class it’s for.

‘It’s not for a class,’ he says. ‘I’m just doing a little advanced reading for Gastrell’s Immortality seminar in the fall.’

‘The fall? You’re not graduating with us?’

‘I took a leave of absence sophomore year so I have another year.’

Sam told me that he’d taken time off. He said Yash’s dad had put his mom in a psychiatric hospital and Yash’d had to get her out. I asked how Yash’s dad had had the power to do that when they’d been divorced since Yash was five, and Sam said he didn’t understand why I wanted to be a writer when I could never just trust a story.

I like that I’ll know where Yash is in the fall. ‘Have you read that story “The Last Fall” by Ray Hart, about a guy who stays at college for an extra semester?’

‘Do tell. The plot sounds positively riveting.’

‘It’s beautiful. All his friends are gone and he sees the back of the neck of an old girlfriend in class and marvels at the feelings he once had for her and he’s got this housemate who only plays an album called Country Greats and the leaves are falling and the cold is coming and he has this thing with another girl that’s not really serious but there’s this gorgeous moment next to a soccer field when she fastens and unfastens a button on his jacket.’ I can’t read the expression on Yash’s face. ‘It’s just this long tender farewell to youth.’

‘I’d like to read it,’ he says, and nothing else. No quip, no barb.

‘I haven’t done it justice.’

The back door rattles and we both jump. Sam is in the window. He gives the door a shove with his hip and it comes unstuck. I’ve never seen anyone go in or out that way before.

He comes in and plucks at the green napkin in my lap. ‘Fancy.’ He spins around to the stove and studies the skillet. ‘None for me?’

Yash and I both get up and start chopping onions and potatoes. Sam pours a cold cup of coffee from the percolator.

‘How was church?’ Yash says.

Sam sits in my seat at the table and stretches out his legs onto Yash’s chair. ‘The new guy hasn’t gotten any better. Everything is in the interrogative, like he is seeking and questioning with us. It’s such a pose.’

‘Maybe he is questioning,’ I say.

‘If he is, he shouldn’t be in that job. God is not a question. He’s the answer.’

Yash and I are shoulder to shoulder at the large cutting board with our knives. I want to give him a quick glance, but Sam in this twitchy mood might catch it. Instead I tap my knife two times without cutting anything. Yash taps twice back.

After he eats, Sam and I walk to the library. Yash goes to study with someone named Annabel at the bagel shop. Sam takes my hand and pulls me off the path and against a tree and we kiss for a while before moving on. This attraction is our only language, and it’s fading. Still, after that it’s hard to focus on Cosmos for astronomy, a gut to fulfill my science requirement. I watch Sam instead. We always sit at a table in the library, not in the armchairs near the windows where I used to sit before I met him. He has a book pinned open with his left hand and writes swiftly in a notebook with his right. He’s translating Ovid back into Latin, a poem called ‘Iphis and Ianthe’ from Metamorphoses . I looked down at my paperback. It really is like we go to different schools. Next he’ll move on to Early Modern Ethics. He’s got Hume, Rousseau, and Kant stacked up beside him. Since I lost my golf scholarship, my college education has been funded by a series of loans and my job at High Five. I am going to have to pay it all back, this paltry dabbling I’ve done, these wasted years. I haven’t been serious. I watch how quickly Sam writes in Latin.

He looks at me. ‘What’s going on?’

‘I’ve made all the wrong choices.’

I go to my advisor. He teaches courses on Swinburne that I’ve never taken and is always adjusting the back pillow behind him. He shaves, but he lets the hair grow wild everywhere else on his head, great tufts sprout from his ears and nostrils, his eyebrows are thickly entwined.

I tell him I want to do an honors thesis in creative writing.

‘Too late for that,’ he says.

‘I want to stay another semester.’

‘It’ll mean another loan.’

‘I know. I want to write an honors thesis and take two seminars.’

‘You have to have a pretty high GPA for those.’

I hand him my transcript.

His tangled eyebrows move around. He removes the pillow behind him and replaces it with a smaller one beside his chair, then hands me back my transcript. ‘So be it,’ he says, and does something with his mouth that I think is meant to be kind.

A few weeks later, I run into Yash outside my writing class. It’s midafternoon, early March, the sun strong again after its brief winter waning. Sam is in his Ethics seminar for three hours. Yash and I walk toward the quad. He says he was planning to get an iced tea and read in the sun. I say that was my plan exactly. He remembers that my story was being workshopped that afternoon and asks how it went.

‘Everyone was very nice about it,’ I say.

‘Even Bryce?’

I laugh. I told him once about Bryce, a guy in my class who had no tolerance for female protagonists. If a story was about a woman, he would inevitably say that he’d had a girlfriend like that once. I don’t think he realized how often he said it. ‘He didn’t say a word.’

He bumps against me briefly. ‘He loved it!’

We get teas at the cafeteria and sit on the steps in the sun. I have this feeling that this is how all of college should have been and somehow wasn’t, sitting with Yash on the steps of the quad. I have a stab of sadness, then I remember.

‘I’m not graduating either.’

‘Really?’

I tell him about the thesis. I don’t mention the seminars I’ve signed up for. One of them is Immortality and I don’t want him to think I’m stalking him.

He nods and doesn’t say anything else. I point to the copy of The Golden Bowl by his foot and ask how it’s going and he tells a story that his professor had told him that morning about how Henry James, upon hearing of the writer Constance Fenimore Woolson’s suicide, went directly to her apartment in Venice, destroyed his many letters to her, and tried to drown her dresses in the lagoon, but they wouldn’t sink. Yash acts out this story with much élan, gripping the gondolier’s pole James used to push the gowns underwater and recreating his haunted face as they floated back up to the surface. Yash is even-keeled, always in a good mood, but today there seems to be an extra bit of joy. When he’s done he sits back down and puts his face up to the sun. ‘I’m glad you’re staying here,’ he says, not opening his eyes. ‘I’ll have one friend.’

‘Me too.’

He bumps me with his shoulder again. ‘We’ll have our farewell to youth together.’

I tell Sam that night after my shift at High Five, so that he hears it from me first. We’re on his bed, eating jelly­beans from the Easter basket his mother sent him. He has a stronger reaction than I anticipated.

‘You like to make things hard for yourself, don’t you?’

I shrug my shoulders. Here comes the judge.

‘You gave up your scholarship and took out student loans that everyone knows are hard to pay back even when you have a real profession in mind. And now you want to rack up another semester’s worth of debt—for no good reason apart from the fact that you don’t want to grow up.’

I was still in my work uniform: khakis and a teal polo shirt with a basketball decal high on the left boob. I’d worked every semester of college, and two jobs during summer. Sam had worked part-time at his father’s office in the summers and, after a trip to Europe this coming summer, that’s where he’ll work in the fall.

I look around at his free house with free utilities. I lift up the pink Easter basket by its handle and swing it between us. ‘I’m not sure you want to go toe to toe with me on growing up, Sam Bam,’ I say and get a small smile out of him.

The deadline for Sam’s and Ivan’s theses looms. Ivan got all his anxiety out early and now puts his head down and writes the thing, while Sam, who expressed no concern about it all year, is suddenly a wreck. He’s writing about Hume’s principle of contiguity, but finds himself beginning to disprove his own argument. His coffee intake triples, he starts smoking, and the only way he can fall asleep, for the few hours that he sleeps, is if he lies on his stomach while I rub his head and sing. The first song I sing to him is ‘Scarborough Fair,’ which reminds me of ‘Been Too Long at the Fair.’

‘Do you only know songs about fairs?’ His voice is muffled, his face mashed into the mattress.

‘Maybe.’

He is asleep before I can start ‘North Country Fair.’

The singing lasts for a week or two. He says I have a pretty voice and calls me Calliope. I wonder if Yash can hear me from his room. After he hands in his thesis, he slowly calms down. He asks me to help him quit smoking. Cigarettes had killed two of his grandparents and he promised his parents when he was a boy that he’d never touch them. He has to be free of them by graduation, he tells me. I make little bundles of cigarettes tied with ribbon for the next five days that reduce his consumption by three each day. On day six, no more.

A few days before graduation we go to a senior dance. Yash got up his nerve and asked Lara Mertens. We meet them there. The party is outside and there’s a band and a bar and blazing torches sunk in the ground all along the edge of an enormous garden. Lara is friendly. She kisses me on each cheek, asks me if I’ve read any more Japanese history and rolls her eyes. When Yash speaks, she is very attentive. She likes him. Yash is not himself. He has a sort of mask around other women, I’ve noticed. I thought maybe with Lara it would be different but it isn’t. Other friends come up and we get separated from them and at some point Sam tells me to stop looking at Yash and Lara.

‘I can’t tell if he’s having a good time.’

‘Of course he’s having a good time. He’s on a date with the goddess.’

I run into a couple of people from my writing classes and talk to them for a bit, then I see Sam bum two cigarettes off his friend Brent. I excuse myself and walk over and pluck them out of his pocket. He tries to grab them back but I clutch them tightly and in our struggle I get knocked hard to the ground.

It’s a semiformal. I’m on the ground in a pale green dress. I see Brent’s disgusted expression as he looks down at me. He doesn’t have time to hide it. He doesn’t offer a hand up. Sam does, but I don’t take it. I get up, brush the dirt off the back of my dress, and walk directly out to the road and the two miles home to Pye Street.

I don’t go to graduation. I work brunch and dinner at High Five and get out at midnight. My housemates are having a party. I have a beer on our porch and take their ribbing about having not actually lived there this year. Carson is the only one leaving. Starting in June I’ll pay eighty-eight dollars a month to have the room to myself. I tell them they’ll be seeing a lot more of me now. I leave Carson and Jenny making out on the porch swing, which surprises me and makes me feel the distance between us. I haven’t been around enough lately for her to tell me about this development. I go to my room and feel the floor shuddering from the music and the dancing in the living room where Mavis used to be. I stand at my window looking out at the street, watching the steady stream of students and parents come down the hill from campus toward town. The parents try hard to blend in and some of them are just as drunk and keyed up as their kids, but their bodies move differently. I wouldn’t have asked either parent to come and they wouldn’t have offered, and I see now that that would have been painful, not to have family here this weekend. I doubt I’ll stay for the ceremony in December, so I won’t have to deal with it. Not graduating now was a good decision all around.

I stand there for a long time. I recognize a few people under the streetlamps: Mark from my psych class sophomore year, Ryanne and Landry who lived on my hall last year. Then I see Brent and another friend of Sam’s named Cole—and Yash. He walks slightly behind. I haven’t seen him since the semiformal. I don’t know how it went with Lara. I think about opening up the window and yelling out to him but instead I pull back a bit. What was he like with other people, not me and Sam and Ivan? He’s never been here, probably doesn’t know which house I live in. He’s talking and the other two are laughing and I wish I could hear what he’s saying. When he’s alongside the house he looks over at the people on our porch, then directly at my window. I stay still. I don’t know what he can see. He moves on.

Carson leaves with her family the next morning, a three-car caravan back to Brooklyn. I hug them all on the sidewalk, Carson the longest. Jenny comes down the steps with a coffee cake just out of the oven. I’m surprised by their tears. We wave them off and I go back to my room. It feels enormous, and empty. Only now can I see how absent I was for our senior year. We moved in at the end of August and it was roasting hot and we lay on our twin beds cooling ourselves off with ice cubes, talking and laughing before sleep. We’d lived together starting sophomore year. She knew everything about my family, kept track of every detail even though she never met any of them. She had a mad crush on my brother. She didn’t care that he was gay. She said once that if she ever met my father, she’d kick him in the balls. Her family came to visit twice a year. Her parents had gotten pregnant with her in eleventh grade and her father freaked out and fled to Texas and her mom had the baby and mailed him a photo. He was at the door less than a week later, pleading for forgiveness. Their parents helped with Carson, they finished high school and got jobs, bought a home, and had four more children. They were much younger than Carson, her siblings, and they worshiped her. They’d come screaming out of the car and glom onto her. They stayed in our room, all four of them fighting about whose turn it was to sleep on the bed with Carson. This past August, when they’d driven her down, the youngest, Meg, had asked if she could sleep with me. I scooted over. She told me I smelled good—she did not, she smelled like burnt licorice—and fell asleep nine seconds later.

August feels like a decade ago. I try to retrace the year. I remember mornings before class. We ate our cereal together on the porch, those warm September mornings. We had a ’70s party at the house the second week of class and blasted Earth, Wind & Fire and Queen. The cop who came after the neighbors complained sat with us on the porch and told us he wanted to be an astronaut. We drove with Joe and Caroline to Hatteras for a weekend. We threw the Halloween party. And then a few mornings later my clock radio alarm went off to the college station and the news that Cyra had been killed.

‘I know her,’ I said.

‘Know who?’

‘Listen.’ I turned it up.

Carson fades after that. Everything dims a bit. What happened? I went to the funeral. I met Sam. I met Yash. It got cold.

I get back into bed. Carson and her family will have reached the highway by now. It’s eleven thirty in the morning. I’m tired to the bone.

I come home that night to a box on my porch filled with things I left at the Breach: a few T-shirts, Cosmos , a hairbrush that’s not mine. At the bottom there’s a note from the little notepad by the door, folded in half.

I’m sorry about our fight—we both can be pretty stubborn sometimes. I’m taking off in a few hours. I guess we’ve reached the end of our road. What a long strange trip it’s been, no? Yash’s dad called a while ago and he asked how my love life was going. I told him and he said that Jordan sounds like the kind of girl you divorce. I know you’ll take that the wrong way. However, it helped me to see we didn’t have to be together. I didn’t have to fight for some polysyllogistic fallacy of my own making.

Don’t forget to graduate someday!

Cura ut valeas,

Sam

I’ve never burned anything anyone has written to me in my life, but I take that note straight to the gas stove. I light it and watch it curl and blacken in the sink. I wash the flakes of ash down the drain.

Still, the words reverberate. Jordan sounds like the kind of girl you divorce. What hurts the most is that it’s probably true. I’ve never known a happy marriage. My mother was miserable and left my father for the cantor, who seemed like a good guy, but he died before they could marry. I don’t think she’s had a relationship since. My father married Ann, a neighbor who stood by him when he got fired for drinking with the high school boys he coached and showing them the peepholes in his office that looked into the girls’ locker room. He treated Ann worse than my mother. My brother said recently that Ann had called him from the closet where she was hiding from him. She wanted to know what would happen if she called the police. She didn’t want him to go to jail.

I probably am the kind of girl you divorce.

At least Sam is gone. I don’t know if Yash has left yet for Knoxville for the summer. I walk to the library. It’s empty. All those seniors who packed the place last week are gone forever. I find ‘The Last Fall’ by Ray Hart in an old New Yorker , make a xerox, and walk to the Breach. Yash’s car is still there, his bedroom light on. I go quietly around back, slide the pages under the kitchen door as far as they’ll go, and flee.

Two days later his car is gone. There’s a wheelbarrow filled with soil in the driveway, two fat azalea bushes wrapped in burlap beside it. The backyard has been mowed and the air smells sweet and like the past.

I apply for a new loan and get a few dinner shifts at Chantal, the most expensive restaurant in town. Only six tables and no entrée under fifteen dollars.

After my first night of training there, I walk home and pass the apartment building where I lived for those three weeks with Cyra. I stop and identify our door on the second floor. It bothers me how little I remember, how distracted I must have been. How unfriendly maybe. She was alone. Her friends from freshman year weren’t back yet. She never put anything in the refrigerator. I remember that. All that was ever in there was the stuff I brought home from the restaurant in the afternoon in aluminum containers with cardboard tops. Did she even know how to cook? Did I ever offer her my leftovers? The place looks like a cheap motel, with its balcony that stretches the length of each floor. There are people outside partying in different spots. It must have been like that last summer when I lived there but I don’t remember it that way. This must’ve been where she met that boy next door, and his roommate, out on the balcony. It feels like one of my jobs, to remember her. How had the university buried her story? I remember she leapt like a fawn across our living room.

I stand there a while, then head toward home. At the foot of Pye Street is a laundromat called Bubble Time. I stop there next and look through the windows. It’s a funky place with good music and a café, indoor and outdoor seating. The walls are psychedelic colors and the machines are painted, too, each one a different animal. You feed your clothes into the mouth of a lion or an orca. I’ve heard it’s hard to get a job here. They pay over minimum wage, and there are tips from the café plus the tip jar at the register that’s always overflowing. Supposedly the couple that owns it sells drugs from the shed in the back parking lot.

It’s quiet when I go in, two people reading on a couch and the owner—Lorna—beside the register. She doesn’t look up. She’s swirling a paintbrush around in a glass of green water. When I get to the counter I can see her painting, a centaur holding a piece of fruit—a female centaur, with long hair, bangs, and breasts.

‘That’s lovely,’ I say, because it is.

She looks up at me.

‘Are you hiring?’

She holds her paintbrush up like she’s outlining my face. ‘Sure. Why not?’

Bubble Time is where I meet Claudette. Claudette is an incorrigible flirt. She’s most of the reason for the stuffed tip jar. There are always guys hanging around long after their laundry is done. Her other job is at Häagen-Dazs. I meet her there when she closes at eleven and we eat mounds of ice cream, lock up, and go to Don’t Answer, an outside bar with picnic tables and kegs along the fence. With Claudette you always met a guy, a fellow sidekick. I dance with them on the hardpacked dirt and go home alone. I like my room on Pye Street. I push the beds together and keep a stash of books beside me and read late into the night and early in the morning. I start reading Don Quixote for Dr. Gastrell’s seminar in the fall. I take notes. I write a short story, only five pages, the first one I’ve written that was not for a class. I like it. It has a different flavor somehow. It feels entirely my own.

There’s an oversized astrology calendar on the wall behind the counter at Bubble Time. Inside each day’s box are suggestive planet positions like Wet Venus in Aquarius or Sextile Jupiter in Scorpio. I flip past June to September 3, a Tuesday, the day I would have the first class with Yash. Mercury-Saturn Square, it says, unsexily.

I keep my eye on that calendar. I note the day Sam flies to Barcelona. He is gone. He’s left the country. Claudette and I go to Don’t Answer that night. They’re only playing Prince, and everyone gets up on the picnic tables for ‘1999.’

The next morning there’s a note pushed through the nail on my door:

Yash called

I can’t call him back. I don’t have a number. He said he was going to live in his father’s barn for the summer. I could call information for his number, but I’m not about to call over there. Jordan is the kind of girl you divorce .

The only reason Yash would try to reach me would be something to do with Sam. A plane crash, a Eurail accident, a nightclub fire. Something awful must have happened to him.

I’m at Bubble Time when he calls again. Michael, Lorna’s husband, waves the receiver at me. ‘It’s a boy,’ he whispers loudly.

My stomach lurches. I reach for the phone.

‘Jordan,’ he says, with a little laugh that acknowledges the weirdness of his tracking me down.

‘Yash.’ I plug the other ear with my finger to block out the music. I brace myself. I don’t know what’s coming. ‘What’s up?’ I can hear the alarm in my voice.

‘Well, I’m—’ There’s a small crash in the background. ‘Shit. Catastrophes abound. I was thinking. I was wondering. I can’t find a job here. I thought maybe I’d come back there. I have a couple of leads on a sublet but I’m wondering if—for just a night or two—if there might be a couch free on Pye Street?’

My lungs feel hot and tight. Michael is wolfing down an enormous platter of nachos and watching me. I clench my eyes shut. ‘Yes, there’s a couch. We have a couch. It’s yours.’

He asks if tomorrow is too soon and I say it’s great. Then I say I have to go because my very stoned boss is glaring at me.

‘I wasn’t glaring,’ Michael says after I hang up. ‘I just thought I might have to go get my defibrillator for you.’

‘You know he’s never going to sleep on that sofa,’ Claudette says later, when I’m stuffing our filthy couch cushions into our biggest machines.

‘It’s not like that.’

‘Do you know how much you talk about this guy?’

‘It’s not like that for him . And even if it were, he wouldn’t. He never would.’

‘Right.’

She squats down behind the counter. I can hear her rifling through Michael’s stacks of CDs. She switches out the disc and ‘Jessie’s Girl’ comes blasting out of all eight speakers.

‘No, no, no,’ I say but she pulls me out near the door where there’s space and makes me dance with her.

The next afternoon I get off work and run up the hill. His car is there, his mom’s old red Chevy Nova. I touch it. It’s real. He’s here.

I climb the porch steps slowly. I hear Dylan playing through the window. I see the back of his head. He’s on the freshly cleaned couch, my housemate Maxwell in the beanbag chair. I listen at the screen door. Low rumbly talk about Blonde on Blonde . He’s wearing a shirt I’ve never seen before. His hand is on his knee, his long fingers thrumming along. He is in my house. Dylan is singing about Johanna.

I step inside.

He jumps up.

‘You found the couch.’

‘I found the couch.’

‘Good drive?’

‘Good drive, yeah.’

We don’t hug. Maxwell watches our awkwardness. He has no plans to leave the room.

‘Thank you so much for this.’ He looks at Maxwell. ‘It will only be a night or two.’

Maxwell grins. ‘Uh huh.’ Maxwell slept on this couch for three months until a room opened up.

‘You hungry?’ Yash asks. ‘Should we get some dinner?’

I change out of my work clothes into my favorite summer dress, pale blue with big white buttons down the front. We’ve never had summer together. I force myself to breathe.

Then we’re in the Nova. I’d been in it a few times, Ivan up front, Sam and me in the back. We’d gone to a party in the woods somewhere. Another time we went to a barbeque restaurant in Raleigh. Now I’m in the passenger seat and Sam is in Europe and Yash looks over at me.

I want to tell him about Willie Sylvester. He asked me out at recess in sixth grade. I’d had a crush on him since third. ‘I feel like I’m in a dream,’ I said to him when he asked me. I feel like that again, in the passenger seat of Yash’s car.

‘Where to?’ he says.

I suggest Cate’s because it is a few miles out of town and I remember him saying once that they had the best bread pudding he ever tasted. He looks relieved to have a destination, puts the car in gear, and pulls out slowly. The Nova is at least fifteen years old. The smell, the seat fabric, the pebbly vinyl dashboard remind me of being little.

‘Did you grow up with this car?’

He smiles. ‘You can hear my mother screaming, can’t you?’ He switches into a piercing Deep South accent. ‘You know what I think? I think all y’all are lazy butt bums!’ He clenches the wheel and narrows his eyes at me then lifts himself up close to the rearview. ‘The three of you. Three lazy bird turds.’ He puts his eyes back on the road and pretends to swat everyone in the car.

‘Who were the other two?’

‘Arlo and Bean. They lived across the street. She yelled at them like they were her own. I was always with them.’

I ask if he saw them when he was home and he says that Arlo was working on an oil rig in Mississippi and Bean dropped out of school to manage a band called Stationery. ‘They’re going to be bigger than Toto, he told me, and I said, who the fuck is Toto, and he went crazy. I still don’t know who Toto is and no one’s ever heard of Stationery, but Bean says they’re getting traction in Japan. I have this scar on my lip’—he leans over to show me something I’ve seen a hundred times—‘because in fourth grade I said “Fly Like an Eagle” was a terrible song. He pushed me off my chair in homeroom and my front tooth went clean through. Oh shit, here we are.’ He turns into a dirt driveway.

Cate’s is a farmhouse. All the lights are on. He shuts off the engine and turns to me like he has no plans to get out of the car. ‘Who were your neighbors?’

I tell him about Mrs. Kane, her whispery voice and frizzy white dog and how she wrote books my mother wouldn’t let me read. ‘I tried to anyway, but they didn’t have them at our library.’

‘We’ll have to find them.’

‘We will.’ I look at him, then look away. I’m scared he’ll see how happy I am.

We walk up the farmhouse steps. It feels like a date, like something we’ve done many times with other people over the past few years but never with each other. We don’t speak until the hostess asks us if we are two. We follow her to a small corner table on the back porch. It’s overlooking a flower garden. The plants have just been watered and the air is humid, dense with the smell of the roses and phlox below our feet.

A waitress comes over with a pitcher of tea. She takes a book of matches from the pocket of her apron and lights the little candle in the glass holder in the center of the table. There are no other students here. Everyone around us, including the waitress, is decades older. We aren’t going to get interrupted or seen by anyone who knows Sam. It’s just us. I have him all to myself. I take little glances of him looking at the menu, his thick hair falling across his forehead the way he likes it, his scarred lip. I’ll never touch him. I know that. I don’t know what Sam has told him, but even if he believes Sam and I are truly broken up for the last time, he won’t cross that line. He wouldn’t be here if that were a temptation. There are plenty of other people he could have asked to stay with. Once I think all this through, I relax. It’s not a date.

The waitress takes our drink order and leaves us alone in our corner on the porch. We look at each other and laugh.

I start to ask him what happened back home and he says at the same time, leaning in, ‘I was the one who pointed you out to Sam, you know.’

‘I thought it was when my stupid Bacon parody got read out loud.’

‘It wasn’t supposed to be a parody. “Contemporary imitation,” that was the assignment. But yours was a parody.’

‘I couldn’t help it.’

‘It was very funny.’

I take all the credit. I don’t say that it was the professor who made it funny.

‘It never occurs to me to be funny in writing. I always get so grim.’

‘But you’re such a funny guy.’

‘I know it.’ He widens his eyes in bewilderment and we laugh.

‘So that wasn’t why Sam noticed me?’

‘No, it was a little before that. And I noticed you. First.’

I look back down at the menu. I’m worried my blushing is making me sweat. I take a sip of the iced tea then blow into the glass and the air comes back cool on my face.

The waitress returns with two beers and takes our order. I hand back the paper menu quickly, hoping he doesn’t see it shaking.

‘So what happened back home?’

He shakes his head. He doesn’t want to talk about it.

‘Weren’t you going to work for your uncle at the paper?’ His uncle Percy works at the Knoxville News Sentinel . He told me once that Uncle Percy was like George Willard from Winesburg, Ohio , a newspaper man with big dreams stuck in his hometown forever. But when Yash gave him the book and suggested the similarity, his uncle said, ‘You’re way off base, son.’

‘Yeah, I just couldn’t do it. I didn’t want to be there.’

I thought there’d be more of a story.

He tells me he got a letter from Ivan in Dublin. ‘His first line was “I’ve seduced the landlord’s daughter. ” ’

‘Don’t tell me. He was incredible.’

‘Yes, he was. Off to Poland next, in time for the election.’

The elections in Poland are a source of contention on Pye Street. Solidarity is poised to defeat the Communist Party and possibly leave the Eastern Bloc. ‘The Marxists in my house are not happy,’ I say.

‘Marxists are never happy. There’s never quite enough purging or mass graves for them.’

‘Hungary could be next. Do you think it’s possible that it will all just collapse?’

‘And the wall comes down and everyone, even the Marxists, live happily ever after?’

‘More happily, at least.’

‘Maybe. For a little while. And then some new force will appear to make them miserable again. We’re not exactly improving as a species.’

‘Yes, we are.’

He laughs. ‘No, we are not.’

‘How can you say that? All of literature rests on the promise that we change, we grow, have epiphanies, become better, understand our flaws.’

‘Too late. Have you ever noticed that? It’s always too late. Oedipus, Macbeth, Raskolnikov.’

‘For them. But not for us. We have gotten better. Ethically. Morally.’

‘We haven’t. Human behavior doesn’t change.’ He is so certain of this.

I insist it does and give the obvious examples of the spread of democracy, the abolition of slavery, increasing religious tolerance, women’s rights.

He counters with Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Gulag, Vietnam. More people have been killed in this century in wars and by their own government than in all previous centuries combined. If killing another person is any measurement of ethical behavior, he says, we are worsening. I argue that it is the technology of war that has changed and that the majority of people have a wider sense of fairness and a belief in freedoms, and perhaps these wars are more ethical than the ones in the past that were for land and lucre. ‘You don’t think these wars are for lucre? Yes, cultural norms and fads bring temporary progress here and there, but that’s not a change in human morality. Inside we are all exactly the same as we have ever been and will always be until we extinguish ourselves soon enough. To believe otherwise is just a story you tell yourself to sleep at night.’

‘I don’t think I could live without a belief in moral progress.’

‘And I can’t feed myself lies. There’s a lot of beauty along with the pity and fear, as Aristotle said, in it all. Our famed condition.’

‘Is that what life is to you, a tragedy?’

‘Of course it’s a tragedy. A very silly one. The absurdity is as great as the despair.’

‘No room for hope?’

‘Not much.’

‘I wouldn’t want to live without hope.’

‘Well, I do. I like it here.’

We realize the waitress is stalling in the doorway with the dessert menus.

She moves toward us. ‘I didn’t want to get in the middle of anything.’

‘We were having our first fight,’ he says, looking down at the choices. ‘Arguing about whether humans as a species are improving or not.’

‘Oh yeah? Let me guess who’s the Pollyanna.’ She points to me.

I raise my hand in confirmation.

‘That’s a keeper, hon,’ she says, patting Yash on the shoulder as she walks away.

We study the desserts.

If Sam and I had this conversation, he’d ask for the check and not speak on the way home. But Yash looks up and grins and asks me if I like bread pudding.

Back in the Nova he says, ‘Where to now, Pollyanna?’

I don’t want to go home. I don’t want the night to be over. When the night is over he’ll find a job and a sublet and I might not see him till September 2nd. ‘Don’t Answer?’

This surprises him. He smiles and starts the car. We pull out onto the road back to town. He is driving slowly. When we crawl up to a deserted intersection, he comes to a full and very long stop.

‘Okay, Mr. Cautious,’ I say. ‘I think you may proceed.’

He chuckles. He likes to be teased.

We park and walk down the little alley to get to the back of the bar. The music blares. Elvis Costello’s ‘Welcome to the Working Week.’

‘I haven’t been here since freshman fall.’

‘Let the farewell to youth begin,’ I say.

He stops and looks at me. ‘That story,’ he starts to say, and the rest is drowned out by Claudette, who is screaming my name. She comes running up, beer sloshing out of her big cup.

‘Yash! You’re Yash,’ she says and I lean back so he can’t see me and glare at her to tone it down. She gives me a wicked little smile then hugs us both and tells him very loudly and way too close to his ear that the couch cushions are very very clean. ‘Come, come,’ she says and grabs our hands and leads us to her group by the fence.

‘Hey you,’ a guy named Billy says to me as we pass his table. Another, Cody, points at me and says, ‘We’re dancing to Guns N’ Roses tonight.’ All the sidekicks are here.

Yash is amused. ‘Well, Miss Popular certainly hasn’t been at home moping. Can I get you a beer?’

He goes off to stand in one of the keg lines. Claudette grabs me and pulls me down onto a picnic bench with her. ‘That guy is in love with you.’

I don’t believe her, but all my muscles weaken anyway.

‘I wish.’

‘Trust me. He is.’

‘Nothing can—’

‘Oh, I know . Nothing can happen because he’s such a good guy . Good guys are human. He just needs a signal from you.’

I put my head on the picnic table. ‘I’m not good at signals.’

‘I know. That’s what’s so cute about you. But in this case you’ll have to give him one.’

I rock my head back and forth.

‘A small one.’

‘What’s going on?’ Yash says, back with three beers in a precarious cluster.

I straighten up.

He squeezes in on the other side of me. It’s tight. Our sides are touching and I feel him trying to not press too hard against me. He’s cooler than I am. How do I give him a sign when I can’t breathe? Another beer is only going to make it worse. Unlike the rest of the population, I get more awkward with alcohol. I put the cool plastic cup against my cheek.

‘Have you ever spent a summer down here before?’ he asks.

I shake my head.

A guy named Buck and two Seans are vying for Claudette’s attention. She leans over me and grills Yash about why he came back from Knoxville, where’s he’s going to look for work, and who was from India, his mother or his father? Her questions reveal how much I’ve spoken to her about him. I’m relieved when Buck interrupts and we start playing a game that involves placing one, two, or three fingers at the edge of the table. I think they must have been playing it earlier because everyone understands how to play but Yash and me. One of the Seans shouts the rules to us but they make no sense.

‘Uno, dos, tres, fire!’ Buck says.

Fingers go on the table. Yash and I both put out two.

Buck looks at all the fingers. ‘Crack crack,’ he says to me then to Yash, and he bashes our fingers with his fist. It stings and we laugh. We play many more rounds and no matter what we do we get cracked every time and we’re laughing too hard to figure it out.

The song ‘Africa’ comes on.

‘It’s Toto!’ I yell at Yash and we all get up to dance. He’s a very cute dancer. I didn’t know this. The way his hips move, his body still boyish. I can’t quite take my eyes off of him. He looks happy. His hair swings loose. His smile is enormous. ‘This is the stupidest song I’ve ever heard,’ he says.

‘Give him a sign,’ Claudette says.

I shake my head.

‘What did she say?’ he says.

‘I couldn’t hear her.’

He doesn’t believe me but he’s still smiling.

We dance to Madonna and Roxy Music. One of the Seans takes Claudette’s hand and pulls her in close as if it were a slow song and says something that makes her laugh a long laugh. This is the Sean she likes.

Brent and Cole come through the back alley. I haven’t seen them since the semiformal.

Yash glances in their direction and puts his lips close to my ear. ‘Should we go?’

The house on Pye Street is dark when we pull up. I don’t want to go in. There will be no sleeping for me, with him downstairs on the couch.

We walk up the porch steps. ‘I didn’t know what to do, after the senior party,’ he says.

‘What was there to do?’

He gets to the top step and sits. ‘I didn’t know what happened.’

I sit too, but not close, not where I want to. It would have been an easy sign, to sit closer. ‘You and Lara were inside.’

‘We came out and you were gone.’

‘I’d wanted to go in but Sam said I should leave you alone. And then—it doesn’t matter. My biggest regret is not getting to hear how it went with you and Lara.’ It occurs to me that maybe Lara is still here, maybe he’s come back for her.

‘She wasn’t my type.’

‘Really?’ The relief is instant, buoying. ‘After all that?’

‘After all that. I didn’t know what to do after you left. I was so angry at Sam for not going after you, for not apologizing. He never apologized, did he?’

‘No.’

‘He felt shitty about it, he did. But he couldn’t say he was sorry.’

‘He was angry about a lot more than cigarettes.’

‘I know.’

But I don’t know what he knows, what he means.

‘He wrote me a note. You probably know that.’

‘I didn’t know that.’

‘It wasn’t an apology. It was more of a screw-you.’

‘I’m sorry.’

‘It’s fine. He wasn’t my type.’

‘I could have told you that last fall.’

‘I wish you had.’

‘I knew about the first note he wrote you.’

‘Oh yeah?’

‘I might have helped him a bit. At the end.’

‘Heart the Lover?’

He smiles.

Fuck. ‘That was the only good line,’ I say. ‘You were quite the puppet master.’

‘I didn’t mean to be.’

‘You salvaged our first date, too. “How was the daisy?”’ I say in a loud voice.

He laughs. ‘I didn’t think he’d get you back there after The Deer Hunter .’

‘Three hours straight of Russian roulette.’ I put my finger to my temple and pull the trigger. ‘Click.’

‘I told him it was a bad idea.’

‘I’ve never felt this way about anyone and I know he’s your best friend and I don’t wish him ill, but I honestly hope I never have to see him again in my life.’

‘I’m assuming this means you’ve broken up.’

I laugh.

He shrugs. ‘I didn’t know for sure. Things were tense before he left. He wasn’t himself. Then he did leave and I wanted to go see you but I didn’t know if you’d want to see me or if you’d think Sam had sent me, that I was doing his bidding or something. I started to think I wouldn’t even have one friend left in the fall and then that morning just before I left town, I saw the story at the back door.’

‘You liked it.’

‘I hated it.’

‘What?’

‘Maudlin, overwritten, banal.’

‘Banal?’

‘Isn’t the whole thing about writing that the stakes have to be high? Who cares about this dope wandering around campus?’

‘That moment at the end when they’re standing there and—’

‘I know, the button thing. Didn’t do it for me.’

‘It was gorgeous and tender. Everything in it is working toward this mood, this ache, this very tactile sensation that gets deep in your bones. He sort of reminded me of you.’

‘Of me? That loser? How does he remind you of me?’

Because I’m a little in love with him. Because he moves me. I can’t think of anything true that I could say out loud.

‘If I ever write something decent,’ he says, ‘it’s going to be a whole lot better than that.’ He stands up. ‘Hold on. I have something for you.’ He goes quickly down the stairs in the shirt I hadn’t seen before today, his skinny arms, his dark elbows. He reaches into the back seat of his mother’s car. He comes back up the stairs and hands me a book. ‘Sorry. I didn’t mean to arrive completely empty-handed.’

It’s a paperback, gold and black. Hunger by Knut Hamsun.

‘It’s about being a writer, no matter the cost.’

‘Thank you.’ I want to hug it. Instead I read the back. Or pretend to. The words won’t stay in place.

‘I was nervous earlier. So I forgot to give it to you. You’ll like it, I think.’

‘Why were you nervous?’

‘I wasn’t sure you really wanted me here. That you were just being nice. On the phone.’

‘Wait till you sleep on that lumpy couch. You won’t think I was being very nice.’

‘And I worried you thought it felt like a date, tonight. At the restaurant.’

I laugh. ‘It did feel a little like a date, didn’t it?’

‘You put on a dress.’

‘I did.’

‘And the waitress thought so. She called you a keeper.’

I love that we’re reminiscing about the evening already. But for some reason I blurt out, ‘Your dad said I was the kind of girl you divorce.’

This stuns him.

‘Sam told you that?’

I nod.

‘My dad has said that about every woman since he left my mother. Even my stepmother.’

I’m embarrassed I brought it up.

‘My dad is a jerk, Jordan. It’s why I couldn’t stay there. He didn’t want me working for my uncle, he didn’t want me seeing my friend EJ. He didn’t want me spending time with my mother or playing tennis. One minute I’m a lazy hippie and the next I’m a pretentious yuppie. Either way, he’s convinced I am an all-American fuck-up, which is sort of his catch-all for any kind of person except him. I’m like my mother, I’m as useless as a beggar in Calcutta. Just a running commentary. He has these things on repeat and one of them is that every woman is the kind of woman you divorce. I feel awful you had to hear it.’

I wish I hadn’t said it and need to change the subject. ‘Have you ever brought a girlfriend home?’

‘Never.’

‘Not even Megan.’ That was his girlfriend in high school.

‘No. Only my mom met her.’ He tells a funny story about Megan causing a small house fire with her curling iron and I tell him about the foyer fiasco in Atlanta and we are comfortable again.

We go in the house and I show him the kitchen. There aren’t as many dishes in the sink as normal and I fear it is giving him a false impression. ‘There’s one bathroom and it’s up here.’ He follows me up the stairs with his Dopp kit in the dark. ‘It’s disgusting,’ I whisper.

Outside the bathroom I tell him he can use it first.

‘Oh, okay. Thank you. Noche noche, then.’

‘Noche.’

I turn around and go into my room. I can’t bear to shut the door all the way. The bathroom door shuts. I stand there. I take off my underwear and throw it in the hamper. It’s soaked through. My whole being wants one thing, the one thing it can’t have. The clock radio says 3:33. I had nine hours with him. Why isn’t it enough? Nine hours ago we were talking about Arlo and Bean and Mrs. Kane. I think of something and laugh out loud.

He’s in the doorway. ‘What’s so funny?’ he whispers.

I go closer to whisper back. ‘I remembered this Halloween when we rang Mrs. Kane’s bell and she had no idea what day it was and gave us all old cough drops from the bottom of her purse.’

He kisses me.

‘I’m sorry,’ he says.

He kisses me again. ‘I’m so sorry. I want to know more about Mrs. Kane. I do.’ He walks me backward a few steps into my room. We kiss. ‘Oh my God I’ve wanted to do this for so long. You have no idea how long.’ We kiss a long time. He looks over my shoulder. ‘This entire room is bed.’ He looks at me again. ‘Am I bungling everything? You should probably tell me to go downstairs right now.’

I shake my head.

He lifts his hands to the top of my dress. ‘I have thought about doing this all night.’ He unfastens the first button and looks at me.

I nod but before he can undo the next one I pull the dress up over my head and toss it in the corner. I’m not wearing anything else.

He is kissing me and laughing. ‘You didn’t let me do the whole sexy button thing all the way down.’

‘Claudette told me to give you a sign.’

‘This is a good sign. I love this sign.’

We get his clothes off, too, and we are still standing, looking at each other and grinning.

The feeling catches me off guard.

Oh.

Love.

Y ash never did look for a sublet. We bought king-sized sheets for the pushed-together twins and I raced home at night after work to join him on that big bed. Every night was hot and we slept without clothes or covers, our bodies close, our skin steaming. He got a job as a prep cook at a diner two doors down from High Five and if our breaks lined up, we’d meet out back and make out.

For my birthday in July he brings me breakfast on a tray: scrambled eggs, sausages, a biscuit, and a little fruit garnish like at the diner. My mother has sent me a package and after breakfast I open it, a thin cotton bathrobe that goes on then comes off quickly. He climbs on top of me and slides inside and we move together. I’m watching him, watching his face start to flush, start to lose control of its expression, and he looks down at me watching and it seems like he’s in pain when he says, ‘I love you. I know it’s too soon, but I do. I love you so much.’

We don’t just have sex. We read The Aeneid out loud to each other. We read Yeats and Auden. We read Proust in French because we both studied it in high school and we talk about moving to Paris. But Proust in the original is difficult, and we’ll read him in English in Gastrell’s seminar in the fall, so we read Camus in French instead. And we make up a version of Sir Hincomb Funnibuster that you can play with two people. It’s like honeymoon bridge, he says, which I’ve never heard of. Honeymoon Hincomb, we call it. Then we start calling each other Hincomb. Then Hinkie. Then Hink.

In early August I have to have my wisdom teeth out. My teeth are so impacted that the doctor has to crack apart all four teeth and take them out in pieces. I chose local anesthesia so I am awake for the whole thing. Afterward my mouth aches and bleeds but I don’t care because Yash, after a trip to Claudette at Häagen-Dazs, comes dancing through the door, a pint in each hand, singing ‘Strawberry Sorbet’ to the tune of ‘Raspberry Beret.’

Ivan comes back from Ireland and stays with Brent for a few days. Before he comes over, Yash moves his bag and books back out to the living room.

‘Brent’s futon is a lot better than this,’ Ivan says to Yash when he sits on the couch.

‘It’s only a few more weeks.’ He’s found a room to rent for the school year.

We go to a diner. Yash and I sit on the same side of the booth, knees touching under the table.

Ivan tells us tales about Bloomsday in Dublin, about meeting Joyce’s grandnephew in a barber shop in Mary Street. ‘At the barber’s, man. Like Buck Mulligan shaving on the roof. ’Twas mystical. What? What’s going on? You guys have not stopped laughing since we got here.’

Then he tells us about the landlord’s daughter, the ferryman’s sister, and a pretty French girl on the flight home who told him in a sexy accent if they didn’t hold hands during takeoff the plane would crash. ‘Best come-on line ever. I’m using that one.’ But once they were safely in the air she let go and refused to speak to him for the rest of the flight.

He is amused that everything he says delights us. ‘Whatever you guys are on, I want some.’ he says, which only makes us laugh harder.

‘Sam should be getting back soon, right?’ Ivan says to me.

‘No idea.’

‘He hasn’t been in touch?’

‘We broke up before he left.’

‘Heard that before.’

‘Definitively this time. Very mutual. Fini.’

Yash presses his leg against mine.

‘Ça suffit?’ I say.

‘Yup, we got it, Hink,’ he says and we freeze.

‘Hink? You two have gotten super weird,’ Ivan says.

The next night Yash goes out with him alone while I’m working. He comes back later than me and flops on the bed. ‘The guy has no clue. Picked up on exactly nothing. This might be easier than I thought.’

‘To hide it forever?’

‘Not forever. I just want Sam to hear it from me first.’

The week before classes start, he moves into his room on MacDougal Street. It’s bigger than mine, the bathroom is cleaner, and there is AC. It’s like going to a hotel. I stay there many nights in a row.

One morning, early, the phone in the kitchen rings. One of his housemates knocks on the door. We’ve been messing around. ‘Please don’t move,’ Yash says.

He comes back so grave I think his father has died. ‘Sam is coming for the weekend.’

We leave no trace of me in his room. He borrows a mattress and I help put the sheets on it. We sleep separately that night. Sam is coming early the next day.

I work lunch at High Five and an evening shift at Bubble Time. I jump every time the phone rings, hoping for an update. He was planning to tell him straight off, get it over with. By nine I’ve heard nothing. Claudette wants me to go out, but I can’t risk running into them. I go home. Yash is in my room, sitting stiffly on the bed.

He looks at me and shakes his head.

‘What happened?’

‘He got here and I showed him my place. We went out for lunch. I knew you were at High Five so I took him the long way around. It was bad. Even before I said anything it was bad. I kept feeling like he knew. But at lunch he talked all about some girl he’d met in Berlin, and then about you and how the breakup had been for the best. And I’m thinking, this is going to be fine.’ He laughs. ‘I’ll just tell him and it will be okay. But I can’t seem to do it. We go over to see Cole and have some beers with him and that guy Lonnie from Pike, and they’re both surprised I’ve been in town all summer and haven’t come by or been out at the bars and as we’re walking out of there Sam asks me if I’m seeing anyone. And then I’m sure he knows. Maybe Ivan did say something? Shit, I don’t know, but I say it.’

‘What did you say?’

‘I said I’m thinking of taking Jordan out.’

‘ Thinking of taking me out? ’

He drops his face into his hands. ‘It’s all I had the courage for. And he flipped on me. Said I could never ever do that, that it would be reprehensible, unforgivable. He told me to swear to him that I would never do that. And I could not. I have no idea where he is now.’

‘Maybe he went home to Atlanta.’

‘No. He’s here. He’s not through with me.’

‘You’re going to have to tell him the truth.’

‘I know.’

I walk him downstairs. Hug him at the door. Watch him move slowly up the hill to MacDougal Street.

I have the house to myself. Everyone else is out. I knew Sam would react that way. Yash will lose him if he chooses me. I will lose Yash if he chooses Sam.

I’m in the bathroom when I hear knocking at the front door.

‘Jordan,’ he calls.

He must have followed Yash here. Fuck. I move slowly to my bedroom. The light is on, the window open. I sit on the floor so he can’t see me. The knocking continues. The door is unlocked. He doesn’t come in. I hear steps going back down the front porch.

‘Jordan.’

He must be standing directly below my window.

‘I just want to talk to you.’

A long time later he walks away.

I don’t hear from Yash for the rest of the weekend. On Sunday evening he comes into Bubble Time with his laundry. After he gets a load going, we sit together on the patio. He reaches in his pocket and pulls out a small figurine made of blue glass. He gives it to me. It’s a dolphin, back arched, about to surface for a leap.

‘It reminded me of you.’

‘I didn’t take you for a tchotchke giver.’

‘It’s an aberration.’

‘That bad?’

He nods. ‘I told him. That it had already started. With us. It was bad. He was so angry. I get it.’

‘You get it? When exactly does his owner’s warrantee on me run out?’

He bends his head over so far I can’t see his face. ‘I don’t know how to do this.’

He gets up and goes back into the building and out to the street and disappears. His clothes are still swishing around in the washer. I leave them there when my shift is over.

At home my bedroom door is closed and there’s a note on the nail.

I’m in your bed. Wake me up so I can apologize all night.

— (the real) Heart the Lover

C lasses start. Dr. Gastrell’s seminar is held not in 1B of Tate Hall as listed in the course catalogue but at his house. Every Wednesday night Yash and I walk together to the Breach, through the gate, up the little path, and ring the bell whose sound, to me, means the arrival of pizzas. We go through the hallway with the wobbly table and the notepad and the silhouettes on the wall. Yash and I sit together on the striped couch and a grad student named Vinga sits on my other side. Randy, a fawning junior, takes one armchair and high-strung Ned takes the other, his long, nervous legs stretched through the underside of the coffee table. Others bring in chairs from the dining room. Dr. Gastrell sits in the spot where Yash stood and acted out his date. Gastrell is fond of reading aloud. When we read The Aeneid he pauses on a line then reads it again: ‘Someday we will remember even these our hardships with pleasure.’

Dr. Gastrell does not conceal how taken he is with Yash. Yash illuminates him. When he speaks, Gastrell shimmers with energy. They spar and parry about Platonic forms, Aristotelian ontology, and Homeric divinations versus human agency. Gastrell makes attempts to include the rest of us, and several of the others work hard for his attention, but the real conversation is between him and Yash while the rest of us listen and take notes. Their most heated dispute is over the definition of ‘hamartia,’ which Gastrell says is a tragic flaw. Yash corrects him, saying that the word in ancient Greek, as Aristotle was using it, meant a random error of judgement. From there it escalates quickly. Gastrell claims that nothing in Greek drama is random and that Greek drama wouldn’t have survived at all without this tragic irony that they invented. Yash insists that the power and poignancy come from the very randomness itself, the sense that any one of us, not just a good king with a built-in flaw, is capable of making a mistake, that we are all vulnerable to tragedy because we are human.

The argument leaves Gastrell with a red neck and a moist hairline, and Yash looking like he slayed a small dragon.

For my thesis, I’m assigned an advisor I’ve never heard of and I meet with her every week. If there’s any place I can point to where my writing life actually began, it is here with Dr. Felske on Thursdays at one p.m. I come in each week with two copies of a new story and have to read the whole thing out loud while she follows along on her copy, circling words, squiggling a line under sentences, slashing whole paragraphs. Very occasionally there is a tiny check in the margin. I write for these tiny checks. I get more and more of them as the semester goes on. She quickly understands how limited my reading has been, and how male. She feeds me Virginia Woolf, Katherine Mansfield, Zora Neale Hurston, Elizabeth Bowen, Djuna Barnes, Nadine Gordimer, and Jamaica Kincaid. By mid-November I’ve written twelve stories. We choose five for the thesis and begin to revise. Revision for me in the past has been some light polishing. This is more like a root canal on every paragraph. The writing professors I’ve had before often spoke in generalities, in quotes by famous writers. Chekhov said. Beckett said. And we scribbled down those pearls. Dr. Felske only talks about what she sees on the page. She taps her silver mechanical pencil on a passage. What is truer here? She steers me away from the Southern gothic plots I was enamored with last year and encourages me to write from my own emotions. I start to understand the power of fiction, the reason we make things up. My best story is about my father. It’s not autobiographical. It’s about the manager of a shoe store and the high school boy who gets a job there—but it is about my father, about my rage and shame and love for him. These scenes that didn’t happen concentrate and distill the emotion of what did. ‘The truth has nothing to do with the facts,’ one of my professors said Faulkner said. Professor Felske shows me what that really means.

Madame Trèves, the owner of Chantal, comes slowly to like and trust me. It has taken four months. Once she starts telling you about her family, you’re in, the bartender told me. On a slow night in late September, we are standing together in the little nook in back and she points to an old man she just seated. He resembles my uncle, she says, and I ask how and she says not his features, an energy, a goodness, and she tells me what I already knew from the bartender, that this uncle, her mother’s sister’s husband, hid her whole family in the hay shed on his farm for the last three years of the war.

The next week she gives me three more dinner shifts. I quit High Five and Bubble Time and start raking it in. Over a hundred dollars a night. I begin putting real money in the bank.

I bring home my tips and we count the cash on Yash’s bed. I take a shower and when it gets cold I put on these red long johns I find in his closet. Your little red suit, he calls it, like in the Talking Heads song. We count my tips and roll around on the bed until the red suit is down at my ankles and never ever have I been so happy.

Every few weeks Sam comes to town and disturbs that happiness. He stays with Yash and I can’t go to any of the parties they go to. My name is verboten. When they are together, I don’t exist, Yash tells me. All their friends know not to mention my name. When Yash returns to me after the weekend, he doesn’t want to talk about what they did or where they went or what they said. I hate Sam for this, the way he takes Yash away from me for days at a time and brings him back sullen and petulant and conflicted, the way I used to return to my mother after a weekend at my father’s. I hate the smell of the room after Sam has been there. I hate the box of my things that Yash’s housemate lets us store under his bed and that I retrieve once Sam has gone.

Once, in November, after one of Sam’s visits, I don’t go to Yash’s on Sunday night after work and he doesn’t come to Pye Street. The next morning I decide to do a little test, to see how long it will take him to come to me. I go to class, work on a story for my thesis in the library. Chantal is closed Monday nights. Yash and I usually get pizza. But he doesn’t come or call. I don’t hear from him Tuesday either. Or all day Wednesday. Gastrell’s seminar is that night. If I don’t see him before then, if I walk alone to the Breach and take my place beside him on the striped couch I will start to cry and not be able to stop. I skip my other class that day. I wasn’t able to do the work. I know Yash has class till four.

I walk over to his house. I knock on the door even though I have a key. I feel like I’ve had a pot of coffee. My heart is going so fast. I’m barely in my body.

He opens the door. ‘Hey, Hink!’ It’s confusing. He hugs me tight. ‘Mmmm.’ He presses his nose behind my ear. ‘God, you smell good.’

We go into his room. He’s gotten my box and put everything back where it belongs: my book on the bedside table, my brush on the dresser. He’s been doing a lot of reading. There are at least a dozen books on my side of the bed. I’m trying so hard not to cry.

He opens the closet door and points to the long johns on their hook. ‘I left the red suit out by mistake and Sam held it up and teased me and I thought for a minute he was going to put it on, so I grabbed it out of his hand and he said I’d turned into an asshole. It was kind of a bad visit. We saw at least five of your friends Saturday night. It was a minefield.’

He hugs me and kisses me and I can’t speak and he doesn’t seem to notice. ‘I’ve missed you. Have you eaten? They had that cheddar you like at Kroger’s.’

He goes to the kitchen and I have a cry in the bathroom. I want to tell him how I’m feeling, ask him if he noticed that we haven’t seen each other since last Friday. This is what my old boyfriend Jay meant when he said I bottled things up. But I’m not good at saying that I feel hurt or forgotten or rejected. There had been no room for that growing up. I’m more skilled at burying those emotions. Or hiding them in my fiction.

I go back to his room and he brings me a sandwich and I can’t stop the tears and he says, ‘Oh, Hink, what is it?’

‘I don’t like it when Sam comes here,’ is all I can manage.

He agrees that it’s a tough situation and we lie down on his bed until we have to walk over to the Breach.

In December, when Madame Trèves helps me set the tables, I know something is wrong. She only helps when she wants to reprimand you. I’m not sure what I’ve done. She likes me. She and her husband had Yash and me over for Thanksgiving. We told her we wanted to write books and live in Paris, and she brought out boxes of photographs and told us about every arrondissement she’d lived in.

‘You know you’re my favorite,’ she says to me, straightening the napkins I have just carefully placed.

‘I am?’

She scowls at me. ‘Of course you know that. And I don’t want to lose you. I don’t. But I make sacrifices. Not often. But I do. I have a niece in France. My sister’s daughter. Two kids, no husband, and her girl just quit. Why she would employ a German I do not know. But she is in need. And you want a job in Paris. So there you go. A match made in heaven with me the only loser. You can write while the children are at school. Middle of January you go. You leave me.’ She flicks me away with her fingers, insulted. As if it were all my idea.

On the way home to Yash’s I think about Elizabeth Bowen’s The House in Paris . I remember Dr. Gastrell saying that Ezra Pound invited James Joyce to stay with him in Paris for a week and Joyce stayed in the city for twenty years and wrote Ulysses and Finnegans Wake . I think about how Dr. Felske is always talking about the two things that bring perspective and revelation to a character: time and distance. I think I have to go.

Yash is up reading. I tell him as soon as I’m through the door.

He is as surprised as I am. He wonders if I’ll get paid enough, and if not, how I will defer my student loans.

I tell him I don’t care about my student loans. ‘How will they even track me down?’

He shakes his head. ‘They will eventually, and the penalties will be harsh.’

Why are we talking about my loans? ‘Will you miss me?’

‘Of course.’ He sees my face. ‘A lot. Come here.’ He scootches over on the bed.

I lie down next to him. I stroke his chest and he puffs it up, exaggerating the barrel of it, something I tease him about.

‘I will come find you as soon as I graduate,’ he says.

I want to go, though I don’t want to leave him or our nights of honeymoon Hincomb and the little red suit.

He holds me tight and says until then we can write each other sexy letters like Henry Miller and Anaïs Nin.

At the end of the semester I skip my graduation and we drive to Knoxville. We don’t stay with either of his parents. He doesn’t want their scrutiny. We stay with his friends EJ and Marni.

I’ve heard a lot about EJ, one of Yash’s best friends since elementary school. He and Marni started dating in eighth grade and when she got pregnant senior year they got married. Now they have a four-year-old and a two-year-old, and recently bought a house.

‘EJ will be withdrawn when he first meets you,’ Yash tells me in the car. ‘Marni will do all the talking. Once we’ve had some drinks EJ will crawl out of his shell and Marni will let him shine. If you stay too long EJ will get morose, then belligerent. We’ll slip off to bed before that. He’s a good guy, but his demons are always circling.’

‘Because of his dad?’ EJ’s father died of a heart attack in front of him when he was nine years old. He was the only one home. They were making hot dogs.

‘I think he had them before that. Even as a little kid he always thought you were trying to rip him off. I think things were fucked up in his house. He complained about his dad, but once he was gone he was a saint. He always loved Marni. He was obsessed with her. It’s good they’re together. She’s good for him. And those little girls. You’ll love them.’

We pull into their driveway and the little girls come running and screaming out of the house, the littler one crying because she can’t reach Yash first.

They call him Gas and he calls them the pigeons. He scoops them both up in his arms and they put their faces close to his and everything he says quietly to them makes them squawk and howl and kick their legs.

Marni is on the stoop and I introduce myself and shake her hand. She is our age, twenty-two, but I feel ten years younger beside her. She asks about the drive and I ask about the new house. She’s watching Yash and her girls over my shoulder the whole time.

We all go in. We follow her through the kitchen to the living room with the pull-out we’ll sleep on. The girls tug Yash into their room. She asks us to hang out with the girls while she finishes dinner. EJ will be home from work soon, she says. She’s the first person my age I’ve ever met who has kids and a husband who will be home from work soon.

The girls want to make a fort out of the couch cushions and the blankets from their beds, and inside the fort they want to play a game called Prance, which Gas invented. It involves making your first two fingers do various movements and you have to guess the word for it.

‘You can’t do “prance,”’ the older one says to me. ‘That’s the only rule. No prancing.’

Yash goes first and puts both fingers into the palm of his other hand and shoots one finger out straight before they both scream, ‘Russian folk dancing!’

We all crack up. Yash says, ‘I may have a slight advantage, having taught them a few concepts already.’

The younger one holds up her little palm and makes her fingers jump up and down. ‘Jump,’ I say. ‘Bounce. Leap. Hop.’ I wait for the other two to join me but they are smirking. ‘Catapult. Gambol,’ I say. The little one shakes her head.

‘Saltate!’ the other girl says then collapses laughing.

I could stay in this fort under these blankets all night. The little girls and their fat fingers and the words Yash has taught them. Everything is funny.

EJ follows the pattern Yash predicted. He becomes delightful halfway through dinner and he and Yash and Marni tell stories I’ve already heard but with fresh details. I don’t want to get up and go to the bathroom in case I miss something. I never want to miss one single thing Yash says.

When Yash goes to the bathroom EJ says, ‘He’s never brought anyone home before.’

I nod, to confirm I knew this.

‘No. This is a bigger deal than you understand.’

‘EJ.’

‘No, she needs to know.’

‘What does she need to know?’

Something shifts in the way he looks at me. I have a volatile father, and I understand we’ve just made the turn Yash warned me about. Down the hallway the door to the bathroom opens. ‘Do no harm,’ EJ says in a low voice.

Yash recognizes the change and says he’s beat from the drive and we quickly do the dishes and sneak off to the sofa bed, which is comfortable even when, by five a.m., there are four of us in it. By six we are up and on a walk to feed the horses at the end of the road.

We go to his mom’s for breakfast. She’s picked up seasonal work at a department store downtown and has to go in at ten that morning. She’s so young, only eighteen years older than us. She has long hair and bare feet with purple nail polish and gives us both long tight hugs. This is the house where Yash was raised. He points through the window to Arlo and Bean’s house across the street—‘She’s a doll but the husband is a waste of blood and bones,’ his mom says—and at the Sullivans three doors down with nine children and the McDaniels at the end of the street with eleven. ‘Big breeders on this street,’ Yash says. ‘My poor mom with her one strange Indian boy.’

She looks at him, displeased. ‘Yashie. Don’t say things like that.’

His mom has put out a big spread of food and he gives her a hard time about spending money trying to impress me.

‘I wasn’t trying to impress her. I just want to feed your bony self.’

We sit and he clams up and she talks about transcendental meditation and the tiny parking lot of the new market that has opened up. ‘If you find a spot good luck trying to get out. It’s tight as a tick in there.’

Every word out of her mouth annoys him. But she keeps trying. Even when it’s clear she’ll be late for work, she is offering us more food, coming up with new topics. Yash is holding up her coat and purse.

‘You’re gonna get fired, Peggy Lynn, if you don’t hightail it right this minute.’ He says this in a Deep Southern accent and I hear the boy he once was.

She gets up and lets him slide her coat on, hand her the purse and open the door. ‘It was a real pleasure, Jordan. Hope to see you again, honey.’

From there we go to see his dad— Jordan is the kind of girl you divorce —for lunch . He and his wife, Paige, live on a farm thirty minutes outside the city. Yash always said his father left India far behind, but I didn’t expect the ten-gallon hat or the slow Southern drawl. He works in whiskey. He owns a distribution company and it’s all he wants to talk about: value chain, cost base, centralized buying, disintermediation, wallet share. The only time he veers from the topic of work is to tell Yash he knows about his mother’s new boyfriend, Bud. ‘That poor fellow has no idea what he’s hitched his wagon to,’ he says. Paige breaks in with many questions after that. He doesn’t hide his impatience with these side conversations. Yash is humorless and docile. I don’t recognize him. It’s a great relief to get back in the car.

We spend the afternoon with his uncle Percy and his aunt Sue, who are easy and delightful. They are raising their little grandson, Jared, who loves Yash as much as the pigeons do. We eat pie at their kitchen table and play games with Jared in the yard. I watch Yash slowly unwind from the visits with his parents.

That night we cook dinner for EJ and Marni. The girls are our sous chefs. We urge their parents to go have some alone time in the living room but they stay at the kitchen table and watch us.

Late that night, after we’ve had stealth sex on the sofa bed, nervous the girls would bust in at any moment, we hear arguing. At first we can only hear EJ, low and forceful, but as he gets louder, Marni’s responses become audible. She seems to alternate from combative to placating.

‘Well, we avoided it,’ I say. ‘But Marni didn’t.’

‘I don’t think she ever does.’

It stops abruptly a while later and the house is silent. Yash falls asleep. I stay awake a long time. Only after the girls crawl in beside me around three do I give in to sleep.

Yash drives me to the airport the next morning. It is early and we’re quiet most of the way.

My hand is on his leg but his face is rigid and he doesn’t look over. I wonder if he’s angry I’m leaving.

‘What’s going on?’

He takes in a deep breath. ‘I just wish I could keep driving, back to school. I don’t want to be here for another week.’

‘Come home with me.’ I’ve already asked him. He’s already said no.

He stops outside the terminal. He says they fine you if you get out of the car, so we say goodbye right there in the front seat of the Nova. I cry and he doesn’t. He seems so far away, out of reach already, and that makes me cry harder. It feels like a mistake to leave.

‘Hink,’ he says, ‘you’re going to miss your flight.’

I pull my big suitcase out of the back of his car. I lean into the front and kiss him and I tell him I love him and he says it back, but he has disconnected. I shut the door and he pulls away. I wave and he waves though he is looking straight ahead.

I fly to my mom’s for the holidays. Yash and I talk on the phone a few times. Once he gets back to his place on MacDougal Street, he sounds more like himself. He says he’s wearing the red suit and won’t take it off until he gets to Paris.

The day after New Year’s, I leave for France.

M adame Trèves’ niece Léa lives at 16 rue de Vaugirard, two blocks from the Jardin du Luxembourg. There is a blue door, built for carriages, that clicks open with a code. In the entryway is a row of silver mailboxes. The poste comes twice a day, at nine in the morning and four in the afternoon. The family has started to call me le facteur, the mailman, because I check it so often for letters from Yash.

His letters are small packets, six to eight yellow legal pages of his small blue ballpoint print, full of observations, allusions, and reflections, perhaps more Henry James than Henry Miller, but with far more humor. I wait weeks for one. We are both broke and can’t afford phone calls, though after three weeks without a letter I will break down and call him from a phone booth, my ten-franc pieces swallowed one by one. An hour’s conversation is a third of my weekly salary. L’argent de poche, pocket money, Lèa calls it, because she is providing me room and board.

That spring, while he is writing his thesis, I do not hear from him for the month of April. I call twice and leave messages with his housemates on MacDougal Street and he does not call back. On the early-May day when Léa brings up the thick white envelope—she has met the real facteur on the street—I burst into tears. I run to my tiny room to read it. It is, as they always are, brilliant, erudite, distant, unapologetic; sweet and affectionate only in the last two sentences, like the turn at the end of a sonnet. ‘Enough of my perambulations. I do love you, babe, cumbersome as it is for me to feel, and to confess.’

This is the first time he’s used ‘babe’ on the page. It’s his most tender endearment, which he uses only in the most intimate moments, when it feels like we are breathing from the same body.

At the bottom of this letter, in even smaller print, almost as a test to see how closely I am reading, is one more sentence:

P.S. I’ll land in your land on the 5th of August.

I hoped he’d come in June or July, but it’s okay—he is coming.

I need to start dinner, but I can’t get a hold of myself. He loves me. He called me babe. He is coming in August.

Léa knocks on my door. She comes in, sees my tears, sits beside me on my bed. We’ve never been in my room together before. She’s dressed to go out with her boyfriend, Laurent: silk shirt, suede belt, black skirt. She wants to tell me a story. She speaks in English, which she rarely does, only when she wants to be sure I understand every word.

She tells me that when she was nineteen she fell deeply in love. After a year he told her he wanted to go to the States, drive around the American West. He asked her to come, he begged her to come, she says. But she had to finish her studies. And her parents didn’t want her to be an American hippie dropout. He left, and when her studies were over she didn’t join him as she had promised. ‘I don’t know why. I suppose I was hurt he left. And then he met someone. He wrote me. I was écrasée. Completely broken. I could barely move. But my friend Alain, he is waiting for me all this time. So I went with him.’ The old boyfriend came back looking for her. It had not worked with the American. But she had just gotten married. ‘Then he married, too. I got divorced. He is divorcing now. This man, it’s Laurent. He will move in here in a few months.’ She counts on her fingers. ‘Twenty-one years late. What I am saying, these decisions we make in youth are everything. You have no idea. Those feelings, they don’t revenir. Pas comme ça. And no one tells you.’ She points to the pages of Yash’s letter on the bed. ‘Do not put this love second. Marry him. Marry him and have your babies. It doesn’t matter what happens after that.’ I say I’m only twenty-three and she says, ‘Screw the calendar. What does a calendar know about love?’

‘Let him go,’ my friend Nobiko, who takes care of the twins on the fourth floor, says to me. She is divorced. She hung on too long. Trop longtemps, she says. It’s June. I’m waiting for a letter again. The next day a letter comes and I show it to her. She says something in Japanese then translates it into French. Something about a petit poisson. He’s keeping you on the hook, is what she means.

I find some cheap French classes and make a few friends in them. I bring the kids, Luc and Delphine, to their lessons and playdates all over the city. I try to study grammar. I try to read. In my tiny room I start to write a couple of short stories but don’t finish them. Most of my writing comes out in the form of letters to Yash, in which I try to stay upbeat and anecdotal and not overwhelm him with my longing for him, and the journal I keep for the overspill of that emotion. I am so in love with him it is hard to take a full breath, I write in the journal. His absence feels like losing a lung.

My life is pending, suspended. It swings from letter to letter. When one arrives, I soar for a week straight. Over the next week, I come down slowly. Once back on the ground I fear the worst. He’s met someone, someone who makes him feel different, new, even more alive. She is Brazilian. She is a dancer. She is a Brazilian dancer and I will never hear from him again. Then a fresh letter arrives and up I go again.

His first packet from Knoxville in June is exuberant. He’s graduated with highest honors, he’s set up a table and chair in his father’s barn, and he’s made a vow to start a novel, five pages a day. This makes me so happy I don’t force myself to wait a few days. I write back immediately. I have so much I want to say, I tell him, that everything is bubbling up fast and jamming together. ‘And still,’ I write, ‘there is this sense that I could express it all in just one nonexistent word and you would understand exactly what I mean.’

His July letter is shorter and less buoyant. His father is a despot at work, his mother is chaos incarnate. He would leave town tomorrow but he has to save for France. He is reading Kafka, he says, ‘possibly not the best choice for the moment in question.’ At the end of the letter he tells me he wrote nine of the worst pages of fiction ever committed to paper and they have been befittingly burned with the brush pile behind the tool shed.

And finally he is here. I go to Charles de Gaulle to meet him and bring him back to my little bed. The family, like most Parisians in August, has left the city. They’ve gone to Léa’s mother’s in Saint-Malo. We have the apartment to ourselves. We lie down on our sides facing each other, the only way we can fit on the narrow mattress, pressed as close as we can be. He is new but familiar, precious, thrilling. ‘I think it’s safe to say I love you,’ he says. We move slowly—he’s been awake for over twenty-four hours—and have slow tiny-bed sex. He comes and calls me babe when we are sweaty and spent. ‘I didn’t know how much I missed you,’ he says.

Our first week together we stay in Paris. I take him to all the places where I ached for him. It was like bringing him home to kindly relatives who would share my joy. Here he is, I say to the horse chestnuts in the Luco, to my booth at Le Danton, and to the spot on the grass in the Champs de Mars where I read his most recent letter. Here he is.

We make our own Proust tour and see his rec reated bedroom at the Carnavalet, with pieces of the cork he used to line his bedroom walls. We go to 102 Haussmann, now a bank, where he lived for thirteen years while writing La Recherche and where, Dr. Gastrell told us, in September of 1914 he sobbed in the moonlight when a German invasion of the city seemed immi nent. We find the alley down which Swann went to find Odette’s bedroom door.

We go out one night with my friends from French class, Irish Deirdre and Dutch Loes and Loes’ friend Fabien from Toulouse. We meet at a basement bar near the Pantheon and squeeze into a table in the corner. I go to get us drinks and look back at him there with my new friends, elbows on the table, head tipped to the side, his rooster cowlick, his mischievous grin. He’s telling them a story. I have that familiar impatience to get back to the table so I don’t miss what he’s saying.

Madame Trèves made me promise I would go to her favorite restaurant, Lapis, and I’d waited to go with Yash, but once he sees the menu on its little stand outside the blue-and-gold door, he won’t splurge on the prix fixe meal. He worked all summer to afford this trip, but he doesn’t seem to want to spend any of the money he saved.

I take him to an inexpensive Indian restaurant in the 5th that I like, Le Punjab. I’d never had Indian food until I moved to Paris. We walk in and a woman in back calls out to us and Yash answers and I don’t know what either of them has said. He always claimed he spoke no Hindi. She shows us the only table in the window, raised up on a platform so you have to step up onto it, and her husband brings over the menus. The couple chat with Yash and I can tell he is telling them that he doesn’t speak much, but they disagree and tell me in French that he speaks very well.

Where in India is his family from, they want to know and instead of saying Delhi Yash says something else and they don’t know it so they get out a map and they all look at it together and can’t find the town. They ask him a question in Hindi he doesn’t understand and they ask it to me.

‘Comment s’écrit ce village?’

‘Je ne suis pas sûr,’ Yash says and they are thrilled he understands French, too.

They bring the woman’s father out from the back and go through it again and the old man doesn’t know the town either.

We never order. They just start bringing out dishes. They fuss over us. They think Yash is marvelous.

On the way home he says, ‘They were such kind people, weren’t they?’

‘They were.’

He is silent for a long time. I take his hand. We’re walking up Mouffetard. We have it all to ourselves. The shops are closed, the restaurants quiet. The Parisians are gone and the tourists aren’t interested in this part of town at night.

‘That is the first time I’ve ever been to an Indian restaurant.’

‘You don’t have any in Knoxville?’

‘We have one. I could never go there. I was raised with India as the Death Star. You couldn’t mention it. My second-grade teacher gave me an extra credit assignment on India and my father tried to get her fired.’

He lets go of my hand and rubs his face and is quiet again. Then he says, ‘Four years of college and I never studied its history or Hindi. I’ve never read an Indian writer. Let’s go there. I’m not sure my father would ever speak to me again but let’s go. Will you come? Someday?’

‘Of course.’

In bed that night he tells me he has only one recurring dream, that he is giving his father’s eulogy. ‘It’s an embarrassing cliché. I’m standing there, sometimes in a church, sometimes in a field, once inside a storage unit—but it’s always good, my eulogy. It feels sort of the same from dream to dream. Off the cuff, no notes. But it feels like I’ve said it before. It’s a very good speech. People love it. My mother and my stepmother are right up front and they are weeping and holding hands. I nail it, every time.’

‘And your father is never there to hear it.’

‘Nope. He’s always dead.’

I convince him that we, too, need to get out of the city. We take a train to Strasbourg and another to Davos. Yash wants to see the sanatorium where Thomas Mann visited his wife, Katia, for three weeks in 1912, the visit that inspired The Magic Mountain . The air is as clean and sharp as it is in all the books when tubercular characters go seeking a cure. We feel lightheaded, walking up to our inn from the train station, the Alps rising on all sides, the highest peaks pale blue with ice. Later we stand in front of the enormous building, still a sanatorium, for asthma now that tuberculosis can be cured. It looks like a giant hotel with big balconies off every room where the patients would spend their days breathing in the cold, clear air. We walk around the grounds and imagine we are consumptive strangers meeting there, like Hans Castorp and Clawdia Chauchat. Chauchat, he tells me, was the name of the machine gun used by the French in World War I.

The next morning we go for a day hike, twelve kilometers to a southern peak. We start early in order to get down by dark. The innkeeper’s son packs us a lunch and snacks. He is our age, blond and broad, a bit mechanical when he speaks English. Yash is convinced he has a thing for me, and he has this running joke on the hike that the Swiss man is behind a tree or a boulder.

On the trail we talk as we often do about books, what makes the magic, where the genius lies. He says it’s in the structure. It’s always in the structure. We argue about this. I insist it can be in a number of elements—the images, the dialogue, all the ways in which the narrative comes to life—and he says it’s always the form that makes the difference. I say the structure of War and Peace was no great shakes, and he breaks the book down for me section by section to show how Tolstoy was reconceiving both The Iliad and The Aeneid to build his masterpiece.

The trail is narrow, the trees tall on either side. An occasional footbridge stretches over a stream. During the first hour we have glimpses of the town below getting smaller through the trees. The next hour or so we have no views, then with no warning the sky opens up and the land flattens into a meadow flush with pink and red flowers.

‘I warned you this might happen.’

‘You did,’ he says.

I put down my backpack and run through the grass with my arms stretched out. I spin around and around and begin to sing that the hills are alive as loudly as possible. Eventually I peter out and Yash joins me in the grass near the lip of the ridge and we lie there and feel the mountains and their shadows and we take off our clothes and have sex until three cows come trotting quickly toward us in an aggressive, uncowlike way, each with a big loud bell around its neck, and we leap up naked and laughing and unsure of which way to go. They abruptly change direction and we lie down in the grass again and their clanging fades away slowly.

Yash traces his fingers over my neck and shoulders. ‘I think for the rest of my life the sound of cowbells will make me horny.’

Closer to the peak we come to a dark green pool surrounded by flat rocks. We take off our clothes again. The water is very cold. Not long ago it was ice. I want to play in the water together, ride on his back, kiss in his arms, everything slick and sexy. But he swims away from me across to the other side. I get out and stand on a warm rock, the cool water dripping from my hair down my back and legs into a pool at my feet. The sun dries my skin. It feels polished and alive. He comes out of the water and stands beside me. He takes my hand and I feel relieved. I press my lips to his neck and hold him close and more water from his hair drips down my back and shoulders and my skin tightens as it evaporates. I tell him I love him with my whole heart.

I look up at him and his mouth is twisted.

‘What’s the matter?’

He doesn’t answer.

‘You okay, Hink?’

He shakes his head. ‘It just hurts a little, to feel this good.’

When we come back to Paris at the end of August, Léa and her children are home. Yash and I take them to tennis lessons on the Métro and shop for food and make them meals. The kids grow attached to him quickly and Léa tells me that if he weren’t so marvelous she would never let him stay in my room. Yash and Laurent argue volubly about topics as disparate as NATO and prosecco. A week before Yash is supposed to fly home, Laurent offers him a job at his company in something called l’intelligence artificielle , which I’ve never heard of before and will for a long time think of as exclusively French. Laurent insists it is an exciting and promising field. He has a friend in the Ministry of the Interior who can move the papers quickly. Yash thinks about it for a few days and accepts. He’s going to stay! He will make a real salary. We can get an apartment and I’ll finish out the year working for Lèa, then I can teach private English classes and really start to write.

On the night before he was supposed to fly back, he goes to the phone booth around the corner to ask his dad to send over some clothes and books. And there in that glass box, in less than ten minutes, he has a change of heart.

At first I think I can change it back. ‘This is a rare opportunity,’ I say. ‘Laurent is going to get you a work permit . Mr. Cautious needs to carpe diem a little.’

‘Or it could be a year of French bureaucracy and getting deported before the paperwork comes through.’ His father has gotten to him so fast.

‘What does your dad think is a better idea for you?’

‘It’s not him. I’d been thinking maybe I should stick to my original plan.’

Original plan? I have not heard of this plan.

‘To save enough to move to New York.’

New York?

‘A guy I know from high school is there. He’s working at Houghton Mifflin. Entry-level position, though he’s pretty plugged-in already. He had dinner with Philip Roth last month.’

I’ve never been to New York. It always looks so bleak in movies. This plan makes no sense to me.

‘Paris is better in every way than New York.’

‘Not for being a writer.’

‘Yeah. Think of all the crappy novels that have been written here. Ulysses , The Sun Also Rises , Madame Bovary .’ I have no idea where Madame Bovary was written and hope he doesn’t either.

‘New York is the hub that Paris used to be,’ he says.

We stay up all night, his last night, going around and around on this. Didn’t we spend last fall dreaming of living in Paris? What happened to that? What happened?

‘So,’ he says, softening, nuzzling up to me, ‘you don’t want to live in New York?’

‘Not really.’

‘With me.’

‘I like trees.’

‘With me, near a park?’

‘When?’

‘When I save up.’

It feels like such a mistake, him going back and working for his father again, miserable, when he could be here and we could be together right now.

Our last sex is sad. Or at least it is for me.

The first pale light comes through the window. In an hour he’ll have to go to the airport. I can’t stop crying.

‘How about January?’ he says. ‘I can make enough by January.’

He leaves. Paris loses all its luster without him. There is a bare space in my room where his green duffel used to be. I am the facteur again, checking the silver box morning and night. He barely writes. He says he is working as many hours as his dad will pay him for, sometimes sixty hours a week. I take on tutoring jobs while the kids are at school. I stop going out. I buy nothing. I save for New York.

By the middle of October, I need to hear his voice. I go to the pay phone at the corner on a Sunday afternoon. As it rings I pray Yash or his stepmother will answer, but I am not lucky.

His father acts like my name is only vaguely familiar to him. I ask him if he could ask Yash to please call me when he gets a chance.

‘Does he have your number?’

‘Yes.’

‘Are you still in Europe?’

‘Yes.’

‘That will be an expensive phone call. Which will appear on my bill.’

‘I’m sure he’ll reimburse you.’

‘Wouldn’t your words be prettier in a letter?’

The pay phone beeps. I have ten seconds to put in another coin or be cut off.

‘I’ll do that. Thank you, Mr. Thakkar.’

Yash does not call back.

I write Carson in Brooklyn about rentals, and she writes back fast saying a friend of a friend was looking to sublet her prewar walk-up between the Navy Yard and the bridge. I don’t know what any of it means. I send Yash the friend’s address and phone number and tell Carson we’re interested.

A few weeks later one of Yash’s packets comes, the yellow legal sheets of paper full of complaints about his father and whiskey distribution and the cubical he shares with a man who smells like mayonnaise and vapor rub. On the last page he says he talked to Carson’s friend and the place sounded decent. He would send her a check at the end of the week and she would send him the keys. We could move in on January 1.

To save money I don’t fly home for the holidays. Léa and Laurent go to Rome, and her children spend the vacation with their father in the 16th. I have a few students who stay in the city, and I squeeze out a few more francs from them before I go.

Yash calls me on Christmas Day. He wants to know if I’m okay. He hasn’t heard from me in a while.

‘The shoe is on the other foot.’ I can hear how strange my voice sounds.

‘What’s wrong, Hink?’

‘I’m tired. I’m tired of missing you.’

Words feel useless. I just need to see him.

‘I get it,’ he says. ‘It’s been a long fall.’

‘It has.’

We talk about the logistics of early January. He says his flight to Newark lands an hour after mine, giving me time to get through customs. We’re both flying Delta. We’ll meet at baggage claim. He received the keys to the apartment. He promises he won’t forget them.

I get to baggage claim fifteen minutes before his flight lands. I lean on my big suitcase, an old oatmeal-colored one of my mother’s, and wait for his flight to appear on the screen. Finally it does. Carousel 3. I drag my oatmeal bag over there and sit again. It is moving but there are no bags on it yet. Two women come down the escalator and stand close to the conveyor belt. I go over to them and ask if they’ve come from Knoxville. They have. Yash has landed. I go back to my perch on the suitcase.

‘Someone’s happy,’ a man with a Delta badge says to me as he walks by.

I watch the escalator. The backs of my legs prickle. My gut aches. My stomach has been upset all week. I think of sharing a bathroom with him again. Hinky Stinky, he used to say. All the people coming down the escalator now and standing at Carousel 3 waiting for their bags to appear on the conveyor belt are precious to me because they’ve been on a flight with Yash. I know he’ll be one of the last off. He walks slowly. He’ll stop in the bathroom, sip from the cooler. ‘He sounds a bit low energy if you ask me,’ my mother said once on the phone. This surprised me. What did I say to give her that impression? His mind works so quickly. Low energy? I watch more people glide diagonally down. None of them with his sweet face.

If he knew how much I loved him it would terrify him. I think of Willie in sixth grade, asking me out by the swing set. He called me every night that week. We talked a lot about his hamsters, Sailor and Glory. Glory stuffed her cheeks with seeds and you could press her neck and feel them all in there like a bean bag chair, he told me. Sailor didn’t do that. Willie and I met at the mall that Saturday, walked around holding hands. Before our parents came to pick us up, he kissed me outside the bathrooms by the food court. He said I was a good kisser and I told him about my crush on him since the beginning of third grade. I told him I remembered a pale blue shirt he used to wear that year, and the little drawings of rabbits he used to make at the back of his math workbook in fourth grade. He called the next day and broke up with me. Why, I asked before my throat closed and the tears started. He said it was too much pressure. All that stuff I’d said about liking him for so long. He said it made him feel like Sailor.

‘Why?’ I whispered.

‘Because you have all these memories of me stuffed inside you and I don’t, and it makes me feel funny.’

I sit on my suitcase thinking about that phone conversation. It was kind of a great comparison. And he was so honest. I haven’t told Yash that story. I didn’t want him to see it as a cautionary tale. When we’re in our walk-up I’ll tell him about Willie Sylvester. He’ll like that name. Good name for a character, he’ll say.

Suitcases start emerging from a hole in the middle of the carousel, up and over they go, sliding down to the belt. It happens fast, the way people grab them and disappear. Soon there is only one silver suitcase going around and around. It isn’t his. I go to look at the arrival board. There’s another flight from Knoxville in two hours. I go to the bathroom. I pass a bank of pay phones but I don’t use one. I wait. After an hour, I go to the phones and call Carson to see if Yash has left a message for me. He hasn’t. The next flight from Knoxville lands and Yash is not on that either.

I go back to the phones and dial his dad’s number. My heart is pounding.

I’m trying not to cry but I’m crying. His stepmother answers. A small blessing.

‘Oh, Jordan, we worried it would be you.’

‘What happened?’ I hear my voice ring against the three walls of phones.

‘Oh, sweetie. Calm yourself. He’s fine. He told me to tell you he’d be on the road till late and that he’d give you a call at Carson’s tomorrow.’

‘On the road? He’s driving here?’

She doesn’t answer.

‘He’s bringing his car to New York?’ He decided against that months ago.

‘He’s not driving to New York, hon. He’s gone to Atlanta. To Sam’s.’

Somehow I find a cab to Brooklyn. I howl the whole way. The driver never says a word. It’s New York. He’s seen it all.

I press her buzzer and Carson comes down in her old slippers.

My coat can’t button anymore so she sees the shape of me, the mess I’ve made.

‘Oh, honey.’

I wail in her arms.

‘Does he know?’

I shake my head.

‘Oh, my little chicken,’ she says.

She holds me for a long time, then she carries my heavy suitcase up the stairs.