FICTION
The middle of the universe is tonight, is here,
And everything behind is a sunk cost.
—Marina Keegan, from the poem “Bygones”
Cold Pastoral
We were in the stage where we couldn’t make serious eye contact for fear of implying we were too invested. We used euphemisms like “I miss you” and “I like you” and smiled every time our noses got too close. I was staying over at his place two or three nights a week and met his parents at an awkward brunch in Burlington. A lot of time was spent being consciously romantic: making sushi, walking places, waiting too long before responding to texts. I fluctuated between adding songs to his playlist and wondering if I should stop hooking up with people I was 80 percent into and finally spend some time alone. (Read the books I was embarrassed I hadn’t read.) (Call my mother.) The thing is, I like being liked, and a lot of my friends had graduated and moved to cities. I’d thought about ending things but my roommate Charlotte advised me against it. Brian was handsome and smoked the same amount as me, and sometimes in the mornings, I’d wake up and smile first thing because he made me feel safe.
In March, he died. I was microwaving instant Thai soup when I got a call from his best friend asking if I knew which hospital he was at.
“Who?” I said.
“Brian,” he said. “You haven’t heard?”
*
I was in a seminar my senior year where we read poems by John Keats. He has this famous one called “Ode on a Grecian Urn” where these two lovers are almost kissing, frozen with their faces cocked beneath a tree. The tragedy, the professor said, is in eternal stasis. She never fades, they never kiss; but I remember finding the whole thing vaguely romantic. My ideal, after all, was always before we walked home—and ironically, I had that now.
*
I watched as the microwave droned in lopsided circles, but I never took the soup out. Someone else must have. Charlotte, perhaps, or one of my friends who came over in groups, offering food in imitation of an adult response and trying to decipher my commitment. I was trying too. I’d made out with a guy named Otto when I was back in Austin over Christmas, and Brian and I had never quite stopped playing games. We were involved, of course, but not associated.
“What’s the deal?” people would shout over the music when he’d gone to get a drink and I’d explain that there was no deal to explain.
“We’re hanging out,” I’d say, smiling. “We like hanging out.”
I think we took a certain pride in our ambiguity. As if the tribulations of it all were somehow beneath us. Secretly, of course, the pauses in our correspondence were as calculated as our casualness—and we’d wait for those drunken moments when we might admit a “Hey,” pause, “I like you.”
“Are you okay?” they asked now. Whispering, almost, as if I were fragile. We sat around that first night sipping singular drinks, a friend turning on a song and then stopping it. I wish I could say I was shocked into a state of inarticulate confusion, but I found myself remarkably capable of answering questions.
“They weren’t dating,” Sarah whispered to Sam, and I gave a soft smile so they knew it was okay that I’d heard.
But it became clear very quickly that I’d underestimated how much I liked him. Not him, perhaps, but the fact that I had someone on the other end of an invisible line. Someone to update and get updates from, to inform of a comic discovery, to imagine while dancing in a lonely basement, and to return to, finally, when the music stopped. Brian’s death was the clearest and most horrifying example of my terrific obsession with the unattainable. Alive, his biggest flaw was most likely that he liked me. Dead, his perfections were clearer.
But I’m not being fair. The fact of the matter is I felt a strange but recognizable hole that grew just behind my lungs. There was a person whose eyes and neck and penis I had kissed the night before and this person no longer existed. The second cliché was that I couldn’t quite encompass it. Regardless, I surprised myself that night by crying alone once my friends had left, my face pressed hard against my pillow.
*
The first time I saw Lauren Cleaver, she was playing ukulele and singing in a basement lit by strings of plastic red peppers. I remember making two observations during the twenty minutes my friends and I hung around the concert and sipped beers: one, that I wanted her outfit (floral overall shorts and a canvas jacket), and two, that she was skinnier than me, a quality that made her instantly less likable. She was pretty, apart from a very large nose, and I’d seen her around campus, riding her bike along Pear Street or smoking cigarettes outside the library. She had the rare combination of being quiet and popular, a code that made her intimidating to younger, fashionable girls and mysterious to older, confident boys. We moved in different circles and I hardly thought about her again until the morning after I first kissed Brian, whom she had dated intensely and inseparably for two years and nine months.
I’d never had to deal with an ex-girlfriend before and I didn’t like it. Adam and I were each other’s firsts and I’d only had month-long things since the two of us broke up. One thing I am is self-aware (to a neurotic fault), and I recognize that a massive percentage of my self-esteem depends on the attention of a series of smug boys at the University of Vermont. The problem is I’m good at attracting them: verbally witty and successful at sending texts. I’m also well dressed, or try to be, and make fun of boys in the way that reads as I like you. Perhaps it’s not a problem so much as a crutch, but I have this pathetic fantasy that I’d be more productive if I were less attractive. Finally finish some paintings or apply for funding of some kind. The point is that Lauren Cleaver and I were not friends because Lauren Cleaver and I had all this in common. This, and Brian.
*
His parents arrived the morning after the accident, and his roommates e-mailed a few people they thought might want to stop by. I wanted to go, and felt like I had to go, so I put on a pair of black jeans and a black sweater and asked Charlotte if I could borrow her black boots.
“They don’t fit you,” she said. “And besides, you don’t need to have black shoes.”
I wasn’t sure. And felt guilty for pondering my red ballet flats as I walked the seven-minute walk to his house. I figured I wasn’t supposed to be capable of that kind of thinking, and I felt like an alien. I feel that a lot, actually, in a lot of circumstances. Like I ought to be feeling something I don’t. My father used to tease me at the table by implying “cold Claire” had brought in the draft. I had three older sisters, all beautiful, and I was always less affected than they were, slower to smile. I remember finding it extremely hard to open presents as a child because the requisite theatricality was too exhausting. My sisters forever humiliated me over a moment in fifth grade when I’d opened a present from my grandmother and declared, straight-faced, “I already have this.”
It was cold for March, so I walked quickly. Brown snow still hugged the sides of our streets and the pines leaned in like gray walls, still limp with yellow Christmas lights. Whenever I slept at Brian’s, I called him as soon as I passed this certain stop sign—timing his arrival at the door so I wouldn’t have to wait. “I’m here,” I’d say, a block away, and he’d meander downstairs to let me in. This time, I knocked.
William let me in. Roommate and rich boy from Los Angeles. We were never friends, really, just occasional cohabiters, but we awkwardly hugged and he asked me how I was.
“Fine,” I said instinctively. But he understood that I wasn’t.
We walked upstairs and I felt immediately like I shouldn’t have been there. It was smaller than I’d imagined: Brian’s parents, two adults I didn’t recognize, and five or six of his closest friends. They huddled together in the corner next to a plate of bagels and an untouched platter of fruit. His mother was actually sobbing into the side of one of the women and I felt suddenly and extremely claustrophobic. The whole world was stark and bleak and I realized I couldn’t think of a single thing I was looking forward to. Brian had begun to be that for me—the thing at the end of the day I could think about when everything else was boring. I looked through the open door to his room and saw that his bed was still unmade.
“This is Claire,” William said. Tactful enough to stop before attempting to label my relationship. I held up a palm to the room and I wondered if anyone else had needed to be introduced.
“Claire,” his father said. “It’s good to see you.” He sounded genuine.
We’d gotten along at that brunch, though the whole thing was kind of an accident. Brian and I had slept late and when his parents arrived at his house at eleven o’clock, I was still in his bed, naked. I got dressed quickly—embarrassed to put on my heels from the night before—and was invited by default to eat eggs at Mirabelles. We laughed about it later.
“Good thing you weren’t some one-night stand.” He bit at my ear.
“Good thing,” I said, and punched him.
*
Brian’s dad gestured toward the untouched food but I said I was fine and moved over to the circle of his friends. I could tell at least one of them, Susannah, didn’t want me there. You don’t know him, I’m sure she was thinking. We don’t know you.
Apparently, they’d all been together at the hospital on Tuesday night and they were sharing stories in hushed voices about how and when they found out and waited, how and when the congenital aneurysm took place. I wanted to ask exactly how it all worked, how it all happened, but I couldn’t really engage. I kept looking into Brian’s room at the lump of a comforter piled on his sheetless bed, at the light spilling in from his window, speckling its folds, and decided it was the saddest thing I’d ever seen.
*
When Lauren Cleaver walked down from upstairs, everyone turned. Her face was swollen and red and she was breathing in staccato bursts. She must have gone upstairs to collect herself. To calm down, stop crying. There was an older boy with her whom I recognized from pictures as Brian’s brother. He was holding her by the shoulders and saying something into her ear. My mind raced, imagining the dinners she must have had at his family’s table. The trips she might have taken with them, the grandparents she must have met. She’d have watched movies at his real house clad in sweatpants and sweaters. Spent time with his brother, his mother, met his dog, his uncles, his high school friends.
Lauren looked thin and beautiful as she walked down the stairs and I realized that of course I wasn’t the girlfriend. I can’t explain how or why, but it filled me with a profound, seething anger . . . followed, inevitably, by waves of a familiar self-disgust. Brian was mine, I wanted to cry. My nose he’d kissed on Friday, my shirt he’d slipped his hand inside. The last time he’d kissed Lauren was in June and I knew they no longer talked. I imagined for a moment what he would have been like if Lauren died—if he would have romanticized their relationship and lamented the loss of their potential reunion. But it didn’t really seem like she was engaged in rationalization, just that she loved him a lot. Or had.
I knew, of course, that their breakup had been mutual and long coming. Brian and Lauren were beyond associated, and their collapse was slow and necessary. I also knew that only days before, I’d engaged in late-night deliberations with Charlotte over whether or not to break things off—that only days before I didn’t think of Brian the way I thought of him now—but neither of those things seemed to matter. Lauren was harrowed, drastically, and my cheeks were smooth and dry. I felt inadequate, cold; my relationship with Brian abruptly grounded.
For some reason I hadn’t until just then tried to think of the last time I’d seen him. But it must have been Tuesday morning when I darted out of his room and off to class. I’d forgotten my computer charger so I had to ring the doorbell again and I crawled back into bed fully clothed for a minute before I left. I wished I could remember the last thing he said to me but I couldn’t.