Carrie Pilby. Caren Lissner
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on.”
I just looked up at him.
“What’s the matter with you?”
“It’s not…I can’t.”
He sat up and looked into the distance.
“David?”
He ignored me.
“Come on. I’m…”
He rolled over on his side and pulled his blanket up. “Forget it. What’s the use?”
“Are you mad at me?”
He ignored me again.
I turned over, too, but I couldn’t sleep.
I lay there, my back to him, quietly waiting for him to change his mind. I wanted to get up and put on some bedclothes, but I thought that the more silence there was, the more he’d need to break it. I was scared even to breathe. I watched the red numbers on his clock radio change.
Eventually I fell asleep. At some point in the night, I woke up and pulled on a T-shirt. Then I went back to sleep.
In the morning, when I awoke, David was already in the kitchen, heating up coffee. I padded in there, and he gave me a silent nod and went back to the coffee. He also was quiet in the car going back to campus.
I went through my classes upset but trying to concentrate. When I came home, the light on my answering machine wasn’t blinking.
I collected my introductory philosophy books and read in bed. An hour passed without a call. I was scared. Why had I been so stupid?
But he would have to give me another chance, right?
I read Meditations on First Philosophy, but my eyes just kept rolling over the same words again and again, as if I were highlighting the book in varnish. Nothing stuck. Every few minutes, I looked at my clock. Dinnertime was approaching. I’d have to hike down to the dining hall and sit at the end of a table alone. Doing that always gave me an empty feeling in the pit of my stomach. I didn’t want to do it if he was going to call.
I felt hungry. I ignored my stomach and tried again to concentrate on Meditations, but I decided maybe I needed something light to read. So I picked up Thus Spake Zarathustra.
The phone rang.
I reminded myself, even as I dashed to it, to make my voice sound uninterested.
“Hello.”
I wouldn’t have admitted it, and it sounds very clichéd, but clichés become clichés because they happen: when I heard his voice, my stomach jumped.
“I went out and got wood for the fireplace,” David said. “I could use a little help initiating it.”
I wanted to tell him how happy I was that it was him, how scared I’d been, how much I’d missed him and how I would say whatever he wanted. But I didn’t. I told him I would meet him outside in ten minutes.
That night, we ate heaping bowls of linguine at an Italian place, then went to David’s apartment. Once in the living room, we lay down on the rug in front of the fireplace, a bottle of wine between us. David put his glass down on the brown tiles and lay on his side in an S shape, his knees bent. I rested my head on his jeans and stared into his chest. Thank God everything’s okay, I thought. It felt so good just to lie there, listening to him breathe. I closed my eyes, and we both lay quietly for a while. Then, I felt his fingers move over my wine-ripened lips. “Come here,” he whispered, and he brought my chin to his face. “Let’s stay here for a change,” he said, and I nodded. Soon he said, “Say it. What I wanted you to say yesterday. Please.”
Before he’d called, I had told myself I would, and on the way over, I had told myself I would, but now I couldn’t. It didn’t seem like the right words. It didn’t seem to fit with either me or with us. And why did he want me to say it, when he knew how much it bothered me?
“Say it!”
I started. “‘I… I…’”
“Yes?” His eyes were closed.
I couldn’t finish.
“Come on,” he said. “Go ahead.”
“David,” I said.
Then I said no more.
He sat up again. “Is this it?”
“I…”
“Is that the best you can do? You’re not even going to try?”
I just looked at him.
“One compromise?”
It just didn’t fit.
“Didn’t I teach you? Didn’t I say it over and over? Why can’t you learn it?”
I didn’t know what to say to that.
“Is it such a hard thing to learn?”
Finally I said, “It’s not something I would say.”
“But you can learn.”
“We’re not in class.”
“Just say it!”
I looked at the rug. “It wouldn’t be me….”
“Do you always have to be such a goddamn prude?”
Before I could say anything else, he jumped up, stalked into the bathroom and shut the door. I sat still on the rug and suddenly felt very cold.
He came back out in a minute and said he’d drive me home.
We rode to my dorm in silence. He didn’t say anything when I got out of the car.
In my room, I curled up in my bed in the dark and stared at the phone, sure he’d call. I rehearsed various speeches in my mind, speeches in which I would tell him that maybe there was a way we could get past this, that maybe there were things he wouldn’t say, either, if I asked, that I had already made compromises and that I’d been happy to make them for him, but this was something that bothered me. And if we couldn’t get past this, I wanted to say why it was hard for me to yield to his request.
But I never got the chance to say any of it. He didn’t call.
The only time the two of us did talk was in class, when all of us were discussing the reading materials. That was it.
The semester eventually drew to a close. He and I never had another personal conversation.
I got an A in the class. I guess David would have been afraid to give me anything less.
By the way, I deserved it anyhow.
For a long time after that, I had trouble seeing couples kissing on campus. Their lives were so normal; why did mine always have to be strange? Did these carefree couples know that for some people, not everything worked out so neatly? Did they appreciate that?
The worst was, I knew a lot of the couples were together just for sex. At least David and I talked about books, music and his work. What did these people who did nothing all day but face-mash actually talk about? Some of the girls on my floor had boyfriends whose biggest accomplishment was making fifth-string lacrosse or flunking astronomy.
The rest of my time at Harvard wasn’t much of an improvement. I studied hard, graduated and moved into the apartment my father found for me.
Now that I’ve just spent some time thinking about the relationship with David, I feel sore and unfulfilled, similar to how I often felt after the encounters themselves.
So I go out to the supermarket to grab some ice cream and rainbow sprinkles.
I wend my way through the murky city air and into the perfume-and-garlic world of D’Agostino. I pluck a frosty pint of Cherry Garcia from the freezer, and as I’m pacing the aisles, I pick up sprinkles and cherry soda, too.
Once