Chapter 18 Griffin
EIGHTEEN
GRIFFIN
He doesn’t stay over Saturday. I hadn’t asked him to.
Asking would have been a thing — would have been should we do this and what does it mean and is this what we are now.
I wasn’t interested in having that conversation with him at one in the morning with my hand still in his hand on the bed.
I let him go. He went. The door closed behind him.
I am standing in the kitchen on Saturday at one-fifteen in the morning. He has been gone for two minutes. I am standing in the kitchen and the lamp from the bedroom is on. I have not turned it off. I have not moved.
He took the t-shirt. That is the first thing I notice.
The t-shirt I had pulled out of the drawer at some point during.
The t-shirt I had handed to him so he could wipe his stomach off, after.
The t-shirt that had ended up on the floor next to the bed.
He’s taken it. Or put it back somewhere.
I look around the bedroom from the doorway.
Not on the floor where it had been. Not on the bed.
Not on the chair in the corner where his sweater had been before he pulled it over his head and dropped it. The t-shirt is not in the bedroom.
I walk back to the entryway and look at the floor, then at the chair where I had hung up his coat for him. The hook is empty. He took the coat. The t-shirt isn’t here either — he took it with him. I stand in the entryway and think about that for a minute.
He took the t-shirt with him. He left wearing his sweater — he’d put his sweater back on, and I’d watched him do it. But the t-shirt that had been on the floor was a t-shirt I’d given him, and he’d taken it.
I stand in the entryway and the apartment is quiet.
I look at the small coffee pot on the counter.
I think he took the t-shirt. I think he can have the t-shirt.
That is the first soft thought I have. It arrives before I can stop it.
He can have the t-shirt. Then the next thought, a second behind: I gave him a t-shirt.
Then: he is not going to give it back. And then, surprising me: I do not want it back.
I sit down on the couch. The couch smells like him.
I hadn’t noticed during, because during I’d been doing what we were doing — and what we were doing was the thing, not smelling the couch.
I’m smelling it now. The couch smells like him because he was sitting on it earlier with my coat over his lap.
Because his head was on the arm of it for a while.
He leaves a smell on a couch the way he always has, which I’d forgotten and am not surprised to remember.
I sit on the couch with the smell. I don’t turn the lamp off. Don’t get up. The apartment is now an apartment that smells like him for the first time in fifteen months. I think about the t-shirt. About what it means.
I haven’t let myself think it through. There’s a difference between not thinking and refusing to. I’ve been refusing. I sit on the couch at one-thirty in the morning and I let myself.
He left two years ago. He left in May. The trial the FBI was building toward — he didn’t tell me about a trial, he told me about a case, but a case becomes a trial, and a trial happens at a time.
He told me they’d wanted the version where he came back in six months.
The version became the other version on the Friday of the apartment.
He’s been at this school a year longer than I have.
He started in September of last year, I started in September of this year.
Whatever happened with the case, his window for choosing where to land had ended somewhere before September of last year, and what he chose was here.
He chose this program. He sat down somewhere, at a desk, in a city I do not know, with a list of programs the program had put in front of him, and he picked. He picked this one.
I have been telling myself, since November, that he picked this one because the program had handed him a list and the school I was at was on it. The program does not know I am here. He told me that on Monday. It was on the list. You weren’t a factor. Okay. Fine. The program does not know I am here.
But.
I have been at this school for three months.
I have been on the public roster of this department for three months.
My program puts the new students up in early September, with the year and a sentence about the project.
Griffin, no last name, photography in the twentieth century.
Three months on a website anyone with internet can read.
He has been here a year longer than I have.
He could have looked at the new student list at any point in September or October, once, twice, casually, and seen Griffin.
He’d have thought no. Then no, but. Then clicked.
There would have been a department, a year, a few sentences.
The few sentences wouldn’t have been specifically the sentences I’d have written before, because I’d pivoted, but he would have read them and thought that’s not what he was working on.
Then but he would, if pressed, switch fields.
Then he would have stopped clicking and stopped looking.
Or he wouldn’t have. I don’t know which one.
I do not know if he looked. He did not tell me he looked.
He did not tell me he did not look. He told me on Friday at four-thirty in the stairwell that he had not known I was here until the path.
I had believed him on Friday. I had believed him because his face had done the thing on the path. His face had been caught.
I sit with the word caught. There are two versions of caught.
There is I had not let myself check and now I cannot pretend not to have known, and there is I had not checked at all.
They look the same on a face. A face does not tell you which one.
I sit with that. I sit with the fact that the face had told me one thing and now I am sitting on a couch at one-forty-five in the morning trying to retrofit the face into telling me something else, and I do not know if I am being honest with myself or being unfair to him.
I think about the planning. The lamp on.
The kiss in the stairwell on Friday. The text on Monday.
The yes or no. The lube and the condom in the side table.
The t-shirt that he took. There is a version where the planning was tonight’s planning, and there is a version where the planning is older than that.
I do not know which version is the version. I have only the version he gave me.
I gave him a version too. I gave him the once, and it was bad, and we did not do it again.
I had decided in the bathroom before he came over that I would tell him if it came up, that I would not lie if he asked.
He had asked, and I had told him. I had told him more than he had asked for.
I had told him because if I had not told him I would have been carrying it around with me in this apartment that has him in it now, and I had been carrying enough things in this apartment for fifteen months, and I did not want to add one.
I had given him the thing and I had asked him to receive it, and he had, and the receiving had been the right kind of receiving.
He had not absolved me. He had not pretended I needed him to.
He had let it be what it was, and then he had pulled me down, and we had kept going.
He had handled it the way a person handles something.
I am taking it with me into the question of whether to ask him.
I sit on the couch. I think about the question of whether to ask him.
I think about it for a long time.
I do not ask him. That is the decision I make on the couch at two in the morning.
I am not going to ask him. The reason I am not going to ask him is that he refused to ask for two months, and when he finally did, on Monday, my answer was no, and that did its work.
I do not need to ask him my version of the same question.
It would not change the situation. The situation has not changed.
Let me say the situation, then. A man I buried walked into a coffee shop and a path and a stairwell and now a bedroom, and at every step I have been the one deciding to let him keep walking in.
I let him into the path. I let him into the apartment.
I let him into the stairwell. I let him into the bed.
I have been deciding. If he chose this town, and I am letting him stay in it, then I am also choosing.
He’s not doing it to me. I have been doing it, for three months, and I did it again tonight, and I’m doing it right now on this couch by not asking the question.
I am going to keep going. On Tuesday at the seminar.
On Tuesday before the seminar, because he said and before, and I will be there before.
On whatever Saturday comes after Tuesday.
I will keep going until something stops it.
But. I am going to know what I know. That there is a version where he chose this, and choosing it is not the same as not having known.
That his planning, if there was planning, is real, and means something. That the t-shirt is gone.
I am going to keep this. I am going to keep it the way he does.
He has kept everything I have not said and the not-said-version of everything I have said for three months.
I will learn from him. I will hold the timeline and the t-shirt and the lamp and the planning.
I will keep going. They’ll be in the back of my head while I do, ready for the moment something brings them forward. They’re back there now.
I sit on the couch. I think you chose this. You came back. You let me bury you and you came back, and you’ve chosen to come back. I get up. I turn the lamp off in the bedroom. I get into the bed. The bed smells like him. I lie in it. I lie on my side. I face the wall. I sleep.
I sleep for three hours and I wake up at five-twenty in the morning. The lamp is off and the bed smells like him and I am alone in it. I lie there. I think you chose this. I think I am not going to ask. I think I am going to keep going.
I get up at six-fifteen, make coffee in the small pot, drink two cups, and go to the desk. I open the laptop and the response paper — due in five days. I read what I have written, then the sentence I added a week ago. The archive holds what it cannot say. I leave it. I get to work.