Chapter 25 Reece
TWENTY-FIVE
REECE
It is week four when I notice. It is week four.
Three weeks since Mendez called back, three weeks since the verdict, three weeks since Griffin said I will decide and meant it.
It is the middle of February. The snow on the ground has been on the ground for a month and is no longer white.
The semester is grinding into the part where everyone is tired and nobody wants to be in the seminar room and I have started to feel the deadline of late March in my body.
It is week four when I notice he has stopped calling his sister.
I had not been keeping track. I had not been keeping track because I had not thought I needed to.
Griffin calls his sister every week. Sometimes twice.
He has done this since I have known him.
The sister is a fact of his life the way the desk is a fact of his life.
The sister is named Sara and she has two kids and she lives in Chicago and she is a tax accountant for a regional bank.
Griffin talks to her on Mondays usually, occasionally on Sundays.
The talking is a thing that happens in his apartment in the evenings or sometimes when I am there, where he goes into the bedroom and closes the door and is on the phone for thirty or forty minutes, and I read on the couch.
She has not been on the phone since I have been keeping track.
I notice on a Wednesday. We are at his apartment.
He is making coffee. I am at the table with the laptop, writing a response paper for the second seminar, the political theory one.
I have been writing it for an hour and the writing is going badly.
I lift my head to look at him and I think when did you last talk to your sister.
I think it without deciding to think it.
I think I have not heard you on the phone with her in three weeks. Maybe more.
I think I would have heard. I have been here. I have been here on Mondays. I have been here on Sundays. The phone has not rung for her and you have not called her and I have not heard you say her name in a while. I do not say anything.
Two more days go by and I do not say anything.
I do not say anything because I am trying to figure out what saying something would mean.
Griffin has been deciding. Griffin has been in the deciding for three weeks.
He’s been quieter than he is. Not bad. Not visibly struggling.
Writing his new paper, going to seminar, sleeping next to me — going through the motions.
But he has been doing them with a kind of quiet I have started to recognize as work.
The kind of quiet that means something is happening underneath that is taking up all the energy.
I know this kind of quiet because I have done it.
I did it for two years before he found me.
I know it when I see it now. He has been doing the version of what I did.
He has been carrying something he is not handing me.
He has been making the decision in private.
Not calling Sara is the visible piece of it. I think it means he has decided.
Or it means he is in the part of deciding where you start practicing.
On Friday I tell him I want to go to the lake.
“What.”
“The lake. Saturday. We get a car, we drive up to the lake, we walk on the beach for an hour, we get dinner somewhere on the way back.”
He looks at me.
“It is February.”
“I know.”
“It is going to be freezing on the lake.”
“I know.”
“Reed.”
“Griffin.”
“Why.”
“Because we haven’t left this town in four months.
We’ve been in apartments and at desks and in seminar rooms and on couches and in beds and in kitchens for four months.
The time we have here is… Griffin. We have six weeks.
Less than six weeks. I want to spend a day of it with you somewhere that isn’t these four blocks. ”
He sits with it.
“Okay.”
“Okay?”
“Yes. The lake. Saturday.”
“Okay.”
We go on Saturday. I rent a car. The car is a small dirty sedan with a dent in the passenger door and the heater works only on the highest setting.
He drives because he says he wants to drive and because I think he is someone who, when there is a thing to do with hands, wants to do the thing with hands.
I sit in the passenger seat. I watch the road.
I watch him. The drive is an hour and a half.
We do not talk much. He has the radio on the public station and it is doing a story about a saxophonist I do not know.
I do not pay attention to the story. He does not seem to either.
The radio fills the car with words neither of us is processing.
We get to the lake at noon. The lake is gray and cold.
It is enormous. The lake in February is a thing I had not seen.
I had seen lakes in summer, in the version of my life I had had with him before, with him, in a different life, on a beach in August in cutoffs.
This lake at this time of year is a different lake.
The horizon is gray. The water is gray. The sand is gray under thin snow.
There are no people. There is a couple in down jackets two hundred yards away with a dog.
The dog is small and is running in circles and is the only moving thing on the beach.
We park. We get out. The wind comes off the water in a way that is not unpleasant exactly, but is the kind of wind that requires you to commit to being in it.
We commit. We zip our coats. We start walking.
We walk for a while without talking. The beach is long.
It curves. We walk toward the curve. The dog and its couple recede behind us.
The wind is in our faces and then in our backs and then in our faces again.
He has his hands in his pockets and so do I and we are walking next to each other not touching.
We are next to each other in our bodies and the bodies are doing the thing that bodies do in cold air, which is moving forward.
After a while he says, “I have decided.”
I look at him. I’d known he was going to say it.
I’d known he was going to say it on this walk.
I just hadn’t known he’d say it in the first half hour.
I’d thought he might wait until we were sitting somewhere later — until dinner, until the car on the way home.
He’s decided to say it now. On the open beach, in the first half hour, with the wind in our faces.
“Okay,” I say.
“I am coming.”
“Okay.”
“I want to tell you — I have decided.”
“Okay.”
“I want to tell you I have decided in advance of telling Mendez. I will tell Mendez Monday. But I am telling you now, two days before, because I want you to know first. I want you to be the first person to know. I do not want you to know with Mendez. I want you to know with me.”
“Okay.”
“I am coming.”
I keep walking. I keep walking because I don’t know what to do with my body if I stop.
He keeps walking. The wind is in our faces and his hand has come out of his pocket, reaching for mine, and I take it.
We walk holding hands on a beach in February with no one watching and his hand is cold through the glove and so is mine and we’re holding hands and walking. After a while I say, “Why.”
He looks at me.
“You are asking me why.”
“Yes.”
“Reed.”
“Griffin. I want to know. How you decided. What you decided. I don’t want to take this without knowing what it cost. I want to know what you’ve decided to give up. I want it spoken. I don’t want it to just be a thing you said yes to. I want to know what the yes contains.”
He is quiet. We walk for another minute.
“I called Sara three weeks ago,” he says.
“I know.”
“You know.”
“I noticed you stopped calling her.”
He looks at me.
“You have not said anything.”
“No.”
“Why.”
“Because it was not mine. It was a thing you were doing on your own. I have been letting you do it on your own. I have been trying to.”
“Okay.”
He is quiet for another minute.
“I called her three weeks ago,” he says.
“Monday afternoon. I’d been planning to tell her I was with someone.
That something might be changing. I’d been working on it for a week.
I sat on my couch with the phone in my hand and thought it through.
From her side. I’d been thinking it through from my side for two weeks and hadn’t been thinking from hers, and on Monday I did.
I sat with the phone and I understood what telling her would mean.
If I went. If I told her I was with someone and then I went, she’d have a thread.
She’d have a name. A story she wouldn’t let go of.
She’d do what I did. She’d look. She’d find.
She’d put the things together and she’d come find me. I can’t give her a thread.”
“Okay.”
“So I called her and I told her nothing. I told her I was having a hard semester. I told her I had been bad about calling. I made up a thing about a paper not going well. I let her tell me about her kids, about her job, about my mother. I sat there on the couch and I let her have a normal call with me, and I knew while I was doing it that the call might be one of the last normal calls I ever have with her.”
“Yeah.”
“And I cried for an hour after I hung up. And I did not tell you. I did not tell you because I did not want to tell you while I was deciding. If I told you while I was deciding I might be deciding for you. I might be saying look what this costs me and making you talk me out of it. I did not want to do that to either of us. I wanted to sit with what going meant on my own first, and then to decide, and then to come tell you what I had decided having sat with what it meant.”
I keep walking.
“I sat with it for three weeks.”
“Yeah.”