Chapter 9 #4
I pulled him to me. His face against me, wetness spreading across my shirt.
“That’s not fair,” he said. “It’s not fair.
” I stroked his hair as he clung to me, comforting him in a way no one had ever done for me.
We stayed like that for a long time. We didn’t speak and we didn’t need to.
We had gone somewhere else, crossed to something, and we could take our time coming back.
Eventually we got up and went to the bedroom.
“I have a plan for us.” An idea had revealed itself to me and taken shape. “You’re all packed for your trip home, right?”
“I thought I would just leave from here. Is that okay?”
“Let’s go away this weekend.”
“Really? Where?”
“I’ll sort it in the morning. But are you game?”
He smiled. “For sure. I’m in.”
In the dark of my room, we undressed each other, our clothes a tangle on the floor.
Tyler lay on his side under the covers and pressed his back to me.
I wrapped my arms around him, hands folded across his chest, breathing him in.
We did not have sex. We lay still in the quiet and for the first and only time, I fell asleep before him.
I woke early and by the time Tyler got up, I had booked the trip: tickets to New York, a hotel on the Lower East Side.
“You’re crazy,” Tyler said.
“Have you ever been?”
He shook his head no.
“Are you excited?”
“Yes.” He almost shouted it. “Was it expensive?”
“It was nothing.” I had put it all on credit cards and would deal with it later. I didn’t care. I loved the idea of spoiling him, taking him on a trip his family couldn’t afford. “There’s some breakfast in the kitchen and then we should get going.”
I’d gotten flights from Akron, farther away; hopefully, anyone from Sawyer would be flying from Cleveland. But I was antsy in the airport as we crawled through security, scanning for familiar faces. I wanted to be in New York already, safe from this school and this town.
“Are you okay?”
We’d made it through security and were headed to the gate. “Sure,” I said. “I just get anxious about flying.”
He seemed satisfied with this answer. “Mom is scared of flying, too.” He looked at me and smiled.
“What are you smiling about?”
“Nothing. You look really handsome.”
And then I asked—I couldn’t help it—“You think I’m handsome?”
“Duh.” He laughed and looked away, back at his phone. “What are you, stupid?”
I once read a study that said unhappiness sprang from the gap between expectations and reality.
The researchers focused on work and found that academia was among the unhappiest professions.
The authors attributed this to the fact that the life we imagined as eager young graduate students—high on critical theory and the freedom from a nine-to-five status quo—was so far from the truth of what the job entailed.
The article concluded that we might be happier if instead we expected the career of a midlevel accountant.
I remember thinking that summer, after my first year—I worked so many years for this; for this?
I fantasized about quitting, but had no idea what else I could do.
My dread grew as a dull ache inside me, thinking of a lifetime spent in this relentless rotation of weeks and semesters, of meetings and reviews, conferences and publications.
Driving my same car to the same lot, to walk the same path to the same building to sit in the same office.
Is this all the promise my future contained?
What a cruelty, to have to work to live.
I often go back to that night before the trip, confiding in Tyler about Cassie.
This is the memory of Tyler to which I most regularly return.
I can lose myself in the sweetness of its recollection.
How it felt to confess, the way he offered his body to be held like a child, when it was him holding me.
And other times, I obsess over it, searching out some detail I missed, desperate for knowledge I will never have.
Wondering what he was thinking as he listened to me.
Wondering what he already knew that night, what he had already decided.
I can make myself crazy trying to figure out what of that night was real—whether it was Tyler at his most loving or his most traitorous.
Sometimes, I’m not sure there’s a difference.
But what I do know is that, that second year, when Tyler appeared, the dread and despair that had haunted me my entire life, and which Sawyer had only compounded, began to fade, replaced by something like hope.
Hope that my life could be more than I’d thought.
And this I can say with certainty: Those few days with Tyler in New York were the happiest of my adult life.
They were perhaps the happiest of my entire life, or least since Cassie left us.
I had not been back to New York since coming to Sawyer.
The moment the city came into view from the cab, it dazzled all over again, as if it were my first visit, too.
The ambition of it: its towers spiraling into the upper reaches of the atmosphere, its avenues stretching for miles, bending beyond sight.
Tyler’s awe only amplified my own. I loved watching him take it in and, even more than that, I loved being the one who had brought him to the city.
I’d had moments of rabid jealousy; his comfort in bed was something clearly earned, and the thought that he’d had sex without me could make me feel crazed, scraped out.
I desired Tyler with an unsettling depth and persistence.
But this, introducing him to New York, being with him the first time he walked across the Brooklyn Bridge, an icy wind leaving us alone at the crest; giving in to his insistence and taking him to Times Square, the glow of his eyes competing with the neon blast overhead, these firsts—no one could claim these but me.
We ate dim sum in Chinatown, stuffing our faces with dish after dish, sweet meats and bitter, soothing greens, staying in the restaurant until close.
We wove the streets of Williamsburg, jockeying with frat boys and foreign tourists to stare across the feral waters of the East River at Manhattan, a mountain of glass and steel pushing itself to the very edge of the island.
We went to my favorite bar, near Tompkins Square Park.
I had discovered it on my first night in the city.
A tiny chamber with black booths bathed in pink light, Patti and Nina and Nico crooning with longing as we bent over drinks gleaming and dark.
Back at the hotel, we christened the room with our fucking, each surface and every corner an invitation to reach farther, push harder.
As if the room itself begged us to fill it.
Our last afternoon, before heading to LaGuardia—he would fly to Charlotte and I back to Ohio—we visited the Met.
We strolled through an exhibit of early fashion photography, the images growing sharper, both more complete and more abstract as the decades unfolded across the warren of rooms. Back downstairs, I led us past the throngs to my favorite part: ancient Egypt.
Room upon room of pilfered goods, benevolent mummies greeting us with their hallowed silence.
A glass case displayed tiny scarabs and we sought out the smallest among them to marvel that human hands could make something of such beauty, that could survive so long, defying time itself, to arrive in a future terrifying and unknown.
At the end of the corridors, we found the temple, disassembled and rebuilt here, stone by stone.
Outside the glass walls of the room, the bare trees of Central Park bowed over empty paths.
We shared the space with few others, or maybe there were more and my memory has subtracted them.
It felt as if we were alone, a hush stilling the room.
We walked the perimeter of the temple, the path of water, the low afternoon sun glinting at us, leading us to the gate.
I took Tyler’s hand and held it in my own, marveling that a gesture so small could suffuse me with such expansive joy.
It felt like everything was mine, all of it belonged to me: this city, this day, this museum, this room, this light, soft and yellow and breaking apart, the padding sound of our steps on the rose-gray stones of the floor, the sand-colored stones of the temple’s gate, this boy, his hand in mine—it was mine, just for me: a universe of wanting, answered.