Chapter 1 #2
I tell him about the sublet and everything I remember about her. He listens and his face looks like it did while he was sleeping. The grandfather clock strikes three. Sam will likely be home soon. I follow Yash to the kitchen and we wash out the pipes and put them back in their rack.
I want to say more about Cyra but I’ve run out of memories. I barely knew her. ‘Are you religious?’
‘No, I don’t think so. I’m something, but it’s not religious.’
‘Spiritual?’
‘Maybe.’
‘Seeking?’
‘Somewhat. A weak seeker. Not for God or gods, though.’
‘Sam wants me to read The Confessions of Saint Augustine.’
He smiles.
‘You’ve read it.’
‘It’s sort of required reading to be his friend.’
We hear the latch of the gate outside. We move quickly from the study into the living room.
Sam comes in the door.
I’m on the couch, Yash in the chair opposite. I call out a hello and Yash says, ‘We’re in here,’ and neither of us sounds like ourselves.
Sam doesn’t notice.
‘Hey.’ He drops his books on a side table and sits beside me. ‘No one told me how boring Stubbs is.’ He makes a face. ‘It smells weird in here.’ He sniffs me. ‘You smell gross.’
Yash and I look at each other. ‘We tried out the pipes,’ he says.
Sam shakes head. ‘You both reek.’
‘I feel sort of sick,’ I say.
‘Me too.’
‘Children,’ Sam says.
In February Sam and I drive down to his parents’ house outside of Atlanta.
They are kind, serious people and though they call him Sam Bam most of the time, they take his life very seriously.
I can’t quite believe the attention they give him, the questions not about what classes he’s taking—they already know his whole schedule—but whether he decided to write his take-home essay on Cicero’s ‘De Fato’ or his letters to Brutus, and if he was still having trouble with Hume.
His mother has a new pillow for him because he had mentioned a crick a few weeks ago.
The crick was from a strange position we’d gotten into, but he doesn’t even give me a side glance as he accepts the gift.
Sam’s younger brother and sister barely speak.
They behave like the governor has come to lunch.
I’m given the guest room off the living room.
Sam will sleep upstairs in his old bedroom.
That first afternoon Sam is tired from the drive and says he’s going to go upstairs to take a nap before we go to some neighbors’ for drinks, then on to dinner at a new restaurant nearby.
I’m not a napper and I’m definitely not welcome upstairs.
I read on my guest bed. At five thirty I stick my head out into the hall that leads to the living room and hear no sounds.
I don’t know what time we’re expected for drinks but I start getting ready.
I change into a dress and tights and new gray boots I’d gotten for Christmas.
I’m putting on a little mascara when there’s a knock and the door swings open.
‘We’ve been waiting for you for a half hour,’ Sam says. ‘What are you doing?’
‘I’ve been waiting for you to come down and get me.’
‘Why didn’t you come out?’
‘I did. No one was around.’
‘Because we were all waiting for you in the foyer.’
‘Well, I’m sorry I didn’t know to look in the foyer.’
When we join the others, I assume Sam will explain the situation. He says nothing.
‘I’m so sorry,’ I say. ‘I didn’t know you were waiting.’
Their smiles are thin and they move quickly to the car.
I feel self-conscious about the mascara. I only put it on because I was bored, waiting for Sam. And they think I’ve held them up deliberately because I was primping.
When his father orders coffee after the meal, I promise him I won’t projectile vomit, but no one laughs.
It’s a bad visit from start to finish.
Back in the car the next day I think we’ll laugh about all the terrible moments, but Sam finds nothing about the visit amusing. He’s angry. He thinks I’ve been disrespectful and impertinent.
‘Impertinent? What am I, six?’
‘If the shoe fits.’
‘How was I impertinent?’
‘The things you think are funny are rude. “I promise I won’t throw up.” Why would you bring that up? Why would you want to humiliate Valerie in front of my parents?’
‘I was not humiliating Valerie, because Valerie was not at the table.’
‘You were mocking her in absentia to elevate yourself.’
‘I was just trying to break the ice in presentia to add a little humor. It was all so stiff.’
‘It was stiff because you threw everything off schedule. We were late to drinks, late to our reservation.’
‘Because you did not tell me when we were leaving!’ We’d already been round on this ten times by then.
‘Why didn’t you come out of the room?’
‘Why didn’t you come get me? Were you not even allowed to touch the door of the guest room in case I lured you with my sexy wiles into mortal sin?’
His list of complaints is long: the mascara, the tall tight boots, holding the door for his father, cynical jokes, revealing that my father was fired from his job. ‘You create unnecessary drama.’
‘At least I didn’t say what he got fired for.’
‘Please don’t tell me.’
I tell him he is a prude in the very worst sense of the word, the most incurious, self-righteous, unchristian sense.
He basically says I’m an unwashed heathen who seeks attention through my embarrassing depravity.
It’s a brutal fight and we say awful things in that car.
We drive through some snow flurries, light flakes that don’t stick on the windshield and have stopped falling by the time we get back to school.
I ask him to take me to Pye Street but he won’t.
He wants to keep fighting. When we get to the Breach it’s empty—Yash has gone up to UVA to see a girl he went to high school with—and he grabs me and presses me against the front door.
Soon our clothes are pulled down and fueled by the fury of our fighting we have sex, real sex, right there in the hallway on the bare floor, the little table with the notepad teetering above us.
Sam seems fine about it afterward. We bring our overnight bags upstairs and we go down again and make some sandwiches and sit on the couch with our schoolwork.
He reads Horace and I read Whitman. He makes coffee and brings his cup into the living room and says, ‘I am glad it doesn’t make you vomit,’ and we laugh and I lean against him and we keep reading.
It’s very quiet, without Yash coming in to say he’s making some popcorn or a pot of tea.
I wonder how his weekend at UVA is going, if he and the girl from high school are more than friends.
I’m a hundred pages behind for tomorrow, but the words swell and I realize I’ve fallen briefly asleep.
‘I’m going to go up,’ I say. ‘I’m beat.’
Sam lowers his book. It takes him a moment to look up at me. ‘Could you,’ he says, rubbing his thumbs along the edge of his textbook, ‘go home?’
I go upstairs and retrieve my things, everything I ever brought into that room.
My bag won’t zip and my backpack bulges.
At the top of the stairs I look at Yash’s door, partly open.
If he were here I’d start crying. But he isn’t, so I teeter down the stairs with my bags and go straight out the door without a word.
Sam doesn’t come after me. It’s started to flurry again.
On the sidewalk I can see him through the window on the couch.
I don’t know if he’s pretending to read or actually reading.
After a few minutes, after he thinks I’ve walked away, he lifts his face toward the window.
He looks scared, like something out there is more menacing than the snow falling faintly, faintly falling on the living and the dead.