Chapter 7
CHAPTER
SEVEN
The Name
Aoife
“The heart was made to be broken.” — Oscar Wilde
He came over in month seven on a night when something was different about him.
He had been drinking before he arrived, not heavily but enough that the careful containment he usually carried had softened slightly at the edges.
He was quieter than usual, which for him meant very quiet indeed, and there was something in his face when I opened the door, a rawness that was only visible because the usual guard was not fully in place, the way you see the structure of a house only when the lights inside are on at night.
I made him a glass of water. He sat on the couch and I sat beside him and we talked about nothing for a while, or rather I talked and he listened, and at some point he reached over and tucked a piece of hair behind my ear in a gesture so gentle and so unlike his usual carefulness that I forgot what I had been saying mid-sentence.
Later, in bed, there was something different about him. He was more present than he usually was, less defended, and I allowed myself the dangerous luxury of interpreting this as feeling, of telling myself that something was changing.
I held onto that thought. He is here, I thought. He is here and he is different tonight and that means something.
And then, at the moment he was least guarded, he said a name.
Not mine.
He said it quietly, barely more than a breath, and it was a woman's name, and I heard it clearly because I was right there, because I had been paying very close attention to everything about this night.
The name entered me the way cold water enters a room when a window is opened in winter, total and immediate and impossible to pretend you had not felt.
I went very still. I looked at the ceiling.
I did not move and I did not make a sound and I thought, with a clarity that was almost peaceful in the way that extreme pain sometimes produces a kind of calm: There is someone else.
There has always been someone else. And whoever she is, I am not her, and all of this, all of these months and all of this carefully rationed hope, it was never about me at all.
He did not seem to realise what he had said. He settled beside me in the dark and within minutes his breathing evened into sleep.
I lay beside him and I did not sleep for a long time.
I did not cry until he was gone.
?
He left before morning, the way he always did.
He dressed quietly in the dark, his back to me, his movements careful and contained the way they always were, and let himself out without waking me, or without seeming to notice that I was already awake and had been for hours.
When the door clicked shut behind him I listened to his footsteps on the stairs and then I put my face into the pillow and I cried with a thoroughness that left me hollow.
Not because he had said a name. Not exactly.
I cried because of what the name meant. Whatever he had been coming to my apartment for, I now understood with complete and terrible clarity, it was not me.
It was something I could provide the shape of, perhaps.
Something I could approximate. But not me.
I thought about Simone saying: I want you to be looking at this with your whole eyes open.
I had not been. I had been looking with the eyes of a person who wanted very badly to be chosen, and that wanting had done the work of interpretation for me.
I lay on my side in the grey pre-dawn light and I thought about my grandmother, who had loved my grandfather with a totality that was one of the most real things I had ever witnessed, and who used to say that love was not a feeling that arrived and stayed on its own but a decision you made every day, for the rest of your life.
I thought: whatever this is, it is not that.
It has never been that. And I have been standing here waiting for it to become that with the patience of someone who does not know what else to wait for.
I got up. I made tea. I sat at the table with my grandmother's cup and I looked at the herbs on the windowsill, which were in need of watering, and I thought about the name he had said, and I thought about the heaviness behind his eyes that I had never been permitted to ask about, and I began to understand that whatever he was carrying, it was not something recent or peripheral but something central and enormous and old enough to have settled into the bones of him.
I did not know yet what it was. I only knew that it was not me, that it had never been me, and that I was going to have to decide what to do with a situation I had no roadmap for.
He came back, as he always did. And I was there, as I always was. And the name sat between us like a secret only I was carrying, which is the heaviest kind.