Chapter 11 #3
“Taking it slow? About a week,” I said, turning around to look at his face. We kissed again, slowly. He ran a hand through my hair, looking at it thoughtfully.
“It’s been a few weeks, though,” he said. “Pretty much since that first day when you called Lisette a rock star. I knew I was in trouble then. And then I took you on the boat and you got seasick, and I touched your wrist, and I thought, Oh no. I’m not in trouble. I’m completely fucked.”
“I thought the same thing. I wanted to kiss you, then, but I also really wanted to vomit, so…”
“I do have that effect.”
I pressed myself against him.
“I thought you weren’t interested in me.”
He laughed quietly. “I wasted so much time trying not to get my heart broken,” he said. “And I still ended up here, knowing it’s going to happen anyway.”
“What are we going to do?” I whispered.
He shook his head against me, wrapping all his warmth around me, head to toe. “We’re going to go back to bed.”
I woke up slowly to the sight of a hand resting on the pillow next to me: Paul’s long fingers curved in an arc.
It felt precious to see him so close, still sleeping, and I slid upwards carefully, not wanting him to wake yet.
His other arm was draped over my waist. There was light pouring through white curtains.
I let myself take him in, the pattern of freckles scattered across his chest, the breath moving in and out of his lips. It seemed ridiculous that anyone had looked at him and thought that he wasn’t worth sticking around for. Softly, I leaned over and kissed the hand that was just within reach.
I still had time. I didn’t have to move yet. For this morning, there was nowhere to go. He took a breath in after a moment, his eyes opening slowly. His smile was so tender that I wanted to store it up in my memory, hoarding it to come back to later.
He pulled me back under the covers like I was sinking into a pond. Hands everywhere. Lips on each other’s skin.
“Stay,” he whispered.
“I’ll stay,” I whispered back.
He made us pancakes in the ridiculously bright early morning light of St. John’s, a slash of light hitting his messy hair, turning light-brown curls into gold like he was the hero in a fantasy TV series.
“You know you’re stupidly handsome.”
He made a scoffing noise. “Being an actor teaches you exactly how handsome you’re not.
When I was doing auditions in Toronto, there were all these guys booking roles because they had slightly better cheekbones than I had.
And I hated it. It was frustrating watching these model-handsome idiots butchering roles that I would have been great in.
But it was even worse when some ordinary guy booked a role, because I couldn’t even blame it on his looks.
He was just more talented, right? And then half the time you’d find out he was the son of someone famous, or the nephew of the guy who owned the theater company.
It’s something I hated about being an actor.
You’re always complaining about how things are unfair.
I felt like an internet troll, furiously compiling lists of enemies and wrongs done to me. ”
“So you never miss it?”
“The part I miss was sharing something with an audience. Making them laugh. But now I’m basically on stage five hours a day as a teacher, entertaining these kids, keeping them engaged. It’s not that different, actually. It’s a lot of the stuff I loved about being an actor.”
I imagined him in front of a class. “They’re so lucky. Most of my teachers were chain smokers who gathered for drinks at Fisherman Pub every Friday to talk about their countdown to retirement.”
“How many days do you have left?” Paul asked.
“In Newfoundland? I don’t know yet. A minimum of six days, and a maximum of who knows. Maybe the end of August. Maybe some angel sweeps in and expedites my visa.”
“Can I spend today with you?” he said, tentatively.
“We should probably ask Lisette,” I said. “See if she wants to come.”
Lisette picked up the phone and told us that she had a church breakfast where she was looking for her next boyfriend, who was going to be at least seventy.
“We can wait,” I said.
“Go,” she said. “I think I’m about to get a marriage proposal, and that could take some time. First, he has to get across the room on his walker.”
Paul glanced at me. “Just you and me then,” he said. “What do you want to do today? Tell me what will make you happy.”
“Right now? A change of clothes.”
“And after that?”
“Somewhere you love,” I said.
“Somewhere I love?” He nodded, considering it. “I mean, we already went to the archives. It’s hard to top that.”
“I could do more archives.”
He grinned. “Even I’m not that much of a dork. Do you have hiking shoes?”
“I have sneakers back at my place.”
After we stopped by my apartment, Paul drove me up the coast to a parking lot, and from there we began a hike in toward the coast. We were silent at first, listening to the occasional call of birds.
I followed him through shaggy coastal woods, down sloping hills, eventually chatting about Canadian wildlife and our feelings about camping and the first time we’d ever climbed a mountain.
We didn’t talk about anything serious. We didn’t talk about how I was leaving.
Finally the woods spilled us out onto a dramatic set of cliffs where a waterfall poured off the edge and down into the open ocean.
We stood there in silence for a long moment. It seemed too huge, suddenly, like a metaphor for something I didn’t know I was capable of feeling. I turned to Paul. His eyes were bright.
“My favorite place.” He gestured like a host on a nature show, sweeping an arm in a glorious half-circle.
I looked around. “You know how in old maps, they imagined that the world simply ended somewhere—that the world was flat, and eventually you would reach a cliff where the ocean poured down into nothingness…”
“Have we reached the end of the world?” he asked.
“I think so.”
We said nothing. Sadness blew past with the wind. I sat down after a moment to look at the view, and I could hear Paul rustling through his backpack, finding the sandwiches that he’d bought for us.
It was a perfect day, clear and breezy, and we ate in silence. I wanted that. If we didn’t talk about it, I could pretend for a moment that there was nothing to say. I rose and approached the edge of the rocks.
“You still have that impulse to jump off cliffs?” he asked.
“Any second now,” I said.
He stood up, put his arms around me and held me close. “Don’t,” he said quietly.
This is going to hurt, I thought. This is going to hurt. This is going to hurt. I turned and pressed my face against him for a moment.
“So,” I said. “You start school soon? Are you still planning a trip to the U.S.?”
“Maybe,” he said quietly. “I’ve got some stuff to work out with Trish, first.” He shrugged. “House ownership, all that.”
My heart sank. Paul knew I was probably leaving. He knew that his gorgeous ex-wife was back in town. Of course he could be romantic with me. None of it had to mean anything. Mark had warned me, and I hadn’t wanted to listen.
We went back to my place after the hike so that I could shower.
Paul left for an hour or two and then came back with a take-out dinner, and then we sat next to each other, looking out the window.
The sun was setting earlier now than when I had first arrived, and it colored the distant water with slate blues and shell pink.
“You never told me much about your father,” he said, out of nowhere.
I shrugged. “Never in the picture. He took off and married someone else when I was two years old, and he was never even married to my mom, so…”
“That’s hard. Did you miss him?”
“Not as such. She had this long series of boyfriends, and that was harder in a way. It was hard when we didn’t like a boyfriend, and hard when we did, and then he left.”
I took a breath, looking out at the fading light.
“I had a professor in college who—one day I came to class right after a break-up, visibly weeping, my whole face must have looked like a cream puff. And I think she was worried about me, so after class she sat and talked to me, even though it was way outside her job responsibilities. I refused to go to a therapist back then. I thought I was so clever that I would outsmart them, like the goal of therapy was to get to the answer the fastest. Anyway, my professor had been through some of the things I had been through, and after she heard all about my break-up, and my parents, she told me, ‘Don’t let your father win. He walked out on you, and now you’re going to think that everybody will walk out on you.
And that will doom all your relationships, so just to spite your dad, you have to try to break the cycle.
You can’t think, All men leave. Because you’ll be punishing yourself for what your father did for your whole life. You’ll be paying for his crime.’”
Paul nodded. “Very wise.”
“I thought so. So when I dated Farid, I decided, I’m not going to do that.
I won’t doom myself. I went to therapy, and we were together for six years, and I thought.
I’ve won. I’ve done it. I was so proud of myself for breaking the cycle.
Even though he didn’t really believe in long-term commitments like marriage, I was still capable of a real relationship.
Only it turns out he did believe in marriage. ”
“Yeah.” Paul was gentle. He remembered the story.
I took a breath. “And I think what I concluded was, it’s not that all men leave. It’s that all men leave me.”
He looked at me sadly and then took me into his arms and kissed me. It turned into a breathtaking, consuming, end-of-the-movie kind of kiss. The thought went through my head that we were still at the end of the world.