Хлоя Бенджамин: The Anatomy of Dreams

“What is it?” she asked, setting her seitan on the ground.

Before I could stop myself, I was telling her everything. She listened to me with quiet focus, her blue eyes wide and barely blinking. The gentle attention of an old friend, of someone who wanted nothing from me, was enough to make me cry harder. I blew my nose so loudly that Hannah leaned away, laughing until she snorted.

“She’s still got it,” she said.

When Gabe’s letter came, she stood between me and the counter where it sat like a parent separating two warring children. For the first few days, the curiosity gnawed at me so badly that we stuffed the envelope in a shoe box in her closet. Soon, though, I realized I had more power if I didn’t know what was inside it. What if Gabe revealed something new? What if he asked me to come back or let go of me completely? I wanted none and all of these things to be true. And for the first time in my life, I learned the value of ignorance. We drove to the beach boardwalk in Santa Cruz and drank cheap, warm beer, sitting on the dock with our feet in the surf, screaming as the Giant Dipper dropped. We huddled in dive bars with her coworkers deep into the morning; hours later, I hiked across campus to gather signatures for my readmission forms and course preferences, as sleep deprived and coffee-high as any other undergrad.

I was twenty-five and a college senior, but I didn’t feel like either one of them. I’d been so serious about college the first time around—even my relationship with David had felt like a kind of work-study. Now, if only to take my mind off Gabe, I was determined to have fun. On weekends, Hannah and I took BART into San Francisco and went dancing downtown. I had never been so close to that many bodies at once, writhing and shouting en masse; with the music pounding and dizzyingly sweet drinks coursing through my blood, I could almost forget myself. It was a tradition of ours: even years later, when I finished my undergraduate degree and began the PhD, we made a monthly pilgrimage to our favorite spot. On one of these nights, Hannah spotted a curly-haired man with a suit jacket thrown over his shoulder, standing at the bar and eyeing us with amusement. “Go on,” she said, “he’s smiling at you”—so I marched over to the bar, brave with vodka, and flirted with him so flagrantly that he asked for my number before pulling me onto the dance floor.

With Gabe’s letter tucked safely away, I had tricked myself into believing that I could control whether and when news of him came into my life. In fact, after four years in Berkeley, I had practically forgotten the letter itself. But one afternoon in May, when I had just gotten home after teaching a section of Abnormal Psych—all grad students were required to TA introductory courses in return for tuition remission—­Hannah bounded through the door. She was breathing hard, one hand still on the knob.

“You’ll never guess who I saw on the train,” she said.

“The guy from the club?” My curly-haired dance partner hadn’t called, not that I blamed him—I could barely remember what we’d talked about, though I did remember stepping on his shoes so many times that he asked whether it was my signature dance move.

Hannah shook her head. “Michael Fritz.”

The name hit me like a rush of cold air. Michael Fritz—one of Gabe’s best friends at Mills. Hair the color of flame and a snigger of a laugh.

“Yeah?” I asked, feigning casualness. I was stirring pasta water, and my hand on the wooden spoon was already clammy. “What’s he doing here?”

“He’s working for a start-up. Something to do with data technology.” Hannah closed the door and kicked off her clogs, walked to the couch. “Hey—sit down with me for a sec, will you?”

The pasta had two minutes left, but I turned off the water and drained it, dumped it into a bowl with a powdery packet of orange cheese. I sat down beside her and picked at the shells. Hannah’s breath was shallow, her cheeks flushed.

“Gabe has a kid,” she said.

The pasta was underdone; it crunched between my teeth, stiff and rubbery as plastic. I spat it out, my heart rattling.

“What?”

“I know, Sylvie,” said Hannah, putting a hand on my knee. “I wasn’t sure if I should tell you, but I thought—in the long run, you know . . . I thought it’d help you move on.”

“Who is she?”

“It’s a boy.”

“The mother,” I said.

“Oh.” Hannah nodded, inhaling. “Apparently, he met her in upstate New York, when he and Keller were working at that college—the one near Canada?”

“Was she a researcher? Or a student?”

“No, no. I think she worked in the town. Sarah something? Works as a receptionist in a dental office—or maybe it’s a chiropractor, I can’t remember. Anyway, he met her there and stayed. Mike visited them on a business trip last year—drove up from Albany. She’s nice, he said. Laughs a lot. Gabe seems happy.”

I nodded and walked to the window. I couldn’t bear the weight of her gaze. When she left for the restaurant that evening, I waited only minutes before going into her closet. I found the shoe box beneath a stack of winter sweaters, Gabe’s envelope on the bottom. I couldn’t wait to bring it to my room; I sat down against the closet wall, Hannah’s white work shirts grazing my knees, and ripped the envelope open. I wouldn’t admit it, but I hoped to find a plea—Gabe begging me to come back to him, moving on only when he received the silence of my answer.

I tore open the top of the envelope. Inside were two paintbrushes. The wooden handles were caked in color, but the bristles had been newly cleaned. They were my favorite brushes, ones I’d had since Mills. Gabe had wrapped them in lined paper, and when I unfolded the page, I saw he had scrawled something inside it.

I hope you’re still painting, Sylve, and that you’re not covering them up anymore. I never wanted you to.

Love,

Gabe

P.S. I’m so sorry.

I put it on the floor of Hannah’s closet with the brushes on top, my throat constricting. I was about to throw the envelope away when I noticed that something else was crumpled at the bottom. It was a glossier piece of paper, folded and unfolded so many times that it was now as soft as fabric. When I smoothed it open, I saw that it had been ripped from Mills’s fall 1999 alumni quarterly. Gabe had circled a photo that took up half the page. Such Great Heights , read the caption beneath: The class of ’99 watches an eclipse.

And there we were: David Horikawa making an ill-fated tower of apples, Michael Fritz balancing his tray on his head, Hannah pointing at the moon with her head thrown back. I was kneeling beside her, following her hand. Only Gabe sat apart from the larger group. He was leaning back on his arms, several feet behind us, and he wasn’t looking at the sky. He was looking at me.

In the pit of my stomach, I felt a low swirl of mourning. If I could arc back through time and begin again, winding the spool of thread back to that hill and the gaping blackness of the sky—if I could change what I’d said when Gabe asked me to come with him, what would I do? I pictured the gate to Keller’s garden, the bloom of the doubled flower, the whole ache of possibility. And I knew that I still would have followed him.

To my surprise, the guy from the club called that weekend. His name was Jesse. He lived on Polk Street, and he wanted to take me to dinner. I borrowed and belted one of Hannah’s floral dresses—at seventy-eight degrees, San Francisco was in the middle of a heat wave—and took the train to the city. Like a giant steel caterpillar, it wound through the lit world of the Castro: past the brightly colored banners and the men in leather, the neon signs of stores with names like Does Your Mother Know, and uphill, into the muted and staggering streets by Randall Park. I got off at Alamo Square—lights threading through trees, the smell of sweat and barbecue ember—and walked to the seafood bistro he’d chosen. He was already there, an open menu on his plate, his chin resting in one hand.