Robert Lennon - Familiar

She didn’t want to think of her mother when Sam slouched off to bed, uncomforted, unconvinced. But she did, she did. And Silas, though he was, she understood, a deeply flawed young man, reminded her of nothing so much as the boys she loved, the bad boys her mother loathed, and the hard and obsessive parts of herself that she most valued.

She is pulled out of her thoughts by a change in the light. Behind her, from the west: sunshine. The wind is steady and slow now, and the clouds have moved on. The sleeping man on the beach is gone and families are arriving, laying blankets on the grass, unpacking baskets. It didn’t rain after all. It isn’t going to rain.

Derek begins to seem slightly afraid of her. He has stopped asking questions and doesn’t attempt to initiate sex. Elisa doesn’t either. She feels as though her existence is a cup filled to the brim; she is trying to stand very still until her trip. For this reason she doesn’t accompany him when he goes to see Amos on Monday.

When he gets home he looks at her with confusion and distaste.

“You’re thinner.”

“Yes.”

“I thought you looked good. Before.”

She shrugs. Did Amos tell him what they talked about? Does she care if he did? She knows she should tell him herself. But she is afraid to.

Derek says, “And you’re not wearing makeup anymore.”

“No,” she says. “You’re just noticing now?” He doesn’t respond, and after a moment he goes upstairs to change his clothes.

There is a part of Elisa, an increasingly prominent part, that wants to follow him, to undress him, to make him love the woman she is turning into, which is to say the real her, the her of the other life. And there is a part of her that wants to push him away for good. The strange thing is, if she could have the Derek of the other life right now, the one from whom she is estranged, the hard one, the one whose love for her is rote at best, vestigial, she would love him, she would take him back and love him. But she does not want to let herself love this Derek, the one who has chosen her over their children.

She resists the temptation. She doesn’t follow.

Instead she e-mails Sam to tell him when she’ll be arriving — the trip is in a couple of weeks. He writes back within the hour: I don’t think you should come.

Why not? she replies. But he doesn’t answer.

Wednesday morning, still half asleep, she reaches out and wakes Derek by stroking his arm. It’s five thirty. He gasps, leaps out of bed, then stands facing the window in a kind of ready crouch.

She sits up. “What is it?”

He turns and says, “I was dreaming.” But he doesn’t get back into bed, he stands there staring at her, blinking, still in a state of near-violent attention. In the gloom, backlit by dim gray sky, he looks like some kind of animal, or worse, something half human. For a moment she actually hates him.

That day she takes a long lunch and uses her new bus pass to go downtown. She walks the few blocks to the frame shop. Larry isn’t behind the counter. But on the low shelf beneath the frame samples lies a small flat package, wrapped in brown paper, with a yellow sticky note attached, and she knows it’s her picture. She asks the girl who’s there, “Is Larry in today?”

“He’s on lunch break.”

“I’ll come back,” Elisa says, and walks back toward the bus station.

But it’s lunchtime, after all. She goes into a Korean café. Was this place here in the other life? She doesn’t remember it. The worlds are blurring — she is slowly merging with the woman she was before, and she can’t remember all the differences. The thought fills her with desperation. Soon they will be so intertwined she’ll never get them apart. She sits down by the window. A crack runs through the glass. She stares through it at the people passing, the buses collecting and releasing passengers.

A man is crossing the street toward her, carrying a plastic drugstore bag. It’s Larry.

“Can I help you?” says a voice.

There’s a woman standing beside her, holding a notepad. Elisa stammers out an order. Larry walks in the door of the café and sits down at a table across the room.

“Anything to drink?”

“Just water.”

She has to crane her neck to see him. The café is almost empty — a silent couple in the corner, a man text-messaging over the remains of his meal. She shifts herself to the other chair at her table, in order to face Larry. He is reading the menu, though not for long. He speaks to the waitress for just a moment. A regular. Then he takes a magazine out of his drugstore bag and begins to read it.

He won’t look up. She’s sure of that. His ability to concentrate is tremendous. It’s irritating to go for a walk with him, because he doesn’t want to stop and look at anything, he just wants to walk. But when that concentration is trained on her, he sees nothing else. The intensity of his attention, in fact, can be overwhelming. Which is why he’s good to have as a lover. But not necessarily to be married to.

The magazine is about music — a jazz magazine. Does she already know this — that this is an interest of his? Perhaps this is one of the things that’s different.

She could go over there. If she waits until the food comes, it will be awkward. She could sit down and ask to join him. If he’s the Larry she knows, he will be disoriented, will appear annoyed. Then he’ll capitulate, adjust, accept. Enjoy.

Yet she must force herself to gather her satchel and glass of water and cross the room. She tries to convince herself that her reluctance emanates from anxiety. That she wants him so much, it is making her lose her nerve. Larry looks up.

“Mind if I join you?”

He is definitely surprised. “I — do we know each other?” But before he has even finished saying it, he recognizes her. His expression is one of puzzlement and slight relief.

“Elisa Brown. From the shop.”

“Sure. You didn’t give us your contact information.”

“I just stopped at the shop, just now.”

“Good. So you like it?”

“Ah — no, I didn’t — I didn’t pick it up. You weren’t there — I didn’t want to explain myself.”

He takes a quick look at the door, then back at Elisa.

“I was already here,” she explains. “Sitting by the window. And recognized you.”

She thinks, Why are you making this so goddamn difficult? She wants, very badly, her real life right now. Where all this has already been accomplished, and sex is already being had. He says, “Of course. I’m sorry — please sit down.”

She sits. He closes his magazine with some displeasure and tucks it back into his bag. Then he faces her squarely and folds his hands in front of him.

Even sitting still, he appears agile, efficient. His features are fine, the eyes alert. He isn’t her type, isn’t what she once thought was her type, which is men like Derek — larger, broader, more solid, as though they’re made of the same thing all the way through. Their strength obvious in their posture, their movements. Larry is more like a machine, a collection of moving parts. You can see every muscle in his face. He could be an adventurer, a traveler. Not that he actually is. In fact he’s a homebody. He lives in a tiny spartan house wedged between the lake and the train tracks, west of the park. Or at least he did, he’s supposed to.

She isn’t sure what she wants to say to him.

“I hope I’m not interrupting.”

“Not at all. I can read anytime.”

“You like jazz?”

He raises an eyebrow and it seems to pull up the opposite corner of his mouth. “I didn’t always. About six months ago I started thinking I needed a new interest. So I began to study jazz. I bought a turntable and amplifier — for some reason I thought I should learn via records, rather than CDs.”