Matthew Thomas - We Are Not Ourselves

The ring made an airy bulge in the center. He felt his chest tightening.

“We’re too young for this,” she said. “We’re nineteen ! I should never have taken that thing. I was in shock, I guess.”

In his silence he was laboring to deepen the groove, but the dull knife had no effect.

“Let’s not be so serious all the time! Let’s have fun.”

“We could make it work,” he said.

“Let’s get the check. We’re late.” She patted his hand, looked for the waiter. “We’ve had some great conversations here.”

He sat, quietly despairing.

“This wasn’t one of them, Mr. Cat-Got-Your-Tongue. Mr. Eeyore. And any other animals I haven’t mentioned.”

He couldn’t help smiling. “Could you try, for one second, not to be so damned adorable?”

“I’m not adorable,” she said. “You just see me that way. That’s the whole problem. I’m fucked up inside, just like you.”

• • •

They arrived as the rest of the cast was stretching. It was going to be a physically challenging production, so Dale, the director and a theater professor, wanted them limber. Since it would be performed under the stars, outside the Reynolds Club, they would be practicing outdoors to get used to projecting their voices.

As Connell stretched, he rehearsed what he would say to Dale. He hardly knew the man, beyond taking one of his classes, but he’d already come to see him as something of a father figure, and he dreaded disappointing him. He went to office hours and listened to Dale hold forth about plays. He hadn’t read or seen most of the works Dale brought up, but he tried to nod along at all the right moments, and when he left Dale’s office, he marched straight to the Reg to check them out. He scrambled to read them before he saw Dale next, but he was always a discussion behind.

“This is where we’ll be for the next two months,” Dale said as he called them together. “There’s no intimacy out here. It’s vast, echoless. The acoustics are awful.” He gestured to the heavens. “The open air swallows all but the loudest sounds. There will be no microphones. You will have to fill this space with your voices.”

Connell watched over Jenna’s shoulder as Dale spoke. She was alarmingly buoyant. He saw her exchange a few looks with Oberon.

“Now,” Dale said, “I want you to spread out.” Connell tried to stay by Jenna. “Form two rows. Everyone has a partner on the opposite row.” When the shifting of bodies finished, Connell saw that Jenna was his partner. “Get up real close,” Dale said. “Closer. Put your face right near your partner’s face.”

Connell wasn’t an actor; he knew that by now. He was never sure where to look when he was onstage. He had tried out for this play to let some more Shakespeare run through his head and carve out some shared space with Jenna, who now was staring right into him. He didn’t know what to do with his arms, which swayed awkwardly by his side.

“We’re going to do a little exercise. I want both rows to take one step back. Okay. Do you notice a difference? Look into your partner’s eyes. Are they looking into yours?”

They were. She was laughing with what seemed like genuine mirth at the irony of their pairing.

“Now,” Dale said, “I’m going to ask you to do something a little unusual. I want you to tell your partner you love them. Don’t be shy. Tell them you love them now.”

“I love you,” Connell said, separated from her by a few feet. She said it too, her brows raised, a big smile on her face, as though she were trying to get him to laugh along with her. It occurred to him that she had never said those precise words to him before.

“Now take another step back,” Dale said, “a big one. You have to try harder to see each other. Maybe not much, but a little. What happens when you get farther away? What do you have to do to compensate? Out here, you’ll be trying to reach people a long way off. Now, tell your partner you love them again.”

Connell said it a little louder than before. Jenna seemed to mean every bit of it. There was no denying her talent.

“Now take another step back. Forget about the distance. Say it as if they’re right next to you, only louder.”

“I love you,” he said weakly across the expanse. He didn’t know how to use his diaphragm, and his breath ran out too soon.

“Now two steps. This time shout it! This is love that gives a damn.”

He did as asked, coughing as he did. She was a figure in a row of people.

“Two more steps. Again!”

This time he didn’t say anything, only listened. He couldn’t make out any individual voices, only a collective one making an urgent appeal.

“One last step! Give it your best shout!”

Jenna was a blur on the other side. His throat hurt. He threw his arms back and shouted as loud as he could.

• • •

His mother had called and asked him to come home and he had said he had a responsibility to the director and the cast to be in the play. He could hear from her silence that she was shocked to hear him talk of responsibility in refusing to come home and help, and the truth was that he had shocked himself by saying it.

He hadn’t realized how scared he was to see his father until his mother’s call. He hadn’t intended never to return; he just had no immediate plans to do so. Jenna had been the best excuse possible, but now she didn’t seem like much of an excuse anymore. He could say he was staying in Chicago to work on things with her— my future wife , he could hear himself rationalizing later, or at least that was how I thought at the time —but he saw the truth of their relationship too clearly to allow himself to pretend later that he hadn’t.

Had he tried to grow up quickly to cover up feeling like a child? Had he asked her to marry him because he needed a grand unifying theory to explain his absence? The thing was, he himself had been scared of marrying her. He didn’t want it, really, any more than she did. He was more relieved than brokenhearted, but now he had to think about everything he wasn’t doing. He had run out of excuses not to go home.

• • •

He quit the play, crammed his pair of army duffels full of dirty clothes, and got on a plane. His mother said she couldn’t pick him up, so he took the bus and train and walked from the station.

He squeezed through the back door with the bags and was struck by the punishing volume of the television coming from the den. He remembered his mother saying tests had revealed that his father had lost some hearing. He headed toward the den but found his father in the vestibule, balanced precariously on a stepladder, looking through the little windows set into the front doors. Connell muted the television and went back and called to him, but his father only mumbled something, so Connell walked over and touched his shoulder. “Dad!” he said, more forcefully. “I’m home .” The news seemed to leave no impression at all, though he’d been away for almost a year.

“He’s out there.” His father gave Connell a serious, confidential look.

“Who?”

“The man,” he said darkly. “That man. He always comes.”

“Where is he?”

Connell raised himself on his toes and looked out. No one was there except the gardener, who had finished pruning the hedges and moved to the house next door.

“Do you mean him?” he said, pointing. “You mean Sal?”

“No, no, no.” His father’s eyes flashed; his hand twitched; his hushed tone and terrified stare implied that anything was possible. Connell wanted to believe in his father’s continued ability to perceive danger accurately. Had he arrived just in time?

Connell turned again to the window; then he backed away, feeling foolish.