Adam Haslett - Union Atlantic

“I should say … about Peter. He’s a good person. He’s been good to me.”

“Glad to hear it. Seems like you’ve done okay.”

“What I have,” she said, her voice careful and measured, “it’s enough.”

How often had he imagined her here, drunk and alone? How long had that vision turned at the back of his mind, a wheel never grasping the other gears, a ghost seeking its way back into the machine?

“I’ve been in Massachusetts awhile,” he said.

“I know.”

“This last year … this last year, I’ve been over in Finden.”

She nodded calmly, even gracefully, qualities he’d never even imagined in her before.

“Why don’t you come into the kitchen?”

He followed her there, keeping his distance, observing as if from afar her motions as she took a filter from the box and placed it in the top of the coffeemaker and poured the grounds into the holder. From the cabinet she took down a packet of cigarettes and offered him one. He declined and she lit hers with a match from the stove.

“I quit,” she said. “It’s just now and then …”

If only she had been here on her own. If only she had been on the old couch, by herself, he thought.

“I want you to know, the reason—”

“Don’t,” he said. “Don’t.”

She straightened, and then stubbed out into the sink the cigarette she’d just lit. One hand gripped the counter while the other floated up across her chest to grasp at her arm.

“I never wanted to trouble you. You going — I understood that. I wasn’t well.” She clutched her arm more tightly. “Won’t you at least sit down?” she said, pleading with him now.

He shook his head.

“Please.”

“I can’t stay.”

His brain had begun to numb, the light and sounds of the apartment hitting on a dullened surface.

Through the door to the other room he could see a sideboard standing where his desk had once been. A lace doily rested on its polished surface beneath a large bowl of fruit.

He had built the house in Finden for her. He saw this now. He had built it so that he could come here and rescue her. Drive her back across the town line, this time for good. What other purpose had the house ever really had? But the woman he’d come to save — she had left before he arrived. Replaced by someone different.

He watched her pour him a cup of coffee and edge it down the counter toward him, her shoulders slightly hunched, her breasts hanging a bit lower on her chest, her hips a bit wider than before, but the color in her face, the new life — it was unmistakable. She was happy.

“I came to say goodbye,” he said. “I never said goodbye before.”

“In the fridge … there’s meat loaf … I can make up a salad.”

“I have to go.”

“Or a pasta …” The tears leaked from the corners of her eyes as she spoke.

Doug walked from the kitchen into the hall, hearing her footsteps behind him.

I carried you, he wanted to say. Down this passageway, from our couch to your bed when you couldn’t walk, I carried you.

At the door, he felt her hand on his shoulder and he turned out from under it.

“Don’t,” he said.

“But where will you go?”

“It doesn’t matter.” In the doorway, he paused. “My place in Finden. It’s over by the golf course. A mansion along the river. You can’t miss it. You should go see it sometime.”

And with that he stepped back onto the landing and quickly descended the stairs.

The bright fluorescence in the foyer of Emily’s dorm hit Nate like the glare of dawn and he squinted to avoid it. He heard Emily and her friends spill through the doors behind him, laughing. It was two in the morning and they’d been drinking since before dinner, roving through parties on campus and off.

“You can’t sleep there,” someone shouted, calling Nate off the bench where he’d taken a seat. He rose, trailing behind the others. Emily was toward the front of the group whispering something to her friend Alex. He was a slender boy, a bit shorter than Nate, his hair slicked up in the front with gel. Though he wore vintage T-shirts and hipster jeans and had that well-groomed dishevelment about him that suggested a perfect nonchalance, he’d seemed anxious to Nate ever since they’d met a few months ago, when Nate had come for his first visit, sometime before Christmas. Anxious in a way Nate recognized. Emily’s other friends had welcomed Nate as a part-time member of the scene, but Alex had mostly avoided talking to him.

Now he knew why. This evening Emily had told him that Alex had asked her what Nate’s status was — gay or straight, available or taken. “You’re fair game,” she’d said as they left the dining hall. “You might as well live here.”

Her dorm room was a social hub of sorts from where her hall mates came and went with their laptops and iPods and the occasional textbook or novel, which they would glance at between the trading of notes and music and IMing with friends across campus, attending to assignments in the down moments between jokes and gossip. They were like a troupe of nervous dancers working earnestly on their poses, shifting quickly from one to the next, until the weekend came, when they’d drink enough to undo all that practice.

On the third floor, people started splitting up, heading back to their rooms, someone calling out a reminder that they had to be up by eight to catch the chartered bus to New York for the protest. When Nate eventually pushed through the doors onto Emily’s hall, she had already slipped into her room.

“You coming with us tomorrow?” Alex asked. He was standing by his door, feeling in his pockets for his key.

“I guess so,” Nate said, his head moving gently forward and back in search of balance.

Less than forty-eight hours ago, he had been sitting in the back pew of Finden Congregational at Charlotte Graves’s belated memorial, listening to one of her colleagues, a former teacher of his, talk about how dedicated she had been to her students. And he’d listened to her former students as well, four or five of them, a woman who’d become a literature professor, a man who worked for the Geological Survey, people in their thirties and forties and fifties, all of whom spoke of how hard she’d been on them and how thankful they were for it. And when they were done, Charlotte’s brother had got up again and said how moved he was that the church was full and how Charlotte wouldn’t have believed it.

Ms. Graves would want him to go to the protest, he thought. The march to stop the war.

“Do you want a beer?” Alex asked.

“I should go to bed.”

“You’re welcome to come in if you want.”

Alex was trying to play it cool but the tightness in his voice gave him away.

Faggot, Nate thought, weakling. With a flick of his tongue he could murder some small piece of this boy. The little power gave him a sickening little thrill.

“So you’re inviting me in?” he asked, almost coyly, giving nothing away.

“Yeah. I am.”

The walls of his room were surprisingly bare. Just a few postcards tacked over the desk. Nate had expected art posters and political slogans but there was none of that. Books that didn’t fit on the overstuffed shelves stood in stacks along the floor and in piles by his computer. Above the bed was a small picture of Kafka.

Alex walked to the stereo and put on some Radiohead before getting them each a beer from the mini-fridge.

“Here,” he said, pulling out his desk chair. “Take this.” He sat opposite, on the edge of the twin bed. For a minute, the two of them sipped their last wasted drinks of the night, looking away at the walls and the floor and the bright vortex of the screen saver with its endlessly morphing patterns.