Adam Haslett - Imagine Me Gone

“You just have to give her space,” I said. “You shouldn’t go over there now. She probably just needs a day off. You should go to bed.”

“I can’t go to bed, something’s happened. She’s been late before, but she’s always showed up, and now nothing, which means either she’s in some kind of danger, or — and I don’t even want to think about this — she’s decided to end everything between us, maybe because of something I said that I didn’t realize offended her, or she was just lying to me and doesn’t care at all, which I just couldn’t stand, it would just be a nightmare, so it’s not as if I can sleep, but I just don’t know if I should go over there now, or if that could make things worse and I should just white-knuckle it until the morning. That’s what I’m trying to decide.”

“I just said to you that you shouldn’t go over there.”

“But I can’t decide if I should or not.”

I could hear Paul rinsing his plate in the sink. He hadn’t waited for me, and I didn’t blame him.

“Michael.”

“What?”

“This isn’t about her.”

“What do you mean?”

“We’ve talked about it. The panic, it isn’t about her.”

“That may be — I’m not opposed to that thesis — but she’s the only solution to it, there’s no other solution.”

“You met her a week ago.”

“Yeah. What difference does that make? I’m as in love with her as I’ve ever been with anybody.”

“That’s absurd, and you know it is.”

“Right, then. Well. I thought at least you’d empathize — being abandoned like that.”

“You haven’t been abandoned . She flaked on one date. She just got out of a psych ward, you slept together for the first time last night, and what is she? Nineteen? And you’re thirty-one—”

“Twenty, she turned twenty last month.”

I closed my eyes, and saw him there in his room at Ben’s, his heart racing like a bird’s. He would have already talked to Caleigh about all this for a couple of hours at least, but that wasn’t enough. As soon as he’d gotten off the phone with her, he’d dialed my number.

Nothing I could say would help. It wasn’t for my advice that he’d called, no matter what he told himself. Tomorrow my mother would phone and ask if I’d spoken to him, and tell me that she was worried about him, about this Bethany woman, and how upset he seemed, as if it were a new and wholly discrete problem. And after that Alec and I would compare notes, gauging together how serious the episode was, to no more fruitful an end than measuring it against our own tolerance for more of the same.

“And she doesn’t care about my age anyway, she said so, she said that I understood her better than anyone she’d ever met, and that I listened to her more than anyone. And I don’t have any problem with her being twenty. If we really understand each other, none of that matters. We could move in together while she’s finishing school, and I can help her with her work, and with dealing with her parents. I think that’s the plan, we haven’t talked about it fully, but I think she’s open to that, and at this point I need that to happen, I can’t wait any longer, which maybe it’s harder for you to get, being with Paul, but Bethany is perfect — I know you think that isn’t possible — and I don’t mean she’s a perfect human being, but when am I going to meet someone that much younger than me who’s willing to share their life with me, and reads James Baldwin? Who isn’t Caleigh. She said she wants me to help her with her thesis, and then help her get into grad school. But if something’s happened now, or her roommate or someone else — her parents maybe — are starting to talk to her about me, and maybe turn her against me, I have to talk to her, it’s the only way. I guess if I miss the last train, I could take a taxi home, I could definitely take a taxi. But you think I shouldn’t. That I should just wait?”

My food would be cold by now, but I wasn’t hungry anymore. In fact, I didn’t feel much of anything but the ache in my thighs from the sprints. The straining to be there for him, to be as close as I could to sitting next to him on the edge of his bed, hooking myself into each phrase and turn of his worry — it gave out eventually, as it always did, into blankness.

Most often, I just started saying, “Uh-huh,” agreeing with him however tendentious he got, and after a while I could beg off, having sympathized, if only by ceasing to argue. But tonight he was threatening to leave his room at midnight in a panic, which would only get worse when he reached her empty apartment or her roommate asked him to leave. He couldn’t protect himself from the impulse, even if he glimpsed its desperation. And so the only thing to do was wait it out, to stay on the phone talking about Bethany, asking him more about their week together, hearing if not listening once more to his dread fantasies of why she hadn’t appeared. Which is what I did.

Long after I had tired of it, so did Michael. Not enough that he wanted to stop talking about her, but a bit. Enough to drain the energy he would have needed to get out of the house.

“I guess I could just wait and try calling her again in the morning,” he said, finally.

I told him that sounded like a good idea, and that I hoped he would get some sleep.

“Trouble in paradise?”

Paul stood with his back to me at the sink, doing the dishes. When next we squabbled, he might bring this up, his having cooked and cleaned. He was banking domestic credit.

His question was snide, though not as mean as it sounded. He liked Michael. He enjoyed his company. He just thought that I indulged him. His own sister he spoke to once every three or four months. She had problems, but for whatever reason, they weren’t his. Likewise his parents, who were divorced and single. His family seemed, more than anything, incurious about one another. As if they’d known one another well in the past but had moved on now and resented, without saying as much, the need to keep up. It wasn’t so terribly unusual. Or, for that matter, pathological. I just simply couldn’t imagine it. Having the option to disattend.

“He was pretty worked up,” I said. In the cupboard, I found a recycled takeout container and put what was left of my dinner in it for lunch the next day. “Sorry about the meal.”

“No worries.”

“What I was saying before—”

“You want me to work full-time again.”

He said it flatly, without anger or apparent consent. He knew as well as I did that his working more was the only way I could afford to attempt my own practice. At least at the beginning. He’d known it all along. We had discussed it.

“I don’t mean next week,” I said.

He’d begun to sweep the kitchen floor. I wished he’d just fight me in the open, rather than going quiet, resentment staying crouched in his throat, waiting but never pouncing. But I did it, too. Always cautious, lest an argument break out that we couldn’t control.

Later, he took his book into the bedroom and lay down to read. He didn’t look up from the page as I came in and undressed. But when I sat on the edge of the bed and put a hand flat on his chest, in peace, he set the book aside and rested his hand on top of mine.

“We can talk about it, can’t we? It doesn’t have to be right away.”

He nodded, passing a hand idly through my hair. This is what I had at the end of the day that Michael and Alec didn’t. A person.

I brushed my hand across his stomach until my fingers were just under the button of his jeans.

“I thought you’d already gotten your exercise for the day,” he said, his eyes narrowing.

We never used to dig at each other like this on the verge of sex, poking at each other’s desire. But I did it now, too, when he approached me. I tested his motivation. It was the means we’d invented to argue over our doubts without mentioning them. We kept making each other prove we wanted each other. Right at the moment of openness, when you didn’t want to have to prove anything.