Heart the Lover (11)

He comes in and plucks at the green napkin in my lap. ‘Fancy.’ He spins around to the stove and studies the skillet. ‘None for me?’

Yash and I both get up and start chopping onions and potatoes. Sam pours a cold cup of coffee from the percolator.

‘How was church?’ Yash says.

Sam sits in my seat at the table and stretches out his legs onto Yash’s chair. ‘The new guy hasn’t gotten any better. Everything is in the interrogative, like he is seeking and questioning with us. It’s such a pose.’

‘Maybe he is questioning,’ I say.

‘If he is, he shouldn’t be in that job. God is not a question. He’s the answer.’

Yash and I are shoulder to shoulder at the large cutting board with our knives. I want to give him a quick glance, but Sam in this twitchy mood might catch it. Instead I tap my knife two times without cutting anything. Yash taps twice back.

After he eats, Sam and I walk to the library. Yash goes to study with someone named Annabel at the bagel shop. Sam takes my hand and pulls me off the path and against a tree and we kiss for a while before moving on. This attraction is our only language, and it’s fading. Still, after that it’s hard to focus on Cosmos for astronomy, a gut to fulfill my science requirement. I watch Sam instead. We always sit at a table in the library, not in the armchairs near the windows where I used to sit before I met him. He has a book pinned open with his left hand and writes swiftly in a notebook with his right. He’s translating Ovid back into Latin, a poem called ‘Iphis and Ianthe’ from Metamorphoses. I looked down at my paperback. It really is like we go to different schools. Next he’ll move on to Early Modern Ethics. He’s got Hume, Rousseau, and Kant stacked up beside him. Since I lost my golf scholarship, my college education has been funded by a series of loans and my job at High Five. I am going to have to pay it all back, this paltry dabbling I’ve done, these wasted years. I haven’t been serious. I watch how quickly Sam writes in Latin.

He looks at me. ‘What’s going on?’

‘I’ve made all the wrong choices.’



I go to my advisor. He teaches courses on Swinburne that I’ve never taken and is always adjusting the back pillow behind him. He shaves, but he lets the hair grow wild everywhere else on his head, great tufts sprout from his ears and nostrils, his eyebrows are thickly entwined.

I tell him I want to do an honors thesis in creative writing.

‘Too late for that,’ he says.

‘I want to stay another semester.’

‘It’ll mean another loan.’

‘I know. I want to write an honors thesis and take two seminars.’

‘You have to have a pretty high GPA for those.’

I hand him my transcript.

His tangled eyebrows move around. He removes the pillow behind him and replaces it with a smaller one beside his chair, then hands me back my transcript. ‘So be it,’ he says, and does something with his mouth that I think is meant to be kind.

A few weeks later, I run into Yash outside my writing class. It’s midafternoon, early March, the sun strong again after its brief winter waning. Sam is in his Ethics seminar for three hours. Yash and I walk toward the quad. He says he was planning to get an iced tea and read in the sun. I say that was my plan exactly. He remembers that my story was being workshopped that afternoon and asks how it went.

‘Everyone was very nice about it,’ I say.

‘Even Bryce?’

I laugh. I told him once about Bryce, a guy in my class who had no tolerance for female protagonists. If a story was about a woman, he would inevitably say that he’d had a girlfriend like that once. I don’t think he realized how often he said it. ‘He didn’t say a word.’

He bumps against me briefly. ‘He loved it!’

We get teas at the cafeteria and sit on the steps in the sun. I have this feeling that this is how all of college should have been and somehow wasn’t, sitting with Yash on the steps of the quad. I have a stab of sadness, then I remember.

‘I’m not graduating either.’

‘Really?’

I tell him about the thesis. I don’t mention the seminars I’ve signed up for. One of them is Immortality and I don’t want him to think I’m stalking him.

He nods and doesn’t say anything else. I point to the copy of The Golden Bowl by his foot and ask how it’s going and he tells a story that his professor had told him that morning about how Henry James, upon hearing of the writer Constance Fenimore Woolson’s suicide, went directly to her apartment in Venice, destroyed his many letters to her, and tried to drown her dresses in the lagoon, but they wouldn’t sink. Yash acts out this story with much élan, gripping the gondolier’s pole James used to push the gowns underwater and recreating his haunted face as they floated back up to the surface. Yash is even-keeled, always in a good mood, but today there seems to be an extra bit of joy. When he’s done he sits back down and puts his face up to the sun. ‘I’m glad you’re staying here,’ he says, not opening his eyes. ‘I’ll have one friend.’

‘Me too.’

He bumps me with his shoulder again. ‘We’ll have our farewell to youth together.’

I tell Sam that night after my shift at High Five, so that he hears it from me first. We’re on his bed, eating jellybeans from the Easter basket his mother sent him. He has a stronger reaction than I anticipated.