Heart the Lover (22)

Once, in November, after one of Sam’s visits, I don’t go to Yash’s on Sunday night after work and he doesn’t come to Pye Street. The next morning I decide to do a little test, to see how long it will take him to come to me. I go to class, work on a story for my thesis in the library. Chantal is closed Monday nights. Yash and I usually get pizza. But he doesn’t come or call. I don’t hear from him Tuesday either. Or all day Wednesday. Gastrell’s seminar is that night. If I don’t see him before then, if I walk alone to the Breach and take my place beside him on the striped couch I will start to cry and not be able to stop. I skip my other class that day. I wasn’t able to do the work. I know Yash has class till four.

I walk over to his house. I knock on the door even though I have a key. I feel like I’ve had a pot of coffee. My heart is going so fast. I’m barely in my body.



He opens the door. ‘Hey, Hink!’ It’s confusing. He hugs me tight. ‘Mmmm.’ He presses his nose behind my ear. ‘God, you smell good.’

We go into his room. He’s gotten my box and put everything back where it belongs: my book on the bedside table, my brush on the dresser. He’s been doing a lot of reading. There are at least a dozen books on my side of the bed. I’m trying so hard not to cry.

He opens the closet door and points to the long johns on their hook. ‘I left the red suit out by mistake and Sam held it up and teased me and I thought for a minute he was going to put it on, so I grabbed it out of his hand and he said I’d turned into an asshole. It was kind of a bad visit. We saw at least five of your friends Saturday night. It was a minefield.’

He hugs me and kisses me and I can’t speak and he doesn’t seem to notice. ‘I’ve missed you. Have you eaten? They had that cheddar you like at Kroger’s.’

He goes to the kitchen and I have a cry in the bathroom. I want to tell him how I’m feeling, ask him if he noticed that we haven’t seen each other since last Friday. This is what my old boyfriend Jay meant when he said I bottled things up. But I’m not good at saying that I feel hurt or forgotten or rejected. There had been no room for that growing up. I’m more skilled at burying those emotions. Or hiding them in my fiction.



I go back to his room and he brings me a sandwich and I can’t stop the tears and he says, ‘Oh, Hink, what is it?’

‘I don’t like it when Sam comes here,’ is all I can manage.

He agrees that it’s a tough situation and we lie down on his bed until we have to walk over to the Breach.

In December, when Madame Trèves helps me set the tables, I know something is wrong. She only helps when she wants to reprimand you. I’m not sure what I’ve done. She likes me. She and her husband had Yash and me over for Thanksgiving. We told her we wanted to write books and live in Paris, and she brought out boxes of photographs and told us about every arrondissement she’d lived in.

‘You know you’re my favorite,’ she says to me, straightening the napkins I have just carefully placed.

‘I am?’

She scowls at me. ‘Of course you know that. And I don’t want to lose you. I don’t. But I make sacrifices. Not often. But I do. I have a niece in France. My sister’s daughter. Two kids, no husband, and her girl just quit. Why she would employ a German I do not know. But she is in need. And you want a job in Paris. So there you go. A match made in heaven with me the only loser. You can write while the children are at school. Middle of January you go. You leave me.’ She flicks me away with her fingers, insulted. As if it were all my idea.

On the way home to Yash’s I think about Elizabeth Bowen’s The House in Paris. I remember Dr. Gastrell saying that Ezra Pound invited James Joyce to stay with him in Paris for a week and Joyce stayed in the city for twenty years and wrote Ulysses and Finnegans Wake. I think about how Dr. Felske is always talking about the two things that bring perspective and revelation to a character: time and distance. I think I have to go.

Yash is up reading. I tell him as soon as I’m through the door.

He is as surprised as I am. He wonders if I’ll get paid enough, and if not, how I will defer my student loans.

I tell him I don’t care about my student loans. ‘How will they even track me down?’

He shakes his head. ‘They will eventually, and the penalties will be harsh.’

Why are we talking about my loans? ‘Will you miss me?’

‘Of course.’ He sees my face. ‘A lot. Come here.’ He scootches over on the bed.

I lie down next to him. I stroke his chest and he puffs it up, exaggerating the barrel of it, something I tease him about.



‘I will come find you as soon as I graduate,’ he says.

I want to go, though I don’t want to leave him or our nights of honeymoon Hincomb and the little red suit.

He holds me tight and says until then we can write each other sexy letters like Henry Miller and Ana?s Nin.

At the end of the semester I skip my graduation and we drive to Knoxville. We don’t stay with either of his parents. He doesn’t want their scrutiny. We stay with his friends EJ and Marni.

I’ve heard a lot about EJ, one of Yash’s best friends since elementary school. He and Marni started dating in eighth grade and when she got pregnant senior year they got married. Now they have a four-year-old and a two-year-old, and recently bought a house.