Heart the Lover (7)

I do not say, you ruined it by believing in this man-made bullshit. I say, ‘You were in love. It was a natural impulse.’

‘I will never forgive myself for that. For doing that to her.’

‘Sounds like you did it together.’

‘It was my fault.’

‘Why?’

‘Because it’s always the man’s fault.’

‘Why? Did you rape her?’

He glares at me.

I laugh. I’m incapable of understanding his dilemma. It feels completely made up to me. I’ve noticed that about people who had stable childhoods. They like to create their own problems.

‘Why couldn’t you apologize to each other, just say oops, that was a mistake, and move on? Isn’t the whole point of Jesus about forgiveness?’

‘We tried, but . . .’ He struggles for a while to find the words, then says, ‘We are all our sins remembered.’



‘What the fuck, Sam. That’s Hamlet, not the Bible. And it’s a load of crap.’

He’s angry after that and rolls over and won’t speak. After he falls asleep I go back to my freezing house. On Monday morning he walks me to Modern Furniture like nothing happened.

My favorite nights are staying in and helping Yash pick out a shirt for a date, seeing him off, making dinner with Sam, and watching a movie or reading until Yash—and often Ivan—come back from their dates and tell us everything.

Ivan is all about Ivan. ‘I was tremendous,’ he says after an encounter on a waterbed with a med student. ‘She’ll never have it better than that.’

Sam laughs. He doesn’t judge their behavior, though Yash doesn’t seem to be having any sex at all. He comes back a lot earlier than Ivan and makes every evening sound like a complete fiasco. He takes a lot of girls out but never the one Sam says he has a real crush on. Lara Mertens. She’s Austrian, with an accent so mild you have to listen closely for it. She was in a Japanese history class with me a few semesters ago, very stylish, a little sad, putting up with all the Americans. They call her the goddess. She doesn’t seem right for Yash. I can understand the appeal—the beautiful skin, the pouty disdain, the tailored jackets—but she doesn’t look like she has any fun. He’s so sharp, so quick, so eager to make a fool of himself. He needs someone who gets him entirely.

A few weeks before I met Sam, a girl I knew had been killed off campus, stabbed to death, the school paper said in the only article they wrote about it. No one I knew knew her. Carson had gone home for the summer and I’d cobbled together a few sublets before we moved into Pye Street together in September. In August I ended up in Franklin Terrace for a few weeks and so had she, this girl from Iran. She was going to be a sophomore and took summer classes during the day. I was working at High Five at night, so we didn’t see each other much. I only remember a few real conversations. She told me her father had worked for the Shah and they’d left Iran when the Shah did, nine days after the start of the revolution, when she was nine. She had the most delicate and pale skin I’d ever seen, as if a ray of sun had never touched it. She had a crush on the boy in the apartment next door. He was going to be a sophomore, too. When she told me he’d asked her out, she leapt around the apartment like a deer. She was a virgin, she told me. She’d never had a boyfriend before. We lived together for three weeks. I don’t remember saying goodbye. She wasn’t there the day I moved out. I didn’t see her on campus after that. A month later she was dead. That boy’s roommate had raped her and stabbed her sixteen times in the apartment next to ours. I heard the news on the college radio station the morning after it happened. I went to the funeral alone. I didn’t talk about it. But sometimes I woke up in the dark in Sam’s bed and thought of her—Cyra was her name—and her small upturned nose and that tender skin.

One day in January, after we’ve come back from the holiday break and our schedules are all different, I go over to the Breach thinking Sam will be there, but I find Yash alone, smoking a pipe in the study.

‘Is this what you do when no one else is home?’

‘It is. Sam doesn’t think we should touch them. He says they’re antiques, but it just makes you feel so’—he holds the pipe by the bowl and takes three exaggerated squint-eyed puffs—‘Lord Mountbatten.’ He opens the drawer. ‘Here. Sit. I’ll fix you up.’ He lifts an ivory pipe from the holder, stuffs it with tobacco, lights it, and passes it over.’ This pipe has a spectacular downward curve to it. The stem is a little wet from where Yash put his lips.

‘Do you inhale?’

‘No, no, I don’t think so.’

We puff together and laugh at our poses.

Then he takes the pipe out of his mouth. ‘I need to tell you something, Jordan. I feel like I should have somehow mentioned it sooner.’

I stop puffing too.



‘I was at the funeral. For Cyra. I saw you there. I recognized you from class and I wanted to say something to you—you looked so upset and you weren’t there with anyone—but I didn’t and I’m sorry. I was there because I knew the guy who killed her, and I didn’t want to tell you that.’

‘You knew him?’

‘His older brother was on my hall freshman year. The police found a sweatshirt with my name in magic marker—my mother labeled all my clothes in magic marker—in that guy’s apartment. His brother must have swiped it from me and he ended up with it. They questioned me about him and I didn’t know why, then I saw the article in the paper.’