Heart the Lover (9)
‘Why didn’t you come get me? Were you not even allowed to touch the door of the guest room in case I lured you with my sexy wiles into mortal sin?’
His list of complaints is long: the mascara, the tall tight boots, holding the door for his father, cynical jokes, revealing that my father was fired from his job. ‘You create unnecessary drama.’
‘At least I didn’t say what he got fired for.’
‘Please don’t tell me.’
I tell him he is a prude in the very worst sense of the word, the most incurious, self-righteous, unchristian sense. He basically says I’m an unwashed heathen who seeks attention through my embarrassing depravity. It’s a brutal fight and we say awful things in that car. We drive through some snow flurries, light flakes that don’t stick on the windshield and have stopped falling by the time we get back to school. I ask him to take me to Pye Street but he won’t. He wants to keep fighting. When we get to the Breach it’s empty—Yash has gone up to UVA to see a girl he went to high school with—and he grabs me and presses me against the front door. Soon our clothes are pulled down and fueled by the fury of our fighting we have sex, real sex, right there in the hallway on the bare floor, the little table with the notepad teetering above us.
Sam seems fine about it afterward. We bring our overnight bags upstairs and we go down again and make some sandwiches and sit on the couch with our schoolwork. He reads Horace and I read Whitman. He makes coffee and brings his cup into the living room and says, ‘I am glad it doesn’t make you vomit,’ and we laugh and I lean against him and we keep reading. It’s very quiet, without Yash coming in to say he’s making some popcorn or a pot of tea. I wonder how his weekend at UVA is going, if he and the girl from high school are more than friends. I’m a hundred pages behind for tomorrow, but the words swell and I realize I’ve fallen briefly asleep.
‘I’m going to go up,’ I say. ‘I’m beat.’
Sam lowers his book. It takes him a moment to look up at me. ‘Could you,’ he says, rubbing his thumbs along the edge of his textbook, ‘go home?’
I go upstairs and retrieve my things, everything I ever brought into that room. My bag won’t zip and my backpack bulges. At the top of the stairs I look at Yash’s door, partly open. If he were here I’d start crying. But he isn’t, so I teeter down the stairs with my bags and go straight out the door without a word. Sam doesn’t come after me. It’s started to flurry again. On the sidewalk I can see him through the window on the couch. I don’t know if he’s pretending to read or actually reading. After a few minutes, after he thinks I’ve walked away, he lifts his face toward the window. He looks scared, like something out there is more menacing than the snow falling faintly, faintly falling on the living and the dead.
The house on Pye Street has gotten colder and my twin bed feels smaller and Carson’s snoring is a bit more piercing. Different people live here now. Athletic Joe has been replaced by Irish Maxwell, and PhD Jenny had dumped her fiancé and begun a needy, gropey relationship with sports medicine Caroline. They’ve sealed the windows with blue plastic to conserve heat so there’s an aquarium feel to the place during the day, but you still have to vie for a spot around Mavis in the frigid mornings. Maxwell and Caroline are recovering from religious childhoods and reassure me that I’ve done the right thing by walking away and being through with that lubberwart, as Jenny, who is getting her doctorate in Medieval Studies, calls him. On the phone my mother tells me he has a Madonna-whore complex.
‘All men have it,’ she says. ‘His is a little more pronounced.’
‘Maybe he’s just being honest?’
‘There’s nothing honest about the degradation of women. It’s a power move and it’s been working for a few millennia.’ She’s a better feminist than I am.
She sends me an orange sleeping bag with a little hood for my head and it’s cozy. I mention to her that Carson uses it when I’m in class and she sends one to her, too. She has lived on a tight budget since the divorce, but that has never impeded her generosity.
I don’t run into Sam on campus, but I pass Yash once in the crowded corridor of Tate Hall between classes. I spend the rest of the day analyzing the nature of his surprise at the moment he saw me. That night I lie in my sleeping bag and feel sad that he can’t be my friend now. I’m aware that I had ideas about the future that I hadn’t discussed with myself. I figured Sam and I would go on separate paths after graduation, but I hoped Yash and I would stay friends, that we’d be friends for life. Now that seems a lot less likely. And this is the thing I’m most sad about.
Sam comes to Pye Street eleven days after he told me to leave. He hands me a short letter and watches me read it. It is dry and unspecific for an apology. At the bottom he has signed it ‘Heart the Lover’ and that makes me smile. He kisses me before I can speak and, after a talk in my freezing bedroom, we go back to the Breach, where Yash and Ivan actually woo hoo when I come into the living room.
The next morning is Sunday and Sam goes to church. He hasn’t gone since I’ve known him. He told me he didn’t like the new minister. But last night he said he was going to give him another try.
When he gets up in the morning I keep my eyes closed. I’m not sure how I feel about being back in the green bedroom. I was giddy playing Sir Hincomb last night. I faked them all out and ended up getting two full families, which none of us had ever done before. Yash made me a crown out of a pizza box and Ivan pulled me up and spun me around the room. In bed Sam and I tried to talk and we tried to cuddle but those weren’t our strengths together. The talk involved a lot of fancy footwork around the fact that he thought we had both sinned in that brief moment in the downstairs hallway and I did not. We didn’t have actual sex after that, but it came closer than you’d think given our animosity and all our avowals not to.