But they’re all the story I’ve got at the moment. If it’s unsatisfying to hear, imagine how unsatisfying it is to tell, to live. But there’s precedent. Think of courtly love. Dante met Beatrice when they were nine, so requited wasn’t on the table for them either, and after that he loved her from afar. He loved her more because he could only love her from afar. The question is why. What did he love about her if they never spoke, never joked together over sunset-colored spritzes, never shared a gelato on an early summer evening, never got close enough to find out if they had sexual chemistry? Modern readers assume she was hot, but modern readers are shallower than Dante. He says she made him a better person; she made him wholer; she made him worthy. He says she brought him closer to the divine and the eternal. Tell me that’s not better than popcorn and a movie and a make-out session in the backseat of a car. Not that I wouldn’t like to make out in the backseat of a car.
If you look closer, if you go slowly, there can be story even without progress or plot, life in small change, like Dante and Beatrice, like fish swimming hard against the current just to stay where they are. They’re not getting anywhere, neither Dante nor the fish, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t effort, growth, triumph, and beautiful poetry. Trust me, stasis is challenging. And challenge is story.
So maybe these are my love stories: Girl meets boy, loves him, and makes her sister save him. Girl meets boy, loves him, and makes her sister make him save her family. There’s story there, at least a little. It’s tragic, yes, but the best love stories are. I think you know that.
And it’s not like I’m not in good company. I am surrounded by tragic love stories. In Bourne there are more than most, but it’s also probably true that anyone who sat in on as many therapy sessions as I do would conclude there are no happy endings.
Chris Wohl this week is about as good as it gets, and that’s what I mean—sometimes anticlimax is less satisfying but better than the alternative. Sometimes quiet is just like joy. If you squint, you could mistake Chris and his cup of urine and disinclination to chat as cause for jubilation.
“Leandra had an okay week so I had an okay week.” From the doorway, Chris sounds almost apologetic for not being an emotional wreck, but really he’s just sheepish about what he says next. “I don’t want to jinx it by talking about it.”
“That’s not how it works,” Nora says.
“I know.”
“Then sit down.”
“But just in case.”
“So talk about something else,” Nora suggests.
“Next week, maybe. Probably,” Chris says, then winks at me. “Bye, Miracle Mirabel.”
I wave and he leaves, and Nora smiles at me. “Speaking of miracles, looks like you and I have a whole unscheduled forty minutes to ourselves. What shall we do with it?” An unanswerable question—there is not a lot to do in Bourne, and anyway I have biochem homework （though it’s true I assigned it to myself）—so it is only luck, or maybe fate, that what happens next happens next.
A knock on the doorframe and on the other side a woman neither Nora nor I have ever seen before. Which means she can only be one person.
“Uh, hi. I’m not sure I’m in the right place.” She is little. Not just small. Slight. Winnowed. She has on vertiginous heels which somehow make her look shorter and a skirt straight as a drafting tool keeping her upright. Her face is so thin it’s concave in spots. She looks hungry and, with her movie-star makeup, like she’s overreacting—to this town and its empty afternoon and the weary week that yawns ahead. “I, um, I’d like to make an appointment?” A question at the end, that question being: Is this town so podunk your medical clinic is really just a house and doesn’t even have a receptionist? It is.
“Sure.” Nora sits behind her computer, pulls up the scheduling tool. “With me or Dr. Lilly?”
She blinks. “I wanted to make a”—her voice drops—“therapy appointment?”
Nora looks at her screen. “I’m pretty booked next week. There’s a hole the Friday after next.” Her gaze catches on the woman’s eyes, filled suddenly with tears. Nora looks at me. I nod. “Or, as it happens, I have some time right now—”
“Perfect,” the woman says, but without conviction, like at the grocery store when they ask if paper is okay and should they put your receipt in the bag, as if there being a virtually unheard-of opening the moment she seeks it is to be expected, as if the world is nothing but automatic doors that slide silently apart before her as she glides through.