“Yes, you do. I live across the street in that shitty building.”
“You know what I mean.”
“I am exactly the same person I was back then. Possibly a bit less peculiar.”
“I hope not,” I laugh. “Your weirdo-ness was always your best quality.”
Jonas picks up the green glass ring, holds it up to the light. “You should be careful with this. It’s valuable. I used all my allowance money to buy it.”
“I know. It’s worth a lot.”
“I don’t regret what happened.”
“Well, you should. We both should.”
“He was hurting you.”
“I would have survived.”
Jonas puts the ring back down on the table in front of me. It lies there between us. This tiny thing—so ugly, so beautiful.
“I don’t wear it because you gave it me. I wear it to remind me of what we did.”
The waitress comes back to our table, holding the Pyrex pot of coffee in her hand.
“Freshen your cup?” she asks.
“We’re good,” I say.
“Anything else you want?”
“Just the check.” I put on my coat and stand up. “I really do have to go.”
He hands me the ring. “Take it. It’s yours. Even if it reminds you of him.”
“No.”
“Why not?”
I could lie. I would, to anyone else. “Because it also reminds me of you,” I say sadly.
Jonas takes out a pen and tears off a piece of napkin. “I’m giving you my number. For when you come to your senses. Don’t lose it.”
I fold the fragile paper, put it in my wallet. “It’s insanely freezing out there.” I pull on my hat, wrap my scarf around my neck.
“I miss you,” he says.
“Same,” I say. “Always.” I lean down and kiss him on the cheek. “Gotta go.”
“Wait,” Jonas says. “I’ll walk you to the subway.”
Outside the diner, snow is falling in great heaps, dumping fistfuls at a time. Jonas puts his arm through mine, sticks my cold, un-mittened hand into his coat pocket. We walk the seven blocks without speaking, listening to the silent snowfall. The quiet between us is easy, familiar—like walking single file down the path to the beach, roaming around the woods—everything between us resonant but unspoken.
The gray, gaping mouth of the subway comes sooner that I want it to, exhaling bundled, bedraggled people in its stale concrete breath. Jonas takes both of my hands in his.
“You don’t have to miss me, you know.”
I take my hand out of his and put it on the flat of his cheek. “Yes. I do.”
He pulls me to him so quickly I have no time to react. Kisses me with the intensity of every day, every month, every year we have loved each other. It is not our first kiss. That was long ago, underwater, when we were children—when we said goodbye for the first time, knowing it would not be the last. But this time when I pull away from him, it is agonizing. Not found, but lost. I pause, stand on the precipice of memory, wanting so desperately to fall into it, knowing I can’t. Jonas is animal, Peter is mineral. And I need a rock.
“I’ll see you,” I say. And we both understand what that means.
“Elle . . .” Jonas calls out as I head down the steps into the subway.
I stop, but this time I don’t turn around.
“Peter isn’t the ring guy,” he says. “I’m the ring guy.”
23
1991. February, London.
The Heath is empty. Just a few grim-looking dog lovers, who stand apart from one another watching their shivering pets run off leash, chicken-bone legs covered in mud, having fun at their owners’ expense. It’s raining. Not a lush, fertile deluge, but that endless drizzle from a leaden lowering sky specifically designed to make you pull your socks up. A black dog charges across the field chasing a red ball through the mizzle.
I’ve moved into Peter’s Hampstead flat, with its grand, soaring ceilings and plaster cornices. Bookshelves line the walls, filled with leatherbound volumes on shipbuilding or Agrippa that Peter has actually read. At night, when he gets home from the City, we build a proper fire in the fireplace, curl up together on the sofa under feather duvets while he reads aloud to me from the most boring book he can find, until I beg him to stop and make love to me instead.
The flat would be heavenly if it hadn’t been decorated by his mother in austere velvet sofas with lion’s paws for feet, and prints of hunting dogs carrying limp dead fowl in their mouths. Peter has taped a Clash poster over one particularly heinous Br’er Rabbit death scene, and thrown kilims over the backs of chaises. But I can still feel her here, spying through the eye of the formidable-looking ancestor whose portrait hangs above our bed. I know she wasn’t happy when I moved in. A young American girlfriend is acceptable as long as it ends when she returns to her ghastly country.