Tequila was involved. He stroked the bandana in his lap like the limp arm of a disinterested lover. He told her the story, tears in his red-brown lashes, tears on his red-stained lids. She knew it before he even said it, but he had to say it. He felt he owed her that much.
They met in the beginning throes of winter, at a quantum physics lecture. She went because she thought she might enjoy it, something so foreign and intricate, like Star Trek, like falling in love. She sat in the back row and tried to take notes, even though she didn’t understand a thing. During pauses, he would look back at her and smile. She did not smile back, but she watched him, handsome even in her peripheral vision, his mass of reddish curls, his palest blue eyes, and she forgave him his torn jeans.
Before the snow would give way to mouse-belly grey, dark dirty ice, he stamped out her name in the field beside her dorm. Her roommate gasped and made to swoon, watching out the window. She looked. How could she not look? He was there, waving arms like a mad scarecrow, black leather jacket so black against the beaming white.
He had remembered each detail of her face, so clearly, that by memory he
would sketch her on envelopes he mailed to her, letters within so gentle and detailed that she knew not at all what to do with them. Soon she would let him draw her naked, laid across his bed that smelled faintly of pot and of her skin. She saw herself as he saw her: beautiful and small, her prominent collarbone, her little belly.
The bandana had become a rag of his sorrow. She watched his artist’s hands work endlessly over the black and white folds, and imagined his hands on someone else’s skin, awkward and absurd. Someone else must have looked nothing like her; perhaps someone else was tall, and blonde, and perhaps someone else wore tight clothes and laughed too loudly.
The snow was dirty when she closed the door on a whole semester of her
life. At first she withdrew out of laziness; she tired of going to class, and skipped with abandon. Abandon turned into guilt, then embarrassment: if she went back to class now, then everyone would notice. They would want to know why. She did not know why. So she escaped into an online world, forgoing communication with friends in favor of a screen full of strangers. She put a Counting Crows CD on endless repeat and went to bed when the sky eased into pink, turning off the ringer of her phone. He came to her door. He came night after night, and she pictured his fine brow against the cinderblocks, his hand
on the doorknob. He begged her just to say one word, any word she wanted.
She thought she loved him, and to think it made it so. They held hands in the library; they took a class together, Investigations of the Paranormal, in which their final projects complemented each other’s exactly. His was vampirism, and hers was lycanthropy. They didn’t learn anything but to be skeptical. He was skeptical of people who turned into immortals, people who turned into wolves. She was skeptical of people who turned into lovers.
When she had finally agreed to see him, to meet him in the lobby of her dorm, she noticed with some embarrassment that she had not even shaved her legs. The dark hair had gotten so long; when had it gotten so long? He did not seem to notice. He wanted to know if there was a chance. If she could forgive him.
And all it would take was one fingertip of hers on one knuckle of his to regain that connection. She had been physically drawn to him, once, and she had made love with him in her ugly dorm-issued chair, and thought herself so experimental. He held her neck within the crook of his arm as she came, and said that he loved her.
He knew he loved her, and to know it made it so. When he betrayed her, it was after months of no word from her, even though he knew just where she was. His letters to her went unanswered, for the most part even unopened. She could not get past the delicacy of the sketches on the envelopes. She could not get past how often he said “I love you” and she could not swallow enough around the lump in her throat when she tried to say it back.
Finally, when the silence between them had grown and become another entity, perching alongside them in the lobby of her dorm like an uninvited guest, she turned to face him. Her eyes would not meet his; she wanted nothing she would be able to see in them.
“It’s over,” she whispered, wondering why she did not cry. His tears started anew and she stood, glancing down at her hairy legs. She would depend on these alien legs to get her out of this, to take her upstairs to the safety of her humid room. One in front of another, she put them, and put him behind her.
The snow had melted. She could see it through the glass of the lobby doors; grass as fine as kitten fur was straining through the wet soil. She did not know when she had last been outside. It must have been months ago. Anything that mattered at all had happened months ago, before tequila was involved.
© 2003 by Halsted M. Bernard