Fourth Comings

  “I don’t think I can do this,” I repeated in a momentary lapse of courage.

  One eye winked open to give me a look that asked, without actually asking, You can’t do what?

  “I can’t…”

  “You can’t do what?” you said, this time out loud.

  (If you had any idea what I was about to say, it didn’t show in your eyes. And I was looking carefully. Did you know? I was searching for a hint anywhere on your face that revealed that you’d seen this coming. That you, too, thought it was inevitable and the best thing to do under the circumstances. But all I saw was you, unexpecting, and eager to hear what I’d say next.)

  “I can’t be…”

  The words hung there, suspended by an argument-in-progress that passed under the open window.

  “Ninja, dude. Ninja.”

  “But, dude, wait. Seriously. What if…?”

  “What if I don’t give a shit? Ninja.”

  “What if they fought on the open sea?”

  “For the love of fuck! A NINJA WILL KICK A PIRATE’S SWASHBUCKLING ASS EVERY GODDAMN TIME.”

  I paused. It wasn’t the dramatic scenario I’d had in mind, but it would suffice. This overheard inanity perfectly supported what I was about to say.

  “I can’t be the girlfriend of a college freshman.”

  You considered this for a moment. Your smile dimmed but had not faded entirely from your face.

  “Jessica, you’d be the girlfriend of…” You pursed your lips in contemplation before finishing. “Me.” Then your face crumpled under the awkwardness of the phrase. Was this the longest sentence you’d uttered all day? All week? In a month? Eight months?

  “And you are a college freshman,” I said. “A twenty-three-year-old college freshman.”

  “That’s not all I am.”

  “Of course that’s not all you are,” I said. “But it’s going to be a big part of who you are until next year, when you’re a twenty-four-year-old college sophomore, until the year after that, when you’re a twenty-five-year-old junior—”

  “I understand, Jessica.”

  “I don’t think you do.” And then more firmly: “You don’t.”

  And you sucked in your breath as if you had just been tackled by someone twice your size.

  “I know what’s going to happen here, Marcus.”

  “You do?”

  “Yes,” I said, “I do.”

  “Enlighten me,” you said with a tease to your tone.

  “You’re going to find that there’s a certain cachet to being the old guy on campus.”

  “Jessica…”

  “Seriously, Marcus, you’ll get a campus nickname. Like ‘the Buddha’ or something. And when you walk around campus, other first-years from Outdoor Action will point you out, like, ‘Hey, there goes the Buddha. He’s twenty-three years old and he’s a freshman.’ And everyone will be really interested in the whole Marcus mythology and how you ended up here. Like, ‘Hey, did you know that the Buddha meditates twice a day? And he did this silent meditation where he didn’t speak to anyone for like years, including six months on a ranch in Death Valley? And he screwed his way through high school and was like this undiscovered genius, and oh shit, yeah, I almost forgot, he spent time in drug rehab when he was like seventeen, and he’s just like the coolest fucking dude, you know?’”

  I knew I was right. It wouldn’t take much to become a legend here on this preppy little campus in this quaint little town. Columbia is in New York City, a place that isn’t exactly lacking in distinctive characters. While I was there, a guy known as Bathrobe Boy gained notoriety simply because he couldn’t be bothered to get dressed for class. Then there were the Carman Twins, who achieved no small measure of campus popularity simply because—you guessed it—they were genetically identical. And you certainly had a lot more noteworthy and/or notorious aspects of your personal history to get tongues wagging.

  But you were unmoved. You fiddled with the silver ring hanging from the leather string around your neck. You pressed it over your eye and wore it like a monocle as you read the hidden words soldered inside: MY THOUGHTS CREATE MY WORLD. You had made it with your own hands, out of an old quarter.

  Finally you spoke.

  “I’m not a Buddhist. I’m a deist who practices Vipassana meditation.”

  “Buddhist! Deist! Whatever!”

  “Are you drunk?”

  “No,” I said too quickly. “Maybe.”

  You sighed. “I tasted it when we kissed.”

  I felt guilty, knowing that the only alcohol you’ve touched since sobering up at seventeen is that which stubbornly clings to my own tongue. Your observation was apropos of nothing. And, well, everything. And so I responded with another non sequitur.

  “Why Princeton? Why now?”

  I had wanted to ask this question since late last January, when you first told me about your acceptance.

  “It’s one of the best schools in the world. And I’m not too far from my parents, and with my dad…”

  My gaze dropped to the floor, as it always did when you mentioned your dad, which wasn’t often.

  You continued with a shrug of your shoulders. “So why not?”

  “I can think of many reasons why not,” I replied. “It doesn’t make any sense that you’re going here.”

  “I got in. It makes sense.”

  You smoked out most of your brain cells before you were seventeen years old, and yet you still have enough left over to outscore 99 percent of standardized-test takers. (Myself included.) And your, shall we say, untraditional background must have appealed to Princeton’s admissions officers, who have been trying for years to undo the school’s reputation for being a bastion of WASPiness. And they succeeded, according to the headline in one of the local papers: CLASS OF 2010 MOST DIVERSE IN UNIVERSITY HISTORY. And yet if Dude and his friends are a fair representation, it’s a homogenous kind of diversity, which makes you a shoo-in for next year’s catalog. It will be you, a dark-skinned female, an Asian male, and another female blinging a Star of David—a multicultural quartet clutching weighty academic tomes and rocking tiger-themed finery on loan from the bookstore.

  So yes, you were accepted early decision to the number one school in the nation when applications were at an all-time high. You deserve to be there. But, as you know, that’s not what I meant about not making sense.

  “You being here is like an extensive form of performance art. Like you’re going to be ‘Marcus Flutie, twenty-three-year-old Princeton freshman.’ In italics, wrapped in quotations.”

  You rested your head against the pine-paneled wall. “Don’t we all live our life in italics, wrapped in quotations?”

  I thought about Jenn-with-Two-N’s.

  “Well, I don’t think I like this version of me,” I said. “The one in which I’m your old girlfriend, old in both meanings of the word.”

  “You’re not old.”

  “To these eighteen-year-olds I am! I’m like a campus cougar….” I curled my hands into claws and grrrrrrrowled. “Prowling Princeton for some hot young tiger tail.”

  Your abdominal muscles squeezed and released in low-belly laughter.

  “And you won’t want to visit me because you hate the city.”

  You opened your mouth to protest, but I wouldn’t let you.

  “You know it’s true! It is true. You hate the noise. The dirt. The pace. You were miserable whenever you visited me in the city….”

  “I had other reasons to be miserable.”

  “I know,” I lied.

  six

  The truth is, I don’t know much about your misery at all.

  You knew all about your dad’s illness when you miraculously reappeared on my parents’ doorstep last Christmas Eve—the proverbial lost shepherd in a wool peacoat and ski hat—almost two years to the day since I’d last seen or spoken to you. You knew all about it when we made love less than twenty-four hours after that reunion. You knew about it four days later when Hope and I dep
arted for our monthlong road trip.

  In retrospect, there was something tentative about the way you handed over my going-away gift. I was struck then by your shyness, something in the way your eyes skimmed the sidewalk, the sad, downward slope of your shoulders as you presented the red raw silk box containing this blank notebook and eleven others, the Death Valley diaries, filled with your observations of life in the desert without me. I had assumed you were grieving a little bit about me, over saying good-bye again so soon after our sweet reunion. But I was wrong. Your morose mood had nothing to do with me, but with the secret of your father’s sickness, which you only reluctantly revealed upon my return. I can’t understand why you waited, or why you have rarely spoken of it since.

  So I was lying when I said I knew why you were so miserable. I have no idea what it’s been like for you for the past eight months, living at home in Pineville, helping your parents cope with the diagnosis and its aftermath. I don’t know because you wouldn’t tell me.

  seven

  You hadn’t made a move. Sun sliced through spaces in the blinds, and the light slashed in diagonals across your naked torso.

  “You keep encouraging me to tread the middle path, but I know from our past that you, Marcus Flutie, are an all-or-nothing proposition for me.” I cleared my throat. “I’m tired of only seeing you a few weekends a month. I don’t want that kind of relationship anymore.”

  You gave yourself a few moments of deep breathing before finally responding.

  “You don’t want to visit on the weekends.”

  “No.”

  “Then move here and be with me every day.” You clasped your hands behind your head. Problem solved.

  “Move?” I snorted. “Here?”

  “We can live off campus—”

  I cut him off. “I’m not giving up my life in New York just to be your girlfriend. I’ve finished college, Marcus. And if I wanted to relive the experience, I would have applied to grad school.”

  (I am a liar. And a bad one at that. I would love to relive the experience. I am desperately envious of everyone who is currently living or reliving the experience.)

  There was a pause. Then a puckish smile played on your lips. “You say you can’t be the girlfriend of a college freshman.”

  “Right.”

  “There’s another choice.”

  “I know,” I said sadly. “Which is why I made this difficult decision….”

  “Another choice.”

  And that’s when you slipped out of bed, got down on one knee, and took my left hand in yours.

  “Don’t move here just to be my girlfriend,” you said.

  You pulled the leather necklace over your head and slid the silver ring onto my fourth finger. Then you said two words I never I imagined I’d hear from anyone, let alone Marcus Flutie.

  “Marry me,” you said.

  These are the most absurd words I have ever heard.

  eight

  I have never been the type of girl who dreams about this moment. I have never been the type of girl who envisioned the love of my life getting down on one knee on the observation deck of the Empire State Building. Hiding the diamond in a crystal dish of tiramisu. Skywriting. JumboTron. Rose petals spread across a hotel bed. I have never entertained fantasies about any of those once-clever, now-cliché ways for a man to ask a woman to marry him. You already know this about me, which is why you could so easily satirize what most females consider a sacred act.

  A betrothal, even one as simple as yours, is a pretty theatrical gesture. And you love theatrics. I think of you at seventeen, fresh out of rehab and standardized-tested into the realm of misunderstood genius, making your debut in our junior honors classes wearing an über-nerdy jacket and tie. You’ve always gotten a lot of shock value out of embracing, and thereby subverting, the mainstream. Young marriage has come full circle, from an act of tradition (marrying to unite family assets), to an act of rebellion (marrying to escape the family), back to tradition (marrying to have a family), and now rebellion once more (marrying because why the fuck not?). What’s more punk rock than getting married? Why else would so many barely legal celebrity skankbots make and break so many engagements?

  So that’s all your proposal was to me at that point, just another entertaining act in the ongoing performance art of being Marcus Flutie.

  “Marry me,” you repeated.

  “Sure!”

  “Sure?”

  You were skeptical of my speedy acquiescence.

  “Sure! I’ll marry you and we can adopt Young Natty and raise him as our own!”

  “I refuse to be fazed by your sarcasm,” you said. “Marry me, and we’ll work out the details later.”

  “Okay, Marcus. Har-dee-har-har. Game over.”

  “This isn’t a game.”

  “You’re trivializing what was not an easy decision for me….”

  “I wouldn’t call a marriage proposal trivial.”

  “It is when you’re asking me to marry you just so I won’t break up with you!”

  “I’m simply following your all-or-nothing rule.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Let’s choose all over nothing.”

  You wanted to get a reaction out of me and you were succeeding on a biological level. My palms were sweating, my pupils were dilating, my nostrils were flaring. And goddiggitydammit, my heart was booming.

  “Don’t take this the wrong way…,” I began.

  “I’ll try not to.”

  “But I can think of a bizillion reasons why marrying you is the worst idea ever.”

  “Now, how could I possibly take that the wrong way?” You smiled. “Just give me five.”

  “One: You are a twenty-three-year-old college freshman. Two: I don’t want to move to Princeton and you hate New York. Hello? It’s 2006, not 1956! That makes three. And you’re only asking me to marry you because you don’t want me to break up with you. Four. And then there’s number five.” I took a bracing breath. “I don’t even believe in marriage.”

  (Not only do I not believe in marriage, but when I looked down at my newly adorned finger, I couldn’t stop myself from conjuring morbid till-death-do-us-part metaphors, like The leather string hangs from the ring like a slackened noose. How’s that for romantic?)

  When it was clear that you were just going to keep smiling at me, I was forced to fill the silence with stupidity.

  “I mean, there’s a reason it’s called the institution of marriage….”

  You mercifully cut me off before I finish the hackneyed joke about the mental instability of brides and grooms.

  “Okay, you can think of—how many was it, a bizillion?—reasons why you shouldn’t marry me. But I can think of one reason why you should.”

  “And what is that?”

  The sun had shifted through the slats, adorning your serene, smiling face with an orangey-gold halo.

  “Forever.”

  You said it without hesitation. “Forever” is how you have signed most of your correspondences with me, from your short entry in my senior yearbook (“There is nothing that I can write in here that I won’t be able to tell you in person….”) to the dedication to this very notebook. But it’s the as-of-yet unwritten FOREVER that immediately sprung to mind.

  nine

  Your postcards are tacked to a corkboard beside my bed, picture-side up. The seven images are:

  1. A medical eye chart

  2. A starry sky

  3. A globe with the words nuestro mundo

  4. Brassaï’s Couple d’amoureux dans un petit café (Paris, c. 1932)

  5. Sands slipping through an hourglass

  6. ©

  7. The National Organization of Women logo

  The underside of each postcard is hidden from view. If you were to remove one card from the wall and turn it over, it would reveal one word in your feminine cursive. If you pulled out all the pushpins from all the cards, flipped them over and lined them up in the order in which t
hey were received, it would reveal the message that eluded me during your silent years, a message you built one word and one postcard at a time:

  I WISH OUR LOVE WAS RIGHT NOW

  The eighth card is not with the others up on the wall because it’s not mine. It’s yours, the only postcard written to you from me, with the significant word in my own sloppy scrawl.

  AND

  “AND” represented my faith that there would be more to come for you and me, even if I didn’t know what it was. I mailed you that cheapo promo postcard from an A&P supermarket outside Virginville, Pennsylvania, the first (and final) stop on Hope’s and my cross-country tour of creatively named cities. I sent it not knowing if you would even be waiting for me in Pineville when I returned at the end of the month, or if you would be off meditating on a mountaintop halfway around the world. Either outcome seemed both probable and even preferable in their own way.

  I remember sprinting to the mailbox as Hope honked impatiently in the parking lot, her ninety-nine-cent Ambervision sunglasses slipping down the bridge of her nose, a strawberry Twizzler dangling out of her mouth. Hope and I had a lot of highway to cover in Pennsylvania, having already set our sights on its cities named Blue Ball, Muff, Dick, and finally, at long last, Intercourse. Of course, we never made it to any of these sexually suggestive destinations, because less than twelve hours after you handed me this notebook, and only a half hour after I stuck the stamp on that postcard, our car got jacked and our trip came to its infamous end.

  You were there when I got back, thirty days ahead of schedule. That’s when you finally told me about your dad, and explained why you couldn’t stay with me in the city for more than a weekend at a time. And for the next eight months, I tried (oh, I tried) to make good on my postcard promise, to let our relationship evolve in the open-ended spirit of AND.

  Is it any surprise that you would want the final word?

  FOREVER.

  A rabble of butterflies swarmed inside my stomach.