By the time we got back to the dorms, the cold air had sobered me a little, but I was still buzzing, the fluorescent lights in the hallway making my head throb and the texture on the carpet seem hyper-real. Thomas and Gretchen waved good night, and Milton caught my shoulder as I made to follow Charles to our room.
“One sec,” he said, suddenly serious. “About Thomas. Just don’t fuck with him if you don’t mean it, okay?”
“Fuck with him? I don’t fuck with him.”
Milton hesitated. “Just don’t treat him the way Will treats you.”
“What!? I don’t—”
“Babe, you kind of do. I know you probably don’t mean to.”
I shook my head, and Milton patted me on the shoulder.
“Okay. Just… you know how shitty it feels, so be careful with him.”
I nodded, bewildered and nauseated, all the good feelings of the evening rushing out of me like a deflating balloon.
THE STARS rushed past and we zoomed through the planets’ atmospheres, space debris suspended in the thick darkness. I was shaky with awe at the scale of the known universe, even rendered in flickering light and color on the ceiling of the planetarium.
The e-mail from my astronomy professor telling us we had to go to the planetarium for class had come while I was FaceTiming with Will, and I told him it’d be more fun if I could go with him. He’d rolled his eyes at me and muttered about “puppy dog eyes,” but he’d been smiling when he agreed.
Today was the first time I’d seen him since taking my leave of his apartment after our winter break together. We’d talked and texted over the last couple weeks, but I could tell that Will was skittish about the way we’d left things, and I decided to prove to him that I wasn’t some codependent loser by not asking him to hang out every day.
When he’d walked up to where I was waiting in front of the entrance, though, my heart totally leapt. He had come from work, so he was dressed impeccably, and the reminder that he’d left work early to make sure we could catch the last show made me all warm and swoony.
Now, I reached out and twined my fingers through Will’s where his hand rested on his thigh. I did it without thinking, seeking some connection in the face of the sublimity of space. Out of the corner of my eye, I could see Will turn to look at me, but I just kept my gaze heavenward and after a minute he squeezed my hand back. My chest was hollow with yearning, my stomach aflutter with affection for Will. For the feel of the hand I held, the leg our hands rested on, the warmth of his shoulder just touching mine.
Love. Not affection. I knew it, really. It had to be love because you didn’t feel affection for a hand. You fucking loved it. Right?
I was light-headed, the word zinging around to the tune of the whooshing keyboard and the zinging strings that accompanied our rush through space, my skin tingling as if it were only molecules magnetized toward Will by the force of his pull. I wanted to close my eyes, to shut out a vastness that dwarfed my love, but I couldn’t because I wanted both.
I wanted all the solidity of Will’s hand on earth, and I wanted to be blasted apart by echoes of it thrumming through space like the afterimage of a supernova.
“MAKES ME feel like we’re in Rebel Without a Cause,” Will was saying as we left the planetarium and walked through Central Park.
“I never saw it.”
Will shook his head at me the way he did whenever I hadn’t read or seen something he considered essential to being a cultured human in the world. I got the sense he’d worked really hard to catch up on all these things when he left Holiday.
“In class the professor told us this amazing story about Carl Sagan and Ann Druyan,” I offered. “Part of the Voyager project was that on board each of the craft were these records where they recorded a bunch of sounds from Earth—like little Earth capsules or something to communicate things about our world and about humanity if they ever made contact with alien life, and Carl Sagan was the one to curate it. Like, jeez, how do you curate the experience of Earth? It’s so wild.”
My shoulder brushed Will’s companionably, but he didn’t put any distance between us.
“Ann Druyan was the creative director of the project, and she and Carl Sagan fell in love while they were working on it. So she had the idea that they should include a record where they measure electrical impulses of the brain and the nervous system then translate that into sound, with the idea that possibly if the record were found those sounds could be translated back into thoughts. Which is such a brilliant idea, just in theory.
“So she let them record the sounds while she meditated, and she says that she was thinking about being in love with Carl Sagan, so that really it’s like the soundtrack to her feelings of love for him. And, okay, I mean, in meditation you’re supposed to not really think, but still. Isn’t that the most romantic thing you’ve ever heard? She sent her love into space to echo throughout the fucking cosmos!”
I hooked my elbow through Will’s and squeezed his arm against me, caught up in the story. If only I could transmit to him the feelings that I knew he wouldn’t want to hear me say out loud.
Will let me take his arm, but he shook his head.
“I guess, but wasn’t Carl Sagan married to someone else, and didn’t they have some super dramatic divorce with kids and stuff because he fell in love with Ann Druyan?”
“Oh my god, why do you always focus on the part that spoils everything?” I groaned.
“The truth of something doesn’t spoil it, kiddo. It’s the truth. I’m not saying they weren’t in love, I’m just saying—”
“No, but come on. I know you think I’m an über-romantic or whatever, but admit it. You, like, fundamentally refuse to believe that something might be romantic.”
He swung around and looked at me, eyes narrowed. “No. Things aren’t romantic or not romantic. It’s not a definitional category. It’s individual. And I think it’s more accurate to say that a lie is what spoils something. I hate lies.”
This I knew. Even the tiny little white lies that most people would consider a part of basic manners weren’t safe from Will’s scorn.
He started to say something more but stopped when a handsome man in his late-twenties jogged up to us, cheeks flushed and the muscles of his chest defined by sweat.
“Will,” the man said, inclining his head.
Will dropped my arm without looking at me, but the man’s eyes tracked the movement.
“Hey, Tariq. How’s it going?”
Tariq’s smile was flirtatious. Filthy. There wasn’t a doubt in my mind it was a smile that broadcast We have had sex.
“It’s going great.” His eyes tracked up and down Will’s body appreciatively. “You never called,” he said flirtatiously.
Will didn’t say anything, and Tariq set his jaw and cut his eyes to me.
“I guess your tastes run a little more to the… barely legal? To each his own. You take care.”
He gave me a dismissive look, then jogged off, his powerful arms pumping at his sides.
“Asshole. Ignore him,” Will muttered before I’d even had time to process what the guy had said.
A part of me had been wondering if an element of Will’s reluctance to really give a relationship with me a try was our age difference, but when I took Tariq’s comment as an excuse to ask him flat-out, Will dismissed it. “I don’t give a shit how old you are,” he said.
Still, though we went to dinner and back to his apartment after, he was as distant and unreachable as a star.
LAYNE WAS holding the portafilter in one hand and a bag of beans in the other, and she looked panicked. Probably because she’d finally responded to my laborious sighs and asked if I wanted to talk about it, clearly assuming—and hoping—that I would say no like any polite person. But I was desperate. So I said yes.
“Oh, okay,” she said, rallying and putting down the beans.
I gave her a thumbnail sketch of what happened over January break, culminating in me asking Will if we could still b
e together. I told her about what Tariq said and how Will insisted that he didn’t give a shit about my age or about what anyone thought about who he fucked.
How, over the couple of weeks since then, Will had been acting normal, mostly, but how I’d hated it anyway. The idea that Tariq had looked at me and seen not someone that Will cared about, but someone he fucked. The same way I looked at him. Hated that I’d had to encounter him unexpectedly, that he—and god knew how many others going forward—might have to be a part of my life because they’d been a part of Will’s.
Or, worse, that I meant just as little to him as they seemed to.
I’d been sulky. At work, in the dorms, at Will’s. Sulky the way I’d been sulky as a kid when I asked my parents for a dog over and over despite my dad being allergic. Every birthday, every Christmas, I put it on the list, in between every other thing I wanted, the exclamation points after it cascading down the page and rendering all the other things I wanted afterthoughts to the thing I knew I couldn’t have.
But there was nothing to push against, here, no one to hate. Will’s transparency made it impossible to rage at him, and since my frustration was that I wanted more of him, I was hardly going to alleviate it by avoidance.
When I finally stopped talking, Layne shook her head.
“I’m sorry,” she said sincerely. “That fucking sucks.”
And then she made like she was going to go back to the beans.
“Wait! What should I do? I mean, do you have any advice? I’d love your opinion.”
She sat back down, apparently only comfortable giving advice when directly asked.
Layne blew out a breath. “Well. A couple things. When you asked him if you were together, what did you mean? Because there are a lot of ways to be in someone’s life. Being in a monogamous partnership is only one way, and it’s not the default mode for everyone. So, if that’s the only kind of relationship you’re interested and it’s not the kind that Will wants, then that’s a pretty basic incompatibility. You need to figure out what you want. And why you want it.”
“Why I want it?”
“Well, yeah. Like, if monogamy is what you want, do you want it because it’s the only thing you’ve considered, or because it’s normal so you assume you want it? Do you want it because monogamy is something you actively desire or value? Do you want it because you’re jealous thinking of Will with someone else? Or because you aren’t confident about his feelings for you? Et cetera. You know?”
I nodded, wishing I had a pen and paper to write this all down.
“Even if you figure out what you want, though, that doesn’t mean that the other person will want the same thing. And it sucks when that happens, but you have to radically recognize the truth before you can hope to either change or accept it.”
“What do you mean, radically recognize it?”
“Well, sometimes recognizing the truth requires stripping away what you want to be true, which is hard for a lot of people. You seem, um….”
“What? Just say it.”
“You seem like a romantic, I guess. It’s not a bad thing, necessarily,” she said quickly. “But being a romantic means choosing to see the world as ordered by a central force, or around a central person. And for someone who’s romantic, it’s maybe harder to acknowledge data that doesn’t fit with the fantasy view you have, even if that fantasy’s just hope.”
I’d never thought of hope as a fantasy before. And, jeez, I couldn’t believe Layne, whose only contact with me was at work, had come to the same conclusion about me as Will.
“It’s the same in political movement building, really,” she went on. This, I knew, was Layne’s passion. “There’s the romance of the work that you’re doing. ‘Making the world a better place.’” She made air quotes around the phrase. “But if you’re too focused on the romance of it, you forget that someone has to file the paperwork, and get a port-a-potty, and make hundreds of hours of phone calls. And march in the cold and the rain. And you forget that those things aren’t supplementary—they’re every bit as important and central as making inspiring speeches or seeing that your bill passed in the Senate.
“If you get too caught up in yourself as being a part of that romance you forget that it’s not actually about you. That the point isn’t for you to feel good about the work you do, but to do the work because it’s right and necessary. But that requires you to radically recognize the truth, even when it erases the romance you have or the romance you think you’re a part of. I have to recognize that when I go to a Black Lives Matter protest, I’m a white person taking up space, and my very presence there might do harm. That my intentions don’t matter, at the most basic material level.
“That’s the radical truth: that I might care a whole hell of a lot, but my level of feeling doesn’t affect the fact that other people might experience me and the world differently than me, and that no romantic grand narrative I bring into the space, learned from years and years of absorbing the world through headlines and sound bites, is going to change the fact that some people will look at me and feel just the same as if I were some ignorant NYU freshman who jumped on the protest thinking it was a parade I could Instagram.”
I gaped at her, never having heard her say more than a casually tossed-off comment here or there about anything but coffee or scheduling or mopping the floors.
She opened her mouth to continue, but paused. I didn’t know what my face was doing, but my surprise must’ve been evident. I gestured that she should continue.
“Practically speaking, thinking about your situation, you need to recognize whatshisname’s truth too. Will’s. Like, who is he, really? What can you expect? How much is it reasonable to expect someone to change? Is that expectation generous? It means stripping away the romance from them, from your vision of them. It’s really hard to see people as they are, sometimes. We have a lot invested in seeing them in relation to ourselves.”
“Okay, sorry, but… are you like a licensed therapist or something? A professional philosopher? Sorry, never mind, go on.”
Layne shook her head seriously.
“These are all things that I think a lot about,” she said. “In my community, among my friends and lovers, nonmonogamy is the norm, so we talk about it a lot, and I have a lot of experience with different ways it can play out. I know some of the questions you need to ask, that’s all. And stripping away the narratives—whether of romance or of fear or whatever—that culture has manufactured and perpetuated is at the heart of my political work. You can’t have any hope of working toward social justice until you cultivate the ability to see the realities of what you’re working with.”
JUST AS Charles’ philosophy project had taken over his life, he had taken over our room and turned it into something that looked like that dude’s office in A Beautiful Mind. He restructured his schedule so that each day lasted for thirty-six hours instead of twenty-four. He was still abiding by the whole wake up, eat breakfast, then lunch, then dinner thing. But it was difficult when some of his classes now occurred in the middle of his night. His working with the lights on at all hours of the night—excuse me, of my night—hadn’t been too bad, but in an attempt to make sure he didn’t accidentally sleep at the wrong time, Charles had taken to putting a file cabinet that he found in the basement on top of his bed so that he couldn’t go to sleep without wrestling it off his bed—and into the middle of the room, where I inevitably tripped over it or stubbed my toe on it.
But tonight it was our turn to host movie night—which we should just start calling Felicity night—so we really needed to move the damn filing cabinet.
Gretchen showed up early with snacks, and I related some of what Layne had told me, because it seemed like stuff Gretchen would be interested in.
I had thought about Layne’s words a lot in the last few days. When Will called me a romantic I’d thought of it in contrast to him and his total resistance to romance of all kinds, but to hear it in the context of what Layne said put it in perspecti
ve.
She was right that I saw the world as having a kind of meant-to-be. Without many friends or much to see, I started to make a game of seeing things through the lens of the books I read or the movies I watched, imagining drama where there was none, or turning the drama to a different plot.
My parents’ dull relationship seemed depressing as a model—certainly nothing to aspire to. Even my sister, who was pretty and popular, mostly seemed dissatisfied with the boys she went out with.
So when Will showed up, looking so much the part of the hero, interesting and cultured and living in New York City… well, I guess I’d cast him as exactly that.
But everything was different now. Now I knew him. Knew him, I got the sense, in a way that other people really didn’t.
And Layne was right: the truth was that Will didn’t want the kind of relationship I was used to seeing. And that wasn’t bad, it was just true for him.
“Layne’s basically a philosopher,” I told Gretchen, Charles’ head popping up at the word “philosopher,” tuning in for the first time in hours, then immediately turning away again when he realized we were just talking about our actual lives.
“Yeah, she’s pretty great,” Gretchen said.
Since Gretchen had been hanging out at Mug Shots doing work, she and Layne had spent some time together, I knew, and there was something in Gretchen’s voice that sounded strangely….
“Uh, Gretch,” I said carefully. “Are you like… into my boss?”
She shot me a way-to-make-it-all-about-you look. But then she bit her thumbnail and nodded.
“Kinda. I’ve seen her a few times. We hit it off, so.”
“Whoa. I didn’t know you were….” I was going to say I didn’t know she was into girls, which was true, but mostly it was that I’d never thought of Gretchen as being into anyone. She never talked about having crushes on anyone or finding people attractive. She never talked about sex or mentioned people she’d dated in the past. I’d kind of assumed she just wasn’t particularly interested.