By the time I made it back to the gate, the sun had long disappeared below the flat skies. There were no lights out there and as my eyes adjusted to the black-gray of the night, my car emerged from the dark encasing it. Seeing it at the side of the road, knowing it would take me back to Sawyer, a murmur of grief opened within me. It grew as I rode along the side roads and onto the highway north, filling my body and then exceeding it—filling the car and spilling out to fill the freeway and the space beyond, so this grief surrounded me, engulfed me, and carried me home.
CHAPTER 11
The alarm sounded. I threw back the covers and jumped out of bed. I pulled on my sweatshirt and running shorts, grabbed my headphones, and headed out. The dawn air held the overnight chill, a surprise against my skin, still waking. A soft white light bled out from the horizon, the sun just starting to emerge.
I jogged in place for a minute, warming myself up, blowing into my hands. I fiddled with the headphones, running the cord under my shirt. I clicked on the stopwatch and took off. The music kicked on, low but rising, encouraging me forward. I swooped through the still-deserted dawn streets of downtown Sawyer. The town was pretty in the empty silence, all potential and promise. At the western edge, I turned south, opposite campus. I flew beneath an underpass, the first spring buds of March pushing from a patch of dirt on the other side. The town fell away and I moved along fields. Some farmers were up, preparing for the growing season. I passed one I saw most mornings; our schedules had synced. I had invented an entire life story for him: parents who died young, leaving him the farm; a wife who toiled beside him; three kids they’d saved up to send to college. From his tractor, Harold (I had named him Harold) raised his arm in a still wave. I lifted my hand in reply and skimmed by. In the third mile, I picked up the pace, ignoring the pinch in my lungs. Sweat slicked my body, pouring down my face and sticking my clothes to me. I pressed on. Paved roads gave way to dirt.
I did not stop moving until I closed the loop, just over eight miles, arriving back at my building, bent forward, one hand against the wall, wracked and panting, my side split in two. Back in my apartment, in the small book I kept by the door, I made note of my time. Forty-seven seconds better than the day before. Six weeks of this daily run; I was getting close to the best time of my peak period in college, before grad school ate my life and I lost the discipline. I stripped and stepped into the shower. The shock of its icy force seized my body. In the kitchen, I made coffee. I scrambled some eggs, scooping them onto a piece of toast. I ate over the sink and when I finished, I washed the crumbs down the drain.
Each day began like this, exactly like this. I had whittled my life down to the bone of it. I slept, I ran, I ate, I worked, I ate, I slept. I was focused, purifying—a clarified light, everything else filtered out. This was it. My life at Sawyer had disassembled with so little effort, it was almost sad. But I did my best to keep ahead of such thoughts. When they surfaced and caught up with me—a memory of Tyler in bed; the impulse, when coming upon an unintentionally hilarious line in a student paper, to text Safie and share it—I dove back into work, or lengthened my running stride, or turned up the cold in the shower; those remainders of my previous life vanquished.
I wasn’t exactly unhappy, though. While I used to find the monotony of academic life and the smallness of Sawyer stifling, now that constriction comforted. I took an inverse pleasure in my new ascetic existence and its lack of anything extraneous. Each day, an atonement. Each day, one more day without speaking to or seeing Tyler. Another twenty-four hours of distance between us. Almost the entirety of my existence unfolded inside my apartment. I worked on the book, revising and reorganizing, filling ingaps in arguments, checking back against source materials. I went to campus only when necessary. I would arrive just a minute before class, hold office hours in the hallway, and then return immediately home. I had skipped out on every meeting—the monthly departmental ones and a school-wide emergency assembly to address a growing “plagiarism epidemic.” My no-show approach garnered increasingly incensed messages from Susan, her outrage escalating with each abstention.Let me remind you,read her most recent email,participation in the life of the department is an obligation of your position and is weighted accordingly in the tenure review process. None of your colleagues approach it as a matter of whimsy.The last bit struck me as homophobic—I couldn’t see Susan accusing Colin, say, of engaging in whimsy. But I replied to this as I did to all the others.Thank you for the message. I will keep this in mind. Mark.While it is true that I took some satisfaction in imagining Susan unraveling upon receipt, I was not trying to stir the pot. Far from it. I just wanted to disappear. I knew I was tanking my chances at Sawyer, but I saw this as a kind of insurance policy: It meant I had no option but to land a new job. I was happy with the progress of the book, even excited about getting it to the editor to review. I reached out to anyone from grad school I thought might remember me to say I was going back on the job market in the fall.If you hear of anything,I’d copied and pasted from email to email,I would be very grateful if you let me know.
That evening, I prepared for a trip to campus. Each year the department rotated responsibility for supervising senior thesis projects, and this year the assignment landed with me. Susan had sent two or three messages checking up on me. I resented her attempts to micromanage and deleted the emails without replying, although Ihad been sitting with the students every week. We met in a study room I booked in the Chemistry building because I knew I would run into nobody there. I had been to my office only twice, at the start of the semester. The first time, on a deserted Sunday afternoon, to collect some books and whatever papers I needed for the term; and again the following Sunday, to guiltily retrieve the plant I had left to die on the windowsill.
I supervised nine students and we met together as a group. While this was to limit my trips to campus, I told them it was to “facilitate cross-fertilization.” (I lifted that phrase from an email about a workshop offered by the Center for Teaching Excellence; I did not attend the workshop but I did read the email.) I didn’t mind the meetings, though. The thesis was a requirement for honors and the students were earnest and hardworking. They trickled in and I listened as they talked among themselves. News about acceptances to grad programs, efforts to line up summer internships, complaints about unreliable internet in the dorms. Two students shared competing rumors about the lead in the spring play, who had abruptly withdrawn from classes and flown home. (“Her roommate says her parents made her because of an eating disorder, but I don’t know, she’s not even that skinny.”) When the group had fully assembled, I had each give a status report on their projects and identify one issue they wanted to workshop with the group. We were approaching the midpoint of the semester, spring break almost upon us, and so they were starting to feel some pressure. The collective anxiety mounted as they took their turns, each feeling they were in worse shape than the student preceding them. Sometimes higher education seemed good for nothing besides multiplying insecurities and intensifying feelings of inadequacy. I did my best to reassure them. “This is why we’re here,” I said, “toget you where you want to be. We’ll figure it out together.” I wanted to add that, in the grand scheme of things, these projects didn’t really matter. But they had invested so much of their young identities, I didn’t want to minimize the experience.
We made our way back around, problem-solving each student’s thesis. About halfway through, my phone dinged with a message. I didn’t think to turn it off for these meetings; I never heard from anyone. I glanced and was taken aback—it was Stephen. We’d had no contact all these months. As I did with Safie, I’d looked up his teaching schedule on the registrar’s website, so I could better avoid a run-in. I couldn’t imagine why he’d reach out. An anxious loop of questions distracted me the rest of the session. I rushed the students through to the end, insisting they had no reasons to worry.
After the last of the students cleared the room, I opened the text:
Hi Mark, I hope you’re doing okay. I know we didn’t part on great terms but I was wondering if we could meet for coffee or something. I’d like to talk.
I read through it again and again, trying to glean some hidden meaning between the words. I’d thought of Stephen often enough that it surprised me. He had been a bigger part of my life than I realized; I was too caught up in the maelstrom of Tyler to see it. I found myself wondering how things might have turned out for us if I hadn’t fucked it all up. But I couldn’t imagine that after some time had passed without me, Stephen felt anything other than relief. I sat in the empty room for a while, twenty or thirty minutes, staring at the phone. Cassie had this trick for whenever I got overwhelmed by a decision. This had started happening when I was seven or eight, intense fits of worry bursting within me. I would panic about insignificant matters—which shirt to wear, what icecream to choose from the endless array of bins. “Close your eyes and take a deep breath,” Cassie would say. “Now open.” Her face hovering above mine, placid and unmoving, she would ask, “Now what do you want?”
I hadn’t thought of this in years and yet the memory arrived intact and immediate, as if it had been waiting for me. I shut my eyes and inhaled. I could almost feel Cassie’s hand on my shoulder. I took another breath and opened my eyes. I picked up my phone and typed out my reply:
Yes, I’d like that. It’s nice to hear from you. This weekend?
We arranged to meet at a cafédowntown. In this semester of exile, I’d had virtually no interactions with anyone other than my students. And those conversations were easy to navigate, drawing from scripts determined by distinct roles and the clear boundaries of our relationships (or at least, roles made distinct and boundaries reclarified by my transgressions). I was worried I’d forgotten how to conduct myself in a different kind of conversation and I fretted about what Stephen wanted to discuss—if he would berate me or beg me to take him back. I thought the first option most likely. Anything he could say, I deserved, and perhaps letting him have at me would release me from some of my guilt.
I arrived early. I didn’t want to face the awkward negotiations of seeing one another for the first time while ordering drinks or considering where to sit. (“What’s the difference again between a cappuccino and a latte?” “I fucking hate your guts.”) The caféhad just opened, in a long-empty space formerly housing a pizzeria. The new owners hadn’t really renovated. They just painted the walls a muddy blue and hung a poster of the Eiffel Tower. An attempt to transport us from Naples to Paris, I supposed. Istationed myself on the small patio in front. It was a warm enough day, at least for these hours of peak afternoon light. I needed the feeling of space around me.
A few tables over sat two older women, in their seventies, maybe even eighties. They were immediately recognizable as sisters, something in the line of their noses, handsome profiles of a different era. They sipped frothy drinks from giant brightly colored mugs—one yellow, one red. They cooed over a piece of cake, passing a fork back and forth. I could make out the gist of the conversation. An upcoming christening, someone’s grandchild, not theirs. I wondered if they’d outlasted husbands or if it had always been just the two of them.
Stephen arrived, wearing this shirt that always looked great on him and a new jacket. (I still had the one he’d left at my apartment; I’d hung it neatly in a closet, thinking he might want it back someday.) I stood. We passed awkward greetings back and forth, arms at our sides. I asked if the table was okay or he’d rather be inside; he said outside was fine. He asked if I needed anything else to drink; I said I was fine. He left to order and I sat back down. Across from me, the women laughed and one said, “Well, I guess I don’t pick my church based on how good-looking the pastor is.”
Stephen was gone a while. Maybe he changed his mind and slipped out the back. I pictured him wrestling with a high window in the restroom, pulling his body up and through, anything to get away from me. I kept checking my phone. Finally, he returned.
“Sorry that took forever. I think they’re still getting the hang of things.”
“I should have picked somewhere else.”
“No, this is great,” he said. “It’s warmed up today. It’s nice to be outside.”
He had a small dark freckle on his cheek that, I am not sure if you’d asked me to describe him I would have known it was there, but now, it felt like—oh, there it is, the freckle. Stephen’s freckle. I asked how the semester was going.
“I can’t complain,” he said. “Classes have been fun. And actually, I got some good news last week.”
“What’s that?”
“That big grant I applied for? It came through.”
“Stephen, that’s amazing. If I’m remembering right, it was for a lot of money?”
He smiled. “You’re remembering right. I almost feel guilty. It’s going to buy me out of all my teaching next year.”
“I think you’ll get over it.”
