Narratives
It’s 3pm on a Sunday afternoon, and Adriana and I are talking about narratives.
I am arguing that the guy I’m after is probably playing it coy, which would be The Reason He Has Not Called. Adriana is suggesting that I’m wrong. The Reason He Has Not Called is because he doesn’t want to.
Her words knock me off my balance, and allow my arms to pulsate with pins. I’d spent the past 3 weeks under duress, attempting to navigate this new lover. Removing all capitals & unnecessary vowels from my texts in a plot to appear more laid back. Making sure the dark circles under my eyes were covered matte nude.
But I love language, so I’d started to miss the U in fcking. And although I open my lips so that Adriana will know, she responds quicker than I can get out an excuse.
‘I don’t like this guy,’ she says, fingers full of crab. We’re eating at Joe’s Crab Shack in Red Hook, and it’s the middle of April. The day before had been the first to reach 72, but now we were being pushed around by a strong breeze. Adriana is wearing her new cow girl hat and I’m bundled into 3 layers. We’re sitting inside but it’s still cold.
‘This guy’ was Nathaniel, an old high school classmate I’d recently reconnected with via online dating, 10 years after our graduation. We hadn’t been friends, and I’m not sure I ever liked him very much. He was one of those people who was always friends with everyone & I find very insincere. How are you supposed to know if your friendship carries any weight with this sort of person? It is important to me to know that I am important to the people who are important to me.
But the narrative of our story was great. Nathaniel and I had both been involved with high school drama, and although we’d never spent much time together, I’d watched him grow up. Play Obron to my Helena in ‘A Mid Summer Nights Dream,’ and win class valedictorian. He was the type of guy that if asked what kind of music he liked would say ‘everything,’ which is the same sort of person who joins the Community Service Organization so he can perform in the high school talent show. And I hated those types of guys. They had no shame! There was so much music out there not to like. So many people not worth trying to make like you.
But Nathaniel was handsome, and I had been very overweight. He had grown up with tons of friends, whereas my locker door was filled with newspaper cutouts of my favorite quotes and laser prints of Barbara Kruger collages. We are talking about high school, after all, and unfortunately for the time, my narrative was deemed only as substantial as my waist line.
Maybe things would have been different if we hadn’t met before. Would I have been interested in a moppy haired actor with an unkempt beard, who hadn’t landed a gig in months, working as a spin instructor to pay the bills? Probably not. But the understanding that I could have grown up into a desirable person who Nathaniel could now find attractive, was an extremely exciting idea. Sure, I hadn’t thought about him in a decade, but the possibility of our encounter was an even more alluring idea than the question I would not think to ask — could Nathaniel have changed enough so that now I could be interested in him, too?
The answer was yes. Yes yes yes and ten fold yes. I looked at him and he looked at me and I forgot the right words, instantaneously thinking — this is the kind of guy I should be with. He would make me very happy.
He was class valedictorian, after all.
So we make nice on the Internet, and then we make nice at his roommates play. We make nice out at drinks with his roommate’s parents, where he describes our re meeting with a gigantic grin, and while I sit in the back seat of his car. And finally — in the foyer of Nathaniel’s brownstone, with his tongue between my lips, and my hands woven between the hairs of his long beard, nice.
There was so much promise after our first encounter. So much hope. I wasn’t going to sleep with him & Nathaniel was going to call me back. I’d hoped in a car instead of walking upstairs, and he texted late night — that was really something — and I believed him. I felt sure it was.
Every once and a while, I wonder at what decidable my thoughts can be heard. Dogs and cats seem to notice them, they often single me out on the street, masters in tow, as if to say ‘I know I’m with him, but it’s you who understands me best,’ and I usually agree. We can both sense the currents running under my skin.
In a perfect relationship, there is an electricity that passes between our eyes when we speak, and a combativeness, a dialogue that feels exclusive, pervasive, and singularly our own. I did not want to feel this with Nathaniel, but I felt it. Every swim he’d taken in the lake where my parents stored their canoe. Each joke we made about the winding road my father drove to school.
They do not tell us this about the past. They say — sometimes you will meet someone and it will not be right, but then you will meet them again and it will be. They do not say it will not work out. If you are lucky enough to have the pleasure of a re meeting, the movies tell us, things always end in eccentric faith. He never forgets to call you back.
Sure, we saw one another again. Went out, felt each other up. He made sure after every night of drinking I was well fed and tucked into bed. I would kiss him twice in the morning before I left for work.
And one such morning, when I wake up refreshed, Nathaniel’s nose deep in my hair, I will roll over and he will kiss me. I will put on my tights, tell him not to watch, I always look so stupid when I do that, and Nathaniel will grab me. Around the middle, and kiss me square on the lips, smiling. I’ll see you soon, he will choose to say.
Except that was the last time I saw Nathaniel. Adriana might have been able to predict it, but I couldn’t. Even weeks after I Never Heard From Him, I still kept a secret hope I’d receive a phone call one day, even though gossiping with girl friends, even while calling him a jerk.
This is the secret shame, the kind you take behind closed windows, with the curtains drawn tight. The type that plays from the juke box to the same melody as your favorite song when you were seventeen. Objectively, you know that neither is very good, but your love was so strong at one time that if asked, you could hardly find a flaw.
