In hindsight he knew he should have wrecked her engagement. She gave him every cue imaginable: inviting him over while her fiancé was at work, riding on the back of his motorcycle in a dangerously skimpy romper, texting him until two in the morning, and inquiring, in detail, about his love life. She was cold when he introduced her to another friend who was female. But, as are most young men, he had been blind to women’s subtleties.
Of course she was beautiful. He wouldn’t return to her story if she were not. She was slim with high cheekbones and dimples under sheer blue eyes and dark hair. He remembered how her body felt against his when she straddled him on the motorcycle, how small she felt against his back, how she threw her arms around him and squeezed when they turned or accelerated, how thin the fabric was separating their skin. Was it erotic? It wasn’t cheating. It was chaste.
She might have been his most enthusiastic lover. Of all the women who had sat on the back of that bike, only she had given herself to it, to him, to the experience, so wholly. Yet he never so much as kissed her.
Why didn’t he? He could have ridden straight to his apartment and torn her open. Just one time would have been enough to change everything, to ruin everything, for good. Why did he never do it? He could escape. He was far from home and could fly away and leave her life a shambles. She had everything to lose. He had only to gain. She wanted it. Who was he to decide what was best for her?
The issue was that he believed he was a good person and that others thought him so. It didn’t matter that she and he could get high and dance to the disjointed beat of popcorn popping in the microwave or ride aimlessly for hours with no helmets, she clinging to him, trusting her life in his. He had too much respect for her relationship and for her fiancé, Alex, who was a good man, a strong man, a dependable man. Alex was the kind of man who would love her the way she deserved, who would give her a house and children, whereas he, what would he give her? He didn’t think she was intelligent, and he believed she was too rural, with traditional, almost conservative beliefs. When they would discuss literature, their shared passion, he would find himself unimpressed with her insights. She wrote bad poetry, and when they took a creative writing class together, her work, objectively, belonged at the bottom of the barrel. In hindsight he realized that she knew something about family that he didn’t, that her insights were sound, that she offered more than he had, that he was too immature to see what really mattered. At best, he would’ve ruined what she had and given her a brief flame. Perhaps she knew that. Perhaps that’s what she wanted. Was he right to deny her that? The conscience. The stupid curse of the conscience.
He knew their friendship caused Alex considerable strife. She had put him in an impossible position. She was an empowered woman, a feminist, and, technically, she had done nothing wrong. She was allowed to have male friends. She had never even so much as kissed him. When his power went out in a blizzard, it was Alex who drove to rescue him from the cold and offer him their spare bedroom. She said they would fight about him behind closed doors.
One day stood out. He had stayed the night in their spare room. Alex left for work in the morning, and she and he were going to ride to brunch. She came out in a crop top and shorts that barely extended beyond the curve of her butt.
“I don’t think that’s safe to wear on the bike,” he stammered, “if we go down, you have no protection.”
“And?” she replied, “We don’t wear helmets. Wouldn’t we wear helmets if we were concerned about being safe?”
They rode to brunch. She squeezed his sides with her bare thighs, and he could feel her body heat mingling with his. When he didn’t need the clutch, he was so bold as to rest his left hand on her knee. The hand was gloved.
After brunch, they were supposed to work on their final project for a class about the plays of August Wilson. That was the pretense of him staying the night; they needed to be up early to eat and have enough time to finish the project. In reality, the project would only take a couple hours. It required each of them to annotate one of Wilson’s plays with the mindset of a director, explaining how they would stage each scene and direct actors to deliver the lines. He chose The Piano Lesson because of Wilson’s opening note about the setting:
“Dominating the parlor is an old upright piano. On the legs of the piano, carved in the manner of African sculpture, are mask-like figures resembling totems. The carvings are rendered with a grace and power of invention that lifts them out of the realm of craftsmanship and into the realm of art. At left is a staircase leading to the upstairs.”
Wilson presented the director with a problem. How could someone acquire a piano so magnificent that it would have the aura of true art? The simple answer was that such a piano didn’t exist and certainly wouldn’t be available to put on stage. The solution, he saw, was that the piano must be covered with a sheet the entire play, only to be glimpsed at in reverence and awe. This was the only way to transform a regular piano into an art object. Anyone with a basic understanding of the works of Benjamin would see that.
He would represent the upstairs of the house, and the ghost that inhabited it, only with sound. A cheap platform and holographic ectoplasm would transform an indictment of the horrible specter of slavery into a kitsch comedy, which was not Wilson’s intent. When he saw the play on Broadway a couple years later, the director, unfortunately, had other ideas.
Alex called to say he would be home from work early. He must have sensed something, smelled something, like an animal. She did not change her clothes. They heard his keys in the door. He walked in and looked at her.
“That’s what you’re wearing,” he said, a statement, not a question.
“It’s hot,” she replied, “we need to buy an air conditioner.”
Then he went to bed at 3 PM.
An hour later, they were finished. She drove to a print shop to print their work. He stayed behind. A bad move.
She came back and stood in front of him shaking and sobbing.
“You didn’t pick up,” she said. He looked at his phone, not a call, not a text, nothing.
“I never got a call. I’m sorry. What happened? Are you okay?”
“I was robbed at gunpoint.”
“Oh my god,” he stood and held her shivering in his arms. Alex appeared in the bedroom doorway. He waved Alex over and passed her into his arms.
“You didn’t pick up,” she sobbed to her fiancé.
“I’m sorry,” her fiancé replied.
“She was robbed at gunpoint,” he whispered into her fiancé’s ear.
Later she took an edible and went to sleep. Alex and he talked. Neither of them understood what happened. Neither of them received any calls.
She was robbed at gunpoint, but she had her phone and her wallet; she had her keys and her car; she didn’t appear to have experienced bodily harm. He couldn’t help but wonder if the robbery really happened. Was she in shock? Was she crying out for help? Was she testing them to see which man would react the way she wanted? He couldn’t say these things to Alex, but he wondered if they were thinking the same thing.
She woke up and looked at him.
“Please stay.”
“No, you’ve been through a lot. You should rest.”
“Let Daniel go,” Alex added, “he needs to get home. He doesn’t even have clothes here.”
“I want Daniel to stay.”
He and Alex looked at each other. He stayed the night again.
A few months later, the night he left for good, she cried and clung to him and tore the t-shirt off his back. She texted him in the morning to say she had slept in it.
He thought all this on the plane home from their wedding, his first time seeing them in four years, his first time in Ohio in four years. At the reception, he had met a lesbian named Cypress. They had bonded over the discomfort they both felt in the church, and he had showed her pictures of his cat. He always got along with lesbians. She had told him that there was nothing sluttier than a man who loved a cat, and he thought that that was almost true. The ceremony itself was too traditional for his taste, but he was impressed by their first dance, Alex hoisting her over his head like in Dirty Dancing, and by how she gave her bouquet to her mother rather than throwing it to the desperate women. Seeing her dance with her family, the four of them with their arms around each other, their heads together, charmed him. Alex tried not to cry. He told Alex it was okay to cry.
He couldn’t shake the belief that he saw a hint of sadness in her, as if she knew that in this act, that on this day, she was losing something, a sense of freedom, an easy escape, an alternative, and resigning herself to a particular kind of life that was not bad but that was not enough. As she read her vows, she looked up and locked eyes with him for the first time in the night, and in that moment he realized that he too had lost something: not her, for he never had her, but the possibility of her had been extinguished. That was all that was ever there, a possibility.
All this while the fat Italian man seated in the too-tight plane seat to his left lectured him about how the special sensor he invented could increase the efficiency of wind turbines by over fifty percent.
“You put it on the blade,” he said in his Italianate English, “You put it on the blade.”