XIII

It may seem that I’ve left out a month somewhere between November and January, but that’s not the case. That December just didn’t exist to me. It was the longest month of my life, but now I can barely recall how I occupied my time. While Carrie was carefully rebuilding the pillars of her life around her in the next room, I was sleeping four inches closer to the floor and cursing the nameless friend who had introduced me to Adam.
Unlike our previous separation, there were no sleepless nights, and when I woke up late in December, I was pleased to find that I had somehow successfully completed my third full semester of college. I was three quarters of half way done the final step before I was allowed into the “elusive real world,” and I was content to wait it out in my bed. Carrie, of course, had other ideas. That’s how I ended up at Major Tom’s, dressed like a kid that had just crawled out of her mother’s closet, with too much makeup and a dress so tight that it did little to hold in my C cup breasts.
Two weeks after Adam had left for London, I was back into classes and working at my new internship. I was getting by. He had emailed me a few days into his semester, but mostly our email correspondence consisted of classes and coworkers and trivial shit like that. I had mentioned that I wasn’t sure what I was going to do for my Spring Break. That day I got an email suggesting that I come visit him for that week. My head was spinning. As usual I read far too much into his innocent gesture and had myself rereading every email he’d sent me looking for clues of a hidden fondness that I was only fabricating. There was only one thing I could do to pull myself out of this neurosis: I went to the bar.
On my fourth or fifth Parliament, my lighter died; it sparked and sparked but alas, no flame to quench my burning desire to fill my lungs with smoke. At that very moment in a little bar in Cambridge a knight in shining armor held out his Zippo to save my day.
“You know,” a familiar voice said, “That shit’ll put you in an early grave.” I hadn’t seen Eric since the week before Adam and I had split up some two months before. I hadn’t really thought of it, when you divorce your spouse you divorce their friends. I hadn’t even made an attempt to salvage the once fledgling friendship that we’d been developing. I was really happy to see him.
Maybe it was the inherent connection that he held to Adam, or maybe it was that we genuinely had a lot of catching up to do, but we talked that night until last call, and then all the way to my doorstep. Once there, we spent another hour smoking and talking until I noticed the sky. The sky at three thirty has always been my favorite color, and as I pointed out the shade of blue, I realized how late it had gotten. I fished my keys out of my purse and stood, patting my skirt smooth in the back.
“It was really good to see you.” I rubbed my right eyes sleepily. The morning really had crept up on us.
“Absolutely. We should really do this again sometime.”
“How ‘bout we cut out the trip to Major Tom’s?”
“Sounds like a plan. I’ll give you a call sometime. Sleep tight.”
I didn’t tell Eric what I’d been doing at the bar that night. In fact, the topic of Adam never came up. Secretly every word we said to each other was weighted with his name. We were sharing a loneliness that he’d left us both here on our side of the pond. It was easier to deal with if we left that fact lying in the air between us. When I got up to my room, Adam had left me an instant message with a link to discount airfares.
Valentine’s day rolled around and I was feeling pretty crappy. It was almost a year ago that I’d met Adam, and I was struck with sad reminiscence. All I could think about was how happy I’d been when we’d first gotten together, thinking that maybe I wouldn’t have to spend anymore Valentine’s days alone. Now it was once again February 14th and I was strolling the narrow aisles of the local video store. I’d already picked up a one pound bag of chocolate, a six pack of Blue Moon, and a pouch of tobacco (having become a full time smoker, Parliaments now seemed to live right outside the limits of my price range), and now I was debating over whether Comedy or Horror was better suited to my mood.
As I backed up to get a better look at the top rack of comedies, I bumped into another forlorn video addict.
“Sorry,” I apologized, collecting the DVDs that I’d knocked out of the anonymous renters hands from the floor. I looked down at my own hands and found Pretty in Pink and a Dario Argento film. “Conflicted?” I held out the movies and met Eric’s eye.
“Clearly.” We both smiled like two people with a secret in a room full of people who didn’t get the joke. I nudged him playfully.
“Hey you. You haven’t called me like you promised.”
“Yeah I know.” Eric fumbled awkwardly with his movies. “I uh…”
“You uh…?”
“You know…” His left hand was now rifling through his unkempt hair.
“No, I don’t know.” He sighed.
“I don’t know. I guess I just figured it would be weird with the whole… well, the Adam thing.” That was the first time either of us had breathed that name. It seemed like he’d broken an unspoken pact we had not to discuss Adam. At the same time though, it seemed like it was out in the open, we didn’t have to worry about when it where it was going to come up. I was relieved in a way.
“Eric,” I began pointedly to highlight how ridiculous I found that statement, “just because Adam and I aren’t together anymore doesn’t mean that you and I suddenly cease to have anything to say to each other. If we’d met through someone else, we’d still have become friends. There’s no reason that we can’t be friends now.”
Neither of us said anything for a moment or two. We stood in the aisle between horror and comedy, silently staring at our own shoes, glancing up periodically to see who would speak first. It was Eric.
“So, what do you think? Molly Ringwald or Asia Argento?”
“I am a fan of red heads,” I admitted.
“Really? Well, would you care to join me for a private screening? I mean, unless you’re meeting someone or something. It’s not big deal.” He was babbling now. “Just, if you’re not doing anything I’m not doing anything and so maybe we could both not do anything and it would be a little bit more interesting.” He took a breath and laughed at himself a little bit. I paused before responding.
“You still drink Blue Moon?”
A half hour later we were being serenaded in a music shop by Jon Cryer. I hadn’t been in Eric’s apartment in months, and had only been once before without Adam. It was a little bit weird at first. Once we both got comfortable, however, we remembered how easy it had been to talk to each other right from the beginning. When the movie was over, and we’d finished our beers and chocolate, Eric suggested we step out for a smoke.
“I didn’t know you smoked.”
“Well, it’s hard not to pick it up when you’re around smokers all the time, so with Adam liv…” He cut himself off.
“It’s okay Eric. Adam is a part of both of our lives, we don’t have to edit his name out of conversation.” He smiled sheepishly. “So he’s a smoker now too, eh?”
“A pack a day of that Parliament shit you guys used to smoke.”
“And what do you smoke that’s so damned classy?” I followed him out to the porch and took the offered lighter. As he passed it to me the smell of cloves filled the air. “How trendy. Bali Hais?”
“Roll my own thank you very much.”
“Cloves?”
“Yeah, herbal shit. None of that tar and crap.”
“Yes, you’re so very health conscious, inhaling massive amounts of smoke into your lungs and gorging on chocolate.”
“And beer, don’t forget the beer.”
“Right, and beer.” I inhaled deeply and held the tobacco smoke in my lungs for a moment before releasing it back into the atmosphere. “So how was he when he moved back here with you?”
“Falcor?” Eric was referring to the cat that he and Adam had rescued shortly after he moved to Cambridge, who had followed us out to the porch. I shot him an “I’m not fucking around” look, and he sobered from his own joke. “He was pretty bad off. Honestly Jane, I don’t know if you realize how bad that hurt him.”
“Well it sure as hell wasn’t a walk in the park for me… Did you know about her?” He looked down at the street below his 3rd floor fire escape. “Oh.” There was a moment of silence, and then he turned to face me.
“Adam’s my best friend Janie.” I didn’t flinch at the familiar use of my name. “I told him it was fucked to not tell you, but it wasn’t my place. You have to understand that.” It was true. It would have been fucked for him to tell me.
“How long was it going on?”
“Not very long. I don’t know what he was doing. I don’t think he knew what he was doing. He just got sc…”
“Scared?”
“Yeah.”
“Yeah, me too.” I guess in a way that’s what I’d done with Brady. Granted Adam had done it twice. Maybe I’d just grown up a bit more than him while we were together. At least I thought I had then.
“He knows he messed up though. Even afterward.”
“We’re just not in the same place anymore.”
“Were you ever?” When I looked up, Eric’s eyes met mine in a gaze that challenged the entire year I’d spent with Adam.
“I don’t know,” I admitted, looking back down at my nearly burnt out cigarette. “We still talk. Online, I mean.”
“I know, he told me.”
“What did he say?”
“That he wants us both to come visit? He asked me to talk you into it.”
“You’re doing a hell of a job.” He laughed then.
“We should go. It will be fun. We can take a weekend trip to Paris and climb up to the top of the Eiffel tower.”
“Oui, Oui.”
“Then we can trip down to the Moulin Rouge and you can sell yourself for our return ticket.”
“What’s the matter, don’t think you’ll get a good price?”
“Let’s face it, Janie, you’re the looker out of us. I just don’t think any middle aged suburban French man would leave his wife for me.”
“You, my friend, have got the fragile ego of a supermodel. Don’t sell yourself short. I’m sure I know plenty of Parisian men who would leave their wives for you.” He smiled, and a somber look took over his face.
“Seriously Janie.” He put his hand on mine on the rail. “I care about you and Adam both, and I just don’t want to see either of you get hurt again.”
"Well I don't want to get hurt either," I said. I wasn't sure how else to respond to the sentiment.
"So, are we going?"
"I think it sounds like fun. I'd say like old times, but old times weren't in London and would probably be a lot less strained."
"So it's settled-- Spring break in London."
"Alright. Should you book it or should I?"
"I can take care of it. Adam put me in touch with the agent who got him his flight."
"Sounds good, but for now I should be getting home."
"Carrie going to be worried?"
"Hardly, her and Jack had big plans tonight."
"Ah yes, how is that going?"
"Fantastic. I feel like I'm sharing a honeymoon suite instead of an apartment."
"Well good for them." He flicked his cigarette off of the porch. "What about you Janie?"
"What about me?"
"You still moping?"
"Moping?" I almost slapped him. Moping? I wasn't moping. He quickly jumped to his own defense.
"I didn't mean it like that. I just mean that you deserve to be happy."
"Well thank you." The tone of the conversation had shifted from light to terse, and I was ready to leave. "What about you Eric? You haven't been with anyone since I've known you."
"I'll get around to it. When I meet the right girl."
"So no one special right now?" I threw my cigarette off of the porch, and looked him in the eye.
"No one special." I'm not sure why, but at that moment I felt relieved. I tried not to think about the wave of... dare I say promise that washed over me in that moment. Eric was Adam's best friend, and even if I were over Adam, which I undoubtedly was not, it would break every code in the guy handbook for him to date me. And dating him would make me on fucked up bitch. Proximity, I decided, was the only answer, and the only reason I was feeling the feelings I felt in the last couple of minutes I spent putting my shoes back on and helping Eric clean up our beer bottles and chocolate wrappers.
Based on that assumption, the logical conclusion to draw would be to lessen the proximity between the two of us. We did the opposite. The following weekend, we began preparation for our trip: expedited passports, called travel agents, researched weather patterns over the Atlantic. When we weren't planning which winter coats would be best suited for finding each other in a crowd, we were catching up on our favorite movies. The clerk at the local video store no longer asked us for our information in order to look up my rental account. We burned each other CDs for the plane ride, took a few trips to the campus bookstore, where neither of us could bring ourselves to spend fourteen dollars on a new book. We developed a semester reading list. Since Valentine's day, it seemed that every time we saw each other we had a new recommendation for the other. Our solution to this was lists. By the time we were in our last few days of trip preparation, both of our computer monitors were covered in post-it notes written by the other. The Saturday before we left, we went to the library, lists in hand.
"You seriously think that this looks like something I would enjoy?" I was holding up a copy of Elron Hubbard's "Dyanetics."
"Same thing I thought." I shot him a questionable look. "Hey, I'm not telling you to convert or anything. I just think it's interesting. If I weren't so solid in my lack of a belief system, I might fall for this guy's crap. He sells a good line is all I'm saying. It's worth checking out." I sighed.
"I will get it, under one condition."
"Which is?" I didn't say anything, but walked away, gesturing for him to follow me. I held up Ethan Hawke's "The Hottest State," when I'd tracked it down in the new book section.
"The guy from Reality Bites wrote a book?"
"Who's the cynic now?"
"Come on, the guy's an actor."
"So?"
"So, first off, who would even give him a book deal?"
"Apparently the fine folks at (check)."
"Well that doesn't make it read-worthy."
"No, not necessarily, but it's a good book. Just give it a chance."
"You're telling me you've read this?"
"Twice."
"Alright, let me look at it." I shoved the hardcover in his general direction, the bleeding heart cover of the book pressed against his chest. He turned it over and read the cover of the book to himself. "Jesus Janie, this is a fucking chick book."
"Fine, don't believe me. Do you remember what you thought about.”
"Hey just because I liked a chick flick doesn't make it any less of a chick flick."
"Come on, just give it a chance." I put on my breathiest porn star voice and raised my eyebrows. "I promise you won't be disappointed." He looked down at the book in his hands, eyes squinted in indecisiveness. "Fine, no Dyanetics then."
"Alright, alright. Fine. I'll read the damned book if it will make you happy."
"It will make me ecstatic."
"Good." We began to walk toward the checkout desk.
"It would make me an ecstatic Jane the whole way to London."
"Well that's good."
"Maybe even an ecstatic Jane once we get to London."
"I'm glad."
"Eric, you're making my year."
Fade out to black and open on our plane ride to London. Seven hours over the Atlantic Ocean, and neither of us so much as cracked the books that we'd begged the other to bring. We each had the perfectly un-creased hard covers on our laps. The newest teen comedy played mid-flight, and we took a hiatus from conversation to watch the movie, each of us with only one ear covered by the in flight headphones so that we could hear the other's mocking comments and respond. Eric initially had an aesthetic qualm with this plan.
"We're missing half of the sound that the director has intended for us to hear," he said in film-snob speak. I rolled my eyes.
"I'm sure that whichever music video director put together this 90 minute commercial will forgive us if we miss the footsteps folly work in the shower scene." I also noted that he wasn't petitioning the captain to demand wide screen versions of the in-flight entertainment. After that he shut up.
We had about four more hours of conversation to fill after the movie had gone off, and was replaced by a map with a tiny plastic looking airplane showing our current location, with miles logged typed underneath. We barely stopped talking at all with very little regard to the sleeping passengers around us. Every now and then he would allude to the Ethan Hawke book in his lap.
"I hear this a good book," he would say, which would prompt a flying death look from me. At one point we decided to simultaneously read his book, since neither one of us could be trusted to keep ourselves busy without bothering the other, but since I'd already read the book once before, and had more of an aptitude for speed-reading, he quickly fell behind and I got bored again. We rolled into London around 8am, Heathrow time.
Once we'd collected our bags, I followed him out of our gate where a sign bearing both of our names loomed above the small crowd that was awaiting arrivals. As the crowd parted, like it was choreographed for celluloid, My eyes met Adam’s, and I forgot that there was another name on the sign he was holding. I hadn't expected him to pick us up, and my heart dropped to the floor, right through all of my intestines and splatted on the stone ground underfoot. As we made a simultaneous approach, our eyes never strayed, quite an accomplishment for two people with ADHD. I dropped my bags when he threw my arms around me, and could still feel my heart against his even when he'd pulled away to greet Eric.
That night the three of us hit the town. We pounced on the opportunity to drink in public, and bar hopped about the city, ending up in our hotel lobby. We hadn't seen Adam's flat yet, but he promised to have us for dinner the next night. Eric turned in around midnight, probably partly to give Adam and I some time alone.
After Eric went up to bed, Adam and I had one last drink at the bar, and then went back out into the cold night. Despite the fact that we were leaving my hotel, I followed Adam back to his flat like a lost kitten. We didn't go up at first, just sat outside, smoking Parliaments like old times. I offered him a hand rolled clove, and he grimaced.
"You too? I've lost you all to the dark side." We sat on the steps in silence for about a half an hour, chain smoking. We smoked more that night than in all of the "smoke breaks" we'd taken together our Freshman year. Finally I broke the silence.
"I miss you, you know." I looked down at my feet, which were stuffed into two pairs of socks and my four year old Doc Martens.
"I've missed you Janie. I don't think there will be a day that I don't."
"It's not right though. We're not right."
"We're a mess, Janie. I know it and you know it, and no matter how much we love each other that's not going to change."
"I know that." I didn't want to think about it though. I wanted to pretend that it wasn't true. I wanted to go back upstairs with him and spend the week locked in his room and pretend that none of the horrible things we'd put each other through had ever happened. It took every bone in my body focusing into one thought: 'no,' but I resisted the temptation I'd put on myself and stood to leave.
"Janie, I don't ever want to hurt you again. Don't you think we've hurt each other enough?"
"What am I supposed to say to that? No, I'd like you to cut a bit deeper? Of course I've been hurt enough, but that doesn't mean that this hurts any less. It doesn't make me love you any less."
"Hey." I looked away from him. I was crying now. I hated crying in front of him. He stood to face me, and turned my face toward his. "I still love you too, Janie. I always will, but that doesn't make it any better for us to torture each other this way." He didn't move his hand. I squeezed my eyes shut tight, then felt his lips pressed hard against mine, his tongue seeking out my own and I kissed back at first. Quickly I realized what I was doing, however, and pulled back, burying my face in my hands.
"I'm sorry," was all I could say. He looked at the ground. I couldn't take my eyes off of him. He'd gotten contacts, and his eyes were no longer hidden behind dark, thick frames. They almost glowed under the orange light of the street lamp above us. He shoved his hands deep into his pockets, and looked back up at me, silently. "I should go." With that I backed away and turned to walk in the other direction; I began to walk quicker and quicker until I was running. The further I got away the more I wanted to go back, so I ran all the way back to my hotel, up the three flights of stairs (waiting for the elevator took too long), and into the double room that Eric and I were sharing. He was in the bathroom when I'd opened the door to the room, and I didn't know what else to do but sink to the ground outside it. I was sobbing now, and I knew I'd done a number on the makeup I wasn't used to wearing.
"Jane, are you okay?" Eric opened the bathroom door, and a look of concern quickly overcame his sleepiness as he crouched on the floor next to me, slinging an arm over my shoulder.
"I'm fine," I said in one short breath before the well really overflowed, and my body was wracked with sobs I could not control. Eric got me a small bag from the bathroom, and helped me slow my breathing. We splashed some cold water on my face and by then I'd calmed down a bit.
"You don't have to tell me what happened," he said, holding a cold face cloth on the back of my neck. It was three in the morning. I nodded. He put his hands on my shoulders and turned me around to face him. "You're going to be just fine." I smiled, and put my head on his shoulder. We stood like that for a few minutes, him holding me close under the fluorescent light of the hotel bathroom. I took a deep breath, which I think was in some way, a signal that I was fine. Eric helped me into bed, and held me until I fell asleep. I never did tell him what happened. There was nothing to tell.