Short Story

The dog stops, pointing at the sight of a squirrel, his hind quarters quivering with suppressed anticipation.  This is the dance, Kaitlin thinks: the dance called "this time it will be different."  She wonders if Dante has any idea what he would do if he actually caught it.  The fantasy doesn't go a step beyond acquisition.  Attraction and denial.  While the squirrel is in sight, the entire world stops, so deep is his desire. 

The squirrel chitters and disappears behind the trunk of the jacaranda tree. Dante rises up on his hind legs, straining with questions.  He wants it.  But it's gone.  She sees him trying to hold both realities in his head simultaneously.  Then he smells something on the wind and he's down on the ground, pulling her with him towards the next clump of ivy.  She glances at her watch and relaxes a bit; she doesn't have to be at the airport for another two hours. Plenty of time to let Dante sniff around a bit.

The jacaranda trees bloom in May.  Their lacy beauty and saturated color always reminds Kaitlin of the Hollywood courtyard apartment she shared with her ex-husband, back when they had room to dream.  The kids are now in college and in many ways she's back in that same place.  With room to dream.  With new plans to plan.

In two hours Arthur will be here and everything will change.  Instead of feeling like they are always stealing moments for each other, he will be in her life now, and she will be in his.  They will have time to finish all the conversations, time to make mistakes and fix them later.  The vegetable garden they plant next spring will be consumed next fall. 

For the past year they've been criss-crossing the country, staying in hotel rooms around the world, and texting each other like teenagers.  She's been glad the kids are both away now, or they'd be teasing her mercilessly.  But it makes sense, she thinks.  She met him while she was in college.  It's a fitting closure, finally being with him now after all these years.

They were on the Metro in Paris, just pulling out of the Odeon station, when he told her he'd been seeing another girl the year they were together in Berkeley.  The windows of the old car were open, letting in the heat and acrid smell of creosote.  The signs in the station flashed by faster and faster, and soon the platform was a bright spot behind them in the darkness.  Her palms were suddenly slick with sweat as she held onto the pole.  She tried to square this new information with her memories of 30 years ago, and found it all too easy.

 "Why now?" They had been so happy this week.  They'd done such a good job of forgetting the past.  "Why are you telling me this now?"

Arthur leaned down to talk directly into her ear.  He's always been such a nut about privacy, she thought randomly.  Like anyone here would give a shit, even if they did speak English.

"Everything needs to be clear between us."  His voice resonated deep in her chest like the metallic percussions of the train.  "I'm so sorry that it happened."

She looked down the interior of the car.  An old woman sat with her young granddaughter in the seats by the door.  She held a cane with a tight grip, while the girl rummaged for something inside a plastic grocery carrier.   The girl pulled out a roll of hard candy and looked up at the woman, who nodded slightly and held out her free hand.  The girl opened the package and placed one of the wafers onto the woman's palm, then took one into her own mouth.

Communion, Kaitlin thought.  That's what people do with each other.  People who know each other deeply.  They commune.  They atone.  They forgive each other.  How long has it been since I've trusted someone?  How long has it been since I decided to forgive him and gave up wondering why?

She considered telling him about the moment she'd just witnessed.  He'd like the communion part.  His eyes would light up and she knew he'd engage with interest.  When he got alert like that, she knew she had him, knew it like it was a sexual energy awakening.  But there was a piece of her that was closed off after hearing of this new deception.  Telling him about the old woman would let him off the hook.  Thirty years later, it still hurt.

She looked at him, willing herself unreadable.  She saw his blue eyes, the eyes of the ocean, the eyes she looked into for answers when she was young.  His face had aged around those eyes, but the eyes themselves had not changed.  He smiled and she refused to smile back.   

“Two more stops," she said, finally glancing over at the map. 

"Marry me," he said.

She heard the words but could not put them together.

"What?"  She turned to him, appalled at the skepticism lurking deep in her voice, wondered if he heard it too.   Hearing her own darkness, she was immediately sorry.  Immediately softened to the moment.

"Our life together has to start off right.  I needed to come clean before I asked.  And… " He kissed her on the forehead, gently, then pulled back.  "I needed to ask."

The bright lights of Châtelet flickered into view and engulfed the train.  The door opened and he put his hand on her back as they emerged from the car. 

He stopped her on the platform, forcing her to turn towards him.  She glanced at the Sortie sign by the stairs and felt an odd impulse to laugh.  She looked up and found no hint of deception or darkness.  Nothing, now, but kindly humor, deep love, and a touch of fear. 

It's the fear that decided her.  He's nervous, she thought.  He actually cares what I'm about to say.

She placed her arms around his neck, willing time to slow down long enough for her to snapshot this moment.  He pulled her to him tightly and she thought of all the romantic movies that started, or ended, just like this… with an embrace in a Parisian train station… a promise of life to come.  The train sucked the air out of the tunnel and her skirt whipped round her legs as they kissed.

"OK," she said, feeling like she'd just jumped off a cliff.  It wasn't an unpleasant feeling, she thought, as she let herself free fall into his world, feeling 19 again.  Saw him walking into the classroom with rain droplets shimmering on his peacoat and his black beret framing his curly black hair.  She allowed herself a brief fleeting moment of hope.

"OK, you," she said.  "Let's do this once and for all."

The wooden frame houses of South Pasadena sit behind carefully random landscaped yards.  After two years of walking Dante up and down the same streets, she still stares openly through the Craftsman plate glass windows, longs to read the spines in the mahogany bookshelves flanking the Batchelder fireplaces.  After fleeing Pasadena when she graduated high school, then finding herself raising her own kids here, she's realized her karmic fate is unavoidable.  She needs to forgive this place her teenage history and allow it to rebuild a new set of memories for her.

It's like a marriage, she thinks. An arranged marriage.  Yes, I could leave, but then there would always be something I may have missed.  Something that, if I had just seen the story through to the end, would've changed the way I saw all of it. 

She also understands how far she's come to get here.  It's been a long journey from the pizza parlor in Berkeley.  And for the first time since leaving home, she's going to be able to take a break, find her own inner rhythms.  What will it be like not to work? she wonders.  Well, it's not like marriage isn't its own job in itself.  Now there's a new set of memories to be built.  He'll be back in California for the first time in 30 years.  And she'll have a partner for the first time in ten.

 The first time she saw him she was sitting in the back of a smallish classroom on the third floor of Wheeler.  Her mind was cluttered with dozens of things, very few of which had anything to do with the class about to start.  Her drivers were fucking around too much on the job, and the one cook who could manage a Saturday night rush had just told her he was going back home to Indiana for a month starting next week. She was looking at working every night to make up the holes in the schedule, or hiring someone new.  Her Italian grades were going down, and she had a nagging feeling that she was going to need to take another semester off to earn enough money to continue.  And now she had another fucking lit class to add to her list of books to read and papers to write.  Berkeley, man, she sniffed inside.  Supposed to be so great, and the teachers are the size of midgets down there in the bowl of the amphitheatre classrooms… and all you get are these asshole TAs who think they know everything. 

And then he walked in.  The drizzle outside had left sparkles of water on the shoulders of his peacoat.  His black hair curled about his face beneath a black beret, and his blue eyes sparkled with an inner humor as he looked around the room.  His gaze stopped at her, although for the life of her she couldn't guess why.  She was dressed in 501's and a black sweatshirt, ragged with fatigue and had a frankly surly attitude about this whole endeavor, even as she knew how much she was killing herself to keep up her tuition and classload.   She knew all this came through. She knew she was different from all these Moraga and Woodside chicks, with their pressed blue jeans and cardigan sweaters.  She knew she was different and not in a good way.  So what the fuck is he looking at anyway, she thought.  Oh.  I get it now.  I probably delivered a pizza to him at some point.  Great… maybe I can swap a medium pepperoni for my midterm paper.

But she forgot all this the second he started talking.  He let the poetry lead the class, not him. After such knowledge, what forgiveness?  Think now / History has many cunning passages, contrived corridors / And issues, deceives with whispering ambitions, / Guides us by vanities…."  His voice was deep and his presence was sure, authoritative.  In his words, when he described the poetry, she heard a deep understanding of the work, something that came from honest study, humble appreciation, long hours of soft opening up.  She wondered about his age and was amazed when he let it slip that he was only six years older than she was. 

Over the next month her initial wariness of him was gradually replaced by a cautious respect, which turned into a rapt attention, and then into a full blown crush.  She could not read the poems without hearing his voice.  She memorized lines between pizza orders at night.  Here I sit, an old man in a dry month, being read to by a boy, waiting for rain.  Rolled the words over her tongue as she spread the mozzarella over the skins, speckled them with sausage.  The tiger springs in the new year. Us he devours.  She didn't know if it was the words themselves that seduced her, or what he brought to them when he worked with the class in discussion.  All she knew is that she was finding a rare solace in the language and, without having the least bit of volition in the matter, that became him and he was all she wanted.

The night he asked her out for coffee was the first time they slept together.  She had to buy her main driver a six pack of beer to take over the cooking down at the shop.  After they talked for two hours at the Caffe Med, they went out into the blustery rainy night.  He opened up his umbrella and shielded her as they walked down to his place on Dwight Way, just above Ellsworth.  A sprawling apartment on the top floor of a dark shingled building, the steps creaked beneath her feet, and she noticed the paint bubbling on the walls of the bathroom when she went in to pee.  She looked at her face in the mirror for a long moment, not sure if she dared to go back out, knowing that she was at a moment in her life that would change everything.  After such knowledge, what forgiveness, she thought… and smiled at herself as she decided that the knowledge is everything.  Everything.

They smoked a joint sitting on his sofa and when she was too high to stay next to him she got up to stand at the big window. Through the wet dancing trees she saw the sodium orange glow of the city across the bay.  He got up and stood next to her, resting his forearm on the top of her shoulder casually, like they'd been together for months.  Her body froze, and her heart started thumping.  Heat coursed through her body.  I'm being seduced, she thought numbly.  Then she turned and touched his arm with her lips, relishing the feel of the hair along the line of sensitive skin beneath her lower lip.  She looked up at him; his blue eyes were staring at her, not smiling, not predatory, just…knowing.  Waiting to see what she's going to do next.  She turned towards him, their bodies a foot apart. 

Once they touched, she lost the rest of her ability to track anything.  The pot, the fatigue, the nights of work, the days of classes and studying… it all disappeared and she fell into the experience with a grateful amazement that everything could suddenly be so simple again.

She moved in with him winter quarter so she could afford to stay in school.   Because of the money she saved in rent, she cut down to working only five nights a week and on her evenings off they went to art films and heard Garcia play at the Keystone.  On weekends they walked down to the end of the Berkeley pier to look at the sailboats racing on the bay and made out while the waves crashed on the pilings beneath them. 

Every time she opened the door and walked inside she inhaled the smell of their nest… pot and sex and books … and reveled in the sense of the only happy home she'd ever known.  It was precious of course because they both knew the moment was fleeting.  He had gotten a teaching offer at Bennington for the next year.  She had two more years still to go.  Briefly they contemplated her coming out there with him, but they both knew that would be fated to failure.  She couldn't afford the plane fare, let alone the tuition.  And if she just came to be with him… what would that be like?  She'd be giving up her entire future, the degree she'd suffered so much to earn.  He said he'd never ask that of her, and if she offered it, he wouldn't let her.

She took over his apartment after he packed up his forty boxes of books and three boxes of clothes.  With every load they carried downstairs to his U-Haul she felt emptier. When she looked in his eyes, she could tell he was already gone, and that made her feel more desolate than the dust bunnies skittering across the empty shelves.  He was excited.  He was brimming with plans and dreams and tomorrows.  She could only tell herself that the future was unknown, but in her heart she knew how the story was going to end. 

 She walks the dog through the canopies of the deep lavender trees, brilliant in the summer morning sun, and marvels at their leafy filigree, the way their sticky sweet blossoms airbrush the sidewalks and cars like purple pastel snow.  They color the contours of their world with an hallucinogenic haze.  Eye shadow trees, a friend once called them.  The shading of grace.

She has built a decent life for herself since the divorce.  She has a weekly tea with the kids' step-mom and considers her, without reservation, one of her closest friends.  The two households combine holidays and the kids have grown up with a grounding of humor and common sense that far exceeded all rational odds, given the genetic history they'd inherited.  Her father had never been around and she often wondered if her predilection for charming, absent, womanizing intellectuals was a flagrant, embarrassing grasp towards that primary relationship. 

She dated for several years after the divorce then stopped when the patterns became altogether too obvious.  She lost herself in her work and that felt fine.  She had her job by day and at nights, after the kids were asleep, she wrote.  She worked feverishly and after a couple of years she had put something together.  It took another two years to find an agent and place the manuscript, but finally it was selling, and she enjoyed a very minor celebrity in the book world.  It was a good life, she thought.  Not great on the love front, but at least there were no surprises.

They had written letters feverishly at first.  She clung to their correspondence throughout the cold fall quarter, taking a beer and reading the scrawled pages from her favorite perch on the roof.  The bright winter sun sank behind Mt. Tam across the bay earlier each evening and she'd read until she'd memorized the words like stanzas, piecing together the sporadic declarations of affection like a divination.  As the declarations grew more sparse, she learned to harden her heart, take the possibility more seriously that this was all it was ever going to be.   She started a half-hearted affair with a cook from the other store over in Oakland, and he treated her well and took the edge off her loneliness.  At Christmas she went home to visit her mother, endured the barrage of rage and criticism and accusation, and drove back up after New Years, once again resigned to a life of solitary independence.  At least I'm doing this on my own terms, she thought.  And tried to be nicer to the new boyfriend, because he really was a good guy after all.

Sometime during winter quarter she saw a flyer on the lit wall of Wheeler, announcing summer writing workshops at Bennington College.  Two weeks studying with fiction and poetry writers whose names she recognized from the New Yorker and the pages of the Book Review.  She found his name, Arthur Walker, and touched the flyer briefly, her fingers feeling the heat of his name through the paper.  Two weeks.  What a dream that would be.  And then she saw the words "financial assistance available," and decided that she would apply.

The day she got the letter telling her she'd gotten in, fully paid for, she gathered up her tip money and went down to the pay phone outside the grocery store.

He sounded hurried when he heard her voice, but she begged him to wait a second.

"What?" he said, shuffling papers in the background.  "What's going on?"

"Good news," she said. 

"I could use some of that.  You wouldn't believe this place."

"I got a letter from Bennington today."

"Bennington?"  The background noise stopped.  Well, at least I've got his attention, she thought.

"Yeah.  The writer's workshop summer program.  I've been accepted."

"The summer program?"

She couldn't help but hear a note of wariness in his voice.  She tried to ignore it, but it came back to her, months later, with a haunting insistence.

"Yes." She decided to shut up and risk hearing exactly what he had to say.

"It's expensive," he said finally.

"Yes, I know it's expensive.  But they want me enough to pay for me.  Everything but the air fare."

"You're kidding."

"Don't sound so fucking surprised.  Jeez.  You used to think I had some talent."

"Talent… yeah… of course.  You've got all kinds of talent.  I'm just… this is kind of sudden."

"Well, I didn't have to tell you, you know.  I could've just showed up"

"Well… of course.  Absolutely.  That's good."  She heard him exhaling.  He's taken up smoking again, she thought.  "It'll be great to see you," he added.

"Yeah?  It'll be great to see you too."

"That's in July, huh?"

"Yeah.  First two weeks."

He took another deep breath.  "Too bad you can't stay the month," he said finally.

"The month?"

"Yeah.  I have a faculty cottage.  After the workshop is over, I'm sure we could find a place for you."

She relaxed her shoulders and closed her eyes, surprised to find how close to tears she was.

"That sounds wonderful."

"Everyone's on vacation in July.  I can show you around.  You'll love it out here."

And so it was planned.  She saved her money, bought a round trip fare for the entire month, and sublet the Dwight Way place to her boyfriend.  She figured that was the least she could do.

The muggy New England summer surrounded her like a wet dream.  She moved from her dorm room to the classrooms to the readings infused with a dazed wonder, staring about her at a life she had never dared imagined.  She was living the life of the rich, the intellectual, the privileged and the lettered.  She attended early evening cocktail parties on the front porches of the faculty cottages, drinking gin and tonics until the dark was deep enough to see the fireflies.  The writers who spoke at night intoxicated her with their language and she studied them from her perch in the auditorium, wondering what their lives had been, what trade-offs they'd made to get to this moment in their lives. 

One night Arthur gave a reading of material he'd written their year in Berkeley.  She remembered waking up at noon on Sunday mornings, pulling on her jeans to go get orange juice at the corner store.  She would read the Chronicle and he would share his paragraphs with her as he edited them, weaving the stories around them both.

He insisted they should not cross any boundaries while she doing the workshop.  It was a small community, he said.  People talk.  But there was heat between them.  A fierce red hot sizzle of heat that cut through the torpor of the heavy summer air like a blade.  Once they met accidentally after an evening reading, when she was rounding the corner to go back to her dorm.  Before she could think, they were kissing feverishly, drunkenly, making up for months, devouring each other with their craving.

Another time she had to ask him about a piece she was working on and came to his office during office hours.  She played it very cool, keeping everything above-board even as her face flushed red and everything either of them said came out with other implications.  She made it through her question and he gave her some stilted instruction, but when she left to go he stood up and they fell into each others' bodies like an electric current was fusing them together.  They ended up on his sofa, half undressed, before he managed to stop them both.

"Kait… god… no.  I can't.  Fuck… this is killing me."

She sat back, catching her breath, slowly buttoning her blouse.

"But what if I wasn't a student.  What if I was just your… you know.. .girlfriend from home?"

He laughed somewhat bitterly.  "Home."

"I'm your old girlfriend.  Is that against the rules?"

His face became composed, shut off.  She watched his openness disappear sadly, like it was a train she had just missed, pulling out of the depot. 

"It's complicated, kiddo.  You should go."

She stood up.  "Can you still put me up?"

 He inhaled and looked away, not meeting her eyes.  "Yes," he said finally.  "I said I would.  I'll figure it out."

"Well, there won't be that many prying eyes then.  Don't you have privacy even there?"

He looked at her with a smile and shook his head. "I'd be a fool to believe it for a second."

The first night in the cottage she slept downstairs while he slept upstairs.  Sleep was a distant possibility, actually.  She lay there sweltering in the heat, listening to the insects screaming up a chorus outside.  Her body was throbbing with frustrated desire. Her brain was swirling with the words she'd been hearing and reading and writing, and unanswered questions beat in her ears with insistent, obsessive monotony.  She finally got to sleep around 5:30, as the cool of the night thinned out the breeze and her frantic thoughts wearied themselves into submission.  She did not hear him leave for his morning meetings.

Around noon the heat roused her out of her exhausted sleep and she lay in the guest room bed wondering what was going on and how she'd gotten so far away from anything she recognized.  She got up and splashed cold water on her face, looking at the dark circles under her eyes in the mirror.

She was making coffee in the kitchen when she heard the front door open.

"Hey there," she called out.  "You have any coffee around here?"

She heard footsteps on the old wooden hallway floors and before it really registered that they did not sound at all masculine, she felt herself tensing and heard the other woman's voice from the doorway.

"So, who are you?"

The voice was cold, but cultured.  Kaitlin noted, with a touch of interest, that the other woman didn't say "who the fuck are you," as she would've done, and then she turned to see her.

She was perfectly put together, cool like lime sherbet.  Her honey blond hair was up in a pony tail and her sleeveless blouse looked crisp and ironed despite the heat.  Her eyes were blue and cold and calmly assessed Kaitlin's t-shirt and bare feet.

She approached Katilin and held out her hand.  "I'm Jennifer."  Her hand was soft, well-manicured.  She smelled of homes with libraries, and sailboats, and comfort.

"I'm… hi.  I'm Kaitlin."

"Kaitlin. Huh.  Do you know Arthur?"

"Ah.  Yeah.  I was a student of his at Berkeley."

"California."  Kaitlin could see the woman thinking it over, wondering if she'd ever heard her name.  The fact that she hadn't put a hardness in Kaitlin's heart that nearly choked her.

“I'm out here for the workshops."

 "Oh.  Lovely.  It's nice to have you, Karen.  Make yourself at home."  She left the kitchen and went up the stairs.  Kaitlin's head roared with fury.  She doesn't even have a bag, she thought.  She fucking lives here.

 She packed her satchel and spent an hour on the pay phone in the carriage house, crying while on hold and hiding her red eyes behind her soggy hair every time a departing workshop participant walked by.  She finally managed to change her ticket and hung up the phone with a weary sense of accomplishment.  In twelve hours she would be home.

She walked to his office upstairs and saw that he was in conference.  She dropped her satchel on the creaky wooden floor and opened the door.  He was in mid-sentence, hand raised as he made a point.  He took one look at Kaitlin and excused himself.

It helped that he felt terrible.  It helped that he started to cry.  He wanted to tell her so badly, he said.  But he didn't know how.  And once he'd seen her, he'd known how much he'd missed her.  How much a part of him she was, the real part of him.  The part of him that hadn't lost in all the school politics, the wealth, the heady narcotic of the New York publishing world, rising golden to the south. 

"So what's the deal then?  You're not going to marry her, are you?"

He took a deep breath and looked away. 

"She's willing to support me in my work," he said finally, not meeting her eyes.  "You of all people should understand what that means."

 "The writing trumps love?"

 "The writing trumps everything, Kait."

 It helped that he sounded sincerely regretful.  But at the end of the day it was that one sentence that made her understand that it was over.  They were different in ways that could never be reconciled.

She paused as she started walking towards the parking lot, and looked out over the Commons green, stretching long and privileged out towards the place they called The End of the World.  This is not a place I understand, she thought.  As she turned to walk away the only thought she had left was a sad hope she could hitch a ride down to the bus station in time to catch the 4:40.

She followed his career for the next five or ten years, until it became clear that his devil's bargain was paying off.  The books he was writing were good, important books.  He was going deep and making a difference in the world of literature. 

And it wasn't just about the money.  She got used to seeing the pictures of them together in the press.  At their house in the Hamptons.  Sailing on their boat.  And over time she had to admit they looked sincerely happy.  His talk about it being only for the money, she eventually realized, was to save her from the whole truth.  Once she knew that in her heart, she quit looking for him in the book review pages, wished him well from afar, and closed that chapter in her life.

Until that day in New York last spring. 

She was at a booksigning for her second book, looked up, and saw him standing in front of her table, holding a copy for her to inscribe.

His eyes were the same, but the black hair was nearly fully silver, and he had filled out from the lanky pot-smoking bohemian she had known in Berkeley. 

She felt her face flush and held out her hand to take the book.  Holding the pen poised, she wondered what in the world she could possibly write that would come close to describing their story.

God, I hate inscriptions, she thought.  Her mind was a complete blank.  She could feel the people in line shifting impatiently.

"The name is Arthur," he said helpfully.  She laughed.

“I .. have no idea what to write," she looked up, finally. 

"I'll wait," he said, reaching for the book.  "I have time."

She found him waiting for her outside, gazing across the street at Lincoln Center.  It was a balmy night, the first smell of summer on the air, and people were out in throngs enjoying the promise of the warmth to come.  She hugged him briefly and noticed how he refrained from kissing her on the cheek.  Which is right, of course, she chided herself.  He's been married all these years.  I'm just an old friend from long ago.

"You haven't changed a bit," he said.  "Still beautiful."

He caught her eye and she looked away, suddenly wary.  "Let's walk," she said.

They headed downtown along Broadway, sliding into the river of people and letting the patterns of sidewalk and street punctuate their conversation.  They talked of his books and her first book, which she was gratified to learn he'd actually read.  Even though their writing was different, the process was similar and they talked about how it all worked together, weaving stories of other artists they knew,  music they admired, places they'd seen.  They had made their journeys separately, but always paid attention to the dance of letting the words come, always ready to capture them with a net of silken threads, seducing them into reality, harnessing the ethereal voices.

Even though he'd been a bestseller for a number of years, he'd turned out a novel a number of years ago that was dark and overworked, completely out of character.  It turned the critical tide against him, and he'd never been able to fully shake the curse.  Secretly, she had been a little gratified that everything had not been perfect for him, but she'd always wondered what had happened to make him change his magic formula.

"I'd had an affair," he said, matter of factly, when she asked.  They were walking through Times Square and the smell of sizzling sausages mixed with the cigarettes and taxi fumes on the crowded sidewalks.  "With a student."

"Of course."

"Of course.  But this one didn’t go right.  She dumped me for a younger guy and something inside me failed at that moment.  I was too old to be doing this shit anymore.  I was past my game.  And when that collapsed, so did the words.  They stopped coming out with the same kind of …authority."

"Hard to be an author without that."

"Yes, exactly.  I was just a middle aged guy with a rich wife who barely tolerated him and the entire thing fell apart on me."

"Did she know about the affair?"

"Affairs. Yes.  And they wounded her, at first.  Until she stopped caring.  That was worse.  We had a house in town, we had a house in the country.  I refused to grow up.  And then she was diagnosed with breast cancer.  And died about three years ago.  I've been a bit adrift ever since."

"I'm sorry," Kaitlin murmured.

"You, of all people, shouldn't be."

"I gave up on expecting anything from you a long time ago," she looked at him carefully, making sure he knew the care beneath the words.  "I mean that in a good way.  It was the expectations that were the problem."

"Expecting me to be honest and honorable?"

"Yeah. And… other things.  I wanted you to be something you weren't."

They held each other's gaze for a long moment, and then he turned away.

"Hey," she said, touching his arm.  "Let's go get some food, huh?"

They took the number 2 train downtown and got off at Fulton.  Emerging from underground, they turned east and found their way into Chinatown.

The conversation continued over dinner, erasing years and miles.     And the night was still warm as they emerged from the Chinese diner and talked their way up the blocks heading back uptown.  They stopped to sit in the empty chairs on the plaza outside Grand Central Station, then took a pitstop at the Waldorf-Astoria.  When she came out of the marble restrooms, ornate as San Simeon, he held out a rose for her, plucked from the massive arrangement in the foyer of the hotel.  She laughed.  "Always the grand gesture."

"I can put it back."

"Never," she said, and tucked it behind her ear.

They finally stopped outside her hotel.  She looked into his eyes and remembered their intensity with a sharp poignant stab in her belly, remembered how they would look at each other, laying spent on the bed, their breathing relaxed, the sweat cooling from their bodies.

"I know I wasn't who you wanted me to be, Kaitlin.," he said finally.  "But maybe things have changed.  I want you to consider having some expectations again about me."

"Oh?" she said.  Keep it light, Kaitlin, she cautioned herself.  You have no idea where he's going with this.

"I used to think the words trumped everything, but they don't trump this."  He touched the flower behind her ear. "They don't trump a flower in the hair of a beautiful woman."

She wanted to tell him he's still in love with romance, that he's still able to fall for the sweet moment, the subtle gesture, the seduction of resistance.   She wondered how long it would last, how long before a stray smile or a pair of sassy young eyes would capture his imagination again.

"Good night," he said suddenly and she had a sick feeling he had just read every one of her thoughts.  He turned away with a kind of sad resignation she'd never seen before.  She watched him for a second, weighing whether to call back to him.  She remembered that moment looking into his mirror they night they got together.  That sense of everything depending on what she was about to do.  She was turning into the revolving doors of the hotel when she heard him call.

"Kaitlin!"  He came running back, holding out her book.  "You forgot to sign this!"

She turned towards him and knew immediately what to write. "Give me a pen," she smiled up at him.  She held the book up against the wall of the hotel, steadying it with her left hand.

"After such knowledge, what forgiveness?" she wrote. "Here's to our next chapter… with the highest of expectations, K"

As she handed him the book, she touched his hand briefly, then bent down to kiss the back of it.  Felt the hair tickling the underside of her lip.  "Call me," she said as she turned and went into the hotel.

 The dog snuffles through the purple petals littering the sidewalk.  At the end of the day, she thinks, after packing off his 40 boxes of books and three boxes of clothes, it's him coming back to me.  Dante lunges forward suddenly, lurching after a squirrel running up a trunk.  She looks up and notices that this jacaranda is completely different from all the others.  Instead of a lacy bouquet of pure purple, this one has been infused with a bougainvillea, growing and snaking up inside it, exploding with a vibrant red all through the interior of the tree. 

The dog strains upwards, watching the squirrel disappear in the blooms.  The bougainvillea takes up most of the tree, twining inside of it, living within its boughs like an uninvited guest.   It's like a clear anatomical doll, she thinks, like one of those Body World figures.  The circulatory system courses red and exuberant underneath the fragile exterior.

The pairing is unspeakably beautiful, and yet she wonders what the bougainvillea is doing, beneath all its brilliance, to the hosting jacaranda.  The exquisite interdependency saps the tree's nourishment, the precarious beauty coming at a cost to both. 

She remembers the first time he kissed her in front of the window that rainy Berkeley night.  We will have to mutually survive our entanglement, she thinks.  He's inside me, in the form of scar tissue and tears and betrayal.  Together we are at once unique, exposed, and ultimately compromised. 

Perhaps we can escape the things that made us what we were, she thinks.  Perhaps we can adjust without the romantic upheavals of youth and grow gracefully together, in long silences and companionable sameness.  Beautiful and doomed.  The words float into her head.  Maybe not such a bad pairing, she thinks.  Maybe we have to embrace both in order to complete our stories.

She gives a tug on the leash and starts picking up her pace towards home.  Suddenly, she can't wait to see him.