The
Boy in the Tunnel
by
13.
You go to a friend’s party and she’s there, Joanie, and you kind of knew she might be there, but you also
kind of thought she would know you’d definitely be there and maybe she wouldn’t
want to come because she didn’t want to see you. But she’s there anyway, so
maybe she does want to see you (not likely) or she wants to show you that she’s
over you (possible) or she just didn’t even know or care that you would be
there, and seeing you is kind of like seeing someone she worked with for a few
months at some job she can barely remember, and you haven’t occupied iota one
of her mental energy since you broke up (we have a winner).
You’re nervous all day, going to the bathroom every
thirty minutes like you used to before your dates with her. You even take a
shower and change clothes after work, like you think something is going to
happen. You get to the party and you know Joanie’s
not there, because there’s no blonde head towering over everybody else. Your
friend Stephen introduces you to a friend from his MFA program, Shannon, and he
leaves you to talk, and though she’s not wearing a ring or with anybody you’re
pretty sure she’s engaged or at least has a serious live-in boyfriend because
you think you remember Stephen mentioning that, plus Shannon says something
like “we” have a two-bedroom, so now one of them is a study. You wonder when a
woman’s hands became the first things you focus on when starting a
conversation; you feel too young for that, still.
You talk to
Joanie is here.
She hasn’t seen you, or if she has, she hasn’t felt
the need to acknowledge your presence, and she’s not even looking at you,
because now you’re staring, literally staring, and
It doesn’t look like Joanie’s
here with anybody. When she broke up with you she said she was still hung up on
an ex-boyfriend, said they were this close to getting engaged actually, and you
were a great guy and she really liked hanging out with you but she didn’t want
to lead you on, didn’t want to enter into some sort of serious relationship
when she still had feelings for this other guy, and she wasn’t really ready to
be in a serious relationship with anybody anyway, so maybe we should just be
friends. Fine, you said, yeah, let’s be friends, because, okay, yeah, I’m
disappointed, but I like hanging out with you too, so yeah, I’ll give you a
call, we’ll go see a movie or something okay? okay.
That was eight months ago. You haven’t spoken to
her since.
You were pissed off at her for a while. You thought
she was lying—you knew she was lying. I mean, let’s face it, you’re not
perfect. Your relationship with her was not perfect. At the time you might have
thought it was some kind of storybook romance, but when you look back on it you
see all the little things about her that annoyed you—she never called you
unprompted, not once, every time she called it was in response to a voicemail
from you, and you would have killed for an unsolicited call from her—and all
the many things that you did wrong, all the reasons she could choose from to
justify dumping your sorry ass. She could have picked any of one of those
things instead of this ex-boyfriend bullshit. Like “I’m this
six-and-a-half-foot-tall goddess who writes what’s possibly the most beautiful
poetry you’ve ever read, whereas you’ve spent the entirety of our relationship
growing a beer belly and whining about your shitty job at that shitty firm
where the partners are all about to get disbarred, so I’m kicking your ass to
the curb.” You would’ve still been mad, sure, but you couldn’t exactly argue
with that. Or “You’re okay to talk to, usually, and I don’t mind watching a
movie in your presence, but if I have to have sex with you again I’m going to
throw up,” which is what “you’re a great guy but I don’t want to lead you on”
really means anyway. If she would have just told you how awful you were at
being a boyfriend, at just being a man in general, you would have been fine
with that.
Because saying “you’re a great guy” and “I like
hanging out with you” and “I’m not ready for a serious relationship right now”
is worse, it’s a thousand times worse, because it gives you hope. It makes you
think yeah, maybe we can still hang out, and I’ll win her over again, I mean,
she stuck with me all that time for a reason, right? And she’s not ready for a
serious relationship? Neither are you! Hell, you’re barely ready for serious
shoes. You just want to be with her and see how it goes, because you’re tired
of being lonely. You want someone to care about other than yourself.
You didn’t tell her any of that. You didn’t fight
the breakup. When you’re feeling really sorry for yourself, you hate yourself
for not fighting, because maybe that’s what she was looking for. Maybe she was
tired of your whole withdrawn unemotional brooding thing and she just wanted to
see some enthusiasm, so she floated out this whole tentative breakup thing (did
she ever actually say “I want to break up?” You’ll kill yourself trying to
remember) hoping you’d take the bait and actually display some goddamn passion
for once, but you failed. You just let it happen.
And then you hear from Stephen how this
ex-boyfriend, some basketball player or something, how he treated her like shit
basically for a year, and led her on like she’s so supposedly worried about
leading you on, and cheated on her and was just flat-out not discreet about
it—and so how are you supposed to take this? This is the guy she dumped you
for? She’d rather keep alive the option of getting back together with this guy,
who by all accounts is a major-league asshole, than stay with you, who at least
likes her? Likes being with her? Would do anything to
still be with her—except, apparently, tell her?
You’re still staring at Joanie
and either she really doesn’t know you’re here or she’s just amazingly good at
ignoring you. She’s moving towards the back now, to talk to someone else, and
Stephen is wading through the crowd to you.
“Did you see Joanie?” he
says. Yes, you say. “Is this weird for you?” he says.
“Weird” is just too small a word to apply to a
situation like this. You haven’t talked to her in eight months, right, and
obviously there’s a reason for that, and so you probably don’t really want to
talk to her tonight either, and just her being here is doing something odd to
your body, because you can’t stop staring at her and your heart is beating too
fast and your stomach is hollow—but you wanted to see her, you’ve wanted to see
her since she let you go, and you spent all day thinking about seeing her, how
you would act, what you would say. The only thing you want more than never to
see her again is to be with her forever. “Weird” can’t contain that.
“A little,” you say, “but it’s not your fault.”
“Should I say something to her? Like ask her if
she’s seen you?”
“That would be weird.”
You’ve thought about how this reunion should
happen, if it were to happen. You think maybe you’re actually glad to be rid of
her. You miss her at night, when there’s no one in bed beside you. You miss the
way your apartment felt empty, but pleasantly so, on Saturday and Sunday
mornings after she’d left, and you lounged around drinking orange and cranberry
juice mixed together (she liked screwdrivers and Cosmos, and you always had OJ
and cranberry juice in the fridge so if she asked for a drink you could make
it, but she never asked, and so you went through cartons of the stuff by
yourself, and you loved it but you can’t drink it now because the taste reminds
you of her). But you know it, you should admit it, you like being by yourself.
You’ve done it so long, you’re used to it now. You
liked those weekend mornings because she wasn’t there, so you could construct
some idealized version of the previous night, and fantasize about how perfect
your next encounter would be. But you know that when you were together, it was
awkward and you were terrified that she didn’t like you, so you never let
yourself show her how much you liked her. You liked the idea of being with her
more than the reality.
And that’s what you miss, really. You miss being
with someone. It doesn’t have to be Joanie. It could
be anyone. Your apartment is empty now, but there’s no potential in that
emptiness.
All day you’ve rehearsed what you would say to Joanie if she were here tonight—something like “I wanted to
call you but I didn’t think I could just be friends with you, and by the time I
felt like I could, it was just too late”—and even allowed yourself to think
maybe she’s been thinking about you too, and you’d both realize you hate being
apart and she’d invite you over, etc. You can tell now that’s not going to
happen. You can still see her head, floating like a blonde balloon over the
people around her, and you can see that if she’s ignoring you, she’s doing it
deliberately and with great effort. She doesn’t want to talk to you.
The thing is, though, she’s sort of set up camp
between you and the bathroom. And you have to go (four beers will do that to
you). If you go to the bathroom, she’ll see you and you’ll see her and then
you’ll have to say something. But you can’t talk to her in this state—you’re
not going to be doing the holding-it-in dance the first time you talk to her in
eight months—but there’s this horrible pressure on your bladder, and the more
you think about holding it the more you have to go. You have to do it. So you
scuttle (scuttle is definitely the right word, because isn’t that what
spineless bottom-dwelling sea creatures do?) to the bathroom, keeping your head
cocked down and to the left in a very serious “lost in my own world, engaged in
deep thought” kind of pose, and thank god there’s not a line for the bathroom,
so you get in there and do your thing and kind of steel yourself in the mirror.
You wonder where the expression “steel yourself”
comes from, and if it used to involve actual steel, like it referred to knights
getting armored up before a joust or something, and you think maybe some armor
is exactly what you need right about now. All you have is some stupid velvet
jacket you bought because some magazine told you it would look cool, but now
you see how ridiculous it is, how goddamn ridiculous you look, and no wonder—no
fucking wonder—she doesn’t want to talk to you. You look like Hugh Hefner’s
retarded nephew. You’re just playing at being a man. You do whatever a magazine
tells you to do, all your conversations revolve around things you’ve seen on
TV, you can’t build anything or fix anything, you’ve never even really—let’s be
honest—been in love, even with Kenya. (Maybe Joanie’s
still in touch with her?) You have all the emotional maturity of a Nine Inch
Nails album. You think you’re the first person who’s ever run into an ex at a
party? Do you think you’re special because of the way you feel right now? Do
you think you’re going through anything that a billion other people haven’t
gone through before? People do this all the time, but you—you think because she
slept with you for a few months, you had some sort of epic operatic romance,
and now how can you live, if living is without her? You’re like some traveler in
the desert who finally found a few drops of water but doesn’t even realize that
just over the dune people are literally drowning in it.
There’s nothing you can do in the bathroom to steel
yourself. You don’t even know how to steel yourself. You just wash your hands
and open the door and just at that moment she looks toward the bathroom and she
sees you, and she can’t pretend that she doesn’t see you because you see her,
and you can’t pretend that you don’t see her because, frankly, you’re staring
again. She waves, and it’s just heartbreaking. You wave back and force your way
through the crowd to her. She’s sitting on a futon in the corner of the room.
You lean on a bookcase for support. You fidget with the buttons on your
ridiculous jacket, because your hands are freaking out and don’t know what to
do around her. Her mouth is a toothy rictus of forced
amicability, and you feel your face assuming the same expression; you don’t
want it to, but you are no longer in control.
You’ve been
practicing this for eight months. You have so much you want to say.
“Hey,” you say.
“Hey.”
“Good to see you.”
“Yeah.”
“How have you
been?”
“Good. School, you
know. You? Everything the same?”
“Exactly
the same.”
“You’re still
working at that—“
“Yeah. I just know the feds are gonna
come busting in any day now.”
“Hey, it’s work.”
“Yeah.”
That’s it. That’s all either one of you has to say.
In twenty seconds everything you’ve dreamed about for eight months has just
disappeared, vaporized. Why even bother saying what you wanted to say? It’s
only going to make things worse. If you or she wanted to have that
conversation, you would have had it seven months and three weeks ago. You don’t
really want to get back together with her, do you? You’re starting to realize
what you’re sure she already knows: you lasted exactly as long as you should
have. Possibly longer.
Her eyes are dropping, scanning, but that same
horrible smile is plastered on her face. You have to get out of this. You have
to get away.
“Well it was good
to see you.”
“You
too.”
You point vaguely
toward the door, toward nobody. “He’s waiting for me to have a cigarette.”
“You started
smoking?”
“No,
yeah. He’s waiting.” You’re
already moving away. “Bye.”
“Bye.”
You turn your back to her and head for the kitchen.
You need a drink, something. You wish you were a knight and did have a big
steel sword, so you could stab yourself. That went all wrong. You should have
said what you wanted to say. There’s still a chance. There’s always a chance.
You look back at her. She’s already talking with someone else, and she’s
smiling, and her smile is real now. She doesn’t want you. She never did.
You find a beer in the fridge and swallow half of it.
Stephen finds you and starts talking, but you can’t hear anything he says.
You’re staring again. If you could only make her see.
Maybe she still has
This is never
going to end.
© 2005 Gardner Linn