I’m not sure there’s any emotion worse for you than jealousy. Anger, sadness, pity—even at their worst, they have a kind of purity to them: you’re suffering but you’re righteous, the world is failing to cooperate. But jealousy, oh, what a shameful and wincing performance. You’re not just suffering; you’re afraid of being exposed for your suffering. On the days that I sat there watching him, pretending to work, I wouldn’t have been any more ashamed if I’d been spying for North Korea.
I never told Anna I’d gone to see him, though I did, via some of the most faux-casual, unconvincing conversational maneuvers I’d ever made use of, try to get her to tell me more about why they’d broken up. And I never spoke a word to him, except for once when he came over to ask if I was using the other chair at my table (I grunted something that we both understood to mean, No, take it, leave me alone).
Instead I went on seeing her at night, always denying that there was anything the matter, and I went on fixating on him, imagining the noises she made under him, thinking of the things she must have said to him, if she thought that my arms were strong. It seemed to me that for the first few months of our relationship (when had I started thinking of this as a relationship?) I’d somehow missed the most basic fact of all: I was just a placeholder, something to keep her occupied between the men she actually wanted to be with. The truth of it seemed mathematical and terrible. I could only love her so long as I could be tormented by her; and the more I was tormented, the more convinced I became that my love, which had started out as an absurdity, was the genuine article.
There is, I’ve noticed, a direct relationship between the handle I have on my life at any given moment and the handle I have on my email. On the laptop glowing in front of me while I strained to see Max’s tattoos, my emails were multiplying like termites.
Hi sweetie— Quick question about setting up the new speakers in the living room. Probably easier to show you in person. Any night this week you might be able to stop by?
Hi Adam, I got your name from David Shapiro, who mentioned that you were potentially interested in UVA. I graduated last spring and now I’m clerking for a 2nd district judge and living pretty close to you in D.C. (I think). No pressure, but if you ever want to get together and chat about the pros and cons of your different options …
And from Thomas’s mom:
Dear Adam, I just thought I’d try writing to you again, since we ran into your mother the other day and heard all about what you’re up to. It sounds as if you’re doing just as wonderfully as you deserve. I’m sure your mother mentioned it, but Thomas continues to travel and continues to drive Richard and me up the wall with worry. I know you’re very busy, but we’d love to catch up at some point, if you ever find yourself with a free afternoon.
Responding to Sally—or even responding to one of the messages not from Sally—would have been as far beyond me as doing a cartwheel across the room.
Instead, when I did look at the computer, it was either to reread months-old emails from Claire (“dinner at 7:30 or 8?” “my boss is actually I think maybe mentally handicapped”) or to do research into questions like: What’s the name of that actor with the cleft palate?
Or, Is Rosetta Stone really supposed to be good for learning Mandarin?
Or, Are there any good places for a solo traveler in South Dakota?
Or, How do you know if someone’s going to break up with you?
Or, How do you work out your forearms?
Or, and this one I could never actually formulate into a searchable question, so instead the thought just worked its way through me like the caffeine from all of those free refills of coffee, Does it feel this way for everyone else?
When friendships start to die, there’s a temptation, the same way there is with crops or civilizations, to appease the gods with sacrifices. That’s sometimes how I think about what happened—Mira was the unlucky person on the rim of the volcano at the moment when Thomas and I needed a way to make our bad luck stop.
But that makes it sound deliberate, when of course deliberate is the one thing it wasn’t. There’s a part of me, though, the part that takes over when I’m falling asleep, say, or waiting for a plane to take off with my forehead against the window, where the distinction between deliberate and accidental seems about as formidable as rice paper. Anyway:
Our friendship, by the time we were a year into high school, was in definite trouble. Some of this may have had to do with my having made the baseball team, which had pulled me off toward upperclassmen, guys more like my half brother than like Thomas, who took me to parties and got me drunk and turned me, for a few hours a week at least, into exactly the sort of person Thomas couldn’t stand. And some of this, or maybe just another way of looking at the same part of it, was that Thomas had started to become puritanical. It was one thing to spend a Friday night reading about the history of railroads when you were in eighth grade and the only wildness you were missing out on had to do with who’d kissed who at a dance; it took a much stranger, harder personality to keep on claiming that your greatest pleasure in life was talking philosophy with your dad when suddenly there were actual pleasures to be had: girls willing to do the kinds of things that until then we’d only been able to see between static bands on channel 153; alcohol, the getting and consuming (and occasional vomiting) of which was now as important a pathway in most of our lives as the getting and consuming of sunlight in the life of a plant.