At the Bottom of Everything(2)

So that spring I became a tutor, which seemed, along with being a nanny, to be one of the loopholes people my age had discovered in the professional world, a way of making a reasonable amount of money without working particularly hard or doing anything more soul-crushing than absolutely necessary. My mom and stepdad were appeased by the thought that I was just biding my time before going off to law school and becoming a public defender (which I still thought I might do), and I was appeased by the thought that I got to spend all my nights with Claire.

I’d met Claire when we were undergrads, but we’d only known each other well enough to smile when we shared an elevator or when we passed each other in the library. She was one of the girls, of whom there were dozens at Penn, who I’d see and think, In another life, maybe, yes. Red hair, pale skin, freckles that weren’t so much countable as a kind of wallpaper pattern. She was in things like improv troupes and student movies, on the fringes of the theater crowd but not quite so pretentious or pleased with herself as most of them seemed to be. She always had a boyfriend, usually another actor.

I first saw her in D.C. at a party in Adams Morgan just before I left the magazine. It’s always unsettling, seeing people you’ve almost but not quite forgotten about—not because they’ve changed (she’d hardly changed at all) but because they’ve gone on existing, finding jobs and making friends and moving apartments, all without the help of your thinking about them. So there she was, Claire Brier, standing in front of the little table that someone had set up with bottles of vodka and juice and red plastic cups. We hugged when we saw each other, despite never having hugged when we’d seen each other regularly. We carried our drinks over to the window, because even though it was April the heat was on in the apartment, and while we talked she fanned herself with her hand. She turned out to be living alone on U Street, working at a think tank, still doing improv on the weekends. She finished her vodka and poured herself another. She looked, I thought and think, like a girl who should live on a rocky beach in New England, drink enormous mugs of dark tea, dig up clams.

“You always seemed like such a dude,” she said after we’d been talking for a while. “I thought you were a Flip Cup kind of person.”

“I thought you were a vocal exercises kind of person.”

“Mi mi mi mi mi.”

We hugged again before she left, more confidently than before, and she told me that I should come to her next improv show.

I did, and that did it. There were, in those first weeks, afternoon coffees that ended with us on a bench near her office, her legs in my lap; there were mornings of having to unmake the bed to find our underwear; there was kissing good-bye on the Metro platform. By that first fall together we were spending almost every night at her apartment, reading next to each other in bed, having conversations between the shower and the bedroom.

“So I guess this is what it feels like,” she said once, when we were leaning forehead to forehead, the only two people on the long escalator in union   Station.

I wish I could take that year, like the salvageable bits of a meal dropped on the floor, and separate it from what happened next, which now seems minor but which at the time seemed baffling and tragic and unbelievable. What happened is: she broke up with me. “You had a bad breakup,” my mom said when I was over for dinner one night, in a summing-up-and-moving-on voice. (Are there good breakups? Are there breakups that leave both people feeling that they’ve just emerged not from a washing machine but from a bittersweet and not-too-long movie?)

There was the philosophical version, which would settle over me sometimes as I was falling asleep—I never entirely opened up to her and this little flaw, like a crack in a glass table, had no choice but to spread—and then there was the battle-flashback version that I spent most of my days trapped in. The fight outside her building, when someone leaned out from a high window and called out, “Get a divorce!” The bleary Sunday morning in the kitchen when she said, “I don’t know why we’re doing this anymore.” The night on the couch when we both cried while Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives played in the background.

In the middle of my tutoring sessions now, while the fifth grader I was supposed to be paying attention to burrowed through a sheet of word problems, I’d look up into the black living-room windows and think: Cold and alone. I don’t know where this phrase came from, or what cold had to do with anything, but the words were like a lyric that had eaten into my brainstem: cold and alone, waiting for the light to change; cold and alone, eating Chex for dinner; cold and alone, listening to my roommate and his girlfriend have sex at half past two in the morning.