The other life

Other things happened in his life, years later which were to have, if not as profound, nearly as important an effect on H’s life. Some of which I’ll briefly narrate here to allow me time to remember what happened to that plane and H and Lauren. I know that it was important, but I can’t recall in what way. Anyhow, read on.

               

She was getting into the car quickly, and then she was gone. He was walking down a street in the cold, self-consciously blowing out puffs of what looked like smoke, except no one was allowed to smoke anymore, so this was about as close as you could get, walking down the street, lined by parked cars, watching the cold.

                She probably wasn’t coming back. Or if she did come back, it would only be for a short while, just long enough to figure out that she hadn’t really intended to come back, but had somehow talked herself into coming back, if only to confirm that she really never should have come back. It was the type of girl that she was, or had been, or whatever someone becomes when they go from being a central figure in your life to someone on the periphery. The representation was probably only calculable, or definable in a mathematical sense. There really was no proper way of describing it using the faculties of speech, which were limited. It was impossible to get it straight: the relationship you might have with a person who you could see two years later walking down the street and either cross the street to avoid or perhaps, if they came up on you unawares, engage in conversation with and maybe end up sleeping with on that same night, with the only real contingency being whether you saw them from far enough away or not. There really wasn’t a good term for it.

                She’d been interesting, smarter than him. She was studying advanced linguistics and was fluent in French and Portuguese. Many nights, after he’d made some slapdash dinner, they’d sit around the living room, and he’d watch her work for a while before interrupting with questions. He was bored easily and liked to be paid attention to. She was interesting, and he wanted her to expend all of that massive mental energy on him, which he knew was selfish, which is why he made himself wait for sometimes up to an hour before he interrupted her with a joke, or a story from work, or a question about how to say something in French. Like most Americans he loved how French sounded. He would have her explain the nuanced meaning of certain words, the French sounds brushed past his mind like snowflakes past a window. He liked to watch her mind at work, bending round things in its own peculiar way—the way she had of staring just above his head when she was thinking of something, but really, her attention was elsewhere, turned inward, scanning that beautiful mind of hers.

                It’s a wonder now looking back at a collection of evenings tossed together in his mind like a pile of photos on the floor, that they were ever together at all. She could sit and discuss French existentialist thought in detail, while deconstructing the very notion of the language that they were using to explore thought, and the best he could muster up were a few facts he’d gleaned from a book he’d once read about Rome. The problem was that she did things thoroughly, completely, she beat dead horses and then dug them up later in the week to beat them up some more, while he came upon a horse with a stone caught in its hoof and called it dog food. He read books quickly. He had conversations quickly. Everything he did was based on the idea that he could be doing something else.