“What?”
“He said, ‘Because you’re having dinner with me.’ And that was the night I started dating Professor Brown.”
My jaw dropped.
Siobhan laughed, those low, dulcet tones dropping into the night like orchid petals. She looked me right in the eyes. “Perhaps I understand more than you think.”
Formula for honesty: alcohol + loneliness.
“How long were you with him?” I said.
“Five years.”
“How old was he?”
“Forty-one to my twenty.”
My eyebrows rose. “How was it, being together?”
Siobhan tilted her head up again, remembering. “Exquisite,” she said in a throaty voice, and I shivered. “Not perfect, but something that could only happen once in a life. Most people fumble through young adulthood with idiots of equal age and naivete. Youth wasted reinventing the wheel. Being with an older man changed all of that. It shaped me in many, many ways.”
“Good ways?”
Her eyes fixed on me again. “Some good. Some not. There are times when I wonder who I would’ve been if I had gone out with that boy instead. If I had discovered life through trial and error, rather than through Jack.”
“But you’re amazing,” I said, earnest with rum and adoration. “You’re so smart and wise and beautiful. You’re perfect.”
Siobhan gave me a funny look. Then she leaned in and kissed my cheek, her lips warm and dry.
“You are a dear thing,” she said. “You deserve happiness.”
I stayed there for a while after she went inside, my palm pressed to my cheek where she’d kissed me, trying to hold in the feeling of being loved.
We were in St. Louis for the first snow.
We walked through the white fleece lying over downtown, Evan in a wool coat, me in fur boots and knit stockings and a skirt and parka, like a little girl. I felt like a little girl, laughing at the snowflakes colliding gently with my face. They collected in my eyelashes and when I looked at Evan he said, “You’ve got stars in your eyes,” and I kissed him, his lips warm and sweet in the cold. Our breath wrapped around us in scarves of steam. On the smooth white cloth spread before us, colored lights danced in soft, diaphanous waves, like auroras.
I refused to let myself worry about expensive cars pulling up, men with guns. My heart was too full of beauty to admit fear.
The loft was freezing in winter, so we curled up on the couch with blankets and mugs of peppermint tea. My nose was always cold, and Evan kept kissing it. He’d let his beard grow out a little and I ran my fingers over the bristles, blond and auburn and a few isolated silvers.
“Almost Christmas break,” I said.
We hadn’t decided where to go yet. Chicago, maybe. I’d never been up there. All that really mattered was we’d have two solid weeks together, no school, no sad Sunday goodbyes. It’d be like living together. I was nervous, even after all of this. The removal of all boundaries, all distractions, leaving us with nothing but each other—scary. What kind of people would we be without secrecy and desperation?
“I want to show you something,” Evan said.
I watched him fetch his laptop. The snow falling outside cast shadows over us like rain, and I thought of the raindrops running down the windows of his car a million years ago. Everything had a gunmetal tint, the shadows cool and misty, drifting, filling the loft like a sunken ship. All day I’d had Lana del Rey’s “Young and Beautiful” in my head, and now I heard it again and something hot twisted in my throat.
Evan sat beside me and ran a hand over my knee. “I haven’t shown anyone this in a long time. It’s old, and it’s not who I am anymore, but I want you to see it because it was part of me, once.”
He played a video.
There he was, a twenty-something college guy, baby-faced, higher-pitched, skinnier. His acting demo reel. The clips were mostly from student films, overly Serious and Meaningful, everyone trying too hard to Act except for him. He didn’t look like he was acting at all. He looked like a sad, lost boy who’d wandered into a shot and knew it was all fake and absurd and embraced it with fatalistic humor. The camera focused magnetically on his eyes, his mouth, the way he conveyed so much in the subtle flicker and shift of a lip, an eyebrow. But the thing that struck me most was how absolutely alone he looked. Even in a group of people, he was apart from them. He’d smile, but his eyes would go elsewhere, to some place inside himself.
I looked up from his laptop.
“Did that lower your opinion of me?” he said.
I shook my head.
“Is it weird seeing me when I was your age?”
“A little.” Would I be so different in ten years? “Evan, you are actually good. Seriously good. Why did you stop?”
He stared off into space. The light waned, the snowfall turning opaque, a muslin sheet flecked with stars.
“It didn’t make me happy,” he said.
“That’s it?”
“That’s everything.”
I put my hand on his wrist, feeling the broad bones, the veins spiraling up his arm. Startling, how real he was. “What makes you happy?”
I wasn’t fishing for compliments. I really wanted to know. But he touched my face and I knew what he was going to say, and suddenly I didn’t want him to say it. I averted my eyes.
“I don’t get you sometimes,” I said.
“What don’t you get?”
“Why me?”
I thought of Siobhan and her professor and all the men who’d been drawn to me, who I’d used and discarded and never felt a twinge of regret over. What did they see in us? Did they see us as girls they could teach about all the things they couldn’t share in their classes or jobs or wherever? Did they just see pretty faces, smooth young bodies? Were they less intimidated because we were young and dumb and not yet hardened by disappointment? Maybe it was more about themselves, about getting a second chance to be the men they hadn’t been when they were young. It hurt when I thought about that. That I might merely be a lesson for Evan to learn something about himself. That I might just be schooling the teacher.
“It could have been anyone,” I said. “All the women who look at you when we go out. Ms. Bisette at school. God, even Hiyam. Why me?”
He stared at the coffee table, the reflection of snow like confectioner’s sugar sifting down.
“It couldn’t have been anyone,” he said softly. “For a long time before I met you, I felt my life was this kind of test. I was in deep, cold water, swimming for shore, and my arms were getting tired, my skin numb. On the shore was everything I thought I wanted: a better job, a house, a family.” He swallowed, his throat cording with tension. “But I could barely keep my head above water. Eventually I stopped seeing the shore. Only cold dark blue, in all directions. I know it’s cliché, but when I met you, my eyes opened. I looked around, and realized I could stand up whenever I wanted. There was firm ground under my feet. That shore in the distance was an illusion. I was already somewhere beautiful.”
I stared at him, my lungs not seeming to be doing anything vital to my survival.
“You are so alive, Maise. You are so here, so present in the moment. You’ve taught me that happiness is possible now, not in some distant future. You’ll scale a mountain without a second thought, face your fears, throw yourself into danger, and you’re not reckless, but bold, proud. You have a lion’s heart. You aren’t afraid to live.”
I was shivering, even under the blanket. Wesley had called it self-destructive. Evan understood. It wasn’t about flirting with death, like Mom. It was about wanting to live all the way to the seams of life.
But how he could feel that way, when he’d made me feel that way? How could two zombies bring each other to life? I wasn’t brave before I met him, and I definitely wasn’t happy. Cockiness and not caring aren’t boldness or pride—they’re coping mechanisms. When you’re a wounded animal in the company of jackals, you can either cower and submit, or feign strength. Wear your blood like a red badge of courage. That’s all I was doing.
“Let’s watch something,” I said finally.
Evan glanced at me.
“Show me Casablanca.”
He was quiet as he turned on the TV. A nervous energy buzzed between us, a revelation building up. It hummed in my marrow, the roots of my teeth, electric and tense, and I knew something was coming, something that would change me.
He sat beside me on the couch and seemed about to speak. Then he hit play.
Bandshell orchestra blares. Credits come up over a map of Africa. The countries are bigger and simpler, before all our modern wars and genocides. It’s a complicated story: two refugees from Nazi Germany are trying to book passage to Lisbon via Casablanca, which is part of unoccupied France. The Nazis want to prevent resistance leader Victor Laszlo and his wife, Ilsa, from leaving. At the heart of Casablanca is Rick’s Café, where Rick himself makes money off desperate refugees and corrupt authorities alike, playing everyone. Rick’s friend scores some priceless letters of transit that will get anyone out of Casablanca, no questions asked. Even a resistance leader wanted by the Nazis. The friend entrusts the letters with Rick and is then assassinated by the cops, which sends Laszlo and Ilsa looking for help from Rick, now the only guy who can get them out of the country. Of course, it turns out that Rick knows Ilsa. They were lovers in Paris. She left him on a train platform with a broken heart and a goodbye letter, its ink bleeding in the rain.
I was intrigued at first, and as the story went on I got totally caught up in it, grabbing Evan’s arm at tense moments, laughing at the whip-smart dialogue, becoming completely absorbed against all of my twenty-first century ironic instincts. I disdained the moral simplicity of old movies, the clear-cut villainy and heroics. But this movie was all about gray areas and moral ambiguity. Rick helped people, but he profited from their desperation, too. Ilsa tried to use Rick’s love to save herself and her husband. The French police captain took advantage of powerless girls, yet let Rick shepherd them to freedom. There was good and evil in everyone.
When Rick remembered his days with Ilsa in Paris, that humming in me became keening, sharp and poignant. I couldn’t help seeing the parallels. A forbidden love blossoming while dark forces surrounded them. The dread of the encroaching end. I knew what was coming, the inevitable parting—the repercussions of that parting had been rippling through cinema for decades. But when it happened on the runway at night, Ilsa getting into that plane with Laszlo as Rick stayed behind, I started to cry. Jesus Christ, I had not cried at a movie since I was a kid. But I couldn’t stop.
Evan turned the TV off. “Are you okay?”
“No,” I said, laughing at myself. “I don’t know what’s wrong with me.”
I couldn’t see him too clearly, but his eyes shone in the snow-shrouded gloom, and his voice was thick. “What are you feeling?”
“I don’t know.” I cleared my throat. “Why didn’t he ask her to stay? He still loved her.”