Page 14 of After His Eulogy
“Yeah.”
“Mint.”
“Yeah.”
“Same as before.”
“Yeah.”
He looks at me. He looks at me for a long second. His face has done this thing in the last three days where it looks like a face that has been turned a quarter degree. Like the angle of it relative to the rest of him has changed by something subtle.The change is doing something to me. I cannot place what. I am looking at him. I am holding a tube of toothpaste. I am at a pharmacy.
“How are you,” I say.
I say it because I cannot stand the silence. I say it because I am the one who showed up at his apartment and said almost nothing. I say it becausehow are youis the kind of sentence a person can say to another person in a pharmacy on a Wednesday.How are youis the smallest possible version of asking. He looks at me.
“I’m at a pharmacy,” he says. “On a Wednesday. With a basket. Buying tissues.”
“Right.”
“That’s how I am.”
“Okay.”
“How are you, Reed.”
He says my name like it’s a word he is testing. He has not said it before. He did not say it on the sidewalk, and he did not say it in his apartment on Friday. He called meyou. I noticed that, the whole conversation,you. He is saying it now. He’s doing it on purpose. He has decided to pick the name up. It’s mine. It’s what I am called. The other name, the full one, the paperwork, the things he does not know, is its own thing. Reed is what I gave him on the sidewalk. He’s saying it now.
“I’m okay,” I say.
“Okay.”
“I’m… getting through it.”
“Through what.”
“Griffin.”
“Through what, Reed.”
I look at him. I do not have an answer that is not the answer I cannot give.
“I have to go,” I say.
“Okay.”
I move to walk past him. He does not move out of the way. He does not block me. He just does not move. I have to turn slightly to get around him. As I do, my coat sleeve brushes his sleeve. The brush is something I do not know how to describe. It’s a coat against a coat. It is fabric. There is no skin in it. I feel it for the rest of the day. I get to the register. I pay for the toothpaste. I do not turn around. I walk out of the pharmacy and I walk down Mason and I do not look back. I walk for fifteen minutes before I realize I am still holding the bag at my side instead of putting it in my pocket. I look down at the bag. The toothpaste is in it. I thinkI know what toothpaste he uses. I have known what toothpaste he uses for six years. I knew it before I left. I know it now. The kind, the brand, the variant, the size of the tube he buys, the way he pinches the bottom of the tube when it’s almost empty rather than rolling it. Rolling it is, in his words, a thing for people who do not want a clean countertop. I know what aisle of which pharmacy he goes to.
I know what toothpaste he uses, and I just had to confirm it to him, in an aisle, with a tube in my hand. I walk home. I sit on the couch. I do not call Mendez. The toothpaste is in the bag on the couch next to me. I do not move it. I sit there with the bag on the couch and I look at the bag and I thinkCrest. Mint. The same one.I thinkI just had to confirm it.I thinkGriffin knows what toothpaste I use too.The thought arrives clean. He knows. Of course he knows. He has known for six years, and he has been sitting with knowing for two more years on top of those. He’s the one who said Crest before I said anything. He knew before I had to confirm. We are walking around in this town carrying the same information about each other. I sit on the couch with the toothpaste in the bag, and I do not call Mendez.
TWELVE
REECE
I see him in the doorway of the proseminar at four-fifty-seven on Tuesday and I thinkof course. I should have known. I did know. I knew the second the registrar’s email came out at the end of last week — the one that said the proseminar I had registered for in September was being merged with another section because of low enrollment. We would all be folded into the Tuesday-Thursday five-o’clock with Dr. Kalmann in Carrigan 304. I knew it then. I knew it in the way you know a thing without letting yourself say it. I knew it the way I have known, for years, what toothpaste he uses. I knew it and I did not call Mendez. I did not drop the seminar or switch my registration. I did not do the obvious thing, which would have been any of those. Now it’s four-fifty-seven on a Tuesday and I am in Carrigan 304, sitting in the third seat from the door against the wall, and Griffin is standing in the doorway with a coffee in his hand. He stops. He stops the way you stop when something you have been afraid of for a long time has finally happened. I have seen him do this once before. I have done it once before, on a sidewalk, with him in front of me. Today I’m the one who has been afraid. The fear isnot new. The fear is the fear of being in a room with him for two hours twice a week, and my body knew it before my brain did.
He sees me. He looks at me for one second and his face goes still. It does not move. It just registers. Everything happens behind the eyes and the rest of him stays still. I’m getting better at reading the thing. I have had a week to read the thing. It’s not no-reaction. It’s the controlled version of a very specific reaction. It’s the look of someone who has just registered the situation and is choosing what to do with it. He chooses to come in. He comes in. He walks the length of the room. There is one open seat. There is one open seat in the room, and it’s across the table from me, on the far side. We are around a seminar table that seats fourteen and the seat across from me is the seat he is going to take. I watch him register this. I watch him decide. I watch him come around the table, the long way, not going past the back of my chair. He sits down across from me. He puts his coffee on the table. He does not look at me.
He sets the coffee. He gets out his notebook. He gets out his pen. He puts both at exactly ninety degrees to the edge of the table. He does not look up.
