Page 19 of After His Eulogy
I look at him. I look at his face for a long time. He’s standing on the landing in his coat with his bag over his shoulder, and he has waited on a landing for me — that is a thing he’s doing. He came out of his office at the right time to be on the stairs when I came down. I didn’t register this until just now. He waited. He’s been figuring out my schedule — from the proseminar, from my office hours which he could have looked up, from my methods class which he must have asked about. He has timed himself to be on the stairs at the right minute. He’s on the landing in his coat with his bag, and he’s asking me why I do not come to the bench.
“Because if I keep coming,” I say, “we are going to do this.”
“Do what.”
“This.”
“What is this, Reed.”
“Griffin.”
“I want you to say it.”
I do not say it. I don’t say it because I don’t have a word for it. The word is going to be the wrong word. I don’t know whatthisis. This is the proseminar. This is the bench. This is the toothpaste and the article about Hartman and the brush of his coat against mine in a library stack. This is the question. This is everything I do not have a word for.
“You came once,” he says.
“Yes.”
“And then you decided you could not come again.”
“Yes.”
“Because you decided what would happen if you kept coming.”
“Yes.”
“What did you decide would happen.”
“Griffin.”
“What.”
“Don’t.”
“What did you decide would happen, Reed.”
I look at him. I look at his face and his face is doing a thing it has not done since the sidewalk outside Hartwell. The face is moving. The eyes are doing the work but the face is moving with them now. His mouth tightens. His jaw works. He’s not letting it be still. He’s making me see it. That’s on purpose too.
“I have to go,” I say.
“Okay.”
“I have to go, Griffin.”
“Okay.”
He does not move. I do not move. The stairwell is very quiet. There’s a fluorescent light above us that’s doing the buzzing thing fluorescent lights do, low, on the edge of being a sound. Somewhere below us a door opens and closes. Footsteps come up the lower stairs. They turn into the first-floor hallway. The door closes again. We are alone in the stairwell. I’m two feet from him. The bag on his shoulder is between us. His coat is open at the collar and I can see the edge of a sweater I do not know. I take a step. I do not decide to. The step happens. I take a step and I am closer to him and his face has not moved. I take another step. I’m close enough to him now that I can see his eyes are not blue. His eyes have never been blue. His eyes have been this color the entire time. I have been telling myself for two years that I remembered the color and I had remembered it slightly wrong. Now I’m close enough to see I had not remembered itwrong. His eyes are exactly what they have always been. That is somehow worse.
I kiss him. I kiss him on the second-floor landing of Carrigan at four-thirty on a Friday in mid-November. The mouth I have not kissed in more than two years. His mouth is open. My tongue finds the chip at the corner of his front tooth, the small one, the one from when he fell off his bike at eleven, the one I have known by feel for six years. Finding it is like being thrown back into a body that was mine and is mine again. His mouth kisses me back. His hand comes up and is on the back of my neck. The hand from the bench. The hand on the back of the chair on Friday a month ago. I am kissing him and he is kissing me and we are on a landing in a building and a fluorescent light is buzzing above us. He pulls back. Not far, three inches, maybe four. His hand stays on the back of my neck. He looks at me. His face is moving and he doesn’t know what to do with it. I look at his face. I thinkI have just done a very bad thing and I cannot take it back.I thinkI have wanted to do that thing for more than two years.
“I’m sorry,” I say.
“Don’t.”
“I…“
“Don’t say sorry. I told you. Pick a different word.”
