Page 13 of After His Eulogy
The hand on the chair tightens. His voice does the thing it did on the sidewalk, the thing where it stops being level. I see him notice it and pull it back. The pulling back is somehow worse than the rise.
“Two years. Two years. Of nothing. Of me thinking… of me…“
He stops. He stops the way he stopped on the sidewalk, the way he closes his mouth when his voice has done something he didn’t authorize. I watch him do it. I watch him reset.
“I’m sorry,” I say.
“Don’t.”
“Griffin.”
“Don’t say that. Don’t say sorry. That isn’t… no. Not that word. Pick a different one.”
I do not have a different one. I sit on his couch in his apartment and I look at his hand on the chair and I do not have a different word. He is waiting for one. The silence is going on. I can feel him filing it. He’s going to remember, later, exactly what I said. He’s going to remember exactly what I did not say. He has not used my name once. I realize it now, and I realize I’ve known it the whole conversation. He has called meyou. He has not said Reed. He has not said Reece. He’s not using a name. I open my mouth. I close it. I do not say anything.
TEN
GRIFFIN
He leaves at ten-past-eleven. He leaves and the door closes behind him. I lock it without thinking. I stand in the entryway for a minute with my hand on the deadbolt and I do not move. I don’t know what to do with my body. My body has been standing at the desk with my hand on the back of the chair for an hour and a half. The hand is still doing the thing, the white-knuckle thing. The hand has been doing it because nothing else in me was allowed to. If the hand had not done it, the rest of me would have. The rest of me doing it would have looked like something I would not have wanted to see myself do. I sit down at the desk. I sit down and I look at the chair where my hand has been. It’s the chair I sit at to work. There’s a sweatshirt on the back of it that I had not been wearing tonight because I had wanted my arms to be free for whatever they were going to do. The sweatshirt has been there for the whole conversation. I had moved it before he came over. I had moved it out of my way. I had been planning, in my body, before I had been planning in my head.
I look at the couch where he was sitting. There’s no shape of him on the couch. There is no smell yet. He was here for an hour and a half and he has not left a mark, which is the thing he isgood at. He’s someone who can sit in a room for an hour and a half and leave it untouched. That had been one of the things I had loved about him. Past tense. I do not correct it. I don’t know yet whether the correction is the truth.
I think aboutI had no choice. I think aboutI cannot tell you why. I think about the way his face went still when I saidyou can’t tell me why you let me bury you. The way the face stopped. The way the eyes went somewhere. The way nothing in him moved. I have always been good at reading his face. I read it tonight. The face was the look of someone who has been afraid of a thing for a long time and is now inside the thing. It is exactly as bad as he had been afraid it would be. I know this because I have known him. I know what his face does when he is afraid. I know what his face does when he is performing being afraid. Tonight was the first one. He was telling the truth. As much truth as he had decided to give me. There was more. I sit with that. I don’t make the decision quickly just because making it would end the discomfort. I can sit with a thing.
I do not want to do it again. That’s the sentence that arrives. I do not want to do it again. NotI want him, which is its own thing. NotI forgive him, which I do not. NotI love him. I do not get to know yet whether I love him. That question is a different question and it’s on a shelf I am not reaching. I do not want to do it again. I do not want to be the version of me buried a man and then went to graduate school and then sat at this desk for the rest of his life having done that. I do not want to be the version of me who knew, for a few weeks in October, that the man was alive, and chose not to find out the rest of why. The version of me who chooses not to find out is the same version as the one I have been being. I’m not going to be that version anymore. I do not say it out loud. I do not write it down. I think it once, at the desk, with my hand still doing its thing on the desk in front of me. I let it be the thing I have decided. What I have decided issmall. I have decided I am going to keep being in the room with him. I will let the conversations happen. I will ask the questions he does not want me to ask. I will be patient, patient in the way I am, and let the rest of the truth come out by the only method that will work, which is the method of not-leaving.
I am not going to leave. I get up. I go to the kitchen. I drink a glass of water. I stand at the sink with the glass and I look at the small coffee pot. The small coffee pot. It has been the small coffee pot for fifteen months. Tonight I look at it and I thinkhe saw it. He saw the small coffee pot. He’ll remember it.I rinse the glass. I put it on the rack next to the cup from the morning. I look at the two of them, side by side. I think about the ending of yesterday, when there had been two cups in the sink for the first time in a long time. I had not known why I noticed. Today there are two on the rack, the morning cup and the water glass. Tonight I notice for a different reason. There has been a man in my apartment. There is going to be a man in my apartment again. He’s going to come back. I’m going to ask him to come back. He’s going to come. We’re going to do this slowly. We’re going to keep going. I’m going to find out the rest.
I turn off the kitchen light. I go to bed. I do not sleep for a long time.
ELEVEN
REECE
I run into him on a Wednesday at the pharmacy on Mason Street. I’m not going to the pharmacy on Mason Street. I’m going to the pharmacy on Elm. I have been going to the pharmacy on Elm because the pharmacy on Mason is closer to his apartment. I have been re-routing my life in two-block detours since the conversation in his apartment on Friday night. I have done this without admitting to myself that I am doing this. The pharmacy on Elm is out of toothpaste. The kind I use. The brand. All four of the variants. I know this because I checked, twice, standing in front of the shelf, and the shelf was empty. I stood there for a minute longer than I should have. Then I left and walked the four blocks to Mason because I needed toothpaste and I needed it today. This is the kind of decision that’s going to keep happening to me. I’m in the toothpaste aisle. I pick up a tube of the kind I use. I hold it. I turn to walk to the register. He’s at the end of the aisle.
He has a basket. The basket has things in it: contact lens solution, a roll of paper towels, a box of tissues. He’s reading the back of a bottle of something. He’s wearing the same coat he was wearing on Friday. He has not seen me. I do not move. I shouldmove. The decision is: do I make it worse by leaving without him seeing me, or do I make it worse by being seen, or do I make it the same amount of bad by saying something first. I run through it in two seconds. I decide nothing. My body decides for me. My body stays where it is. I am standing at the toothpaste shelf with a tube of toothpaste in my hand. I am watching him read the back of a bottle of something at the end of the aisle. He looks up. He sees me. His face does not move. His face goes still the way it did on the sidewalk, where it doesn’t move, where it just registers, where his eyes give him away before any other part of him can.
“Hi,” he says.
“Hi.”
“You shop here.”
“I, sometimes. I, the other one was out.”
“Out of what.”
“Toothpaste.”
He looks at the toothpaste in my hand. He looks at it for a second too long. His face moves, this time, just a flicker at the corner of his mouth. I don’t know what it means and I don’t get to ask.
“Crest,” he says.
“Yeah.”
“You still use the same one.”
