Page 17 of After His Eulogy
“Okay.”
“There’s a list. Of places. The program, there’s a list of places they put people. This was on the list. I picked from the list. You weren’t a factor.”
He still is not turning around.
“It would have been a factor,” I say, and I stop, and I thinkdon’t, and I keep going. “If I had known. It would have been the only factor. I would have asked them to put me anywhere else.”
“Okay.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Don’t.”
“Right. Sorry.”
“That’s two.”
“What.”
“That’s two times you’ve said sorry. I told you to pick a different word.”
“Right.”
He turns around. He turns around and he looks at me and his face is closed off in the way it has been for weeks, the way I cannot read. His eyes do the work. He looks at me and he says, “What’s your last name now.”
“What.”
“Your last name. The new one. What is it.”
“I…“
“You don’t have to tell me.”
“I can’t tell you.”
“Okay.”
“I can’t, Griffin.”
“I said okay.”
He’s looking at me. He has the book in his hand. The book is between us because his hand is between us. The book has a green cover that is starting to fade and the title is in a font from the seventies. I’m looking at the book because I cannot look at his face.
“Okay,” he says again, quieter. “I’m going to go work somewhere else. Before this gets worse.”
“Okay.”
He moves past me. He moves past me and his coat brushes my coat and the brush is the same as the brush in the pharmacy. He is past. He is walking out of the row. I am standing in the row with the books that I came for and I have not actually picked one up. He gets to the end of the row. He stops. He stands at the end of the row with his back to me and he says, without turning, “There’s a bench by the river. Behind the science building. I sit there sometimes. After class.”
He says it to the air. He does not wait for me to respond. He walks out of the row and he is gone. I stand in the stack for a long time. I stand there until my legs start to ache. I realize I have been standing in one position for I do not know how long. The light is different. The window at the end of the row is going orange the way it does in the late afternoon. I am in a library and I am alone in a stack and Griffin has just told me where he sits after class. I do not go to the bench. That’s what I tell myself standing in the stack. The bench is a piece of information he gave me, and that is all it is. I go back to my carrel. I put my book in my bag. I leave the library. I walk home the way I walk home. I get to my building. I unlock the door. I go up the stairs. I get to my apartment. I stand in the kitchen. I do not sit down.
I think about the bench. I think about it for a long time. I don’t go. Not that night. Not the next day. Not Friday after the proseminar — which I sit through, during which Griffin and I do not look at each other once. We both contribute to the discussion in ways that mean we have read the article. Not Saturday. Not Sunday. On Monday I go. I do not decide to go until I am on the path. I’m on the path because I am going somewhere else. I’m going to the gas station for coffee. The gas station is not in the direction of the bench. I’m on the path that goes in the direction of the bench because I have been walking, I tell myself, just walking, and the walking has taken me here. I’m at the corner where you turn left to go to the bench. I turn left. I get to the bench at four-fifty-five. He’s on it. Of course he is. He told me he would be on it. He told me he sits there sometimes after class. After class is now. I am here at the time he told me he is sometimes here, and he is here, and I am the one who came.
He sees me. He does not say anything. I walk over. I sit down on the bench. I do not sit close. I sit at the other end. There is a foot and a half of bench between us. We both look at the river.
“You came,” he says.
“Yeah.”
