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By Root 972 0

had been easy to assume him a man of limited ambition. In all the nights I’d so painstakingly talked myself out of loving him, it had never occurred to me that his aspirations reached beyond firing clay pots in studio basements or that his appeal reached beyond the fawning of undergraduate art majors. He’d enjoyed Copenhagen because he made himself fit in it, because he knew when to bend to accommodate a circumstance. All the idle hours welding junk, drawing caricatures, and pulling espressos temporarily kept his latent talent at bay, but he had an energy our little town could not have restrained indefinitely.

How impossible it would be to ask him to come back.

I mentioned the exhibition to Zoë.

“It’s next weekend,” I said.

“It’s upstate New York,” she replied. “Isn’t that like eight hours?”

“Nine and a half,” I answered a little too quickly. I had already MapQuested the drive.

I waited for Zoë to say something. She was halfway through The Fountainhead. She’d been reading impossible books to stay preoccupied; she wasn’t listening to me at all.

“Do you think he actually expects us to come?” I asked her anyway.

“I’m sure he was just being polite.”

I might have written the note off as mere formality if not for a repeat invitation I found in my campus mailbox the following Friday. I’d gone in to clean out my desk, a ceremonial summer duty I hadn’t given two seconds thought until the library mailed me fines for the five overdue books I’d left in my office.

The Humanities Building felt empty despite the business of summer school. Everyone ambled, dilatory from the heat, dazed by the shock of air-conditioning. The women had retired their pantyhose and heels for sandals. The more flamboyant professors were wearing Hawaiian-print shirts; even the most reserved undid a button or two at the neck.

In the congested mailbox I found fliers and announcements and student essays turned in too late. I threw the formidable pile on my office floor and left it there the hour it took me to tidy my side of the room. After hunting down the overdue library books, I organized my pens in matching rows and dusted the knickknacks on the windowsill. I carefully ironed out the Cheetos bag with the palm of my hand before taping it front and center on Everett’s wall. He would be gone until July, parading sophomores across London for Summer of Shakespeare. He went every June. Every June I hated him for it.

At the now-empty desk I quickly shuffled through the pile of neglected mail. I didn’t get very far. On the very top lay a copy of the same postcard Eli had sent to the apartment. I turned it over in my hands, confused. On the back he’d written a note nearly identical to the one on the previous postcard. Why send two? The possibility that he’d worried the invitation would not arrive struck me as thoughtful. Maybe even as a reason to hope.

Would be great to see you and Zoë.

After a moment’s hesitation, I threw the card in the wastebasket. Nine and a half hours, I reminded myself. No woman in her right mind would go so far out of her way to attend a party without knowing the kind of welcome she would receive.

There were pay stubs to file, fliers to recycle, and halfway through the stack—unfortunately—a poem, five stanzas fit to bursting with far more openly expressed affection than I would ever wring out of a single sentence Eli had ever written me:

Untitled

by Anonymous

Love is like a pocketknife

With functions e’re so varied

For cutting through the heart

For getting couples married

For boring to the core of life

With its twisting corkscrew

For dissecting the soul

To something lovers cannot eschew

My love is a knife

Buried in my heart

Rending flesh from bone

Rending me apart

As the greatest love tale tells:

Love is a happy dagger

And this, my body,

the sheath in which it fells.

Never hide how you feel

From the one whom you desire

Fly through wind and rain

Fly through heat and fire

Cross the world o’er

To tell her how you love ’er.

The poem came with a note: For the end of the semester. I read it a