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By Root 1444 0

where you didn’t always have to be on guard, that it was important to remember that it was a green world. Late in November, when I did leave the house at last and took the train back to New York, I walked into our apartment and felt like a stranger. He was still at the office. I wandered around, a little surprised that my things were still there—a pair of my sandals under the chair in the bedroom where I always kicked them. Walking around the bedroom verified what I hadn’t been able to admit in Garrison: that it really was over between us. Seeing my things there didn’t make me feel at home; it made me realize that it had always been Jason’s apartment. He had hung up the Audubon prints his parents had given us for Christmas; I’d never liked them—they were like prints on the walls of some country inn—and here they were, out in plain view. They were on the north wall, which he had always insisted be left empty because pictures would spoil the beauty of the bricks. When Jason came home from work, we made drinks and went up to the roof and talked. It was clear that we wouldn’t stay together, but he seemed to take it as a foregone conclusion. When I walked over to where he stood by the railing, it surprised me to see that he had tears in his eyes.

“Why be upset?” I said. “It’s not your fault. We both feel the same way.”

“When are you going to stop taking everything so casually?” he said. “As if you didn’t matter. You’re one of the nicest people I’ve ever known, and you made a really bad choice about me, way back. I feel guilty that I lived with you and let you assume that I loved you.”

“You did love me,” I said.

“Honey, I’m telling you the truth,” he said sadly. “Don’t forget what good Southern manners I have. You used to make fun of that. I wanted to love you. I acted as if I loved you.”

When I left, I walked to the restaurant and sat at the bar, waiting for Wyatt to get off work. Jason didn’t love me the time he said that on Saturday nights he never wanted to go out but only wanted to listen to Keith Jarrett’s “The Mourning of a Star” and make love? Not when I read him Firbank’s The Flower Beneath the Foot and he laughed until he had to cover his face and then wipe tears away with the palms of his hands? Not at Thanksgiving, when we were doing the dishes and he kept putting his arm around my waist and raising my soapy hand out of the water to waltz me out of the kitchen?

I saw Jason one more time after that night—when I went there on a Sunday afternoon in February, after I’d moved. I wanted us to be friends. I climbed to the fourth floor, certain, for the millionth time, that the ancient stairs were going to cave in. I sat in one of the canvas director’s chairs and let him pour me a cup of coffee from the Melitta coffeepot. It was my pot, and I’d forgotten to pack it. Jason didn’t offer to give it back. He told me about the Garrison house; he had put it up for sale, and a television producer and his wife had made an offer. They were negotiating. As we talked, my eye caught the bright-pink spine of the Firbank book on the topmost bookshelf across the room. Maybe he was harboring secret grudges. Maybe there were things I had taken home with me inadvertently. He got all the Keith Jarrett records. My down vest. The Firbank. Before I moved, he had helped me by separating my books and records from his and putting mine in cartons. I didn’t unpack for weeks, so it took a while to realize how many were missing. If he’d done it deliberately, one other thing he did threw me off: at the bottom of one of the cartons of books he had put his gray corduroy shirt, which I had always pulled over my nightgown on cold winter mornings.

This weekend Corky told me, in the bedroom, that since Jason and I broke up I had begun to shut myself off from everyone—she was trying to be supportive, she said, and I wouldn’t even talk about my anger or my sadness. I told her that I thought about it a lot—that when people weren’t in love they had a lot of time to think; that’s why there weren’t very many surprises, or the surprises didn’t have the same