You Deserve Nothing - Alexander Maksik [72]
I don’t know. I’m not sure I really actually thought those things at the time. It was more a feeling, a sort of dark hum I didn’t want to listen to. But I do remember that feeling, that sense that he wasn’t really there, that he was just doing a job. I don’t know, it’s a strange thing to say, and yet it seems exactly right.
The best days were when there was nowhere to go, when I didn’t need to get home. When it was like that I was happier than I’d ever been in my life. He’d cook for me or play me music or we’d watch a film. Whatever it was, there was always a lesson. How to make a sauce, or why some musician mattered, that kind of thing. You can say what you want but then, at the time, it was a dream. I’d come from ISF and walk through the city all gray and cold and mean and enter that code, a number I kept thinking of as secret and magical. He took me in and fed me and made love to me. I mean through that door and up those stairs it was a warm, beautiful world. I didn’t want anything else. How anyone couldn’t understand that was beyond me.
I started to sleep there. I’d go over on Saturday night after being out with Ariel. At first I’d leave him at three or four in the morning. He asked me to stay but I couldn’t figure out how to organize all the lies. But finally I just said O.K. And when he asked me, I told him my parents thought I was sleeping at Ariel’s. And where does Ariel think you’re sleeping? At home, I said. And that was that. The problem, the real problem, was Ariel. Once I stopped sleeping at her apartment she just lost her mind. At a certain point I stopped going there at all. I left some things at his place and would spend Saturday night and all of Sunday and then I’d take the RER home in the early evening.
I’d sit on the train with that late-Sunday dread, that heavy winter sadness made worse because I was racing away from him, going exactly in the wrong direction. After that, after I cut her out, Ariel barely spoke to me. Or we barely spoke to each other. That kind of thing happened all the time. We were inseparable and then it was over. Girls changed friends all year long. You were part of someone’s life. Knew their parents. And then you’d never see each other again. In that way we were prepared.
I didn’t care about anything else. My entire life for a while. I mean there was nothing else. Nothing. And one day I told him. We were in bed and I looked at him and I said it. Will, I love you, I said and he looked like I’d told him the sky was blue. We made love afterward and maybe he was sweet to me but all I could think about was that expression and how he lay there not moving looking like he was dead.
At school I started sitting outside his classroom. There was this space between where the lockers ended and his door, maybe three feet of empty wall. I used to sit there and pretend to study. I was like a dog or something, sitting outside his door. These are the things you do. I’d sit and listen. I’d stare into my book, sitting on the cold polished floor, in that awful gray hallway with my head resting against the wall, trying to hear everything, to be with him, not to miss a moment.
Those kids adored him. Unless you listened to him teach, saw him, you can’t understand. I loved listening to his voice, thinking about the things he was saying.
One day I heard him make a comment in class and it sounded so familiar to me and I realized that I’d already heard it, that he’d said it a few days before. I don’t remember exactly what it was, just that he’d said it to me. We were lying in bed and it was the same sentence, the same cadence, the same inflection.
It was awful and suddenly I had that same terrible feeling, as if he was a ghost, or I was a ghost, and that he’d never love me. I was just filling space.
GILAD
He’d never been so late. Twenty minutes had passed and nothing. I thought of him waiting at Odéon the day we saw Christophe Jolivet die. I looked around at my classmates and imagined their lives to come. It seemed