“There are some things that love won’t allow
Well I held her hand
But I don’t hold it now” – Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, ‘Nobody’s Baby Now’
The Heavy
He had wanted to see her in the night, to be at a high table when she arrived and to carry two drinks to a cushioned corner of The Stag’s head, surrounded by the ascent of drinkers, and to speak meaningfully from the go: “I was considering whether to contact you. You were one of the most important people in my life.” But she was busy in the night, she said in a text, and suggested coffee the following morning. So instead of meeting him in the night for a drink, he was meeting her early in the day for a coffee.
When he saw her she was very tanned and her hair had lightened. The same feeling he always felt when he saw her arose. Over the year that they had been completely apart, he had judged whether or not he was in love with other women according to the memory of this feeling.
She smiled and said hello to him, but not as if they were finally reunited. Her smile was casual, rather than smally pained, and nothing lay beyond her bright hello. He said hi, how are you, casually in return, yet searched her eyes for something relatable to his own heavy heart. They looked as bright as her hello.
He had drank gin before their meeting in order to have a heaviness about him, about his gaze and the words he would speak. He was just disorientated, however. As they awkwardly moved off, he felt he was drunk in a parental setting, and the cigarette in his hand remained unlit.
He asked her if she minded going to a pub.
Earlier, on the train into the city, he had worked to reconcile his presentiment of meeting her in the night with their daytime arrangement, and concluded that the pub might still work. The daytime was not the territory of lovers reuniting; midday was no time to abandon hard-fought, hubristic resolutions and let oneself say, I want you, I’m still in love. But the pub, he surmised, contained something of the late evening at any given time of day, and paired with alcohol, it could work for lovers like them.
Worry and indecision briefly contorted her face. Why do you want to go the pub over a coffeeshop?
The tone of her voice and the worry on her face gently warned him not to envision togetherness. They would not drink side by side and fall under the one spell. They will sit opposite one another and separately sip coffee as people do who are brought together by a problem that needs figuring out.
Because, he said, I don’t like the hard chairs and people moving around so much in the coffeeshop. The pub is more conducive to conversation.
He had stopped walking and was eyeing her glassily.
Plea entered his words:
They have coffee machines, too, he said.
She looked off to the side at the traffic. It was as if she belonged to a different climate, he thought, now that her skin had become so tanned.
Okay, she reluctantly and breathily assented.
They moved off again and a few seconds of silence passed before she asked him how he was.
He said he was okay and that he had just moved to a new town, in which he felt he did not really fit in. He didn’t wear the appropriate clothes, he said.
Well, let’s get you shopping, she said, within a light, throwaway laugh.
I would like nothing more, he said, yet the tone of his voice suggested that such an aspiration was doomed.
Her face, very briefly, softened apologetically, but was then sharply overtaken by an incurious stare.
It’s glimpsable, at least, he thought. But under a heavy discipline. For her, it’s forbidden. We won’t go shopping together, no. Still, he allowed the warming image of her draping shirts over her forearm as she picked out clothes for him, her boyfriend, to continue on a little longer, fired by the fact that it was glimpsable.
As he enveloped himself within these thoughts, the answers he gave to her small-talk inquiries were half-hearted and uncharismatic. He could feel the gin was slowing him, too, and the day’s light had begun to annoy his eyes, so he lifted his hand to his brow.
She spoke succinctly and with confidence, but her words were pleasureless.
She has already cast me off, he thought. She heard it months ago and, since then, with each passing day, her memory of me became more and more disgraced. The drunken, empty taciturnity she now sees only solidifies her prior-judgements. That I have expired in her life.
Had it been him, however, who had heard something disgracing about her, he would have spoken to her before casting her off. That would have been the moral, loving thing. But on another continent she had heard something about him and cast him off, he deliberated as they walked together past Pichet, where once, years before, they had dined and shared secrets about themselves, competently in love.
He concluded that unless she brought it up to him, and said she knew better than to believe it, he wouldn’t say a word. If gossip is enough to extinguish it for you, maybe we mistook true love. If I can pass from love to a lout in your eyes as easy as that, yes, we must have been far off the mark. But they could have shown me blood on your hands, and I’d have asked you how it got there before I believed the words of those who we once, together, considered knaves.
Or maybe she hadn’t heard a thing. Maybe her time away had simply taught her that it was over. Someone sat down by her side on the beach, or flirtatiously cycled their bike at the same pace as the golden sun broadly gleamed, laughs lost in the heat, and the name closest to her heart changed.
In the pub, she said she would not be ordering anything.
He left her at the table and, at the bar, whispered to the bartender for a gin and tonic. She asked to see his ID.
He did not have it, he whispered, and asked for a pot of tea instead, praying that he would not be refused. Much to his relief, the bartender shrugged her shoulders and said okay.
He looked at her sitting at the table, idly considering her phone. She put it into her handbag, brushed the side of her lap, and unenthusiastically eyed the space of carpet between them.
He brought the pot of tea and two cups down to the table and sat by her side on the cushioned bench. She asked him not to fill her cup.
She listened to his stories of summer, which he had burst into in an attempt to renew his charisma, as if a sand-timer had been placed on the table.
After he finished speaking, she remained silent. He inquired about her brother, her summer, her aspirations, and the names he could remember of her friends, because he wanted to know. But he sensed that she did not enjoy revealing her private life to him, and disliked even more the intimacy he was suggesting by bringing up the old days.
Despite gleaning reluctance and chore-like perseverance from her words and demeanor, he still felt a great pleasure in being beside her once more. His great suspicion eased into certainty: she was the most beautiful woman he had ever seen, yes.
But this great love of his life had closed herself to him. Because of a few traded words, or because distance had made a difference, or because she didn’t like what she saw, she had closed her heart. The spare details she proffered were not to reinvigorate his curiosity in her life, but to satiate that curiosity for good. Out of decorum, out of respect for what they once had, perhaps, she offered him obligatory niceties. But there, the charity ended. If it were a matter of her heart alone, she would be elsewhere. And her heart was growing impatient:
So, you said last night you wanted to speak to me. What was it you wanted to speak about?
She asked this question as if it were the final, requisite inquiry at the end of an unsuccessful interview.
Well, he replied shakily, I was considering whether to contact you and, well, you were one of the most important presences in my life – he eyed the empty bar as he spoke, the way the daylight illuminated the empty wooden counter – and – here he turned to look her in the eyes – I came to the conclusion that I couldn’t let something so significant pass away, for someone I once walked hand in hand with to barely nod at me as they passed by. It’s been such a long time – at the lack of reception in her eyes, he turned and stared straight ahead, and lifted his hand to his brow to block the light – and the only words I have are the ones you said to me before we parted. I just want to know – and here he said both of their names together, and asked if she still felt that.
His hand at his brow, his despairing eyes sought her out again.
I think that’s unproductive, she said sharply as her head shook dismissively, headmistress-like.
Despite a few words about needing to know the city herself, there was no explanation. No details on how she felt towards him. Whether she thought of him as disgraced, faded, unattractive, as someone she no longer loved and Thank God For That or someone she learned love from, remained undivulged. It was just, flatly, over for her. As the sun is bright.
I don’t want to hang around with you, she said, in the end.
And when a heavy like him is filled with incoherence, working his mind to understand why, heaving internally, taking the shots as directed, it is difficult for him to say what he means. So he says what he doesn’t as un-poetically as possible.
I don’t want to be your friend, either, he said, staring at the lighted panes. Very well then, she said contentedly, as if they were finally on the same page.