My girlfriend Julie and I had been on the road about six hours when I decided to ask her about her dissertation. We had been making our way up I-35, traveling north from Houston to Lawrence, Kansas, where her best friend from college was getting married, and I knew that mentioning her dissertation would get her talking. She hadn’t said a word to me since Dallas.
“Are you trying to piss me off?”
“No.”
“Then why would you even mention that?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “Just trying to make conversation.”
She looked at me, then out the window, and I realized all at once that the conversation was over.
I suppose, in a way, it had been cruel of me to even bring it up. You see, back in college, when Julie and Susan had roomed together, they had made a pact one night that they would both become future professors of Expressionist Art, but whereas Susan had made good on her word, studying the German Expressionists of post-war Europe, Julie had found herself gravitating toward some of the more intellectual artists of the time, like Josef Albers, who she considered more important. In any event, when it came time to apply for graduate school, Susan’s senior thesis on Felix Nussbaum had earned her admission to the Ph.D program at Yale, whereas Julie’s magnum opus on Josef Albers had gotten her rejected from almost every place she’d applied. Susan, of course, had gone on to do well at Yale and was now up for tenure at the University of Kansas while Julie was simply struggling to get by, teaching part-time at various community colleges in the suburbs of Houston where we lived.
There was a long history of competitiveness between the two and I suppose that a part of me was trying to fuel the fire that day. Ever since we had left our apartment in Houston, Julie had been looking out the window with a strange and distant despondency. I knew that she was thinking about Susan and it bothered me. She had always had a somewhat unhealthy relationship with Susan and I knew that a part of it was rooted in the fact that the two of them had been so close at Vassar. I never really understood how it began or what it involved, but I knew that it was strange. I remember on several occasions Julie mentioning a man that they had both dated, a young professor in the Art History department, who had apparently wined and dined them both. First Susan, then Julie. And later on how they had gone through a series of boyfriends all somehow connected to each other. If Julie brought home a guy from a bar, the next week Susan would be dating his roommate. If Susan told Julie about a guy that she liked, Julie would find out where the guy lived then date the guy across the hall. They did everything together and for a long period of time during their junior year of college they made a pact of celibacy and spent every single night alone in their dorm room, drinking.
I had also always suspected that there was an element to their relationship that Julie didn’t want to talk about, something more intimate than she was willing to admit. She had conceded to me on one occasion that they had often slept together in the same bed during college and that one night, while they were traveling through Europe, Susan had kissed her by the Seine. But it had never gone much further than that, she said. It had never gotten intimate intimate.
I had always believed her when she said these things. I had always believed her when she told me that the bond they shared was simply a bond of friendship. But earlier that day, as we were driving through the Oklahoma countryside, she had said something to me that had planted a seed in my mind, and I had been thinking about it ever since. As we were driving through a small industrial patch on the eastern side of the state, Julie had looked out the window and said that this was where Ava had lived.
“Who’s Ava?” I asked.
“Susan’s first,” she said and then looked away.
“Susan’s first what?”
“Oh, don’t be such a moron,” she said and then she lit a cigarette and took a drag.
I realized at that moment what she was telling me and it filled my mind with fear.
“I thought that Susan was straight,” I said. “You told me she was straight.”
“Well she is, Alex. For Christ’s sake, she’s getting married tomorrow.”
I looked at her. “But she wasn’t always?”
“No, she was always. She just went through a period of time where she was experimenting and Ava was her first.”
“And how about you?” I said. “Did you experiment?”
She looked at me and shook her head. “It was college, Alex. Didn’t you experiment in college?”
“No,” I said. “I went to community college. People don’t experiment at community college.”
She shook her head. “Anyway, it was a long time ago.”
I felt myself fill up with panic, and I had a desire at that moment to suddenly grill her, to make her admit to me once and for all that she and Susan had been lovers. But instead I said nothing and neither of us did until we reached the outer edge of Oklahoma and I brought up her dissertation.
“My dissertation,” she said again when I pressed her. “My dissertation is not something that we will be talking about today.”
Part Two
On the outer edge of Lawrence we stopped at a gas station and Julie called Susan from a pay phone. It was almost eight o’clock and we had already missed the wedding rehearsal and now Julie was apologizing profusely and asking Susan how we might get to the reception. I could see her arms gesticulating frantically as she spoke into the receiver and I couldn’t help imagining what she was saying.
When she returned to the car she looked upset.
“We fucked up,” she said. “I think we really fucked up.”
“Well, you are the maid of honor,” I said. “I could see how she might want you to be there.”
She looked at me and then closed her eyes. “Just drive,” she said.
Earlier that day we had had to turn back twice — first, because Julie had thought that she’d left her iron on and the second time because she forgot her wedding present. In the end, we had finally left town about two hours late and all the way up to Kansas Julie had been blaming herself for this.
“I know that she’s going to kill me,” she kept saying. “I know she’s just going to kill me.”
I knew that I could have been nicer about this, but I couldn’t resist a little jab. It was a small victory in our ongoing debate about who was more responsible.
In Julie’s estimation I was the less responsible because I hadn’t had a job in seven years. Not a full-time job at least. But my point — and I stuck by this adamantly — was that although I didn’t have a job I still brought in more money than her, and that in the end it was money, not hours, that counted. I was working at that time as a freelance writer for several magazines in the area, mostly medical journals, and I was able to support myself quite nicely doing this. I wasn’t making a lot of money, but I was making enough to pay the rent and buy myself a new pair of shoes every few months. What else did I need? I would reason. And Julie would bring up the fact that we couldn’t live in apartments forever, or that I didn’t have any real savings, or that my income was erratic. Some months I’d be flush, while others living off my credit card.
“But the point is,” I would contend. “I can do it. I mean, it’s not like I’ve ever had to apply for unemployment, have I?”
“Well that’s not something to be proud of,” she would say. “I mean, is that really what you want printed on your gravestone? Alex Peterson: a man who never had to apply for unemployment.”
She would always end our conversations by saying something sarcastic like this and I would always shrug my shoulders or wave her off. The truth was, what she wanted was for me to make a more responsible career choice and what she really wanted was what Susan had: a stable life with a stable man and all the evidence of success around her.
I would sometimes feel my spirits weaken at those moments, acknowledging that on some level I had disappointed her, and I felt that way that day as we drove through Lawrence, Kansas.
At a traffic light, Julie turned to me and sighed. “Do you think she’s going to hate me?” she asked.
“No,” I said. “I don’t think that’s possible.”
The wedding rehearsal reception was being held at a small suburban estate on the outskirts of town. This estate was apparently owned by the chair of the department and I was told by Julie that I should expect a lot of academics there. She listed off a few names, as if I might have heard of them, and I nodded. I could see that she was nervous.
As we pulled up the long wooded driveway to the chair’s estate, I noticed several BMWs and a tan Mercedes parked in front of the house. Around the back I could hear people laughing on the lawn and the sound of music — big-band music — emanating from the patio. I followed Julie to the door and when she rang the doorbell I could see the nervousness in her face. She was gripping the present tightly and looking down.
A moment later the door swung open and a large portly woman with graying hair appeared in the doorway. She smiled at us and led us in, and then down the hallway to the kitchen, where we found Susan sitting on a stool at the counter pouring herself some wine. She was surrounded by a group of people, who all seemed like friends, or family members, or maybe colleagues from her department.
I had only met Susan once before and it was surprising to see her in this context. The last time I’d seen her she’d been coming back from some conference in Austin, where she’d been giving a paper on something or other, and she and Julie had spent the entire weekend getting drunk and telling stories about all the people they had known back in college. Susan had worn the same pair of cut-off shorts that entire weekend, and I could still remember commenting to Julie how she didn’t seem very academic at all. “Well, that’s what’s so cool about her,” she’d said. “She is and she isn’t.” I had not noticed anything strange that weekend, nothing to be nervous about, but now, as she came over and hugged Julie, I was watching the way her hands moved up and down her body, the way they slid across her shoulders and down her back. Julie seemed nervous.
“I’m so glad that you made it,” Susan smiled.
Then Julie turned to me. “You remember Alex, don’t you?”
“Well, of course I remember Alex,” she said. “It’s so nice to see you again.”
I shook her hand and congratulated her, and then she turned back to Julie and grabbed her shoulder. “Let’s go outside, hon. There are so many people I want you to meet.”
Julie gave me a look to let me know that this didn’t involve me anymore, and then I watched them both as they walked out the door.
I fixed myself a drink and tried to mingle. Most of the other people in the kitchen seemed to be affiliated in some way with the university, and for a while I simply stood there eavesdropping on their conversations. Outside on the lawn I could see Julie and Susan laughing, as Susan led Julie around the yard, introducing her to various people and putting her arm around her. I was trying not to let it get to me, but it was hard not to. As they walked around the yard, laughing and talking, I kept picturing them back in college, going to parties together or out on double dates, sleeping in the same bed, writing each other’s papers, taking long weekend trips into New York. And later, as we all sat around the tables in the yard, and everyone stood up to make their toasts, I couldn’t stop looking at Julie, the way her eyes were transfixed on Susan and everything she did. Every time that Susan kissed Eric, her fiancé, a tall bespectacled man from New York, Julie seemed to be kissing him with her. Every time that Eric stood up to make a toast, Julie leaned forward, as if the toast were for her. And later, when Julie took the center stage and made a toast herself, she could barely compose herself she was crying so hard. And though I knew that her tears were genuine, I couldn’t help wondering what they meant. Were they tears of envy? Betrayal? Happiness? All I know is that she didn’t say a word to me for the rest of the night, and when we finally left the chair’s estate, waving to Susan and Eric on the lawn, Julie looked bewildered and scared, as if she’d just been dealt a devastating blow.
Part Three
When we got back to the motel room later that night Julie went straight into the bathroom and took a shower. When she came out a half-hour later I could see that she’d been crying. She walked over to the bed and dropped her towel and for a moment she just sat there naked, staring at the floor.
“What’s wrong?” I said.
“Nothing.”
“Come on, you can tell me.”
She shook her head. “Stop trying to solve everything, Alex. Some things just aren’t solvable.”
“Like what?”
“Like most things.”
I looked at her. “Do you want to have a drink?”
She nodded. “Yeah, I could use a drink.”
But by the time I had walked over to the little mini-refrigerator to retrieve the beer we’d taken from the reception, Julie was passed out on the bed, her eyes closed.
I walked over to her and lay beside her, put my hand across her waist. It had been a long time since we’d shared each other’s company, since I’d even seen her naked in fact, and it was comforting just to lie there.
After a moment she began to wiggle free, and then she sat up.
“You know,” she said. “I have a better idea.” And then she walked over to her duffle bag and pulled out a small bag of pot and a thin tin of rolling paper.
“Where did you get that?” I said.
“Susan,” she said. “She gave it to me. She said that now that she’s getting married, she can’t get high anymore.”
I smiled. “We haven’t smoked in years.”
“I know,” she said. “Maybe that’s the problem.” Then she proceeded to take out the pot and roll it into a joint.
After she lit it, we passed it back and forth several times and then she lay back on the bed and beckoned me to join her.
I began to pull off my shirt, then my pants, and then in what seemed like no time I was on top of her and we were grooving, grooving like we hadn’t grooved in a long time. It felt good just to be there, on top of her, and it felt good to have her hold me, though it felt strange too, like a part of her was there and a part of her wasn’t, like she was only going through the motions for my sake, like she was only just lying there, and I was someone else, or somewhere else, and none of it was real.
“You know what?” she said when it was over, as we lay there in the depressing yellow light of the room.
“What?”
“Susan’s going to get tenure,” she said.
“How do you know?”
“Because she told me.”
“I thought she had to finish her book first.”
“Nope. Eric told her it was a shoo-in now that they were getting married. No one was going to have the balls to deny her.”
I looked at her. “Really?”
“Uh huh.”
“Well, I guess that’s good for her.”
“It’s bullshit,” Julie said, and then she walked over to the window and looked out at the parking lot.
“Is that why you were crying?” I said.
“No,” she said. “I don’t know why I was crying. I guess I just realized that a part of me loves her and a part of me hates her.”
“You don’t hate her,” I said.
“No,” Julie said, shaking her head. “I think I really do.”
A moment later she came over to the bed and lay beside me, her naked body pressed against mine beneath the sheets, and I have to admit I felt a little happy, just lying there, newly assured of her love for me.
“Well,” I said. “After tomorrow, you don’t ever have to talk to her again if you don’t want to.”
“Why would you say something like that?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I’m just trying to cheer you up.”
She turned to me then and sighed, then walked over to her suitcase and began to pull out the pot. As she stood there in the corner, rolling the joint, I found myself transfixed by her body. It seemed almost luminous at that moment, almost pale.
“I should be happy for her, shouldn’t I?” Julie said. She was sitting on the edge of the bed now, the joint pinched tightly in her hand.
“I don’t know,” I said.
“Well, I should be,” she said. “That’s the bottom line. But the funny thing is, I’m not. I mean, I was sitting there at the party and I was thinking, well, maybe she’ll get divorced. I mean, I probably shouldn’t even be telling you this, but that’s what I was thinking.”
I looked at her and then I turned away.
“God, I can’t believe I just said that. You must think I’m a monster.”
“No,” I said. “I don’t.”
“I love her,” she said. “You know, I love her. That’s the thing. I feel like she’s my sister.”
“Well, the two of you have been through a lot together.”
She nodded and then she looked over at the TV, the dark grey screen. “God, I’m such an awful person,” she said. “But I can’t make myself be happy for her. I just can’t.”
I reached over then and put my hand on her hip, and she let me this time. “It’s going to be fine,” I said.
“No, it’s not,” she said and toked on the joint. “It’s not going to be fine at all.”
* * *
At moments like this I would sometimes wonder what had happened to the old Julie, the Julie who used to wake me up by putting her arms around me and kissing my eye lids, the Julie who used stay up late at night telling me stories about her childhood and confessing to the crushes she’d had in college, the Julie who never pretended not to know things she didn’t know, the Julie who never argued, or cursed, or threw up her arms in disgust. Where had that Julie gone? I often wondered. Where was she now?
Earlier in the week I had seen the first signs of Julie’s nervousness. We had been standing in line for a movie — a kind of weekly ritual of ours — and all of a sudden she had started getting antsy, kind of looking around, running her hands up and down her legs. When we finally got up to the ticket counter, she stopped, then looked at me very seriously and told me she couldn’t go in.
“What are you talking about?” I said.
“I have to work,” she said. “I need to work.”
I hadn’t seen her act this way in quite a while. Whenever she said “work” like that, I knew that it could only mean one thing: she was thinking about her dissertation again. Every few months she’d have these little panic attacks and announce that she had to work and then she’d get out her dissertation and read it over, decide that it was shit, drink a bottle of wine by herself, then the next day she’d be fine. This was the ritual we went through three or four times a year, but I hadn’t seen her act this way in quite a while, and I knew all at once it had something to do with Susan and the wedding.
Anyway, I ended up going to the movie by myself that night and then taking a cab home, and when I finally got back, Julie was not slaving over her writing, but laying out the clothes that she thought she might like to wear to the reception. “What do you think of this?” she said to me, holding up a pant-suit. “Too conservative?”
In the days that preceded the wedding, Julie had gone out to the mall and bought a half-dozen outfits, none of which she could afford and all of which she claimed she’d return, but never did. In addition to that, she’d blown a hundred dollars getting her hair highlighted, her nails done, and having a facial. All in all, she must have blown the lion’s share of her meager savings on her best friend’s wedding, and I could see all at once that the stress of it was taking its toll.
“How does it happen?” she said to me later that night, as she stood in front of the mirror, frowning. “How does it happen that a person can become so second-rate?”
Part Four
It must have been around two or three in the morning that I first heard the phone ringing. It was a quiet ring at first, a gentle ring, and I kind of just ignored it for a while, hoping it would go away, but then Julie kneed me in the gut. “Just answer it,” she said. “It’s been ringing for like an hour.”
“Okay,” I said and picked it up, but when I spoke into the receiver, no one was on the other end.
“Hello?” I said. “Hello?”
The connection clicked off.
I hung up and went back to sleep. And then a few minutes later it rang again. This time I answered a little more sternly, and the person on the other end immediately hung up. The phone rang a few more times after that, but I ignored it, and then about a half hour later I heard the knocking at the door.
“Someone’s at the door,” Julie said.
“Probably the maid,” I said.
“At three in the morning?”
“I don’t know,” I said, turning over on my side.
Julie looked confused. “I should get up and see.”
“Be my guest.”
Julie lay back on the bed and closed her eyes and then the knocking continued. A moment later she stood up and walked over to the window and looked out.
“Oh my God,” I heard her say out loud, like she was talking to the person outside. Then she ran to the door and in one fluid motion undid the latch and opened it. “Oh, Jesus Christ, honey. What happened?”
A second later Susan entered our motel room and took off her coat. She was crying uncontrollably, but trying to muffle it with the side of her sleeveless arm.
“Come here,” Julie said, and hugged her. “What happened?”
But Susan didn’t speak. She just stood there sobbing. I sat up and pulled the sheet around me.
“I need to talk,” she finally muttered. “Can we go somewhere and talk?”
“Of course,” Julie said, and then without even turning to me to say goodbye, she rushed Susan out the door.
I lay back in the bed and wondered what could have happened to make Susan act this way. Probably last second jitters, I thought. An unfortunate fight between her and Eric on the eve of their wedding. I sat up in bed and searched for the joint we hadn’t quite finished earlier. I wasn’t a big fan of pot, as I said, but I figured it might help me fall back asleep. I took a few tokes and then turned on the set and flipped through the channels.
All the while I was lying there I was thinking about Julie — Julie and Susan — and what they might be doing. I was thinking about them holding hands, caressing each other’s arms. I was imagining them kissing beneath lamplight on the street. And then I began to think about something that Julie had said to me earlier that week when we were coming back from a bar in town. It had been pretty late by then, already dark, and we had been coming around a long bend in the road, heading south toward the rural highway and our house, and Julie had just looked at me and said that she had this funny feeling about Susan, that even though Susan was her best friend, she couldn’t help feeling that there was something fundamentally off about her.
I asked her what she meant, but she didn’t answer. She simply shrugged and looked away. And then later, as we were lying in bed, she began to tell me the story of the first time Susan betrayed her. It wasn’t the worst thing Susan had ever done, she said, but it had made an impression on her and after that day she had never really thought about their friendship in the same way.
It had happened during the end of their sophomore year, she said, during a period of time when they were both very busy studying for exams and finishing up papers and it was also during a week when Susan was sick, recovering from a bad case of strep throat. At the end of that week they had both had papers due in Visual Studies, and on the night before they were due Susan had come into Julie’s room and asked her for some help, explaining that she was too sick to write hers.
Julie had commiserated at first, as she knew that the professor they had for Visual Studies didn’t grant extensions, and then, after a lot of begging, she’d finally agreed to write Susan’s paper for her. She had spent the better part of that night working on Susan’s paper, had probably spent more time on Susan’s paper than she had her own, and when the papers were finally handed back the following week, she was disheartened, but not surprised, to learn that Susan had not only received a better grade than her, but that she’d received an A.
“She got a better grade than me on a paper that I wrote,” she said. “Can you believe that?”
I shook my head.
“And to top it off,” Julie continued. “When I came home from class that night, the night I turned it in, Susan was gone. She’d gone off for the weekend with some loser from the lacrosse team.” She looked at me. “Turns out she wasn’t so sick after all.”
l laughed and then shook my head, though I wondered why she was telling me this, what it meant.
It seemed that there was something in this story that somehow explained the perverse dynamic of their friendship, the fact that Julie would rather please Susan than herself, the fact that she cared more about what Susan thought of the paper than what her professor did, the fact that Susan could receive a better grade than her on a paper that she herself had written.
Over the next few days I began to learn more and more things about Susan, each story more disturbing than the last. How Susan had once left her stranded in a diner after a dismal double date. How Susan had once lied to her about being pregnant just so she could get Julie to come down to New York and hang out with her. How Susan had copied the majority of her senior thesis out of an obscure book on German Expressionism and then how she’d used this same bogus thesis to gain admission to Yale. How one of her first publications contained entire paragraphs from that same paper Julie had written for her. And how most of her other publications had been written by Richard, which she never acknowledged, of course, and how basically every bogus credential on her vita could be linked to someone she had either lied to, slept with or conned.
The more she told me about Susan, the less I understood why she was friends with her. But it seemed for Julie that there was something else about Susan that only she could understand. Each time she would tell me one of these stories, she’d start apologizing and saying that she wasn’t being fair to Susan, that Susan wasn’t really as bad as she seemed, making up excuses for her at the same time she was telling me about something morally reprehensible she had done.
“It’s just that I don’t think she can help herself,” she said to me one night, as we were lying in bed. “I just don’t think she can.”
* * *
Around four, the phone rang again, and this time it was Julie. She said that she and Susan had gotten a room right above me — Room 216 — and that they were talking things out. I could tell that she was waiting for me to say something, to protest, but I didn’t. Instead, I just lay there listening, and when she finally finished, I said, “So what happened?”
She didn’t answer at first, but I could tell that she was thinking. “I don’t know,” she said after a moment. “It’s complicated.”
“Well give me the short version.”
“Okay,” she said. “The short version is that Susan has had a crisis of conscience.”
“About what?”
“I can’t talk about it.”
“Just tell me.”
She paused for a moment. Then she said, “She cheated on Eric.”
“When?”
“A long time ago.”
There was something almost like sadness in Julie’s voice that worried me. It seemed odd. “Well who was it with?”
“What difference does that make?”
“I’d like to know.”
“It was a professor from the Economics department.”
“Was he older?”
“No,” she said. “And it wasn’t a he. It was a she”
“A she?”
“Yes.”
I started to say something then, but Julie jumped in.
“And don’t even get started with that stuff again,” she said and then cleared her throat. “The thing is, I think she should tell him.”
“Are you crazy?”
“I think it’s important for them to get all their cards out on the table right now.”
“Oh come on, Jules.”
“What?”
“You’re going to fuck up her whole life.”
“I don’t see it that way.”
“Julie, she’s your friend.”
“I know.”
“So don’t go fucking up her marriage.”
There was a long silence. Then Julie, said, “So you’re saying I should just tell her to be dishonest.”
“No, I’m saying that you should leave her alone. I’m saying that it’s her decision to make, not yours.”
It seemed strange to me that I was looking out for Susan’s best interests. Susan who I didn’t care about. Susan who I didn’t even like. But even this seemed too low for Julie. There was something unbearably ugly about it, and I wanted to tell her so. I wanted to tell her that it was one of those moments in a person’s life when you had to make a decision about what type of person you were. But at the same time, as I lay there, I wondered why I cared so much. I wondered whether a part of me wasn’t a little relieved that Susan was getting married after all.
“Look, Jules,” I said. “Tell her to go home. Tell her to sleep it off. Tell her that tomorrow everything will be fine.”
“And what if it’s not?”
“Then that’s her problem.”
“Alex, a person can’t hide from who they are. If she did this, then she needs to acknowledge it.”
There was a long silence after that, and then I heard the sound of Susan coming back into the room. A moment later, Julie came back on. “Look, Alex,” she said. “I gotta go.”
Part Five
When Julie came back to the room, a little after five, I could see the sun coming up at the edge of the fields, just beyond the highway. She walked over to the bed and turned on the lights, but when I asked her what had happened, she didn’t answer. She just disrobed in the corner and then put on a shirt, and then turned off the lights and slid into bed.
“I think I may have just done something terrible,” she said to me finally, shifting in the bed.
“What did you do?”
“I don’t want to talk about it.”
“You told her to tell him?”
She didn’t answer at first, then finally she said, “Yes.”
“Great, Jules,” I said. “Congratulations on fucking up her life.”
“Oh, come on, Alex.”
“I’m serious,” I said. “I mean, what do you think’s gonna happen now?”
She didn’t answer.
“Do you feel better at least?”
“No,” she said. “I feel worse.”
“Well, then why don’t you call her up and tell her that?”
But she didn’t answer. She just moved over to the other side of the bed and pulled the covers around her, and as she did this I remember looking up at the ceiling fan and feeling something shifting inside of me, something changing. I don’t know, even now, how to describe it. It wasn’t something I had ever felt before, at least not with Julie, but I felt it very acutely that night, this feeling that I was leaving myself, drifting away. And though it may have been the pot, or the lateness of the night, I remember feeling for the first time in a long time, maybe for the first time ever, that I didn’t want to go over to her as I usually did. I didn’t want to put my arms around her or stroke her hair. I didn’t even want to look at her at that moment. I knew that she was waiting for me to say something, to ask her what had happened, but all at once I didn’t care. I knew that whatever she’d done, whatever it was she’d said to Susan, was probably worse than I could possibly imagine, and I didn’t want to hear about it, didn’t even want to consider what it might be. Finally, I rolled over on my side and closed my eyes.
A long time passed in silence after that, and then I felt Julie coming up behind me and tapping my shoulder. She tapped it twice, then waited, then tapped again.
“Are you awake?”
“Yes.”
“Don’t you want to know what happened?”
“No,” I said. “Not really.”
“Why not?”
“I don’t know.”
“Don’t you want to know what she said?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
I didn’t answer. And then, after a moment, I rolled out of the bed and put on my pants and shoes.
“Where are you going?” she said, sitting up in the darkness.
“I don’t know,” I said.
And I didn’t. All I knew was that I wanted to get out of the room at that moment. I wanted to get out in the air and walk around. The sun was coming up now at the edge of the fields, but the sky was still dark, and all along the highway you could see a thin airy mist rising up from the ground, hovering above the fields like a cloud that had come down to rest. I walked out into the field beside the motel and stood there for a while, staring back at the motel lights, staring back at the room, trying to figure out what to do next. A moment later I saw Julie’s face appear in the window, looking out. She waved to me, but I didn’t wave back, and then a long time passed after that during which neither of us moved. And I didn’t know what was going to happen then, whether Susan was going to call off the wedding, or whether Julie was going to tell me that she wanted to go home, or whether it might be something else entirely. All I knew was that I didn’t want to go back there at that moment. I didn’t want to go back to that motel room, or back to Julie, or back to our apartment in Houston. For a few minutes, at least, I didn’t want to go anywhere at all. And as Julie moved in closer to the window and stared out, I could see that her eyes were fixed on something in the distance, maybe an object, or a person, or maybe something else. It was impossible to tell. From the way her head was tilted, from the way her eyes were glazed over, it was very possible she was looking at herself.
