She clutched her jacket so tight around her middle she thought she might break a rib.
“I’m sorry.” He did look sorry. He looked sorry in numerous ways. She wanted him to continue, but he didn’t.
She felt like shaking him, screaming at him. What are you sorry for?
For coming here?
For thinking I’d care?
For caring yourself?
For breaking my heart?
For choosing other people instead of me?
For knowing how badly I want to hurt you right now?
For knowing I do care and that I hate you for it?
For having to see that I’m not who you thought I was?
She gritted her teeth so hard her ears ached. “Was I supposed to rush into your arms?” she asked derisively.
He looked taken aback. He was still believing she would be lovable. “No. Lena. I didn’t expect that. I just…”
“Anyway, I have a boyfriend,” she said conclusively, meanly, dishonestly. “Your timing is pretty terrible. Not that it matters.”
There was something horrendously liberating about lying. It was an experience she’d never known before this.
He pressed his lips together. His body began to close in. It took a lot to make him distrust her.
A part of her wanted him to get mad, to prove himself as nasty and as unworthy as she was. Could he even do it?
She wanted an inferno. She’d preserved their love so carefully in her mind these years, but now she wanted to burn the thing down. She wanted every part of it broken and burned and wronged and done.
No, he couldn’t do it. His stance was no longer open. His face was shutting down. He was silent as she smoldered.
“I’m sorry for everything,” he said at last.
She wanted to punch him, but instead she strode away. She turned the corner and listened silently for the click of his door.
On the way back to her dorm her walk turned into a run. She let go of her coat, let it flap heavily around her. She ran as fast as she could until she was out of breath and her heart was shuddering.
She realized later, shaking under the sheet in her underwear, that she’d never really gotten mad at anyone before.
When Lena awoke early the next morning, she was no longer angry. She was astounded. What had she done? How could she have done it?
A fearful, reckless energy prompted her out of bed and into clothes. She walked back to the motel, the scene of the crime, as if to prove to herself that she had actually done what she thought she had done. That it had really happened.
Had it really happened? What could she say to Kostos? Was she apologetic? She checked her heart.
She didn’t find an apology there exactly. She couldn’t quite define what was there: a strange brew of stridency and terror. What should she do?
As she walked along the open corridor, she was scared to see the remnants of the mess she had made.
She prepared herself to knock, but she saw when she got close that the door was already open. She thought of how much stuff there had been in the room, the number of suitcases and the piles of clothes. Now she looked past the housekeeping cart into a room clean and empty.
Tibberon: Oh, Len. Carmen told me what happened. Are you okay?
LennyK162: I’m okay. A little dazed maybe.
Tibberon: Do you want company?
LennyK162: I love your company, Tib, but I don’t need you right now. I’m not really even sad. I’m relieved it’s over. It’s been over for a long time.
Love was an idea. Nothing more or less.
If you lost the idea, if you somehow forgot it, the person you loved became a stranger. Tibby thought of all those movies about amnesiacs where they don’t even know their own spouse. Love lives in the memory. It can be forgotten.
But it can also be remembered.
Early in the summer, Tibby lost the idea of loving Brian. Because of the sex, because of the condom breaking, because of her worst fears seeming real. She couldn’t know exactly why. But she knew the darkest parts of growing up had become linked to him that night. Those dark parts had attached to him and somehow overwhelmed the fragile idea of love.
Tibby distinctly remembered the strange sense that night that her idea of love had vanished. It was a spell broken, a dream ended, and reality took over. She had come to her senses and realized that she didn’t love Brian, that his best qualities were actually his worst ones, and that furthermore, the fact that Brian inexplicably loved her was stupid and intolerable. She had awoken from a dream of love.
And yet.
Now it was all different again. Her dream had come back, and she didn’t know if she was waking or sleeping, what was real and what was illusory.
She called Lena even though Lena had her own things to worry about.
“Do you have any idea what’s going on?” Tibby raved. She was done with playing proud.
“With what?” Lena asked.
“With Effie and Brian!”
Lena was silent. Not for more than a second, but long enough for Tibby to know she knew something.
“Well.” Lena sighed.
“What do you know?” Tibby practically exploded.
“I don’t know anything for sure.” Lena’s voice was slow and steady. “I mean, I know Effie’s had a crush on Brian. But that’s been going on a long time. Everybody knows that.”
Tibby felt she might swallow her tongue. “They do?”
“Oh, Tib. Just a crush. You know, a juvenile kind of crush. Brian is very good-looking, obviously.”
“He is?” Tibby wasn’t breathing at all anymore.
“Tibby! Come on. You know what I mean. I’m not trying to torture you. I’m just stating the facts of the case.”
Tibby sat on her hand. “Okay,” she squeaked.
“Do you want to talk about this?”
Did she? No! But there was nothing else in the world to think of or talk about. “I have to know,” she said.
“I don’t think there’s much to know,” Lena said, and her voice was pitched for comfort. “Effie has a crush on Brian, Brian is miserable over you. I think they’ve talked on the phone a few times.”
“They have?” Tibby’s hand was asleep. Her ear was hot from the phone.
“Tibby, I don’t want to be in the middle of this. But I do want to be honest with you.”
“They haven’t…gone out together or anything.”
“I don’t think so.”
“You don’t think so?”
Lena sighed again. “It’s the kind of thing Effie would mention. Trust me.”
“Do you think Brian likes her?”
“I have no reason to think so. But I do think he’s had a pretty lonely time.”
“Because of thinking I broke up with him?” Tibby asked vacantly.
“Because you did break up with him.”
“Oh.”
“Hey, Tib?”
“Yeah?”
“I don’t mean to bug you, but you really should have told Effie the truth.”
“Gee. Thanks.”
After she hung up with Lena, she sat at her desk and tried to unscramble her brain.
Effie wanted Brian. Brian was a dreamboat. Duh. Everyone knew that. Everyone wanted him. In fact, it so happened that he was way way way too good for Tibby.
It was base and painful how these things mattered.
Yes, Tibby had once forgotten how to love Brian, but her memory was now effectively jogged. Oh, how painfully she remembered.
Of course Brian was gorgeous! It wasn’t like Tibby didn’t know that! Tha
t wasn’t even what mattered!
But all the other stuff did matter—that he was confident and good and that he was an optimist and could whistle Beethoven and didn’t care what other people thought. That he loved Tibby! He knew how to love better than anyone. Or at least, he had.
Now the idea of loving Brian was back. Now she couldn’t remember the idea of not loving him. When she thought of Effie and Brian, she wished she could remember the idea of not loving him.
A spell broke again, a dream ended, but this time in reverse. Now not loving him was the spell. Not loving was the dream she woke up from. That was how it seemed to her. But how confusing it was! How could you even know what was real? Or what would be real tomorrow? She was so scrambled she couldn’t keep track.
Who was she that she could change her mind, her very reality, so completely? Could she ever trust herself again?
Over the next few days she wished she were working more at Movieworld. With her hours so much reduced, she had endless time to stare at her “Script” and wonder about these things. The more she wondered, the less she knew.
She tried to write her script. She had the idea it would be a love story. But she couldn’t hold on to any thread. All she could think about was love’s intermittency, and that made for no story at all.
Peter came to see Bridget in the lab a few days before she was set to leave for home. She had labels in her pockets, stuck all over her clothes. She had three different-colored Sharpies in her left hand and one in her right.
She’d avoided her lab responsibilities for almost the whole program. She knew she had won the notice of David, the director, for her work in the house, so she could get away with it. She liked being outside in the sun. She liked having her hands in the dirt. She did not like this part. So she’d saved her dues-paying until the end of the trip. She thought of Socrates before the hemlock. You had to pay up eventually.
She saw Peter and she removed the label she was holding in her mouth to say hello.
“How’s it going?” he said. They were much changed since the kiss on the hill, both of them chastened.
She shrugged. “Okay.”
He looked around to make sure they had privacy. “I didn’t want you to go without saying good-bye.”