Christmas in Cambridge. The Harvard students from New York and Oregon had switched places with the Columbia and Reed students from Cambridge: vacation musical chairs.
The brother of my friend who was going to die a violent death—but we didn’t know that yet; his death was nearly two years in the future—took me to the movies, where I met my husband-to-be. Our marriage as well was two years in the future.
We met in front of the Brattle Theatre. Les Enfants du Paradis was playing. And in the bright, dry December air, Cambridge seemed a sort of paradise that evening, busy with lights and Christmas shoppers and a fine dry snow. The snow fell on my future husband’s fine blond hair. They’d gone to high school together, my doomed friend’s brother and he. Now he was home from Reed for Christmas vacation.
I sat between them in the balcony, where we could smoke. Long before Baptiste lost Garance in the crowd, my future husband had taken my hand in his. He was still holding it when we came out of the theater, and my friend’s brother tactfully left us there, in the twirling snowy Cambridge night.
He wouldn’t let me go. We were infected by the movie, and Cambridge was beautiful that night, full of possibilities and life. We spent the night together, in an apartment he borrowed from a friend.
He went back to Reed; I went back to selling garlic presses and madeleine pans. Then the future started closing in on me and I forgot about him.
He didn’t forget about me. When he graduated that spring and returned to Cambridge, he tracked me down in the hospital. He was going to Paris for the summer, he said, but he would write to me. He wouldn’t forget to write, he said.
I paid no attention. He lived in a world with a future and I did not.
When he came back from Paris, things were bad: Torrey’s leaving, the question of my bones, the worry over how much time I’d lost in the dentist’s chair. I didn’t want to see him. I told the staff I was too upset.
“It’s impossible! I’m too upset.”
We talked on the phone instead. He was moving to Ann Arbor. That was fine with me.
He didn’t like Ann Arbor. Eight months later, he was back, wanting to visit again.
Things were not as bad. I had a lot of privileges. We went to movies, we cooked dinner together in his apartment, we watched the body count for the day on the seven o’clock news. At eleven-thirty I’d call a taxi and go back to the hospital.
Late that summer my friend’s body was found at the bottom of an elevator shaft. It was a hot summer, and his body was partly decomposed. That was where his future ended, in a basement on a hot day.
One September night I got back to the hospital early, before eleven. Lisa was sitting with Georgina in our room.
“I got a marriage proposal tonight,” I said.
“What did you say?” Georgina asked.
“I got a marriage proposal,” I said. The second time I said it, I was more surprised by it.
“To him,” said Georgina. “What did you say to him?”
“I said Yes,” I said.
“You wanna marry him?” Lisa asked.
“Sure,” I said. I wasn’t completely sure, though.
“And then what?” said Georgina.
“What do you mean?”
“What’s going to happen then, after you’re married?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I haven’t thought about it.”
“You better think about it,” said Lisa.
I tried. I closed my eyes and thought of us in the kitchen, chopping and stirring. I thought of my friend’s funeral. I thought of going to movies.
“Nothing,” I said. “It’s quiet. It’s like—I don’t know. It’s like falling off a cliff.” I laughed. “I guess my life will just stop when I get married.”
It didn’t. It wasn’t quiet either. And in the end, I lost him. I did it on purpose, the way Garance lost Baptiste in the crowd. I needed to be alone, I felt. I wanted to be going on alone to my future.