Stepping Out

There was that time in Beirut when they sat close together on a dilapidated double bed and smoked their way through an entire pack of Lucky Strikes and he cried and she didn’t cry at all and they decided to end it. She loved him like he was sunlight. She wasn’t in love with him anymore. It will be ok, she promised, and loveloveloved him. He had already done that thing that would ruin it. She wouldn’t know about that for a long time, yet. 

He had been in love with Corinne back then, his entire body buzzing with it. Maybe, he thought later, he had been in love with being in love, more than with Corinne herself. After all, it had only lasted a few months longer than their trip. Once they came back to London some of the glow wore off, and he remembered being annoyed with her then, that her little habits and quirks, which had at first seemed charming, suddenly seemed grating. Realistically, what Corinne had been, was someone else. That was hardly enough to sustain a relationship, especially not one that was built on the foundations of another one, a proper one. Still, he remembered the feeling, that deep-seated desire he had felt for her.

When Clara came back to London she told the few friends she hadn’t told already, and they were surprised, because they had been that couple, the perfect match, smart and beautiful and cool, somehow, which always surprised her, that she had somehow managed to become cool. He had always been cool, but she had grown up strange, and spent most of her childhood largely alone. Her close friends, who had already been told, had not been surprised, though maybe sad, all the same. You said you wanted to go, they had reminded her, and she had nodded and known that this was true, that she had wanted to end it for a while, that she had applied to grad school in Lebanon for that very reason, to leave him without having to break up, to nudge their relationship in that direction. 

He gravitated back towards Clara as soon as she came home, a lonely moon. She let him, brought him to her cousin’s wedding, slept in his bed, still went to Sunday dinners with his family every other week. He loved her like rain, like she was sustaining him, somehow. After that night in Beirut, where they agreed to end it, she never kissed him, never touched him with that kind of intent, and he didn’t want her to. He wanted to hold her close to him at night. His body knew hers so well they seemed molded to fit together. Corinne had gone, by then, furious and hurt and not understanding, and he had no way of explaining it to her, his utter indifference to her as anything more than an escape hatch suddenly. In the end he hadn’t even needed her for that, Clara, whom he thought of as the love of his life, whom he was not in love with anymore but still loved, had wanted to escape just as much as he had, and maybe he should have known that she would. They were parts of the same soul, maybe. 

He was to go to Chicago, a full year of school there, and Clara would not follow him. She slept in his bed that night, and in the morning he woke her at six to hug her one last time, kiss her forehead, stroke a gentle hand through her hair. I love you, he said, and she said it back and then just swallowed and watched him walk out. She had a key, could let herself out later. She heard him close the outer door, and then began to cry in earnest, because she did really love him, and a year was a long time to be unmoored. She opened his old laptop, retired and now mainly used for watching movies. It was very early, and she was still crying as she opened messenger, not understanding, for a second, why the names there were not ones she knew. Oh, she thought to herself, this is his messenger, not mine. She knew his passwords, anyway, years of cohabitation and being so close together as to be one having removed most levels of privacy between them. She trusted him not to read her emails, just as she would never read his. But the first message she could see was from a woman whose name she had never heard before, and the tone of it was so furious that she read it. 

He called her that first night in Chicago, but was unable to reach her. He tried again the following night, and the one after that. Worried, he got in touch with a friend of theirs, who said he had talked to her and that she seemed fine. So there was something he was missing, maybe. Why aren’t you picking up, he wrote to her, after almost a week of this. I don’t want to talk to you, she wrote back, after a few hours. Why not? He asked, and honestly and perplexedly had no idea of what had happened. She wrote to him properly, then. Maybe he shouldn’t have asked. 

***

She would wonder at it, later, the mystery of loving someone so completely, of feeling so disrespected by someone she had held so close. Breaking up had been nothing, compared to what came after. She had loved him like he was elemental to her. He had, instead of just leaving her, which was what needed to happen, which is what had happened, eventually, taken what they had and he had broken it apart. He had brought another woman to their bed. He had told someone else that he loved them, while she still let him inside of her. It was a betrayal too big to think about, too sharp, it had cut her wide open.

She was so angry with him. He understood and did not understand it, at the same time. They had been done, by the time he met Corinne, she had been a natural conclusion, to him, had made him realize that what he had was not working anymore, that he had begun looking for something else. He should not have cheated, obviously, he knew it then, even as he did it, and he recognized it now, in the face of Clara’s horrified disappointment. We were done, though, he tried, when she finally picked up the phone after two weeks. She had just shaken her head, her pixelated face drawn and sad on his screen. I would never have done that to you, she said, and he understood something then, because he believed her. She would never have done that to him. He could not imagine a world in which she had. So maybe he had broken something. 

***

It is a memory, that double bed in Beirut, his hand in hers, cigarettes lit and shared. She takes the tube to work in the morning and only very rarely thinks of him sitting next to her. They had been very young, when they were together, and there were aspects of adulthood they were unaware of, when they were playing house. She still loves him sometimes, when she does remember. It’s like a dull ache, now. It has softened some, over the years, but it still stings, just a little. He stayed in the US, got married, eventually. She never did, hasn’t felt the desire to, though she dates, sometimes. Maybe it changed something fundamental in her, when she lost him that second time. She isn’t sure. When she thinks back on it now, it is still that hotel room she remembers the most, the moist smell of mold coming off of the walls, the creaking of the bed springs. The sweet, mild hurt of smoke down her throat.