On Monday, while Tess waits in the campus health center, Russell calls her for the first time since the start of Fall semester. He calls her up every couple of months, but she never picks up. Instead, she clicks the button on the side of her phone once to stop the buzzing, then presses it again to decline the call. After a pause, she will unlock her phone, open her text messages, and type out an excuse. Today, she has a real one, but it doesn’t really matter if it’s a lie anymore. This is all routine at this point, a pattern they both can predict.
She types what’s another summer done to you and hits send. In exactly 48 seconds, according to her phone, his response lights up the screen.
I’m in Westchester. Got married two months ago. Sold my condo and bought a place up here.
The waiting room, already sleek and sweltering, suddenly seems too bright. Tess’s throat congeals embarrassingly fast. Before she can think of a response, another grey bubble of text appears underneath the first.
She’s pregnant with twins. Lucky me, I guess.
Something tight in Tess’s body unknots. She recognizes the joke now and matches her tone to his.
Well it was great talking to you then good luck.
For me or for her?
For her of course. You’re a terrible pain.
Temper.
You’re the one making up wives and babies.
Jealous?
The waiting room door clatters open and a nurse calls Tess’s name. As she follows her down a squeaky, sterile hallway to an examination room, her phone lets out another hollow buzz in her hand.
It’s a nice image anyway.
Tess isn’t sure if he means her being jealous or the other stuff—the pregnant wife, the house upstate, the babies. Before she hoists herself onto the exam table, Tess holds down the power button on her phone until the screen goes black.
◆
Russell and Tess met a little over three years ago in Dublin, in his class 20th Century Irish Prose and Poetry. Tess was spending the spring at Trinity College as a visiting student from a small liberal arts school near Seattle. Russell had arrived a semester before her, through some exchange between NYU and Trinity, and was slated to leave by summer, the same time as Tess. He was thirty-two and a few years into his PhD. Tess was finishing her sophomore year and would turn twenty right before the next school year started.
His class was a small seminar, casual and discussion-based. Tess, who normally attended a smaller school, was better acquainted with intimate classrooms than the other students and frequently found herself at the center of conversation, sometimes deliberately but more often than not without realizing it. Back then, Tess was an eager, even giddy student, overenthusiastic about being in a foreign country for the first time and overwhelmed by the unknown: trawling through all kinds of unknown things—books she’d never heard of, paintings she’d never seen before, not even a replica. In Ireland, she felt like a wild, unformed thing, too aware of the temporality of her life there, and anxious about accidentally missing out on something by slowing down or shaping herself to better fit expectations of what she should be like. She indulged these worries by ignoring set patterns and paths: she refused to follow Russell’s essay prompts and asked for permission to pursue her own ideas, which she pitched and defended during his office hours. Their meetings often bled over the allotted time, and it was not unusual to see them sitting together in the dining hall afterwards, while Tess continued to ramble on and Russell sat across from her watching her talk, picking at his food, amused by her stubborn enthusiasm. It was easy to say that they enjoyed each other’s company in that harmless, instinctual way Americans abroad always do. But by the time she finished her first essay almost a month into the semester, there was already a slow burn building inside of Tess, that feeling she was special somehow, different from the others to him.
The smallness of the city meant they often crossed paths, sometimes in grocery stores but other times in parks and pubs. Instead of turning away from each other, startled and embarrassed by the realness of the other’s life outside of campus, they spoke and walked together, as if there was no difference between who they were here and who they were at school. Most times, they exchanged an easy greeting and carried on separately; but soon, they started to finish their shopping together, with Russell turning a blind eye to Tess’s bottle of wine even though student housing was supposed to be dry and Tess urging him towards different products, all the cheeses and breads and brands that seemed so different than what they had back in the States.
They always left in opposite directions once they exited the revolving doors to the street. Not once in Dublin did they enter each other’s private spaces, never saw how the other lived beyond small hints. Once, Russell had a bouquet of flowers and a small box of chocolates in his shopping basket, which Tess pretended not to notice while they waited in line to pay. Another time, at Doyle’s Pub, Tess saw Russell drop his raised hand quickly back to his lap when he realized she was speaking to a boy she knew from her architecture class. This, too, she pretended not to notice.
None of Tess’s girl friends—the Irish ones or the other Americans—understood the ease in which she and Russell slipped into this familiarity, how quickly they had become casual acquaintances. At first, Tess thought that maybe she understood, but couldn’t explain it to anyone else. Later, she decided that she didn’t necessarily want to explain it, to them or to herself. She shrugged off their questions (What could you even have talk about? Why would he want to talk to you?) and didn’t admit to the little fantasies needling at her brain: girlish, delicate images she’d sketched out about his apartment off campus, about the fox he said trotted across the park he could see from his kitchen window, about the white couch that furnished his living room that he was worried about ruining, about the changes to his clothes as the weather became warmer, about the curve of his wrist when he took off his watch during class. But these images, she reminded herself, were just that: they started and ended with her, and did not apply to her real life.
At the end of the term, during the farewell gala for study abroad students, all of Tess’s friends who had taken Russell’s class with her flocked around him, bombarding him with questions and attention they’d never given him during the semester. A tight barrier was drawn between him and Tess; suddenly she was part of a flock, one of many. All sense of difference drained from her. The images she’d been collecting became banal and embarrassing. She couldn’t figure out how to change the course of the evening without crossing some invisible boundary she wasn’t certain really existed. In the end, he gave her a distracted, disappointing goodbye, with barely a sustained look her way. They returned home to their respective coasts with a vague promise to keep in touch.
◆
When Tess turns her phone back on after leaving the health center, there is another text from Russell waiting for her, as well as five missed voicemails from her father. Normally, Tess’s father doesn’t like to call her; because of the time difference, he lets her call whenever it fits her schedule. She never goes very long without calling home anyway. She likes their conversations and there’s something reassuring about translating her life into short, manageable stories. But for the past few weeks, her father’s calls started coming more frequently, even frantically, in a way that he’d never allowed himself to do before, not even after Tess’s mother died. It occurs to her that this is the first time she shut her phone off in weeks and feels a yank of guilt behind her ribs. Still, she bypasses her father’s messages to open up Russell’s text. Any news the voicemails might have, she doesn’t want to hear on the street, nor does she want to worry her father about visiting the health center any earlier than necessary.
Russell had written what have you been up to lately? Where are you now?
As she starts to walk off campus, towards her apartment, she types out Manhattan? I live here now, you know.
Two blocks away from campus, another buzz from her phone. I know. We should catch up. Finally.
Her eyes flick from the street towards her screen and back again. Golden slants of light leak through the gaps between brownstones. Tess squints against the brightness, balancing on the edge of the curb, waiting for the crossing light to change colors. A slight nudge would send her sprawling to the ground, but she does not move to more solid footing.
Okay I’ll bite, she types, what are you doing this Friday? And before she can reconsider, she hits send.
◆
It was Tess who sent the first email after they left Dublin, to tell Russell that the independent study idea she had fine-tuned with him earlier that year had been approved. This was in early July, while Tess sat in her parents’ kitchen, far removed from the lives she’d created on campus, in either Seattle or Ireland. Russell responded two days later to say congratulations and peppered in some updates from his own life. Tess took this as an invitation to respond with follow-up questions about him and more updates of her own. Soon their emails became a regular correspondence and then the emails turned to texts and the texts turned towards topics they’d never been able to broach in person. An interest in each other’s lives—their real lives, not the ones they had in Dublin, or in a classroom—began to take shape, slowly and sweetly. Tess took sides in departmental disputes, gave her opinions on his reading lists for the courses he was teaching next semester. Once school started for Tess again, Russell learned her class schedule, her petty nicknames for other students. Without noticing, they started to speak to each other every day and, almost just as imperceptibly, their conversations stumbled toward the sexual. Tess spent fall semester of her junior year buzzing with an innocent carnality—that shiny new thrill of being wanted by someone else. When he asked, she only briefly hesitated to send photos of herself, imitations of images she saw every day in her art history class. She liked being able to curate herself in this way, memorizing and then emulating these paintings of soft and fleshy women, unafraid of their dimpled thighs and uneven breasts, confident in their desire to be looked at. She liked that Russell seemed to like it too—not just the pictures themselves, but her delight in them, her careful study of how to pose, how to gaze at the camera, how to act when someone was watching. By the time it was Christmas, it seemed like a mutual exchange, something that pleased both of them equally. It was as if the texts and the pictures became the truth of what they were proof of a real, normal relationship. So much mutual attention had been spent on one another, it did feel as if they had lived some kind of life together.
◆
That evening in her apartment, after a long phone conversation with her father, Tess spends forty-five minutes on the phone with Alaska Airlines trying to get a refund on her flight to San Diego. She had not planned on going home for Thanksgiving break until her grandmother was diagnosed with leukemia earlier in the semester. Weeks ago, her father had called to tell her, the first of many phone calls.
“It’s hard with these things. Once you’ve had one form of cancer, even if it goes into remission, it’s really easy for it to come back as something else.” Her father stumbled over the end of his sentence, his breath crackling against the receiver, and started to speak faster. “It often moves faster. It isn’t as easy to solve.” Solve, as if it were an equation with a definitive answer..
After that, there had been almost daily phone calls, updates about her grandmother’s condition, which Tess usually—dutifully, stoically—wrote down to remember later. Sometimes, she remembered to ask how her father was getting along with all of this again, but mostly she chose not to mention it. She thought it was useless, even cruel, to remind him that this was a second act, a repetition of what they had gone through with Tess’s mother; if he wanted to frame this story that way, he would have to do it himself.
For about two weeks, there wasn’t much change to her father’s reports: sometimes her grandmother ate, sometimes she didn’t have an appetite, but she was still talking, still reading. Sometimes, she even spoke to Tess, whenever her father handed over his phone. Tess bought a ticket home for late November and expected to arrive before the end. But today, after Tess’s appointment, her father called with different news.
“This was the first time she seemed sick—really sick—and weak. Couldn’t eat, couldn’t open her mouth all the way to eat.” Her father’s voice was even, but out of breath. She could visualize him pacing around their empty house, circling through the living room and kitchen and back again. She felt she was losing her footing in the conversation and tried to nudge her mind back into place.
“I was worried that things would be different by the time I came home. I thought it might be difficult.”
“But that’s not what I’m saying. I’m saying it might be over for you before you come back. You might already be done.”
Tess stood in her small kitchen, phone to her ear, looking out her window into the building across from hers. The couple who lived adjacent to her was sitting down to dinner, their bodies shadowy and ill-defined behind their drawn, gauzy curtains. Tess’s apartment was hot. Her apartment was always too hot; she never learned how to control her radiator. She wanted to chuck off her sweater but she couldn’t figure out how to do it without setting down her phone. She heard her father’s echoey, distant voice saying that it wouldn’t matter if she hopped on a plane right now, that her grandmother was in too much pain to even know it was her.
“I’m sorry,” he said, “but I have to say it like this. It’s the only way you’ll be able to know from where you are.” Tess nodded, forgetting that he could not see her face, and then said something in agreement that she couldn’t remember now. After they hung up, a cold and selfish sense of relief trickled back into her body. She won’t have to see that exact, unflinching process of death again; as she waits on hold with the airline, patiently trying to get her money back, she doesn’t let herself feel guilty.
◆
A little after New Years, when Tess was halfway through her junior year, there was talk of Russell coming to Seattle for a long weekend to visit and, although neither one would say it, to make things official. They spent two weeks trading schedules and making plans until Tess changed her mind right before he was about to arrive. She sent off a pithy email, with generic excuses about “not feeling right”, which Russell never answered. Instead, he texted her a few days later asking to talk, but she never acknowledged those messages. Things went silent between them for a long while, until Tess drunkenly apologized over text a few months later, at a friend’s 21st birthday party. Afterwards they started to speak again, sporadically and sloppily, with none of the care or skill from before. He said she was flighty, accused her of wasting his trust and time, and that he was unable to invest in someone who could disappear so easily. She said she didn’t disappear, but even to her, the words sounded pitiful and untrue.
Eventually, even this way of speaking to each other settled into a routine. Their arguments started to seem like performative gestures, like imitations of emotions they’d once had. After a while, they shifted back towards friendly banter and, by the time Tess graduated from college, she even considered them on good terms. Still, when she moved to New York to get her masters in Art History, they did not see each other in person, even though Russell started calling every couple of months, even though Tess texted back. There were many things that prevented Tess from accepting Russell’s invitations to meet or making any suggestions of her own: the fear she’d changed too much since Dublin, for one, or that, once in his presence, it would become glaringly obvious that Russell was right, she was too cold, too fickle, too unpredictable. There was also that heavy, newfound dread that came with the reality of Russell again—the sudden worry she would not be able to reconcile the Russell she’d once known in Dublin with the one that was here in New York, or even with the Russell she’d come to know over the phone, which seemed like a third, completely separate entity. When they first started talking, it felt as if they knew each other well, but for so long, Russell had only been a voice on a phone, a line of text on a screen. She had become used to his shadowy, phantom-like role in her life—neither physically present nor truly absent—that she could no longer picture what they would be to each other beyond that arrangement. Her inability to see Russell or herself as clearly as she had before startled her into a stillness, which then deepened into a comfortable inaction, a hesitancy whose origins and reasoning Tess slowly forgot. What remained was a vague and contradictory sense of caution, and an over-protectiveness for the way she now lived. New York was her opportunity to build a new life, one that was different than all the ones she had before, one that she was certain she’d want to keep: she didn’t need to ruin it by nurturing old habits and desires, by indulging in the same unfiltered keenness she’d approached life in Ireland. Most of the time, Tess agreed with her careful decisions; but other times, it seemed clear that she was simply avoiding unruly areas of her life, as if hoping they would solve themselves if she left them alone long enough.
◆
Tess hadn’t planned on coming to the Art History mixer that Tuesday, but she had been coaxed into it by a classmate who heard they were serving real food. By the time she arrived, there were no more sandwiches and barely any appetizers. Tess had nothing to do but twiddle her thumbs and watch Nathan wrap his arm around a pretty, pixieish woman who kept absently touching his hand at her waist, as if reassuring herself that it’s still in the right place. She’s introduced as Nathan’s girlfriend, who has apparently been with him all semester, but this is the first Tess has heard of it.
Tess was not friends with Nathan; now, she is certain she never could be, even though nothing happened between them. Last semester, they sat near each other in a class on Italian Renaissance painting. This semester, they sit across from each other in a seminar called Ephemeral Art and attend the same optional lecture series. Nathan occasionally responds to her Instagram stories, but that hasn’t happened for some time now. No, nothing happened beyond a few glances that lasted a moment too long, small smiles whenever they caught each other’s eye in class, and a few focused, flirty conversations at other department events. But Nathan happens to be the first person that Tess felt even remotely interested in since knowing Russell and, although she never intended to let Nathan become anything more than a fun, unfulfilled crush, she is still surprised to feel something similar to loss, watching to him explain their seminar to a boy in the undergraduate program, occasionally glancing at his girlfriend to see if she’s listening too
“It’s a term for a piece of art that isn’t meant to last or happens only once. They’re typically made out of material that’s very temporary, like natural, organic things. Ephemeral art became really popular in the Sixties, with that anti-establishment sentiment moving the art world away from being dependent on museums and galleries. It’s basically art that can’t be captured in a lasting object, so it really can’t be displayed in any traditional way.”
Nathan’s girlfriend nods, listening intently. She is tiny and charming, with a deep voice and an emerald wool coat, which Nathan has tucked over his arm. She’s wearing a long-sleeved jumpsuit in a creamy white that doesn’t wash out her skin, and delicate gold bangles that tinkle, lightly, whenever she moves her hands. She just completed her MA in Museum Curation, already has a job at MoMA, and makes a lame joke about how ephemeral art will put her out of work. Everyone involved in the conversation gives a little chuckle of recognition. Tess, who is not involved, slips away to the drinks table. In an attempt to stay in control of herself, Tess has only had coffee, but this has only made her hands tremble and her voice feel thin and distant. She wishes she’d started off with wine like everyone else, but all the white is gone and she doesn’t like being limited to red, doesn’t like having the choice made for her.
The next day in class, Nathan doesn’t make eye contact with Tess. They don’t look at each other when they answer questions or when awkward technical glitches happen during their professor’s PowerPoint presentation. It’s too late in the semester to switch seats: the only thing worse than acknowledging a routine is breaking it, so they stay in their usual spots, eyes flickering in any direction but towards each other.
◆
That night, as the shower runs next to her, Tess sits on the closed toilet lid, wrapped in a towel, scrolling through the National Ovarian Cancer’s Coalition’s website. Since her grandmother’s diagnosis, Tess’s intake of information about illness had dramatically increased and she divides her free time between researching the leukemia her grandmother now has and the ovarian cancer she’d had years earlier. Tess is already thoroughly familiar with ovarian cancer, but she still checks the website frequently, in case something changed since the last time she looked. There was also a precise, clinical comfort in the way they framed the information, a tone that Tess likes very much, even when she already knows the facts.
The website is cutely divided into categories readers “care about”: I care about earlier awareness, I care about community events, I care about research, I care about quality of life. Tess has the earlier awareness page memorized, so lately she tends towards the research pages, though she could probably recite passages of that by heart too. The origins and causes essay is her favorite:
Hereditary breast and ovarian cancer syndrome
This syndrome is caused by inherited mutations in the genes BRCA1 and BRCA2, as well as possibly some other genes that have not yet been found. This syndrome is linked to a high risk of breast cancer as well as ovarian, fallopian tube, and primary peritoneal cancers. The risk of some other cancers, such as pancreatic cancer and prostrate cancer, are also increased.
The lifetime ovarian cancer risk for women with a BRCA1 mutation is estimated to be between 35% and 70%.
Tess doesn’t bother reading about chemo anymore; she’s already seen it twice over and her grandmother had refused to go through it this time. She often thinks of what she would do if she was presented with the same situation. She knows she should do chemo once, that it wasn’t fair to deny herself a fighting chance; but it’s hard to think, even now, in such an abstract way, that it would be worth it to go through it again.
The steam from the shower begins to cloud her vision and the screen of her phone becomes too slippery to track her finger across it. She places it face down on the sink counter and goes to stand under the stream of water until her skin mottles red.
◆
Tess has gotten lunch with David almost every Thursday for the past three months, when his work brings him closer to campus. They have known each other since Tess first moved to New York—David was in his last year of the art history program while Tess was in her first—but he’s twelve years older than her. David is very attached to the idea that New York and grad school throw things like age differences and friendships into a delightful disarray, and brings it up frequently, almost every time they are together. Tess has given up explaining that things are like this everywhere, it’s just their particular situation that frames it in a way that seems unique. David often makes comments about how easy Tess is to talk to, how surprised he is when he’s reminded of how young she is, things that Tess has to shrug off as normal. She’s stopped telling him stories that include her friends that are still in college because it always makes him question aloud what that makes him, if she is able to equally enjoy her time with people who are so young and someone who is his age. Tess isn’t sure how to explain that it makes him nothing: she is the in-between one in this scenario, the one who slips between the two worlds. He has nothing to do with that side of her life at all, so it is easy to avoid those stories. There are lots of areas of her life that David doesn’t have access to—David doesn’t know about Dublin, about her appointment at the medical center that Monday, about her dying grandmother, about her dead mother. For a long time, those blind spots didn’t seem to matter. But lately, Tess has been distracted by the fact that David doesn’t even make guesses at her past, or at the rest of her life beyond what he could see. It wasn’t that he was satisfied with what he knew and felt no need to press for more—Tess has the suspicion that it hadn’t ever occurred to David that there even were other pieces of her life, other angles to her existence.
This Thursday, they are in a tiny Italian restaurant in the Upper West Side, overcrowded with families and couples. It’s loud and clattering and intimate enough for Tess to notice, but choose to ignore.She’s halfway through a glass of red wine and complaining, of all things, about Nathan.
“I get it that it was just a silly crush, something to distract myself, but that doesn’t mean that I’m not allowed to feel something about it, you know?”
David slices into his meatball and shoves half of it into his mouth before he speaks.
“I don’t get it, were you two a thing and now you’re not a thing? Or did it just seem like you two were going somewhere with this?”
“No, nothing like that, I just thought…” Tess trails off, unsure of how she wants to phrase her feelings. Nathan seemed like the idea of something she wanted, and for a while the idea of something feels just as good as the thing itself. It was the disappointment of being blindsided by something that should have been harmless, just airy, fun feelings. But all of this seems outside the grasp of communicating, especially to David. She finishes her sentence lamely, saying “I just thought it would be nice.”
David continues to chew, swallows, then says, “I wouldn’t worry about it. Look, any guy would be lucky to have you. You’ll get over it and find someone else.” A familiar flicker of worry sparks in Tess’s chest, but she doesn’t allow it to ignite. She quickly moves towards a slightly different angle, trying to choke the conversation before it develops in directions she doesn’t want it to go.
“At least it proves that I was right to stay single through as much of the program as possible. It’s so useless to sidetrack myself with stuff like this. I’m already annoyed that I’m wasting even this small of an amount of time thinking about it.”
This is a reoccurring joke, Tess’s insistence on staying single, though recently a streak of seriousness has been painted over this routine, thickly, without Tess being able to trace where it originated.
“Actually, well,” David pauses for a moment, picks up his glass of wine and fiddles with the stem. He’s already, by doing this, broken their routine. “Maybe you’re putting too much pressure on yourself, trying to abide by some arbitrary rule you’ve set.” He takes another gulp of wine, but sets the glass down delicately. There isn’t much room on the table, between their plates and the meatballs and the giant pizza. “I mean, what harm would it do to like someone?”
“It isn’t liking someone that’s the problem. It’s—” Tess cuts herself short again. Suddenly she doesn’t want to—and isn’t sure if she even can—articulate that the problem is the permanency of everything, even something as frivolous and momentary as this. Things that don’t last, that aren’t even meant to last, still leave behind rubble.
“Whatever,” Tess says, “Never mind. It’s just awkward in class now. Like, we won’t look at each other, but we sit right across from each other. So there’s just a little undercurrent of uncomfortableness running through my Wednesdays, that’s all.”
David waits a moment, as if to verify that she’s finished, before launching into his own story.
“Let me tell you—I promise this relates—after I broke up with Andrea, I asked out a girl I worked with. We had been friends for awhile, but really good friends, the kind that talk all the time and could shoot the shit for hours.” Friends like us, is what Tess realizes he means, though she doesn’t say it. “So I asked her out and I was pretty certain she’d say yes. But she was horrified, like I really crossed this inappropriate line. I mean, you have to understand that we used to talk about really intimate stuff, like sex and masturbation and all kinds of things that people just don’t talk about with other people.”
Tess starts wiping grease off her fingers until the paper napkin starts to peel and shed on her hands.
“So anyway, she says no and starts saying things like we work together, like she’s really offended. We just stop talking for a little bit because I asked her out before the beginning of a holiday weekend, and we go the full four days without really speaking. And I’m fine with it, her saying no, or at least I think I am because when we go back to work and see each other for the first time since then, I didn’t handle it very well.” David stops to chuckle. “I had to text her to say Well that didn’t go very well.”
“What does that mean?”
“It just didn’t go very well.”
Tess balls up her napkin and drops it onto the pile of leftover sauce on her plate. David keeps talking, but now he’s staring at the little patch of wall above Tess’s head and not directly at her.
“Anyway, she doesn’t respond to the text, but things start going a bit smoother at work and I’m thinking that things are starting to go back to normal. Except, I’m still texting her like before, only she doesn’t respond to any of them. She just goes cold.”
“What did you say?”
David looks down at her. “What?”
“What did the texts say?”
“I don’t remember. It doesn’t matter.” David sounds genuinely confused, even annoyed at the interruption. “Anyway, this is when I start feeling like things are getting weird, so I text her to say so we’re really just not going back to the way it was?”
Tess nods and tries to give a little murmur of acknowledgment, but nothing comes out.
“That’s when she calls me and she’s screaming at me, really letting me have it, saying awful shit like I had never been her friend and I was just using her the whole time we knew each other. I couldn’t believe she would say something like that.”
David stops, as if sensing he’s losing his audience.
“And anyway—this is how it relates to your thing, I promised it related—our office was designed with open seating, so we could all see each other while we worked. We had to sit across from each other for three whole months until her transfer finally went through and she started working on a different floor. It was brutal! The way we ignored each other got so bad, people even asked me about it.” After a beat, he adds, almost as an afterthought, “Her transfer was already going to happen before I asked her out. That’s not connected.”
Tess doesn’t quite believe him, but also doesn’t think it’s a lie. She just isn’t sure if they can decide what is connected and what is not. She’s thinking of her own phone lighting up late at night, first with Russell’s name and then with David’s, a series of small boxes filling her screen; she is thinking about how these two different events overlap with each other so easily, how the dye from one life bleeds over into another. She also thinks that David does remember what he wrote in those texts, but she isn’t sure if she cares enough to tell him.
◆
On her way home from the restaurant, Tess scrolls back through her texts with Russell. They’ve planned to meet tomorrow night, at a bar located halfway between their respective neighborhoods. She’s sitting on the subway, hunched over her phone in a way that will make her back ache later, but she doesn’t feel like forcing herself to stop and sit correctly. She has scrolled all the way back to last year, right before she moved to New York, but she has stopped reading the texts very closely. She just keeps thumbing her way back in time to prove it was there, to prove it happened. Her mind keeps circling back to lunch with David and the story he told, as if there was a single, subtle thread tying it all together: his story and Nathan’s unwitting participation in it, how close she was to finally meeting up with Russell again, and how she should probably wait to call her father back until after she got her results from the medical center tomorrow. All of these disparate situations, reduced to the same level of importance and meaning.
Supposedly, the success of her friendship with David is built on their ability to speak frankly, but she dislikes the starkness of his story today, how stripped it was of detail. She wants to know what was said between him and this girl, the exact texts he sent and how often he sent them, and what it really means to not take her rejection of him “well”. If she could just have the exact definitions of these things and arrange them in their correct order, she could maybe follow them, like a tiny hairline fracture, to the origin of what made her uneasy with David this afternoon. But already, even as her desire for clarity continued to build, she knows it wouldn’t make a difference. She has the exact transcript of everything she’s ever said to Russell over the past year on the screen in front of her and it hasn’t brought any clarity. Her compulsion to inflict meaning onto a random collection of events, which only happened to be centered around herself, suddenly felt useless and sentimental. It was if there were two versions of Tess: the normal one, who lives through everything as it happens and the other one, always wondering if there was a better way to capture all these things that couldn’t be trapped into perfect answers, framed in perfect stories.
The train slows and then screeches to a stop. Tess looks up and out the subway windows, surprised to find the view muffled in a dark grey nothingness: they’ve stopped short before reaching the next station. She stares out the window at her own reflection illuminated in the dirty glass. When she returns to her phone, her screen is stilled on a short exchange she and Russell had last August.
So we’re just going to pretend it’s normal to keep going back and forth like this? Russell had written.
No. I’m not pretending anything. I’m well aware that it isn’t normal.
Then her again, in a separate bubble of text: when you experience something like this Russell, you can’t blame someone for not being normal.
His response came ten minutes after hers.
Sometimes I wonder if you know the difference between wanting an experience and having one.
For Tess, the problem with Russell is that their situation always seems to unfurl onto their laps and spread into each others lives by luck; neither one of them had to work very hard for it. Sometimes, when she was younger, Tess flirted with the idea of fate, that they had been doomed to circle around each other for centuries before they were born and would continue to do so once they were both dead and gone. Fate allowed her to excuse some of Russell’s fumbles, things he should have known better than to do, things she hadn’t wanted him to say. More importantly, fate made her free, faultless. Fate let her tell herself that there was something built into her bones that made her live in such a sketchy, stilted way; fate gave her a reason to be flighty. The thought of fate was so consoling when she first knew Russell and when she first tried to no longer know him, that now, for a moment, here on the subway, she puts away her phone and lets herself think it again.
◆
Friday morning, during their lecture on still life painting, Tess sits ten seats away from Nathan. The little fold-out desk attached to her chair remains empty, while she balances a small notebook on one of her legs, crossed over the other. Her eyes are downcast, focused on her paper, while the professor drones on at the front of the lecture hall and clicks through a slideshow.
“As we discussed last week, the vanitas genre of still life contains collections of objects symbolic of the inevitability of death and the transience of earthly achievements and pleasures. It is designed to compel the viewer to consider mortality and to repent for the vanities of their corporeal existence.”
The professor clicks to a detail of a larger painting, an image of a human skull. Tess continues to scribble in her notebook and doesn’t look up. She is trying not to think of Nathan, how he held the door open for her as she approached the Humanities building, how they took the stairs together, how easily he smiled and chatted as if nothing was wrong. She is trying not to think about how clumsily she responded to him, even though she knew he was correct, that objectively speaking, nothing was wrong, nothing had happened between them. She is definitely trying not to think about her phone call with her father that morning or about her results from the medical center. She focuses on her writing instead: she jots down a few key concepts, but mostly maps out the exact movements of her conversation with David yesterday, in the same distant, clinical manner she approaches the art. She feels close to recognizing the menacing moral of David’s story—that he told her what another girl did wrong so that she will not make the same mistake when her time comes—but she lets herself linger on the edge of knowing for a moment longer. She dislikes the idea of directly acknowledging an underlying omen; fate, she figured, once seen, could not be unseen.
At the front of the room, the professor continued: “The earliest vanitas paintings were somber, fairly monochromatic compositions. They contained only a few objects, such as books or a skull. They were notable for their elegance and precision; they were exact replicas of reality.”
Tess writes in long, loping sentences, punctuated by dashes and arrows that snake around the page to connect to some other, distant scribble. Although she is trying to distill her conversation with David to its bare bones, she isn’t necessarily trying to downplay its relevance in the larger picture of her life. It’s a struggle to do both: to organize the story into starkest, simplest form, while still capturing its porous implications. The professor’s voice fades into a background drone, a monotonous echo of her tangly, troubled thoughts.
“As the century progressed, other elements were introduced to the vanitas and their palettes became more diversified, even chaotic. Objects were thrown together in a complete disarray, suggesting the eventual overthrow of the achievements they represented. For example, the use of coins here.”
The projection screen switches to a slide of a stack of coins partially hidden by a grinning skull.
“This display indicates that, despite the apparent importance of riches in the corporeal world, they will do nothing to preclude us from inevitable death.”
The professor clears his throat, then stays silent. The rows of seats in the lecture hall curve at a slight angle, making a half circle around the projection screen and the professor. Nathan and Tess are positioned where they can see each other at the outer edges of their vision. Tess is aware of this and has been trying not to look in his direction because of it; but now, when she glances up to see why the professor has paused so long, her eyes automatically flick towards Nathan. He is already looking at her. They hold their gaze and Tess is unsure what he could possibly want in that moment. She wonders, briefly, if Nathan wasn’t actually seeing her and she was searching for meaning in nothing, in his glazed-over vision. She glances away when the professor begins to speak again, but quickly looks back.
“The thesis of the vanitas genre is that our fate as humans is to die and that material possessions, as well as personal pursuits and problems are simply vanities, mere distractions from the knowledge of our mortality.”
Nathan gives her the smallest shadow of a smile, then rolls his eyes slightly, poking fun at the boring, repetitive lecture. Tess looks down at her lap and flips the page of her notebook so she doesn’t have to look at what she wrote before.
◆
After the lecture, Tess walks to the CVS nearby campus and stands in the aisle with all the condoms and lubricants and, farther down the shelves, the pregnancy tests and sanitary pads and adult diapers. The whole avenue of life could be supplied from this one aisle, Tess thinks, still seeing the world in broad stroke, academic terms.
She picks up a box of condoms at random and begins to read the back, trying to decipher if it’s what she wants. It is late afternoon and the store is almost empty. There is no one nearby to distract Tess but she cannot keep her eyes steady on the white lines of texts running across the back of the box. The words seem to mingle and disappear into the bright purple background, into the florescent lights from the ceiling, into the rush of air conditioning rattling overhead. Her own body feels out of sync with itself: her eyes rush over the words too quickly for her brain to keep up, her heart pounding to an excessive beat, the bones in her chest feeling hollow enough to shatter from the slightest touch. Before long, she puts the box back on the shelf and walks out onto the street to catch the subway downtown, without bothering to stop at home first.
◆
That evening, at the bar she and Russell had agreed upon, Tess stands in the doorway and scans the darkened, narrow room. Her eyes are distracted by the amount of objects at the bar: the shine of bottles and pint glasses stacked upon each other, the golden knobs of the taps, and colorful coats slouched over the backs of barstools. There is a flicker of fear that he won’t be here which mingles, quietly, with hope. But suddenly there he is, raising a hand to catch her eye, gesturing towards the booth by the front window, as if nothing had happened at all, as if they have always lived this way.
◆
Three pints into the night, Russell starts asking Tess what she plans to do once she graduates from her program next summer. They have already finished setting the stage for tonight, already balanced foamy glasses in their hands while they walked back to their booth, already nervously traced the sticky rings left on the table just to have something to do with their hands. Now they are leaning into the table, faces closer to each other than they ever have been before, supposedly to hear the conversation better. One of Tess’s feet is tucked underneath her, growing numb; the other scoots closer to the opposite side under the table.
“I want to go to Florence after this. That would be the dream. There’s a technical program over there for art restoration. It’s only a year long, but I don’t know if I should really go.” Tess has never mentioned Italy to anyone else; she isn’t sure she’s ever fully visualized her plan, even for herself. It feels profane, in a way, to even consider a life after New York when she had wanted it so badly before. “My father gets nervous if I’m too far away for too long. I think he’s afraid that one of these days I’ll just disappear.”
Russell’s mouth twitches. Tess regrets saying the last part and hopes he doesn’t say anything about how she’s good at that, disappearing whenever she wants. They haven’t mentioned their failed meeting in Seattle once. She wonders if he will bring it up now, or if he will ask where he fits into this future she’s visualizing for herself. It occurs to Tess that it has been so long since he seemed like a real person, she hasn’t considered that he could be a part of one.
“What does your mother think?” Russell finally asks.
“My mother is dead,” Tess says. After a moment, even though she knows she’s never mentioned it before, she adds “Remember?”
“No. I’m sorry.” Russell’s voice is steady, but tinged with genuine shock. “I don’t think I knew about that.”
Tess stares at him, trying not to blink. Russell watches her right back, almost curiously, as if doesn’t understand her tone and wants to study it. “When did it happen?”
“A while ago. Years ago. After I met you, but awhile now.”
Russell’s head tilts slightly to one side. All night, Tess has been startled by how familiar some of his small habits are: the head tilt, the way he runs his hands all over the table, like he’s silently, absentmindedly claiming it. There is a comfort in this familiarity alongside the surprise, and she wonders if enough of her has stayed the same for Russell to feel something similar about her. She feels very different than who she was in Dublin, but she isn’t certain if that means she actually is different enough to seem different to someone else. Tess surprises herself with how abruptly, and hungrily, she wishes he’ll piece everything together, after burying the story from everyone else she’s known in New York.
“Did it happen in the winter?”
“No. Spring.”
“The spring you graduated from college?”
“No, the spring before that.” The spring, she means, that I disappeared on you.
Russell straightens out his body, leans agains the back of the booth seat. He keeps staring at Tess, tilting his head from one side to the next, as if wanting to see every angle of her face. It makes Tess nervous enough to start rambling, even though he stopped asking questions.
“It started with cysts in her ovaries, which really hasn’t been proven to be connected to the mutation of cells, but I think still contributed to it. Then it was like her entire abdomen was filled up like a ballon or something, but hard, and she couldn’t pee without crying, like really crying with sobs and gasps and all that. It all happened really fast—the discovery of the tumor, the operation to remove it. She had an epithelial tumor, which is really common, it makes up about 90 percent of all ovarian cancers, but she had the kind that didn’t seem cancerous when they examined her, so they didn’t catch it until stage III.
Russell nods very slowly, like everything she just said is perfectly normal.
“I, uh, know a lot about it because my grandmother had it before my mother. She didn’t die from it though. But she’s sick again now.”
“I see. And this is your mother’s—”
“My mother’s mother, yeah.”
Russell looks down at the table, but doesn’t touch it. His hands rest in his lap, where Tess cannot see them.
“There’s a gene that basically guarantees you’ll get it. I was tested for it earlier this week.” She picks up her glass, realizes it’s empty, sets it down again. Russell says nothing.
“They—the medical center, I mean—called me this morning. I have it.”
When Russell looks up at her again, a sharp shadow cuts across half of his face. Tess has the sensation that she could see, in his shaded features, exactly what he will look like when he’s old. The darkness of the bar didn’t reach her yet; a little lamp glowed behind her, spilling light over her side of the table. She tries to picture what Russell could see from where he’s sitting: the way her body cut through the pink, half-light coming through the front window, how the artificial light turned the specificities of her face into silhouette, how young and unformed she must look to him. She wonders if this is how he will remember her from now on—backlit and glowing, sitting still and subdued. It will be a lovely image for him, but she hopes that this wouldn’t be the way she pictured him in the years to come, with that combination of pity and desire and confusion spoiling his face. She wanted immediately to abandon this image for something prettier, that she could put in a better, more concise frame. But it was too late: she could feel the memory forming already, recklessly, like a thing separate from her; both the way she wanted to remember it and how it actually was fell together into one without her.