The One In My Heart

I managed a smile. “Bennett has a late shift.”


White lies were a necessity of life. Yet the moment the fib left my lips, all the lies that I’d ever fed Zelda crashed toward me, an avalanche of falsehood. No, I never think about my mother. No, I’m not afraid, ever. Of course I already have everything I want in life.

“Are you all right, darling?”

“I’m fine,” I said reflexively. “Well, maybe a bit nervous. Saturday Bennett is meeting his father, the two of them.”

It had become second nature, hadn’t it, this deflection?

The deflection worked. Zelda’s eyes widened. “Are they? I wonder if Frances is on tenterhooks too.”

“I’m sure she is.”

Zelda reached for her phone. “Let me text her.”

“Say hi to her for me. I’m going up.”

In my room, I sank down on the edge of the bed. Why couldn’t Bennett be happy with us the way we were? Why must he want what wasn’t in me to give? Why, if he knew I was fucked-up, did he take up with me in the first place?

You don’t hook up with someone crazy unless you’re willing to let them be unhinged.

I pulled out my phone and scrolled through the backlog of our texts. Still not that many of them, and mostly of a mundane nature, the discussion of when and where to meet next.

Yet I read them over again and again, this record of my all-too-real fake relationship. I wished now that I hadn’t turned him down for Valentine’s Day. That I hadn’t let weeks and weeks go by between meetings. That I hadn’t wasted four months last year not contacting him.

But would anything have made a difference? Or would I still end up sitting alone in my room, my heart in ruins?

I scrolled again through all our texts. So few. Too few. In no time at all I’d arrived at his fatal invitation. Are you free tonight? I’d like to see you.

To which I had blithely and innocently replied, I can be there about 7:15.

See you then.

We’d seen each other, and everything had fallen apart.

I swiped the screen again. There was one last exchange, from this afternoon.

How’s the book coming? I’d asked, regarding his progress on The Fellowship of the Ring.

They are about to go into Moria and I’m afraid.

The idea of his joining us for the movie marathon had been incredibly appealing, a wide new vista. But now there would only be Zelda and me.

Until the day I would be left all by myself.

I started tapping, a torrent of geekery on everything there was to know about shuttered, harrowing Moria, which had once been a magnificent city of broad avenues and great carven halls. Until someone dug too carelessly and too deep, and unleashed an ancient demon that caused its untimely destruction.

Only after I’d pressed send on my last text did I realize that what I’d written about was not the end of Moria, but the end of us.


I FELL ASLEEP, PHONE IN hand, waiting for a response.

Any response.

When I woke up there were a dozen new texts, but they were from my grad students, about a problem with our lab machines. Nothing from Bennett.

It was the sanest choice he could have made. But I didn’t want him to be sane, logical, or grown-up. I wanted him to engage.

Then at least I wouldn’t feel so profoundly alone.

Machine issues took up the whole day. Any moment I wasn’t talking to tech support on the phone, technicians in person, or my grad students about how our experiments could be redesigned to bypass the outage, I checked to see whether Bennett had texted me back.

He never did.

Had I been IM’ing into the great digital void? No, I’d broken up my essay on Moria into many separate texts. As I tapped out each new sentence, I’d seen the little notifications that popped up under earlier text bubbles. Read 10:35. Read 10:37. Read 10:38. Read…

Read, but not answered.

That night I lay in bed for hours, trying to fall asleep. At some point I made the mistake of reminding myself that he loved me, which only made me curl up in misery. Next thing I knew, I’d gone downstairs and grabbed my purse from the living room couch, where I’d deliberately left it, so I wouldn’t have a phone next to me.

Put the phone back. Put the phone back! shouted the still-rational part of me.

But I might as well have been shouting at a pack of zombies to stop advancing.

I crawled back under the covers and started tapping. Munich, the snow, the Englischer Garten, and, at last, him. I described our make-believe encounter in Proustian detail, every course eaten, every drink consumed, every flicker of the light as reflected in his eyes. And then, an entire dissertation on our imaginary lovemaking.

I used to touch myself, weaving this fantasy. But unlike you on your masturbation couch, I didn’t want to orgasm right away. I wanted to draw it out for as long as possible.