“You can’t tell me this stuff doesn’t affect you at all.”
“No, you know me.” I pulled my hands under the table, rubbed at the thin white rings of scar tissue at my wrists. Wounds I’d explained away with an invented bicycle crash. “We’re supposed to be happy right now. You just asked me to move in with you,” I said, though that moment felt far away.
“I know. I just mean it’s a lot to work through. But, Ana?”
“Yeah?”
“I’m willing to do it, okay?”
“Okay,” I said.
“Want to get out of here?”
“Don’t think you’re leaving without dessert!” said Junior, rounding the corner with two bowls of panna cotta.
“Thanks, but we’re really full,” I said.
“Dessert is a separate compartment,” said Junior and set the bowls down on the table. Brian, who intuited that it would be quicker to eat the dessert than argue with Junior, took a few big spoonfuls, and I followed.
“Uncle J, can we have the check?” I said between bites.
“Unfortunately I can’t help you. No such check exists.”
“Come on. We want to pay you.”
“You’re students. Forget it.”
“All right,” I said, willing to give in if it meant we got to leave. “Thank you.”
“No problemo. And tell your father to call me for chrissakes.”
Out on the street it was much windier than it had been when we’d gone in, strong gusts cutting through my jacket. Brian always sped up in the cold, and I struggled to match his pace.
“Have you ever thought about going back?” he said.
“Sometimes. But I don’t know what for.”
“It might give you some closure.”
“Oh, here we go.” Annoyed, I stopped trying to keep up.
Brian slowed, too. “Hey, don’t do that. I didn’t mean anything by it.”
“You don’t know the first thing about dealing with this stuff.”
“I know. You’re right.” We were blocking the sidewalk, and he broached the gap between us. He tried to pull my hand from my pocket, but I jerked away.
“It’s cold.”
“Ana, I’m sorry. Just come home with me. Elliot’s still off at some design conference. We’ll have the place to ourselves. We can…decompress.” He was holding on to my wrist inside my jacket pocket, and I interlaced my fingers with his. I could feel myself relenting. I didn’t want to fight with him, and I didn’t want to be alone.
—
Brian and I had quiet sex that felt like an apology. Normally we were relaxed with one another, having learned the patterns of each other’s bodies. But now we were overly careful, each of us fumbling to show the other we were willing to repair the trust I had broken. When it was over I felt a longing for the blitheness I had ruined.
“What is it?” Brian said.
“Nothing.”
“I can see you thinking.”
“Really, nothing.”
“How do you hold all this stuff inside such a little person?” he said, pressing his palm to my chest. “Don’t you feel like you’re going to explode?”
“I’m more worried about you.”
“What about me?”
“What you’re thinking, about all this.”
“I’m thinking that’s why you like Sebald.”
“Oh, don’t start.”
He smiled his crooked smile and ran a finger across my cheek. “Seriously though.”
“Isn’t there anything you want to know?”
“Everything,” he said. “But not tonight. We have time. Tonight let’s just do this.” He slipped his arm beneath me, and I laid my head on his chest.
I listened to his heartbeat slow. “Brian?” I said after a while. He didn’t respond. I slid from his bed and searched his desk for a piece of scrap paper. Sorry to leave. Been having trouble sleeping.
I took a detour to the library. I was nearly finished with Austerlitz and needed a new book. The circulation desk was about to close for the night, and the work-study girl scowled when I walked in and showed my guest pass. I found myself typing “Croatia” into the catalog database, and followed the resulting call number to the Eastern European section at the back of the stacks. I pulled the biggest nonreference book—Black Lamb and Grey Falcon—from its place on the shelf and thumbed through the first few pages in the volume of over a thousand. It had been published in Britain in the forties, and I was wary of what kind of light a dead Englishwoman might shed on modern-day anything, never mind a country so drastically changed as mine. But when I turned to the dedication page my breath seized at the stark precision of its single sentence: To my friends in Yugoslavia, who are now all dead or enslaved. I snapped the heavy cover shut.