“You’re trying to pull away, to disappear. From me, from us. It’s like”—she bit her lip for a second—“Julia left and so you’re leaving too.”
The wall clock in the corner ticked loudly. It was one of the original furnishings in the apartment, provided perhaps to remind everyone who lived here that time was passing. Sweat broke out on the back of William’s neck. He’d worked hard, when he and Julia were first together, to convince the Padavano family to accept him. He’d read a book on plumbing to figure out how to fix a rusty pipe under their kitchen sink. He’d spent afternoons pulling weeds in Rose’s garden. He’d taken poetry books out of the library to try to understand the references Charlie made during conversations. Now he felt guilty about those efforts and how effective they’d been. He and his wife had split up, yet he was still somehow part of her family. A week earlier, Cecelia had called him when her bathroom flooded, and William had traveled there with tools. The three Padavano sisters still in Chicago seemed to be willfully oblivious to the truth of the situation: William didn’t deserve the family Julia had felt compelled to leave behind.
Please go away, he thought. His body and brain wanted to pull him to the dim, submerged place where he wasn’t aware of his emotions, where everything was dulled. But he couldn’t do that anymore.
“You’re not supposed to be here,” he said. “There are rules about having female guests after hours.”
“Oh, please,” Sylvie said.
He silently agreed with her. That excuse was weak. He was weak. The truth was, William felt awake, and uncomfortable, and he wanted things, in Sylvie’s presence. Things he didn’t deserve and that would create more mess. When he’d decided to separate himself from the Padavanos, he really meant Sylvie. Every time she’d entered his hospital room, his heart beat faster. He knew he needed to walk away from her. He could have done so more easily if Sylvie hadn’t asked to hold his hand on his last day in the hospital. For William’s entire life, he’d been trying to hold himself together. There was the little boy coughing in his closet, trying not to upset his parents. The unsteady college student, always a second too slow to smile or to return a high five. The basketball player, at home only with a ball in his hands. The young man who was relieved to be chosen by a powerhouse of a woman who’d handed him plans and schedules and even thoughts. He’d followed her every instruction, but eventually the directions had led him so far away from himself that he was no longer a person.
In the hospital, William had allowed himself to feel sympathy for the lonely child he’d once been and for the young man who’d lost hope after injury forced him off the basketball court. William had found his voice in the hospital, and the medication meant that when he opened his eyes in the morning, his first thought wasn’t about how he could get to the other end of the day. His ongoing goal—and, he thought, his doctors’ too—was that he be healthy enough, good enough, and happy enough. But when Sylvie put her hand in his, William experienced a sensation he hadn’t known existed. With her hand in his, he’d felt whole. The shock and pleasure of this had reverberated within him. Right now he wished Sylvie weren’t in this room, forcing him to have this conversation, and yet he wanted to hold her hand. He wanted the feeling that came with her touch. He wanted it badly.
She said, “You barely looked at me or spoke to me tonight, and I think you pretended not to be home when I came by a few days ago.”
He nodded. He had left the lights off and kept quiet when she’d knocked on his door. “You should leave me alone,” he said. “You should go on dates and have fun. I’m a broken-down man. You have to go live your life.”
Sylvie listened while he spoke, and whereas Cecelia had given him a curious face, Sylvie gave him a pensive one. “But that breaks your mantra,” she said. “You can’t pretend not to be home if you’re going to live with no bullshit and no secrets.”
William took this in. She wasn’t wrong. He was making mistakes, which was why he needed her to go away. He needed to live quietly and carefully, alone.
“I’d rather you answered your door and told me why you wanted me to go away.” Sylvie took a jagged breath, and the sound made William think of a window being yanked open. She said, “I don’t want you to hide yourself, and I don’t want to hide myself either.”
You’re not hiding yourself, he thought. I see so much in you, more than in anyone I’ve ever known. This had started on the bench that cold night, but he could see the ache inside her now. He could see that she was filled with want too. William was still standing near the door. Sylvie was in the middle of the small living space, in front of the red couch. William wondered for a second what his parents might be doing right now. He imagined them sitting quietly in their living room, a fire in the fireplace, drinks in their hands. Their faces faded with age and unhappiness.
“Aren’t you going to say anything?” Sylvie said.
He looked at her, tried to express with his face that he was sorry, because he didn’t seem to be able to speak; he felt incapable of reaching into the maelstrom of feelings and language inside him and pushing words out of his mouth.
She shook her head, clearly frustrated. “I’m going to tell you something. Something I figured out because of you. When I was a kid, my dream was to find a great love, like the kind you read about in a Bront? novel. Or Tolstoy.”
William pictured this, as if flipping through an album: He turned from the image of his worn parents to Sylvie wearing a high-necked gown, standing in a Russian train station.
“When we were teenagers, my sisters wanted me to date boys and not do what I was doing, which was making out with them in the library. But I didn’t have any interest in being a girlfriend, and I didn’t care about becoming a wife. I knew that if I never found my great love, I would rather be single than settle for a mediocre relationship. I can’t bear to pretend happiness.” Sylvie waved her hands for a second, as if they were wet and she wanted them dry. “Here’s the thing I realized, though: I always thought that I wanted that dream because I was romantic and destined to live a big life, but that wasn’t true. I created that dream because real life scared me, and that dream seemed so far-fetched I didn’t think it would ever happen. I’d never seen that kind of love in person. My parents loved each other, but badly, and they were miserable. So were all the other couples in my neighborhood. Have you ever actually seen that kind of love?”