Harriet spent the drive up chewing her thumbnail and glaring out at snowy rises, firs humped under powder. It had snowed heavily all the week before, and they might’ve been driving through a tunnel in the clouds, sculpted white cliffs rising along either side of the road.
That night they played to a room packed to the walls, people older and wealthier than they, looking for some good noise on a Saturday night after a hard day of skiing and exercising their credit cards. The room was hot and stank of hops, wet wool, wet hair, and woodsmoke. Harriet wore a pair of low-slung blue jeans, and when she crouched over her acoustic, Aubrey could see the top of her emerald thong. She was especially good that evening, careless and funny, her usually clear voice pleasantly hoarsened, as if she were recovering from a cold. They played and they drank, Belgian beer with a pink elephant printed on the label. Aubrey was on his fourth and feeling dizzy when he discovered that it was 8.5 percent ABV.
There was no room in the tiny elevator for all of them and Aubrey’s cello, so Aubrey and Harriet rode up together, leaving June behind with her brothers. When they got out on the third floor, Harriet looked one way, then the other, squinting at the white-numbered doors. She swayed and took Aubrey’s arm.
“Where’s my room?” Harriet asked. “Do you remember?”
Aubrey asked to see her key card, but it was just a featureless black rectangle, revealing nothing.
“We’ll call down from my room,” Aubrey said, but they never did.
12
THE STARS CAME OUT, a swarm of bright sparks in the wintry dark. It felt like winter up here, ten thousand feet above the soil. Aubrey ate the last of his granola bar and huddled in his piles of blankets with the Junicorn, pushing it into his face, trying to smell Harriet on it, remembering the way her hair smelled that night in Maine, like pine trees, like juniper.
Thinking about Maine, remembering the way they yanked at each other’s clothes, kissing almost desperately, Aubrey felt the need for Harriet as intensely as he had ever wanted water. And in the deepest part of the night, she pushed the blankets back and climbed carefully, almost shyly, to his side: a Harriet made of cloud, pillowy white breasts, cool flowing silk for hair, lips of dry fog, tongue of cool vapor.
He sobbed gratefully, drew her to him, and fell into her, a long, sweet plunge without a parachute.
13
IF AUBREY WOKE UP FIRST, he believed his whole life might have been different. He didn’t know what that would’ve been like, to awake bathed in sunlight, amid the pillows and piles of white sheets, with Harriet naked beside him. How he would’ve liked to see the light on her bare back. How he wished to wake her with a kiss on her shoulder.
But when he clawed his way up out of sleep, Harriet had already left. She didn’t answer the knock on her hotel-room door. She wasn’t at the breakfast buffet. He did not see her all the rest of the time they were at Sugarloaf, except once, briefly: She was in the courtyard in front of the resort, shivering in a too-flimsy denim jacket, eyes streaming while she had it out with someone on the phone. The boyfriend, he was sure, and he felt a great throb of hope. They are breaking up, he thought. She is breaking up with him, and now it will be our time.
He was watching through the tinted front windows of the hotel lobby, and he would’ve gone to her—wanted to be close to her if she needed him, if his silent presence would help her get through it. But he’d arrived in the lobby with June, who was in a lot of pain. She was having nasty cramps, she said, or maybe a reaction to something she’d eaten. She was hanging on to Aubrey’s arm, and after they had both looked out on the scene in the courtyard for a moment, she tugged him toward the reception desk.
“Let her be,” June said. “I need you more than she does. I’m bleeding so bad it’s less like menstruation, more like afterbirth. I could not have more stuff spilling out of me without giving it a name and buying it diapers.”
June was in such a bad way that she asked Aubrey to do the driving. By the time Aubrey got his cello downstairs, Harriet was already gone. She had split with the Morris brothers. June said it was because Harriet had an obliterating headache and wanted to sleep on the bed in the back of the van, but Aubrey was disturbed. It felt less as if Harriet had departed, more like she’d fled.
“I think that pink-elephant stuff we drank last night might be aggravating my period,” June said. “It sure isn’t helping. We all drank way too much. I wish I could have last night back. I bet Harriet does, too. Like Reagan said: Mistakes were made.”
Aubrey wanted to ask what she meant by that, wanted to know what June knew, if she was talking about more than beer, but he lacked the courage, and soon June was asleep and snoring in a very unlovely way.
When he was back in his apartment, he texted Harriet almost a dozen times, beginning with Wow! So THAT happened, continuing on to I really want to give this a chance, and finishing with Are you there? Are you okay? She didn’t reply, and her silence made him sick with dread. He couldn’t sleep, couldn’t even get into bed. He paced his little bedroom, his stomach upset, playing games on his phone so he wouldn’t have to think. Finally he dozed off on his threadbare secondhand couch, which smelled faintly of rancid pizza.
His phone finally plinked with a message at four-fifteen in the morning.
I’m a horrible person I’m so sorry. I shouldn’t have done that it wasn’t fair to you. I need to be alone for a while. I’ve had a boy in my life since I was nine and now I need to figure out who I am without one. Please don’t hate me. Please never hate me my friend Aubrey.
Beneath that was an emoji of a heart being torn in two.
Three weeks later he was putting his bags down in a flat in the East End. He didn’t hear from Harriet again until March, and then it was another text:
June is really really sick. Can you call?
14
HE THOUGHT HIS CLOUD HARRIET would be gone when he woke, but she was cuddled against his chest, the gossamer specter of a girl with the blind, smooth features of classical statuary. Her hair streamed and curled in the breeze, feathers of white silk. His cock was chapped from screwing her. It had been a little like fucking a pail filled with cold porridge.
He didn’t tell her that, though. Aubrey liked to think he was a gentleman. Instead he said, “You’re a good kisser.”
She gazed at him adoringly.
“Do you understand me?”
She knelt on the bed, hands on her thighs, studying him with a rapt and vaguely idiotic devotion.
He took her hands of smoke and squeezed, squishing them a tiny bit out of shape.
“I have to get down to the ground. I’ll starve up here.”
Her hands spilled out of his as effortlessly as water dribbling through his fingers. She seemed, briefly, diminished and disheartened. Her slumped shoulders implied he was a buzzkill.