“There is a problem, though. You know it, too, at some level. You’re trading in freedom for security. You’re trading in this wide world,” he said, and he gestured to the restaurant with his right hand, “for a nine-to-five job. It doesn’t matter how well paid you’ll be; you’re deliberately trading something for your life. We both know that life. We know what it can offer and what it kills. It’s predictable. That’s why people are drawn to it.”
I tried to be calm. He seemed to be all over the place with his ideas. If I hadn’t been beside him all day, I might have wondered if he had been drinking. I tried to remember how the sand cranes had looked when we finally reached them. They had been more impressive, in many ways, than Yellowstone. They had fallen out of the sky like origami kites, their wings outstretched, their feet shifting slightly to balance their pitch and yaw. Their large wing feathers shifted like piano strings in the air, and they called plaintively, searching for their mates even before they landed, the vast Nebraska plain sending motes of grass and dust into the sunlight to color it.
Somewhere outside of what Jack said to me, the cranes waited. But for the time being, for this horrible, horrible quarter hour, the storm had us, and we could not leave it.
*
I forced myself to slowly sip my consommé. It was too salty, but I didn’t care. I ate with a straight back, the soup traveling in a dignified square to my mouth. Up, right angle, to the mouth, sip, out, right angle, down, bowl. The waiter passed by and checked on us. We smiled at him. He was a young kid, maybe eighteen, with shaggy hair and a Texas bolo tie. Why he wore a Texas bolo was anyone’s guess.
“Should we just drop this discussion for now?” I asked after a little time had passed. “It seems to be a point of conflict for us.”
“I’m sorry. I guess this is my personal demon, right?”
“Just so I understand, Jack, are you worried that you will lose something by joining your life, in whatever way that means, to mine? Is that it?”
“I don’t know.”
“You have to know, Jack. I don’t mean this minute, but you have to know eventually, right?”
He drank more wine, then pushed his soup away.
“Salty,” he said.
I nodded.
“The last time we fought, we more or less exploded. I don’t want to do that this time, Jack. I want us to be honest with each other. The last thing in the world I want to do is invite you to be with me in New York if that’s not what you want.”
“The thing is, I do want that. That’s why I said I didn’t want to meet someone like you. Not now, maybe not ever. Part of me is drawn to everything about it. About you. And another part, the one that I can’t quite understand, that part wants me to keep moving and keep experiencing things. New things.”
“We could do that together. We already have. We’ve been traveling together and seeing new things every day.”
“I know. It’s true.”
“And you’ve made me look at my life and how I lead it. It isn’t all you bending to me, Jack. I haven’t even filled out all the stupid forms from Bank of America. That is so not like me, you can’t even begin to imagine. My focus is wider now. You’ve made me examine my choices, and that isn’t easy. You’ve put a crink in my plans, too.”
The waiter came and took our soups and replaced them with a pork chop of some sort. It was the specialty of the house. I had no appetite for it, but I smiled anyway and told Jack it looked good. He reached across the table and took my hand.
“I had a friend named Tom, Heather. He was an older guy, but not that old. Maybe midforties. Great guy. He was a bit of a mentor for me. I worked with him on that newspaper. He wanted the same things I did, more or less. Wanted to be a journalist, all of that. Then one day when he was shaving, he found a lump right above his collarbone. He went to the doctor, the doctor diagnosed it as cancer, and nine months later, he was dead. I don’t know if I’ve ever fully acknowledged what it did to me. Mentally, I mean. He went from being a fortysomething-year-old in perfect health to a cancer patient in a matter of weeks. You don’t just get over that. Seeing that happen to someone. So I made promises to myself, and one was to see as much of the world as I could, to experience as much as I could as fully as I could. I know that’s impossible, I do, but I also know we are going to die one day, and it won’t be as long off as we imagine. It can happen anytime. Trust me, I heard the mortal knock when Tom got sick. It’s one thing to know that in the abstract, sure, sure, I’m going to die someday, but when it suddenly becomes a possibility that you might die now, this week, tomorrow, then something changes. It changes, Heather, believe me. I know that I am dying. Tom taught me that. This is my problem, Heather, not yours. It’s my worry. You’re perfect. You are. If there’s anyone in the world I want to be with, it’s you. But I’m not sure what I can give you.”
He kept my hand in his. His color had gone up and red.
“Okay,” I said after a long pause. “I get it. I do.”
But I didn’t really get it. I couldn’t think. I couldn’t put two words together. I sipped my wine. My brain felt like a crab scuttling for someplace to hide. Was he breaking up with me? Was he saying this had been fun, we were great, while warning me not to get hooked on him? If so, he was too late.
“Are you all right?” he asked.
“Sure. Just sad.”
“I didn’t mean—”
I stood very, very carefully. Poise, I reminded myself. I needed to be away from him. I needed time to think. The back of my neck felt like it might burst into flame.
“I’m sorry about Tom’s cancer, Jack. I really am. I’m sorry he died. I’m sure that was a shock, and I’m sure he was terrific. It’s not something you get over. But even so, it’s not a free pass to hurt other people. You don’t get to do that. You don’t get to think of people as simply another experience. Not like this, you don’t. You don’t get to play around about being in love and then pull back because you never wanted to be involved in the first place. That’s using people. So you can talk about New York and building prisons and making choices that limit you, but you’re the guy who flirts about getting married and what my name would be, and the whole time you’re wondering how you can get out of this and keep going on your walkabout. Well, don’t give it a thought. Go on your quest, Jack. Don’t let me stand in your way.”
“Heather—”