—
We didn’t talk for three stretches across the bay. By the fourth go-round, the novelty of the windy deck had worn off, and we’d found ourselves a bench inside. At first, I occupied myself by looking at our fellow travelers. When the boat was heading to Manhattan, it was full of people crowded into their own routines, like they had timed their newspaper reading to every league traveled, their cruller consumption paced so the last crumb was licked just as it was time to stand and leave. On the trip back to Staten Island, the people looked more like me and Langston—the non-commuters, temporarily unmoored and slightly unnerved. There was one man in his fifties who rode back and forth with us, reading a Jonathan Franzen novel at a pace usually reserved for glaciers and drunk children. At one point he looked up as I was looking over, and I forswore eye contact as quickly as I could…which was still too late. I was afraid to aggressively people-watch after that.
I found myself staring instead at the ring Langston was wearing. I thought about him and Benny moving in together, taking that step. Langston caught me staring and raised an eyebrow.
“How did you know?” I asked him. “I mean, what told you that you were ready to make that leap?”
I half expected him to tell me it was none of my business, or that there wasn’t any way for me to understand. But instead, he looked at me seriously and said, “I don’t think it’s a matter of ready—I mean, not in an all-the-way sense. You’re never completely ready—you just get to the point where you’re ready enough. With us, we didn’t decide to move in together—we just slept over at one another’s places enough that we’d practically moved in together, and then realized it would be much more practical to actually do it.”
“But do you love him? I mean—rings.”
Langston smiled and started to play with the ring, rotating it back and forth on his pinkie as if to prove that it wasn’t coming off.
“Of course I love him. And I might even love him enough to stop being so afraid of it. That’s what we have to find out. And this is the way to find out—to wake up each morning and start each day together, to be the continuity for each other even when everything else is discontinuous or fickle or cruel. I know in my heart that I can live without him and I know in my heart that I don’t want to—that’s a good place to start, right?”
I agreed…and wanted to know more. “But how do you get there? How do you get to that point?”
Langston let go of the ring, leaned back in his seat. “Are you talking about you and Lily?”
“I guess.”
“You guess?”
“I mean, yes. I mean…I feel we could have that, you know? In some way. At some point. But every time we get close to it, we get shy. I don’t mean with each other. It’s more like we get shy with ourselves. I don’t think about me and Lily being good enough together—I think about whether I’m good enough for Lily. I try to be a bright spot. And sometimes with the two of us, it is bright. But a lot of the time, I’m just a spot. It all feels so big, and I’m just a spot.”
“And only intermittently bright.”
“Gee, thanks.”
“No—that’s cool. Too much brightness is damn hard to look at.”
This wasn’t a comfort. This wasn’t anything, really. I didn’t even know what I was saying anymore. I was restless. Talking about Lily usually made me feel as if she was there in some way, in the same way that thinking about her made her feel closer. But that wasn’t working now.
“This is pointless,” I said.
“What?”
It frustrated me that I had to explain—didn’t he feel it, too? “Waiting here. Talking. Thinking. It all feels pointless. She’s going to do what she wants to do, and she’ll come home when she wants to come home, and ultimately she’ll be with me if she wants to be with me.”
“And you want to be with her?”
“Yes.”
“Does she know that?”
“What do you think?”
“I don’t know.”
Oh, great, I thought. That is hardly reassuring. And then I felt stupid for wanting reassurance when I didn’t feel I deserved it.