I thought about heading over to the party at the hot pool. I really did. And maybe it would have been fun but I kept running the wrong film in my mind, of us all in the water, Amanda on someone’s shoulders trying to pull another woman off some guy. And me feeling tired, and unhappy, and fat, and wet.
The TV didn’t really work. And reading felt too lonely. The longer the night went on, the more I dreaded skiing again with Roland, and the more I thought it was likely he’d take me on a run beyond my ability. It had turned much colder since it rained earlier in the evening and I knew that meant ice. The whole thing felt wrong to me anyway — Amanda and her widower; Roland the ski instructor, sweet as he was, and so dauntingly beautiful on the slopes, either getting me killed, or following after me all day long like a doting dad. I could insist on skiing alone, but that would be the most depressing, I thought, and so I decided to leave.
I wrote a note to Amanda and told her to apologize to the men, and to the trip organizers — I could hear her lecture—These trips are important to me, and Everything was going so well. When are you going to start acting like a member of the human race, or whatever.
I didn’t have a ride, so I took a taxi to the bus station. There was a nine o’clock bus that would get me in at 4:30 in the morning.
Odd choice to be making, I suppose.
I bought the ticket, and I got onto the bus. A couple of other skiers followed, but mostly the bus was empty, and it smelled like spilled beer. A man in a camouflage army jacket was sleeping in the front seat, and a mother and daughter were holding a very intense conversation in the middle of the bus. I sat in the back. I had two books with me, but I was far too distracted to read. I tried to go to sleep but mostly I just stared out of the window feeling sorry for myself and making new blotches on my arms. At one point I said loudly, “Get the fuck over it,” and the mother turned around, and glared at me.
“What the hell do you know?” she said.
I made it to my apartment without further incident at 5:15 A.M. There were no messages on either the home phone or my cell, which I’d turned off, and then on, and then off again, all night.
I slept until two. I had terrible dreams. Keanu Reeves was in one. He was standing atop a cliff and held his arm out to save me, and instead I pulled him down and we both went tumbling until we dropped into a freezing lake.
When I checked my cell, there was a message from Amanda. Her tone had the crisp exasperation of someone lodging a complaint with an airline. I had left my skis and boots in the closet — and she was going to have to return them and retrieve my credit card.
A week went by and then the new intern at work told me there was a man on the phone asking for me. It was Roland, calling to check in. Hearing his voice made me feel happy. I apologized for leaving the ski trip so abruptly, and he said, “You can make amends by going to dinner with me.”
I surprised myself by saying that I’d like that.
That Friday we went to dinner at a Peruvian place in the Village. I barely recognized him outside the entrance to the restaurant. He had on a woolen blazer over a black, collared shirt. His hair was thick and brushed back from his face, which was clean-shaven. He started to apologize for his accident stories and I wouldn’t let him. I wanted to talk about other things.
He walked me all the way uptown to my apartment building afterward and hugged me good night. He might have been hoping for more, or maybe I was. I felt like a different and improved person, at the awkward end of a good first date.
“I’m sorry I got into all that at dinner,” I said. I told him a little about Mitchell. Maybe more than a little.
“Don’t sweat it,” he said. He said it was normal to go through what I was going through, that he read once that an abandoned rhesus monkey will sleep sporadically, drink sparsely, and lose all interest in food.
“Their immune system breaks down,” he said. “They get sick easily; and they die in great numbers.”
“I bet you use that line on all the girls,” I said.
“Only the bookish ones,” he said.
In the middle of the night I grabbed the phone and hit redial, because I’d tried to call Mitchell after work; but I must have called Roland’s number after that because he answered. I was pretty out of it and I said, “Can you please come over?” believing it was Mitchell, and Roland said, “I’ll be there in twenty minutes.”
When he came over, I said something very stupid. I said maybe I’d become a better person if I fell in and out of a coma the way he had.
“It’s never that black-and-white,” he said, and gave me a test-smile to see if I’d been kidding.
I asked him about when he was out, what that was like.
“It was like dying… and dreaming at the same time — there are specific things I remember about it, the shape of a sound; time skipping backward and forward. A conversation about blood types.”
“What sort of things did you learn?”
“Learn? Hmmm. That I would die someday. That I had wasted a lot of time worrying about things that weren’t important. It sounds trite when you say this sort of stuff aloud. It’s a bit like in chess, when you can see the next three moves? I could do that. I could see the traps.”
“Do you want to sleep over?”
“I do,” he said. “But not tonight. How about tomorrow night?”
He was playing this perfectly.
He came over the next night with five different boxes of Chinese food, a six-pack of Tsingtao, and a movie. I ate a little of everything and drank two and a half beers. My fortune cookie said that I was comfortable in my own skin, which didn’t really sound like a fortune, and certainly not mine. “They should call them compliment cookies,” Roland said. His fortune said that he was wise in the way of finances. We imagined disparaging fortunes we’d sneak into Chinese restaurants. “Your spouse will be unfaithful and your children will dislike you,” I said, reading mine.
“Your investments will tank and the bank will seize your home,” he said.
I watched him as we polished off our beers and I could see this turning into something. I laughed out loud for no reason, a goofy, raucous sound that shocked me. He kissed me then and I kissed him back. And then we were rolling around on the floor, groping for body parts and kissing necks and shoulders. He had a much more athletic body than Mitchell, who, when you got right down to it, was too tall and too thin, his voice too raspy from cigarettes, his hair too long and directionless, until he cruelly buzzed it short (the way I’d urged him to have it cut) the week after we broke up. We started pulling at each other’s clothes, and somewhere along the way I fell off the ride and back into the ditch.
Roland beamed at me affectionately, and I felt suffocated.
“I like this,” he said.
“Me too,” I said, slithering out from beneath him. “Let’s go get some air.”
There was a soft snowfall outside and we decided to go sledding in the park. We passed Tavern on the Green with its garish holiday lights, and the honeyed words of a torch song streaming through an opened window; then we walked by Sheep Meadow and the Bandshell, uptown until we found the park’s hidden sledding spots. Mitchell had found two long planks of cardboard in the recycling bins of my building, and we used them as sleds. Did I say Mitchell? Roland. We climbed to the top of the hill — Dog Hill, they call it, or more precisely Dog Shit Hill, because a lot of dogs do just that, only it’s hidden way beneath the snow. It was very cold, and the ground felt hard, even as the new snow was falling. The sledding would be fast. I got a running start and jumped on the cardboard and I yelled out at the top of my lungs, “Shit be gone!” Which felt good, and liberating.