When We Were Infinite

by Kelly Loy Gilbert

  He’s hot!!!! Grace said. I just stalked him on Instagram!!! So preppy!! Is that your new type??

  Part of me wondered if Jason might react in some negative way. He didn’t, though, which meant I’d read our closeness correctly as strictly friendship, and not some prelude to something else.

  I’d thought we’d talk about Tag more, that even though they weren’t physically here somehow he’d become a part of their lives too, but I don’t know why I thought that. Sunny was going out with Dayna now—she’d written a piece and asked them out at the same open mic night Dayna had taken her to years ago, and I’d been so excited I made my roommates watch the video—and still Dayna and I had never met. There were always a million pictures of Brandon at different parties. Grace always said, “We need to catch up!” and then we didn’t. We’d been to hell together, with Jason, but maybe those are the things that draw you close and it’s the mundane that lets you drift apart: different locations, different obligations. Maybe that was growing up, but I was sad about it still.

  Tag was from Litchfield, Connecticut, a two-hour drive away, and one weekend over the summer I went home with him for the first time. His house had a full basketball court on the lower floor, and his mother wore shoes—tan Louboutins—inside. We went for a drive through the rolling green hills dotted with enormous white colonial mansions like Tag’s so they could show me the town, and his father explained how you could tell how old a house was from the number of panes in its windows. It was beautiful and also exquisitely boring, and when we got back to his house, Tag cut a star out of paper and handed it to me and said, “Your medal for surviving that.” Later that night, I idly googled his parents, out of curiosity, and there were articles about how they were major donors to the GOP.

  We were supposed to meet up with some of Tag’s high school friends that night, but after dinner he changed his mind.

  “You’re tired?” I said. We were lying together on the couch in the finished basement, where there was a TV, a pool table and a foosball table, and a bar.

  “Nah, I just don’t need to hear about who’s running whose mom’s art gallery or whose dad’s hedge fund now. The world is big! Move on!” He slipped his hand around my waist. “I always think it’s weird how you’re so into high school still.”

  “What do you mean I’m so into high school still?”

  “It’s one of your quirks. You live in probably the most vibrant place in the world and there are literally thousands of people you can meet who are probably going to be culturally important, and yet you’d rather Whatsapp people you went to Homecoming with.” He jabbed my waist with his finger. “It’s not everyone who’d come all this way just to be the same person.”

  “I’m not the same person.”

  “Would your high school self have dated me?”

  “No.”

  That made him laugh. “Touché.”

  “Also,” I said, “I think that’s a stupid framing.”

  “You think what’s a stupid framing?”

  “That people somehow lose their value when it’s been x years or you move x miles away.”

  He sat up and looked at me. My voice had been shaking. “Are you angry?”

  I’d never seen Tag angry—he found it unseemly and also unnecessary, a waste of emotional investment. “I just think you’re wrong.”

  “Okay, then we differ. There’s no need to be angry over it.”

  I was starting to think that anyone who paid attention had anger embedded in her, like an earring backing. “Okay,” I said, and he lay back down, and after we left Litchfield I decided to end things with him. It was friendly enough; it was just that, maybe for the first time, I was able to want more for myself. What we were together wasn’t enough for me.

  * * *

  And then something happened after Tag and I broke up: Sunny told me that when we’d started going out, Jason had been devastated. I asked how she knew—was she just imagining it?—and she said he’d called her. I was shocked.

  That had been a while ago, and since then he’d dated someone else too, so maybe I’d missed my chance. But the truth was that I still loved him, maybe would always love him, and so—nervous, hopeful—I went to go see him.

  It was a five-hour ride to get to Hanover and I was worried I’d have a panic attack, and then actually I did. But I was on a bus, and the road kept flying past, so I made it. Jason met me at the bus stop and I saw him through the window before he saw me. His hair had gotten longer, and he had that little almost-smile that used to mean he was being his public self. I hadn’t told him why I was coming in case I decided to back out, but seeing him there, I knew I wouldn’t change my mind. After everything, he felt like home to me.

  But then it was different in person. We went back to his dorm and I met all the people I’d only heard about—no one was quite how I’d imagined them—and then we walked around campus together and we were both trying too hard. We kept talking over each other, and he didn’t ask about breaking up with Tag and it felt out of place to just blurt out why I’d come, and it took effort to think of the right things to say.

  I’d been planning to tell him at dinner, maybe, but then we ate with some people from his dorm. One girl, Kathleen, seemed attuned to him in a way that made me wonder if there was anything there between them, and I waited for some kind of signal from him (don’t worry, it’s not like that with us) but it didn’t seem to occur to him to send one, and why should it? There was a knot in my stomach. I’d come all this way, though, so then I told myself I’d talk to him after dinner, but then we went to hang out in Kathleen’s room (rugs and plants and certainly-illegal candles all over) and when we finally went back to Jason’s room one of his two roommates was there.

  “You seem happy here,” I said, as I was folding my clothes to put in my backpack. “Your friends are nice.”

  “Yeah, they are,” he said. For a second he looked like he’d say something else, but then he didn’t. He didn’t seem like someone who felt unfinished, or who was looking for more. He wedged himself on the floor between his bed and desk so I could sleep in his bed, and he fell asleep right away.

  I think I might be too late, I messaged Sunny when I was still awake a few hours later. I was lying on his lofted extra-long twin bed, my chest aching.

  Noooooo, she wrote back. What’s happening?? Did you tell him yet??

  I’m really not getting that vibe from him. I think he’s moved on. Then I added, The stupid thing is I think maybe if I’d been ready after my mom’s surgery I think he would’ve been too. I just waited too long.

  You waited exactly the right amount of time, Sunny said. You’re ready when you’re ready.

  I guess.

  So are you just not going to say anything? she said, and I wrote back, I don’t know.

  I think you should, Beth If it’s what you want, you owe it to yourself to try.

  Sometimes the people who know you best can speak into your life—they can illuminate all its shadowed parts for you to see. But I wasn’t quite sure if that was still true with us, whether that was the kind of adage Sunny would tell anyone or whether she still knew how to be exactly right about me.

  In the morning I had only a few hours before I had to catch my bus back. If Jason found it strange I’d come all this way just to have dinner with his dorm mates and sit around in someone’s room, he didn’t say it. We were going to get coffee and go for a walk before I had to leave, but on the way to coffee we saw flyers about a string quartet playing at the Hopkins Center. It was free and open to the public, so, spontaneously, for old times’ sake, we decided to go.

  It was probably a third full when we got there, a medium-size hall that felt familiar in the way all concert halls do when music’s been your life since you were small.

  “They’re not going to be as good as you, huh?” Jason said, grinning. “You still go to small-time gigs like this? It’s weird I haven’t heard you play in so long. I don’t even know how good you are now.”


  “Probably about as good as you’d hope someone would be if her single mom worked her whole life to send her someplace like Juilliard,” I said. “That’s right, though—the last time we played together was that day you left home.”

  The quartet came onstage with their instruments, arranging themselves on the chairs. By the time it was over, I’d have to go catch my bus. I said, “Sunny told me you called her when I was going out with Tag.”

  “Oh.” He raised his eyebrows. “Well. I’ll be honest, that’s, uh, not a conversation I expected to have right here in”—he glanced down at his chair—“seat 34G in the Hopkins Center for the Arts. But yeah, I mean, I won’t lie to you.”

  I tried to keep my tone conversational. “I had no idea you felt that way then.”

  He didn’t correct my then. “Yeah, I know you didn’t.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “Why didn’t I tell you?” He had the same conversational tone; we could’ve been discussing the bus route. “I mean, you’d just started going out with someone else. And I didn’t want you—just with our history, and just knowing you—I could see it feeling like pressure if I said anything. Also, I mean, what was I going to say? Hey Beth, that went so great the first time, can I interest you in some more emotional unavailability and the occasional freak-out? I wasn’t exactly sitting there with pocket aces.” He said it lightly—he even had a small smile—but then he glanced at me, and sobered. “I should apologize, though. I shouldn’t have said anything to her. I wasn’t trying to send some roundabout message to you.”

  So maybe that was a closed door. But I thought of going back having only said all this to each other, and I knew I had to try.

  “Do you ever think—” My heart was pounding. “Do you ever think about trying things again?”

  He turned in his seat to look at me more closely. “Do you?”

  “I do.”

  His expression changed. “Are we having this conversation?” he said. “I thought you were just annoyed about me calling Sunny. I didn’t realize we were, you know, actually doing this.”

  “I wasn’t annoyed. I was just trying to find a way to say I wish I’d known earlier, because I would’ve wanted to try again. I know a lot went wrong, but I think we could be better than we were before. And I also think we could be better than—whatever was passed down to us.”

  The ceiling was probably forty feet high, but it seemed to be pressing down on me as I waited for him to answer. He swallowed and looked at the empty chairs in front of us, and then something changed in his expression, like he’d made some kind of decision. There wasn’t anyone close enough to be listening, but he ducked his head next to mine.

  “Do you remember the Mendelssohn piece we played for BAYS? That one with the solo audition?”

  Of course I did. I said so. Jason rubbed at his knuckles with his thumb.

  “I’d always planned to tell you this,” he said. “But then you were with Tag, and then when you said you were coming, I didn’t think—well, whatever, the point is that when I heard you play it that day we auditioned, I thought, I am never going to feel about another person the way I feel about Beth. There was a lot I turned out to be wrong about. But that part—I think I was right about that.”

  Onstage, the quartet tuned. The conductor raised her arms. Jason didn’t look up.

  “I told myself I’d never say anything before I could make any real promises. And I know people change, and I can’t ask you to wait forever while I work through all my shit, so maybe by then it’ll be too late. And if it is, I get it, that’s fine, but if I’d somehow had another shot and fucked up that one too, it might’ve been the thing I always regretted most. And that’s saying a lot.”

  We’d moved closer to each other in our chairs. The lights went dim.

  “Do you think you ever will be able to make those promises, though?” I said.

  “I think so,” he said. “I’m working on it.”

  “And you’d—I mean, you’d want to?”

  “You know how you told me earlier I seemed like I was happy here?”

  “Yes?”

  “I almost am. I mean, it’s good. But when you said that all I could think was how if we could try again, and get it right that time, I think I actually would be.”

  Sometimes you can believe in the heart of another person. And sometimes, I think, you can also believe in your own—that it’s stronger than you realized, that it can hold multiple things at once, like anxiety and also hope, the future and also the past. It can hold space for another person without forfeiting itself.

  The music started, Maconchy’s String Quartet No. 3. It was a piece we’d never played together; it was strange to realize, after so many years, how many of those somehow existed still.

  “Well,” I said, “whatever version of yourself you are then—give me a call. Whoever I am then will want to meet you.”

  * * *

  I’d been right: It was never quite the same playing without Jason, without the rest of them. I was a better musician than I had ever been in my life, but still sometimes I missed when we had all played together.

  At the end of my second year, I successfully auditioned for a solo at an end-of-year gala at Tully Hall, and when I mentioned it in our group chat, Sunny said, let’s all come to New York!!!! I wrote it off as the sort of thing people say, and assumed if I didn’t push for it or arrange it somehow, it wouldn’t happen, but then a few days later she sent me flight information. They were all coming, the four of them.

  I couldn’t host all four of them in my dorm room, and they’d wanted to get a hotel, so I was going to stay with them while they were there. It would be the first time since we’d all left home that the five of us would be together at once, and I was anxious about how it would go. We still messaged, still kept up on one another’s lives and days, and Jason and I tried to see each other every few months. But it was always different in person, and maybe they’d get here and we would reach for those ties that had always tethered us to one another and this time our hands would close around empty air. Maybe it would shatter my illusion that we hadn’t truly grown apart. Maybe, as we were all moving into new futures yet again, it would feel like a requiem.

  For the recital, I prepared Bach’s Unfinished Fugue, for which I’d composed a new ending. It was the one I’d heard in the car the day I almost went to the bridge, and every time I played it I remembered what it had felt like then, who I’d been in that car, and I felt as though I’d kept a promise to myself. I hoped it wouldn’t be the only part of everything I got to keep.

  Brandon’s flight was delayed, and Jason’s bus hit traffic, so they’d arrive midshow and we wouldn’t all be together until after. Grace arrived first. She walked into my room like she’d been in it a hundred times and handed me a bouquet, peonies and greenery she told me she’d bought on the way at Trader Joe’s and had arranged herself and then tied with a silk ribbon she’d packed expressly for that purpose. “I know it’s supposed to be after,” she’d said, hugging me, “but obviously I already know you’re going to be amazing, and also I wanted you to see it before it wilts.” It had been the longest since I’d seen her, her life the most hidden from me, and she was so different. She was making plans for law school and volunteering for a congressional campaign, and she was happy in a way I could see now she’d never been in Congress Springs. She felt bigger to me, more expansive. But maybe it always goes that way the first time you move away and make a new life of your own, when you stretch out the corners of your own personal map of the world and tack them down in new places you learn to know.

  That night, knowing they were all out there watching, I let myself hope. I wasn’t there for the ways they rebuilt themselves, and they weren’t there for all the ways I did either. But I hoped a foundation you’d laid years before could hold firm enough to bear the weight of so many new layers, so many new selves. And I hoped too that you could build something vital and lasting even if all you’d had to offer w
as the damaged parts of yourself, even if you weren’t yet whole.

  I played my very best. I was glowing afterward, my professors and classmates catching me backstage to congratulate me before I had a chance to go out and see my friends. The four of them were outside waiting for me, and when they saw me, they clapped.

  “Holy shit, Beth,” Brandon said, and Jason said, grinning, “I feel like I need to write you a thousand-word text about what you just played.”

  They talked about the performance for several minutes, but I could feel a silence hovering, and then it descended. We stood there arrayed on the sidewalk, five people who had shared a life and now no longer did.

  Then Grace said, “Oh, guys, I keep forgetting to tell you what happened to me yesterday. You’ll never guess.” She paused dramatically. “I was home yesterday and it was the middle of the day, like two p.m., and someone outside our building was smoking pot right under our window and it just reeked inside, and I went outside to tell them to move and guess who it was?”

  We couldn’t guess. Grace said, “It was Eric Hsu!”

  “Oh my god, Eric Hsu,” Sunny said. “What’s he even doing now? Besides smoking outside your window?”

  “He goes to MIT, but I guess he’s dating someone at BU. Okay, but literally, isn’t being at MIT but then also just randomly smoking outside someone’s window in the middle of the day, like, exactly where you would’ve expected his future to go? I told every single one of my roommates and none of them got why it was so funny to me and I was like, ugh, I need to see my friends.”

  We were laughing—too loudly; people were looking at us—and Sunny said, “God, I’ve missed you guys.” And I knew then it was all right, that it would always be; we would go out into the world and find our way back to one another still.

  We decided to walk all twenty-eight blocks back to the hotel since we couldn’t all fit into one taxi. We talked about all the things we were doing and all the things we wanted to do, like Grace’s environmental law and Sunny’s studying abroad, Brandon’s volunteering at the hospital and Jason’s switching to a sociology major. We talked about all the ways we wished the world were different, all the ways we’d try to change it. I imagined us like a sunburst, all of them and all the ways they’d touch the world radiating out from the single point of our beginning together.