Arc of the Comet

by Greg Fields

  “What will you do with your car?”

  “Find a dealer to take it off my hands for whatever the hell he’ll give me for it. There’s a lot of history in that machine.”

  “Another bond broken.”

  McIlweath just shrugged. “It has to be. I have the couch?”

  Finnegan went to the hall closet and pulled out a pillow with some blankets. “I hope you’ll be comfortable. If not, we can work something out for tomorrow night.”

  “No way. This is your place.”

  “Nonsense. It belongs to all of us. It’s one of the last possessions we have in common.” Finnegan tossed the bedding on the couch. “Good night, Tom. I’ve said it earlier, but I’m thankful you’re here.”

  “I couldn’t have left without seeing you, Conor. You’re like a brother. I’ve told you that, haven’t I?”

  “It’s good to hear. And the feeling’s mutual.” They shook hands, then embraced. Finnegan cuffed McIlweath on the back of his head. He turned then and opened the bedroom door. “See you tomorrow, Mac. Don’t get up too early, okay?”

  Finnegan and McIlweath spent their two days together running around the city. Rosselli occasionally joined them. In contrast to Finnegan’s pensive brooding, Rosselli was continually ebullient, a small child on Christmas morning. He introduced McIlweath to his Julie, who was, as described, amazingly beautiful and prompted McIlweath to wonder how his roommate had attracted a goddess. Two relatively carefree days seemed to break Finnegan’s depression. McIlweath saw it, and felt relieved, but Finnegan for his part had merely suspended matters for a bit. He knew nothing had been resolved.

  On the morning McIlweath was to leave, Rosselli bade an affectionate goodbye before bounding out of the apartment on his way to the med school. His friend’s visit had been yet another unanticipated pleasure in a life now teeming with them. Finnegan drove McIlweath out to Dulles. Neither said much on the drive.

  McIlweath checked his bags while Finnegan sat adjacent the check-in counter. When McIlweath was done and had his boarding pass and baggage tags, Finnegan rose, and once again they embraced. Deep within him, in some uncharitable hollow space near the flickering ebb of his spirit, Finnegan felt a compulsion to cry. He resisted it, and his nerves aborted the sentiment. Later he would reflect on what was now being abandoned, and regret that he was not able to take closer note of it.

  McIlweath went through security and his thin form disappeared down an escalator to the gates. Finnegan watched his back until it turned a corner, and was gone. He knew it would be years before they saw each other again, if ever. This was a divergence, so graphic as to be convulsive, one of the rare instances in a life when a point of departure lacks all subtlety and so cannot be ignored. Things would be different now, from this point. It had all been so swift, these rites of passage. They each were left to face alone the consequences they authored.

  CHAPTER XXVI

  Music I heard with you was more than music,

  And bread I broke with you was more than bread.

  Now that I am without you, all is desolate;

  All that was once so beautiful is dead.

  —Conrad Aiken, Bread and Music

  When Conor Finnegan returned to his apartment that evening, having gone directly to work from the airport, a single letter sat in his mailbox. He saw the Philadelphia postmark; a dart of electricity shot through his tired frame, at once snapping his senses. He became aware, and his fatigue vanished. Aside from an occasional brief note when they could not get together for two or three weeks, or a frivolous card now and then, Glynnis never wrote him. They had always been too close for letters.

  But this indeed had some length to it. Finnegan held it gingerly on his fingertips and felt its weight. To the kitchen, then, and to the scotch, which he poured liberally over a handful of ice cubes. He sat at the table there and sipped slowly, waiting for the strong brown liquor to take effect, to calm a heart beating too fast and a mind with all the wrong focus.

  After some time he felt the quiet, gentle numbness claim his limbs. His breathing eased and he resigned himself to whatever might be in Glynnis’s words. He rose and went to the kitchen drawer, took out a knife and slit the envelope. He pulled out the pages within, brought them to the living room and began to read as he burrowed himself into the couch there:

  Dear Conor –

  This evening I spent in the studio trying to sketch an outline of a sculpture project, but I accomplished nothing. I can’t keep my mind off you long enough to put two thoughts together, or to concentrate on anything at all. That’s been a common condition lately. I thought that writing a letter might purge me enough to go on with the matters at hand.

  Conor, I love you. You must have no doubt of that. For the past few days I’ve been recalling all the stupid, unnecessary things I’ve said to you that might call that simple fact into question. I’m sorry for them all, and I’m sorry for the distance that we’ve come to keep.

  I don’t know why I feel the way I do, why I’m so reluctant to give my whole being to you. All my reasoning seems so pale in the light of day. My fears are a sign of my own immaturity, and I pray that I’ll be able to put them aside in due course.

  I miss you terribly on those weekends when we’re apart. I know I would be happier seeing you, and on those rare logical moments, I know that I need you on more than just the weekends, that I need you every day. And I wish, oh God how I wish, I could answer the force that tells me not to. Yet when at last I do see you, when I want to rush to you at first glance and take you in my arms, I’m unable. And I know that I become defensive as soon as you start to question me. It could be a gesture, or the way you hold your body, or even the way you pick up my bag for me that lets me know how much you disapprove, how much you’re hurt by all of this. You assail my defenses, and rightly so. This must confuse you no end.

  I can’t know what offenses I’ll commit when we’re together again (They are offenses, aren’t they?), but let me offer my apologies for them now. What I say is not based in malice or distance, but confusion. You confuse me horribly.

  You’re a gentle and charming contradiction, salvation and condemnation in one.

  But I do love you. I can’t possibly say that enough. Whatever lies ahead for us, tragedy or redemption, you must always believe that. My beautiful Irishman, I remember telling you when we first met that your heart was bound to be broken. I said it flippantly, although I saw in your uncluttered innocence a countenance too wide-eyed to survive as it was. There is something in you that cries for protection.

  Perhaps we are both destined for a hasty and sad judgment. Perhaps as I struggle to avoid being dragged down by you I shall ultimately drag you down with me. Perhaps we shall both spend the rest of our years regretting the death of a precious spirit that once made us fresh.

  I say now, without knowing whether I truly mean it, Wait for me, my lover. Please be patient. And if this feeling I express in these pages proves to be fickle or transitory, a last flickering glimmer of a cooling blaze, then know that it once existed as the fiercest fire that burns the human heart, and that you once lived within my soul in a place no one else can ever touch.

  I shall cherish you always.

  Glynnis

  Finnegan folded the pages and sat motionless for an indefinable time. It would take him a while to put this into some type of order. He sighed, went to the kitchen and poured himself another glass of scotch. Yes, this would take some time.

  He stayed with the scotch all night, a warm and customarily sticky summer night in Washington. He turned off the air conditioning, and breathed in the heat. Finnegan wanted to feel the night like a blanket, or a shroud. His glands opened and perspiration poured out of him, welding his back to the chair and causing his hair to fall across his forehead in disheveled wet ropes. Finnegan sat in his chair, played his music, drank his scotch. Periodically he picked up the letter from the corner table to feel its weight again. Ballast, it was.

  What had he just read? A
capitulation? No, not that. With her preframed apologies, it may in fact be just the opposite, a license to kill. Her passionate avowals of a deep and lasting love gave him some comfort. In recent months those had become rare, and he knew that it was easier to commit such sentiments to paper than to speak them to flesh and blood, no matter how close.

  But why had she written it now? If, as it seemed to be on the surface, Glynnis’s letter was a guilt-laden expression both of her love and her deep regret that it had come to this, what had prompted her to write it? Glynnis had always been rather stubborn, he considered. She admitted her defensiveness, and Finnegan knew it to be so. Each time he danced around the fringes of anything that sniffed of commitment, Glynnis crouched in a self-protective coil, ready to strike. Had her guilt over all this gotten the better of her? If so, why now? The prospect of guilt made Finnegan uneasy. There could be no guilt without transgression.

  He considered all this in foggy terms, and the night drew on. Finnegan clinked the ice cubes against the glass, and warmth swelled up within him until it met the heat seeping in from the outside. The night grew hotter; his skin grew clammy. There could be no resolution. Not of this letter, not of Glynnis, not of the eminently flawed scheme of living that had placed him here tonight. It wasn’t working. It wasn’t working at all, and the black-hooded specter crept into the room, looked down at the slouching figure and smirked.

  ’You belong to me,’ it whispered hoarsely. ’You’ve belonged to me from the start,’ and Finnegan stared back, saw nothing and drank his scotch. ’Your precious blood has bought you a poor return. It could not buy you more. You spill it, and it soaks the ground. There is no other way. Look hard at my contours, study my form, and know this: You shall not die, although some days you will wish it. You shall not die, although only sand pumps through your brittle veins. You are the same as all the others, the ones whom you do not know, whom you have never comprehended.’

  Finnegan stared back at what was not there. He stared hard until his eyes no longer focused and a thin, reedlike ringing jabbed at his brain. Before he could recognize it, the night caved in on him. His mind went black in the exhausted confusion of a long distance runner who cannot find the final turn.

  ***

  He woke hours later. Blinking his eyes to bring them alive, he rose unsteadily and squinted at the clock in the kitchen. 11:47. Finnegan felt woozy; the day, the night, had sucked him dry. He entered now on the perverse underside of excitement, of engagement, of presence. He was scraps of shredded paper on the street after a night-long celebration, a glass quarter-filled with stale liquor.

  Glynnis must still be up. Finnegan’s cloudy brain told him to call. To hear her voice, that’s all. To thank her for the letter. Perhaps even to say something in return. That was how the healing should begin, right? Someone makes a move, someone else responds. She could come down this weekend. She could do that.

  Finnegan flipped on a light to see the phone, and a burning seared his eyes. He clenched them shut as they watered against the brilliance. Glynnis. Yes, it would be grand to hear the silky lilt of her gentle New England voice. Her voice had always transposed him to peaceful places, had always calmed him. He loved her voice, no matter the words that it carried. He did not quite know what he would say, but he knew that when he heard her voice the words would come. Finnegan opened his eyes gingerly and blinked hard until they could work in the light. His entire body felt slushy, his muscles turned to spring snow. He picked up the phone and dialed.

  On the other end, the clicking of long distance, then the familiar tone of Glynnis’s phone, the purring backside of the ringing. Twice, three times . . . She must be there . . . four . . . She usually answer by now . . . five, six . . . Come on, come on . . . seven . . . ten . . . twelve . . . Finnegan let it ring several minutes. She had not activated her voicemail, so there was nothing but the rings. Because of the scotch, because of the letter, because of Tom McIlweath, Finnegan desperately wanted to speak with her, to hear her. But she did not answer. On a Monday night, nearly midnight, she did not answer.

  With the paranoid fear of an insecure lover, Finnegan traced through the possible explanations. Perhaps she was at the studio, or with a friend. Perhaps she had gone out for a late bite to eat. Perhaps she merely wanted to go to bed early and turned off her phone. Through the sheer force of his will, Finnegan calmed himself. He demanded no conclusions be drawn, not yet. He could try later, but no, he was too tired. And too drunk. He should just go to bed. This day had been enough. Tomorrow night he’d reach her. There was no point in getting worked up any tighter than he already was.

  But the evening following was no different. Finnegan called at 6:00, at 7:30, at 8:00, and then at fifteen-minute intervals until midnight. The dry crackling brush had been ignited; his fears flamed up and consumed the kindling. Unless the cooling waters, the Healing Waters of Glynnis, splashed upon him soon, this fire might burn out of all control.

  By Wednesday night, when again he got no answer, Finnegan had no idea what to think. There was no way of knowing now what to expect, what his reception would ultimately be on the other end. Something had happened, and he cared not to speculate on its details. Given the recent drift of their affair, Finnegan naturally presumed that whatever it was had to be negative. The flimsy rationales he had drunkenly constructed two nights earlier carried no weight. This was no doubt another chapter in an increasingly sour novella.

  For most of their time he could have rebuilt her entire day from morning to night and specify whom she saw, where she was, what she talked about. But he realized now that, with the continental drift of the last several weeks, he no longer knew the particulars of Glynnis’s life. Those incidentals lent dimension, and without them the entire landscape became foggier. She was vaporizing before his sight. Over the past few months she might be practicing Satanism for all he knew.

  ***

  On Thursday, a rainy, stormy, glum day, Rosselli was already home when Finnegan plodded and dripped through the door. This was a rarity. Most nights Rosselli studied late, then stayed at Julie’s place to repeat that pleasant pattern the next day. But tonight, as Rosselli explained it, he thought a change in routine might keep him fresh. Besides, Julie had midterms looming and needed to put aside the distractions of her lover for a week or so.

  Rosselli had dinner prepared by the time Finnegan got home, soggy with rain and perspiration. Rain did not abate the heat, and the day had been smothering. Glynnis had occupied most of Finnegan’s thoughts that day. His work, mindlessly simple, had not suffered.

  Over dinner, a vapid Rossellian creation of a pasty cut of meat with some spongy green vegetables, they carried on something of a conversation. Finnegan was grateful for the contact. In his new position he had made no friends. Everybody on the committee staff tended to go a separate path. There were no common lunches, no Friday happy hours. Finnegan had begun to sense the initial stabs of a desperate professional isolation he had not experienced before.

  Rosselli had assaulted his food with a primitive brutality, shoveling forkfuls into his mouth before he had completed dispensing with their predecessors. He finished his plate well before Finnegan, then got up to fill it again.

  “Jesus, Dan, slow down. This crap’s not that good.”

  “I can’t help it. I’m starving. I took a swim this afternoon after my anatomy lecture.”

  “I’m surprised you gave yourself time. How far did you go?”

  “Two thousand. I’m in horrible condition, but it felt great. I used to do five thousand without breaking a sweat. The only laps I’ve done lately are around my cadaver.”

  “We get old, Dan. Be grateful some kid isn’t pulling out your liver and holding it up to the light.”

  “You haven’t been too physical of late either, have you, Conor? I don’t recall you playing ball for a while.”

  “I haven’t played ball, or run, or anything. I think I’ve lost my fire.”

  “You’ve got the time.”

  “
Now I do. But I don’t have the energy anymore. I have very little in reserve at the end of the day. But I’m not working hard at all. I’m not doing anything, but I’ve got nothing left.”

  “Motivation,” said Rosselli, tucking away a small mound of mashed potatoes. “You’ve lost your motivation. Find it, or you’ll end up looking like me. Lovable and cuddly, but rather round.”

  “That may be the answer, Dan. Fat people are supposed to be jolly.”

  “All a myth. I’ve always been big but I’ve never really been happy until lately. Didn’t one of your poets write something about that?”

  “Several of them did. ’Only where love and need are one, And work is play for mortal stakes, Is the deed ever really done.’ That’s Frost. You seem to have found your love.”

  “In more than one form. Speaking of which, Glynnis is coming down this weekend, isn’t she?”

  “She said she would. But it’s hard to tell these days what she means and what she doesn’t. I’ve been trying to call her.”

  “No luck?”

  “No answer. She’s out every time I try. Frankly, I don’t know what the hell’s going on anymore.”

  “Hang in there, roommate. You two are about as ideally suited as any couple I’ve ever seen.”

  “But what do you see? Christ, any two people can put on a reasonable show every now and then. I thought so, too. I thought we were God damned perfect. But it’s all superficialities. Time has a tendency to break those down into their component parts.”

  “Don’t give me that, Conor. If you were only drawn to superficialities, then you’d be a hopeless motherfucking idiot, and I know you’re not. I don’t handle self-pity real well, especially from someone like you. There are better places for my sympathies.”

  “Thanks, roomie. Just what I wanted to hear.”

  “I mean it, damn it. Maybe Glynnis is going through a phase, or maybe she’s changing her perspective altogether, or maybe she’s just tired of all the pressure of a relationship. You know her better than I do. People don’t stay the same. That’s a fact, and thank God for it. I hope you two can work it out. I really do. And if you can’t, then I’m sorry, but, hell, it’s not the end of creation. There aren’t any guarantees. Everybody loses a lover before he’s through.”