The Romantics

by Galt Niederhoffer

  But the mood calmed considerably after this awkward jolt. Thankfully, Jake was too agitated to notice Weesie and Pete’s odd behavior. And soon enough, the storm offered its own interruption as wind rose from a rush to a whistle, and rainfall settled on the island. For the moment, they forgot their secrets and took solace in the warmth of the house.

  Though none of the three had had any luck finding Tom, they rushed to find comforting excuses. Chances were good, they decided, that Tom had been found by one of the other search parties. Why else would they linger so long outside in this unpleasant weather? The only question was whether Oscar and Annie or Chip and Laura would claim the hunter’s prize. So they waited, huddled under blankets and pillows, poised to greet Tom when he returned. They resumed the game they had begun on the raft, sufficiently drunk to find otherwise boring confessions impossibly hilarious.

  “I’m going first,” Weesie announced.

  “Honey, you’re too drunk to play,” said Jake.

  “Am not,” said Weesie.

  “Are too,” said Jake. “There’s no way for us to know when you’re telling the truth.”

  “You’ll know because you’re my husband,” she said.

  “Besides, it’s always so obvious,” said Pete. “You can tell from the gestures and the eyes.”

  Jake eyed Pete, annoyed at his public allegiance with his wife.

  “Can I go or not,” Weesie interrupted.

  “Fine,” said Jake. “Just don’t cheat.”

  Startled by the word, she turned quickly to face Jake. But he had only been referring to the game, she realized. Humbled, she proceeded calmly. “When I was seven, I fell off a horse.”

  “That explains so much about your childhood,” Jake quipped.

  Weesie rewarded the slight with indifference. “I failed physics sophomore year. And I love my mother.”

  Pete and Jake remained silent as they considered Weesie’s assertions.

  “Foul,” said Pete. “Jake has an unfair advantage. He knows everything about you.”

  “Actually, I’m stumped,” Jake confessed.

  “You are?” Weesie shouted. “You’re my husband. You’re supposed to know these things.”

  “Do you know what my grades were sophomore year?” Jake quipped.

  “Actually, I do,” she said.

  “Then you have a better memory.”

  “No,” she said. “I just listen better.”

  Jake paused for a moment, contrite. “You’re absolutely right,” he said, then he lunged from his seat to kiss her cheek.

  Weesie shoved him off. The touch of his lips, so soon after kissing Pete, made her feel guilty and nauseated.

  “I’m sorry, Weez,” Jake said. “Don’t be mad. I didn’t even know you took physics.”

  “I didn’t,” she snapped. “That was the lie.”

  “But you do hate your mother.”

  “I do not,” she sneered. “We just argue a lot.” She tugged her blanket to her waist, as though chilled by Jake’s ignorance.

  Jake placed his arm on her shoulder tenderly, but Weesie flinched at his touch, causing Jake to recoil with equal animosity.

  “Jake, you’re up,” Pete said.

  “I don’t want to play anymore,” said Weesie.

  Jake ignored her and narrowed his eyes, racking his brain for the best retaliation. “I did a gram of coke tonight. My marriage is in serious trouble.” He turned to Pete and addressed him directly. “And your wife tried to get in my pants.”

  Jake’s assertions were followed by several moments of tense silence.

  “You fucking asshole,” Pete said finally. “You always have to take it there.”

  “Just playing the game,” Jake chirped. “It was your bright idea.”

  They stared each other down in a parody of virility.

  Finally, Pete retreated. The claim was too far-fetched—it was clearly a provocation.

  “The cocaine is the lie,” Weesie interrupted. “He’s way too much of a pussy.”

  Pete continued to stare at Jake, as though he was assessing an incriminating clue. “No, the lie is that it was a gram. He’d be on the floor right now.”

  “I’ll leave that to your imagination.” Jake smiled. “Since our marriage has never been better.”

  Weesie looked from one man to the other. “Okay, let’s stop. This is lame.”

  “I’ve got mine,” Pete said, ignoring her. “Are you ready?”

  “Yup,” said Jake.

  “I got arrested when I was fifteen,” he began. “I’ve only kissed five girls in my life. And, I slept with your wife.” Pete smiled deviously. “Earlier tonight.”

  Weesie turned suddenly to face Pete, her eyes wide and indignant. Then, doing her best to compose herself, she turned to her husband and shook her head frantically. He was watching her closely, studying her gestures, taking Pete’s strategy to heart.

  “What the fuck is he talking about?” Jake barked.

  “It’s a game,” Weesie said. “Chill out.”

  “Which is the lie?” Jake demanded.

  “Obviously, the last one,” said Weesie. She turned from Jake to glare at Pete.

  “I think it’s the second one,” Jake announced. “He’s way too much of a slut.”

  Jake looked from Weesie to Pete, suddenly helpless in his confusion. But he was deprived a thorough investigation by the sound of the opening door. Oscar and Annie stood in the foyer with Tripler trailing behind. All three were drenched from head to toe. Their eyes were wide and alarmed.

  “Any luck?” Oscar demanded.

  “No,” said Weesie. “You guys haven’t seen him either?”

  They shook their heads solemnly.

  “We searched the entire island,” said Annie.

  “He’s definitely not here?” asked Oscar.

  “Definitely not,” said Weesie.

  A moment passed as the group made a series of silent calculations. Their collective failure to find Tom meant all hope rested in Chip and Laura.

  “That’s fucked,” said Jake. Anger was his default reaction to helplessness.

  “Tell me about it,” said Annie. “Oscar made me walk the entire island, and I’m four months pregnant.”

  A token effort was made to express surprise and congratulations. But much to Annie’s annoyance, the subject was quickly tabled in favor of more pressing issues.

  “I have a really bad feeling,” said Tripler.

  “Now you say so,” said Weesie.

  “What if it wasn’t an accident?” said Tripler.

  “Either way,” said Annie. “Lila’s going to kill us when she finds out.”

  “Come on. Let’s not get hysterical,” said Pete. “I’m sure Chip and Laura have found him by now.”

  “If they’re even still together,” said Oscar.

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” Annie snapped.

  “I’m just saying.” Oscar paused. “Laura might be part of the problem.”

  Several moments passed as the group struggled to comprehend Oscar’s logic.

  “Come on, you guys,” Tripler said finally. “Let’s not get Lord of the Flies on each other.”

  “Shut up, Tripler,” said Weesie. “Yeah, shut up,” said Annie.

  “Both of you, just fuck off,” Tripler snapped. Then, under her breath, she sniped, “Besides, we already knew you were pregnant.”

  Tripler’s comment triggered the inevitable explosion of dissention.

  Jake silenced the group with an unpopular suggestion. “I think we should tell Lila now.”

  “No way,” said Tripler. “She’ll freak.”

  “At this point, that would be an appropriate response,” said Jake.

  “I agree,” said Oscar. “We’re walking the very fine line between witness and accomplice.”

  “We need to call the police,” said Weesie. “Let them do a proper search.”

  “But we looked under the sofa,” Pete quipped. “Shut up, Pete,” said Tripler.
<
br />   Weesie eyed Tripler with new irritation. “We tried it your way, and it didn’t work. We need to do something drastic.”

  “I say we wait until dawn,” said Tripler. “Give Tom a few more hours to show up. If he’s not here by six, then we call the police. There’s no point in getting Lila worked up if we can avoid it.”

  “No,” said Weesie. “That’s too long to wait. We need to do something now.” More waiting, she felt, was dangerous. It amounted to both continued denial and a cover-up.

  But despite Weesie’s opposition, Tripler enjoyed a groundswell of support. The three new arrivals joined the three on the sofa, resolving to thrust bad thoughts from their minds and wait out the darkness together.

  FOURTEEN

  It was admittedly illogical to miss someone before he was gone. But so much about Tom and Laura’s romance defied convention. Usually, missing was preceded by holding, and holding by having. For Laura and Tom, the having phase was short-lived, and the holding was long over. Ever since, they had made up for lost time, seeing each other whenever they could, and, until Tom and Lila got engaged, speaking on the phone all the time and e-mailing even more frequently. The quality and intensity of their correspondence made it feel like the center of both of their lives.

  E-mail was the perfect canvas for their relationship, providing the space for honesty and the cover for secrets. The addictive nature of the technology conspired to turn their friendship into a prolonged courtship. At times, their messages were breezy and nonchalant, filled with trivial information—I hate my job, the weather sucks, I really want to see this movie. At others, their e-mails were thoughtful and self-reflective, as though they were collaborating on a novel in which they were the main characters. Throughout, the computer screen provided a cloak, allowing them to correspond when they otherwise could not.

  That certain moral boundaries had been crossed over the years was not lost on Laura. But ten years of grievances against Lila helped her justify the transgression. Still, as the wedding approached, Laura became increasingly fixated. She was like an athlete with perfect recall of a losing championship game. Every moment of time she had spent with Tom played out with startling clarity as though it were a netted serve, or a missed drop shot. She had been condemned, as penance, to watch the highlights of their romance.

  The first time Laura saw Tom freshman year, he was heading toward her on Old Campus. She lingered even knowing how late she was for Nineteenth-Century English, a bold move considering the size of the classroom and her professor’s policy of humiliating latecomers.

  “Do you know where Linsley Chittenden is?” he had asked. Yes, she was headed there now, she replied.

  When they discovered that he was in the same class, he said, “Will you show me where it is so we can ditch it together?”

  And he kept his promise. Together, they spent the better part of freshman year skipping classes, strolling around campus, listening to music, and otherwise wasting their parents’ money. It was as though they were racing to exchange every conclusion they’d drawn about the world in their eighteen years before the end of the semester. Most of their fervent discussions took place in Tom’s cluttered dorm room, where they huddled on the bottom of a camp-sized bunk, pretending to read or sleep, or indulging their feverish attraction. The year was only occasionally tainted by schoolwork, but they tackled it as a team, pulling all-nighters together and pooling their resources for whichever one was cursed with the more daunting assignment.

  The end of sophomore year marked the end of this perfect era. But after the initial shock of their breakup and Lila’s sudden intrusion, Laura gradually recovered—and benefited from the time to herself. She devoted the next two years to more useful pursuits than first love, such as memorizing the jukebox selection at Rudy’s, devising the ultimate hangover cure, and on the rare occasion, attending her lectures. Throughout college, a strange tension remained between her and Tom, as though they had been interrupted in the middle of a pressing conversation. Still, the arrangement was comfortable, convenient even. Even as Laura moved on to other boys, Tom was never far from sight. And there was some comfort in knowing he was with Lila. At least, she knew he had not fallen in love.

  Two years passed with an utter shortage of new memories. But they picked up again after graduation, when Lila moved to Boston to go to law school, and Tom moved to New York to start his M.F.A, and assess his dismal job prospects. He made these calculations as a tenant in Jake’s Brooklyn Heights apartment, two train stops from Laura’s in Carroll Gardens. Once again, the pace of their relationship—and their memories—picked up. It was as though they had resumed the old conversation. They talked breathlessly, for hours on end, at the expense of all other commitments.

  Countless mornings were spent exchanging excerpts from life and work, drinking coffee from paper cups by the dolphin statue in Cobble Hill Park. Countless afternoons were spent in Laura’s apartment, flipping aimlessly through old magazines or talking over the muted TV, before sprinting madly to the last show at the movie theater on Court and Butler. Together, they survived New York’s emergencies and heartbreaks. On September 11, they raced to Laura’s roof at word of the first tower’s collapse and remained there, standing shoulder to shoulder until the next morning. During the transit strike, they met in Union Square after work and traipsed across the Brooklyn Bridge together. During the blackout, they recovered Tom’s bike and Laura’s roller skates from storage and wheeled to the city, mesmerized by its darkness.

  But despite the time they had clocked together, they had only transgressed a few times: when Laura’s grandmother died, when Tom finished his master’s, and the night before they stopped speaking altogether. The first time, it seemed a forgivable faux pas, a frailty of the moment. Tom drove Laura to the funeral in Baltimore, and they spent the night lying on a made motel bed, Laura staring out the window while Tom traced the perimeter of her dress. When Tom handed in his master’s thesis, Laura met him on the steps of the university library with a bottle of tequila. They woke up the next morning on her living-room floor, oblivious to every detail of the night including their transportation back to Brooklyn. And once, when Jake went out of town for the weekend, they borrowed his car, drove until they were exhausted, checked into the nearest motel, and remained there until Sunday evening. But even that trip was fairly innocent. They were happy just to be together, and talking was almost as fun as kissing.

  Then the last night—had she only known at the time it was to be their last night, she would have treated it, treated him, so differently. She would have studied each moment, photographed every image, anything to make it last longer. She would have treated him so much better—she had only kissed and let herself be kissed. Had she known, she would have spoiled him more, lavished his body with every known pleasure.

  Thinking back, she should have known right away from his strange behavior. He had walked her home from the Warren Street Tavern and invited himself upstairs. This was typical enough. But when they got upstairs, they never made it inside the apartment. They spent the next several hours standing in their coats in her darkened doorway, touching each other over their clothes like a pair of nervous teenagers. It was not until three or four in the morning that they finally fell into her apartment, pulled not so much by the force of their bodies but the weight of so much longing. Technically, nothing sordid took place on any of these occasions. But even Laura would concede that betrayal lived in a separate realm than sex, a realm that was far more innocent, and far more erotic.

  And then he disappeared. Phone and e-mail contact ceased without word or explanation. The next morning, Laura awoke with the feeling of an intense hangover, her vision, thinking, and judgment blurring as though she had combined an entire bar’s selection of alcohol. Her bed, her bathroom, the street below—all were still and empty. Instinctively, she clutched her heart. Until today, that was the last time she had seen him.

  For the first few days, she forced herself to maintain a positive attitude. H
e was busy with an all-consuming deadline, or he’d fallen into his yearly funk. But as days passed without a response, she became increasingly distraught, obsessing over her silent phone as though she were waiting for the results of a medical test. At any given moment—she could be sitting on the subway, answering the phone at work—she was, in fact, reconsidering the merit of something she’d said to Tom, replaying the last minutes of their time together like a criminal detective, as though locating the offending sentence might lead her back to him.

  At first, she assumed he would write back—he was conducting a test of sorts. Perhaps he needed time to recover from his guilt. Or perhaps he had realized that he couldn’t be with Lila and was gearing up for the task of breaking up with her. Calmed by these theories, she adopted an indifferent stance to her empty inbox. She forced herself to take greater intervals between thinking of him, went several days without turning on her computer. Perhaps the pain would lessen over time, as cravings did when she quit smoking after two-week stints in college. But the opposite was true; she missed him more with every moment of withdrawal.

  As days turned to weeks, she started to fear Tom had survived his own withdrawal period, that perhaps she had missed some crucial period during which to change his mind. This realization proved far more oppressive than the sorrow she had felt to date. She became bereft, inconsolable. The notion that she had served as an accomplice to her own neglect was too much to bear. It was as though she had locked herself in a closet only to wake up in a coffin.

  Three weeks into Tom’s silence, she made one attempt to get in touch. She left one emphatic message, then acknowledged the futility—and the indignity—of trying and stopped. Slowly, she began the process of grieving for him in earnest. And surprisingly, it was an enormous relief. Despite the purity of her love for Tom, their relationship had brought equal amounts of pleasure and pain. It was freeing to consider life without him. When the phone finally rang, she had nearly succeeded in forgetting the sound of his voice. But the call was a devastating setback. It was Lila calling to announce the engagement.