by Jud Widing
In that moment, Nur and Deirdre De Dernberg knew they had each other, and at the same time, they knew that this wasn’t enough. They would still have to focus on themselves, still have to strive to accomplish their individual goals. But they could help each other too, because having individual goals didn’t preclude one from becoming invested in someone else’s too.
And what were their goals right now?
This they wondered, having traded empty stomachs and full bottles for the inverse.
Nur thought about all things trite, cliché and played out. That was too much for a single human mind to consider, so she narrowed the parameters to ‘trite, cliché and played out things in dumb romantic comedies’. This was also too much for a single human mind to consider, so she outsourced some of the burden to her sister, because that was one of the benefits of having each other.
If their stomachs hadn’t been empty, and the bottles had remained full, they would have dismissed their conclusions out of hand. These were not the goals of intelligent young women. And they were nothing if not intelligent young women.
But unfortunately, that night they were most definitely something instead of nothing, in addition to intelligent and young and women (well, almost). They were also drunk and heartbroken. So they waited until their Aunt and Uncle had gone to sleep (they could be confident about this: Uncle Bernard snored, and Aunt Amy couldn’t stay in the same room as those oinky snores unless she were just as zonked out), tiptoed down the stairs, and crept out into the balmy midnight.
CHAPTER 37
The first, and very nearly final, challenge they faced that night was where to find pebbles in Boston. Light, aerodynamic pebbles. Oh, they could find rocks. Whichever landscapers had made Brookline beautiful were no strangers to pools of heavy avocado-sized stones. And it was hardly any more challenging to hunt down some lighter alternatives, like mulch. But mulch didn’t have much to offer them at present, because Hyun-Woo lived on the second floor and those stupid brown flakes had no sense of urgency when thrown.
Trite, cliché, played out. What fit that bill more perfectly than standing outside the home of your lover and summoning them to the window with the tap…tap…tap of well-hurled pebbles?
Nur and Deirdre each had things they wanted to say to their respective gents, but Deirdre had never learned Kamal’s address. So, by default, they trekked to Hyun-Woo’s, hoping to find more promising pellets in Cambridge than they’d found in Brookline.
They took the familiar route, green line to the red line, heedless of the fact that they were catching the last trains of the evening. When they finally became heedful of the fact, they shrugged it off. Easy enough to call a cab. Not a problem.
Cambridge seemed to have little more to offer by way of pebbles. It did, however, seem slightly sketchier now than they had remembered it being in the day. Boston grew lethargic once the T shut down, but it kept on moving. This place seemed far more dramatically narcoleptic: at 12:30, Cambridge simply collapsed, toppling headfirst into a glass-doored china cabinet. Oh well. They knew where they were going, and they had each other. Buddy system. Not a problem.
Still no pebbles though. Slight problem. Deirdre found a few promising stones, but Nur had to take a pass on them. The cliché was the tap tap tap, but the subversion, by which the rock is thrown through the window, ha ha ha, had become just as trite. Perhaps even worse, because a subversion becoming the new norm was just the sort of tragic irony that inexplicably put Nur in a brooding, fatalistic mindset.
They spend forty-five minutes patrolling the area for pebbles, during which time they kept their heads swiveling defensively from homeless person to homeless person. It was a vain neck exercise, as they quickly discovered that the itinerant population of Cambridge was not lying in wait to spring upon them and steal their fifteen bucks or however much they had. With the exception of one guy, who did little more than shout “RAN ROUND IT ON THE WEST SIDE” at them as they passed, they were simply ignored. This too kicked up some of the gloomy silt lining the bottom of Nur’s heart.
Even in her state of inebriation, she recognized that her headspace and heartspace were far from ideal, given what she hoped to achieve tonight. What did she hope to achieve tonight? That was a good question.
Reconciliation would be best. Their time together was limited. Sure, she’d learned some life lessons tonight or whatever, but…that was the end of that thought, really. There were no follow-up clauses.
Barring a rapprochement from their pointless belligerence (and what had it been about, anyway? Who could even remember) she’d settle for…what word did she want here…vindication? She wanted to hear him say that he was wrong.
Wrong about what?
Oh, nothing in particular. Just everything. Wrong. Wrong to have said what he said to her, wrong to have done what he did to her, wrong to have hurt her.
What, exactly, did he say again? How did he hurt you?
Look, there was no point getting bogged down in the specifics right now. She needed to find a pebble, and that was all there was to it.
Forty-five minutes after their search had begun, they arrived back at Hyun-Woo’s. They were empty-handed, and worse, they were beginning to Sober Up. As is always the case in these situations, deep in the booze-addled brain remained a little straight-edge homunculus who vainly screamed reason into the aether.
This Is A Bad Idea, You Will Not Have A Productive Conversation In Your Current State, the homunculus cried.
What? Nur’s conscious mind replied
She got as far as spinning in a half-hearted circle, as though the stones she’d seen were just behind her - as opposed to several blocks to the east – when Deirdre had a brainstorm. It was the sort of drizzly thought that could only qualify as a brainstorm when the intellectual landscape looked like the set of a Mad Max film.
“Hey,” Deirdre barked with a jerk of the head, “doesn’t Hyun-Woo have an intercom?”
“…yes. Yes he does.” Nur stopped spinning only after she’d completed the thought.
‘Blarb! Blarb blarb? Blaaaaarb!’ ranted the homunculus.
Yes, an excellent point, Nur concurred. She hadn’t even bothered imagining those four blarbs meant anything. They were nonsense syllables, and as the topic of conversation was love, that felt about right to her. Maybe, at long last, that was the secret to having a productive conversation about thing that didn’t make any goddamned sense.
There came a flurry of ‘blarbs’ at that, but the time for blarb-parsing had passed.
Hyun-Woo had one of those boring intercoms. The kind that had loud buttons, but offers no auditory feedback once you’ve punched your numbers. Some intercoms will making a little bbbblll bbbblll noise, imitative of a ringing telephone. Nur once encountered an intercom that actually played a tune, as though she were on hold with her bank. Hyun-Woo’s gave you the clunking buttons, and then nothing until the person being raised got their ass over to the speaker and started speaking.
Which didn’t happen, and then continued to not happen.
And that was the other frustration with this kind of intercom; it allowed the buzzer to wonder if the buzzee was even being buzzed. Was the damned contraption even working? No way to know, without a reassuring tinkle or ding-dong noise. One had to simply take it on faith that the landlords and electricians had all done their jobs.
Faith, Nur had always found, was an exhaustible resource. That was the trouble with only having as much faith in something as was allowed by the evidence.
She’d never heard the intercom from inside Hyun-Woo’s apartment, and so had no idea how loud it was. Or did it go straight to his phone? She’d heard of some of the more advanced systems working that way, and this was a pretty ritzy part of town. Would it even wake him up? Either hello he was asleep, or the intercom was broken. He couldn’t be ignoring hello her, at least he couldn’t be ignoring h
er specifically, because he didn’t is know anybody that there it was her. Unless he had a camer-
Nur turned to her sister. “What?”
Deirdre nodded towards the intercom. “I didn’t say anything.”
Nur turned to the intercom. “What?”
“Hellooooo?” The intercom asked a third time.
“You have to push the button,” Deirdre advised.
Nur pushed the button. “What?”
“Hello?” The intercom repeated.
“Hello!”
“What?”
Nur realized she had still been speaking Seychellois Creole. She slipped into English as gracefully as a bodybuilder slipping in to her childhood onesie. “Hello!”
“Um, hi!”
“Uh-huh.”
The intercom thought about this for a moment. “Is that Nur?”
“Uh-huh!”
“…what time is it?”
“Late.”
“…why are you here?”
“I want to talk to you.” Nur looked to her sister, who nodded approvingly. She’d come to translate, but so far hadn’t been needed. Deirdre was proud of her big sis.
“…can it wait until morning?”
Yes was the correct answer, because there was nothing technically time-sensitive about this. Except that tomorrow, the homunculus would regain relative control of the Good Ship De Dernberg. Her liquid courage was fleeting, and she had words and thoughts and feeling burning a hole in the roof of her mouth. If she didn’t say them tonight, she’d probably never say them, unless she could contrive to once again get drunk before she and Hyun-Woo parted ways.
That was depressing twice over; their time in America was winding down, and she didn’t have the courage to speak her mind without a bit of spirited lubrication. Obstacles to face for another day; she already had one right in front of her for today.
Or she would do, once she’d been let in.
“No, it can’t wait,” Nur replied.
The intercom said nothing for four agonizing seconds. And then, at long last, it provided some auditory feedback. It said “buzzzzzzzzzzzz”.
CHAPTER 38
“I’ve got a lot of things I want to say to you,” Nur said to Deirdre so she could say that to Hyun-Woo.
“Ok,” Hyun-Woo replied, which rather took the wind out of Nur’s sails. She was hoping for something more in line with ‘good, because I have a lot I wan-‘ and then she would cut him off with ‘no, me first!’, except not as childish.
But no, he’d gone with ‘ok’, so she replied with ‘good’. And then, for a time, nothing at all.
A lot of things to say, now unsayable at the time of the saying. Because this would be their first real conversation about a relationship, wouldn’t it? Must be, because if they’d had one earlier maybe she wouldn’t have labored under the misapprehension that what they’d had was a relationship.
This was always bizarre ground to break, she’d found. Why that should be the case remained a mystery, but the tightening of her chest that always accompanied the condensation of aeriform emotions into chunky, clunky language was impossible to deny. Feeling for and with another person was confusing, and it could hurt, but in a way it was the easiest thing in the world. Emotions come so naturally.
Talking about it was harder, even though it was just words. But ‘just words’ could cut deep, and if Nur had heard the little children’s rhyme about sticks and stones just then, she would have tracked down the living descendants of its author and spat in their eyes. Sure, it would have been better if she cowed them with words, thus contradicting the hateful theory, but her time was precious to her and she figured they’d get the gist.
“You hurt me, very badly,” she whispered in Seychellois Creole. Deirdre passed it along in a more aurally accessible English.
Hyun-Woo took a deep breath, in and out, through his nose. His mouth was a ballpoint slash across his face, underlining an expression she couldn’t read. She gave him a second or two to start responding, but he gave no indication of having anything to say. So Nur continued.
“I’ve thought about it a lot…maybe too much, but I keep thinking about it. And I’m not mad at you.” As she waited for Deirdre to translate that much, her conscience got the better of her. “Well, I’m a little mad at you. But this was your first relationship, so I can’t exactly blame you for not knowing how to conduct yourself.”
As Deirdre ground those words into intermediate English, Nur couldn’t help but savor the look on Hyun-Woo’s face, just a little bit. He was a child of privilege, well-traveled, well-heeled, well-endowed (financially, but also wink wink but also maybe just one wink to be honest), and well-educated to the point of fluency in probably north of a dozen languages. He was almost certainly accustomed to being the one speaking with authority on things. He was almost certainly unaccustomed to being spoken down to by a girl several years his junior.
She could only hope Deirdre had managed to retain some of her casual condescension through the process of interpretation. Hyun-Woo’s face made it seem as though she had. Good girl.
“I wish you had told me that you only thought of us as friends with benefits. But I also wish I had told you that it was more to me than that. I wish I’d said ‘I love you’ sooner.” Without the buzz of the beer, she probably wouldn’t have allowed Deirdre to see her being this candidly emotional. But then again, it had been a while since they’d had those, and they’d done a fair amount of walking. She didn’t really feel drunk anymore…
“We both made mistakes,” Nur mumbled. Deirdre translated this, but with an eyebrow cocked hard towards the ceiling. Her face implied the next words that Nur presented for translation: “What are you thinking?”
Hyun-Woo, taking the arrival of his turn to speak as one might a particularly juicy static shock, cleared his throat and blinked nervously. “Ah…” he began, which Deirdre dutifully repeated. That struck Nur as needlessly cruel, as well as funny. Or maybe not ‘as well as’, but rather ‘therefore’.
“Hm…well, eh…it’s…I don’t really…” gurgled Hyun-Woo, who was actually fluent in ten languages, eleven if one were to count English, which at the present moment one would be forgiven for not doing. “Ah-huh, um….” And then he hiccupped.
Deirdre turned to Nur, reverting to Seychellois Creole. “Do you need me to translate any of that?”
Nur shook her head, hoping to disguise her smile with movement.
Hyun-Woo extended his fingers and chopped his hand once through the air, as if to signify that he was ready to cut the shit and get down to business. Which he did, after an unfortunately timed backup hiccup.
Deirdre listened to him speak, nodded, and translated for Nur, with an unhealthy sprinkling of editorial embellishment: “He says he didn’t mean to hurt you [rolling of the eyes], and that he believed you were always on the same page [subtle, single-finger ‘gag me’ gesture] and he’s sorry he didn’t realize you were taking it so seriously, and then he just sort of rambled [not-so-subtle jerking off gesture] about how you’re from different countries and it could never work or whatever.”
Nur nodded twice in recognition, then promptly cut out the middle woman and spoke directly to Hyun-Woo in English. “I still love you.”
“Oh, Jesus,” Deirdre accidentally shouted. Nur couldn’t blame her – back in their room, they’d charted out a much different course for this conversation. It was all terrifically empowered and independent and modern and who needs to have somebody what good does it even do you how would that make you happy what is happiness who am I where am I oh god maybe we should have eaten something before drinking this much.
Those were words. They were words that Nur believed, even now. But she couldn’t fight the way she was feeling (and how Deirdre would roll her eyes at that). What Hyun-Woo had done wasn’t unforgivable.
It was shitty, but she couldn’t pretend to be an innocent party in the whole thing. Communication cut both ways, and she’d harbored intense feelings for the poor dope without ever telling him. Wouldn’t that be a stressful role in which to thrust somebody? Yes, she supposed it would be.
They wouldn’t work together, for the long-term. That was a stubborn illusion with which Nur had finally parted company. Hyun-Woo was very likely going to be graduating in the next few weeks, and then he would go to wherever the hell he was going next, to do whatever the hell it was he was going to do. And come August, Nur and Deirdre would return to Seychelles, where they would very likely live until they died. She and Hyun-Woo were on different trajectories, and it was going to be painful to part ways with him, but that didn’t help her love him any less.
So…
Why not spend these woefully fleeting days they had left together? It seemed a remarkably simple bit of emotional calculus: would she rather suffer the heartbreak of parting with this guy she loved, and had spent the remainder of her trip with…or would she rather suffer a lifetime of regret for having had the opportunity to spend time with the guy she loved, and forgone it in an attempt to save herself the parting heartbreak, which would surely pass in time?
And there it was again, the disparity between feelings as felt and feelings as articulated. In her heart, she knew her decision to be the right one. When she considered how best to phrase it, it sounded like the sort of thing a cost-benefit analysis CupidTron 4000 might spit out.
