Louisa Meets Bear by Lisa Gornick Page B

just know what you’re doing.”
    Corrine and I rarely call each other by our first names. It made me sit up and listen. “I’m just going to forget it, a one-night misguided adventure.”
    Lily was laughing at something.
    â€œBets are you’re already sunk.”
    *   *   *
    After you tell me that I am a fool, an arrogant little fool, you punch a wall. We are in bed, in my dorm room, and little pieces of plaster fly onto the sheets. For a moment I think you might punch me too, and even though I know it would break my jaw, I wish that you would, that it would be you hurting me and me being comforted by you instead of you yanking on your jeans, grabbing your keys, and slamming the door.
    You are down the stairs before I start to cry. You pretend not to hear me calling, “Bear, Bear,” through the open window until it is clear that people walking by are stopping to look up and I have to duck behind the curtain. In that moment, all I want is to take it back, my words that have, you tell me, wiped out all of your happiness in me, in my smell, in my touch, in our talks, in your certainty as you hike from gym to classroom to club that I am yours and the world is right. I want to take it all back, to say it’s nothing, truly, nothing. Nothing has happened, just a guy I met in a café, nothing will change, but I know that by evening I will board the train to the city, even more the fool than you know.
    A week later, you let yourself into my room with the extra key we had made for you. It’s early morning, not quite light, and I am still asleep. I open my eyes and look at your face. I haven’t seen you since you punched the wall. Already I have slept with Andrew.
    You’re wearing a green sweater and in the gray light it looks as though the muscles have wilted from your face. Your mouth is loose and your eyes are drooping. You look post-operative, like someone whose chest has been torn open so a surgeon can tamper with his heart.
    You sit on the edge of my bed, and I take your hand. For a long time, we don’t talk. I stroke your hand over and over. Then you lay your head on my chest and I stroke the angel wings in your back.
    I kiss your hair. You sob, wetting the sheets and my skin. I pull you into the bed with me, shoes and all. I am crying too. When we make love, it is hard to tell which of us is making what kind of sound.
    Afterward, you prop yourself on an elbow and study my face. “Your eyes are crooked,” you say.
    â€œThanks for telling me.”
    â€œThey are. And you have a pimple on your chin.” You stare at me as though you are studying a map. “There are a dozen other girls on this campus who’d take up with me in two minutes, a lot of them a hell of a lot less morose than you.”
    I run my hands over your enormous arms. All you’d have to do to end your misery is press your thumb to my windpipe and snuff out my breath.
    â€œDon’t cut me off,” you say. “Do what you have to do, but don’t cut me off.”
    I draw you into my arms, spider and prey.
    *   *   *
    It’s a hot May day when my father calls to explain about the conference in Helsinki and the paper he’s presenting on variations in the architecture of the genetic code and how he must have completely overlooked my graduation when he promised to attend. I hold the phone from my ear as he gives me the details. Outside, everything is a Technicolor green. Two bare-chested boys throw a yellow Frisbee on the lawn. A girl in an apple-red T-shirt reads with her back against a tree. My father has never visited me here, never met you. Listen, you brat, I say to myself. He paid for your four years here. It’s too late for a pity party.
    I place the phone closer to my ear and wait for a break in my father’s stream of words. “Fine, Dad, no problem, no big deal.”
    â€œI sent you a little present in the mail.