In Absence and Wanting

Teddy regrets what he has done.

He is, though, not sure precisely what has borne the regret—that he has now just broken up with Caroline and not in a way he liked, that he stayed at the bar where it happened, that he drank until he was drunk, that he had made it obvious without meaning to the feelings he had for Marin while in earnest trying to love Caroline, who was good also, or that in trying to find the epicenter of his guilt, he has not paid attention and has stepped in a pile of slush and his shoe is sopping. Too much is happening at once. And yet all seem to him equally plausible sources. 

What he does not regret is walking home. Even though it is unusually bitter with spring this close. This walk is perhaps the only thing he is glad for, and he holds onto it with a certain grip so as not to lose it. The streets have that wetness, the kind from a rain no one seems to remember or have seen, and the blacktop is blemished with round, small pieces of the green and red lights reflecting back toward the sky. 

It is, Teddy knows, too late to call Marin. Even were Carter not with Sloane, in that moment, she is the first person he feels he would call. She would probably laugh at him, for losing Caroline, want to know why, and in such a state, it would be easy to say what was true. Despite her feelings towards him, she has always absorbed the obviousness of his wanting her in an almost merciful way, shrugging it off, and though this is painful, he knows it could be more so. 

Beside him, a group of girls, no older than 22, stumble ahead laughing. One of them wades behind on her phone, typing away furiously, her face lit up by the screen. She notices nothing, crosses the street without looking. When they reach the other corner, the slower one stops. Her friends turning, they watch her silently, and her hands gesticulate. 

It would take too much effort to hear what they are saying, but it is easy to understand what is happening, having seen it and done it many times. Teddy recalls the feeling, those socially acceptable abandonments when you are young. First to leave and without manners, you’re explicit and honest about where you’re going. At the time, there was no indication of need to be otherwise. The weighty warmth of another body at a distance, pulling you from the world and out of the cold. The anticipation and harmony, even briefly, of a mutual wanting. Walking to meet them with the precise pleasure of not yet having what you desire, but knowing you will get it. Who could choose anything else, anything other than the opening of one body that accepts the other into it? 

The girl peels off, and the friends keep on, no one seeming pleased or displeased. 

Would it have been different or the same if they had met earlier, he and Marin?

At a party, say, or freshman orientation, or if Carter had broken his heart first and dated Sloane when they were still in college, when he was in boyish love with her. To trade, what he knows in hindsight now, would be a small heartbreak for this larger, more impossible one. 

He imagines the slow story unfolding before them, where, in a group setting, they’d meet, and maybe there’d be the four of them at first, but then there would come the natural divide of the room, of Carter and Sloane and him and Marin. Her Levi’s riding up her ankles while she sat on our couch cross-legged, her grin when she recalls where she knows him from. They’d argue about things only they’d know, like which of the seven pizza places back home was the best, or who gave a blowjob in the confessional, and who only said they did. There’d be the inevitable leaving to go downstairs for a smoke, and the returning thud of her loafers against the wall by their dorm door. He’d have, at his disposal, stories of her from Sloane, and even more precious to him in thought, stories he’d have been there to witness on his own. 

The time they’d have spent together, studying, in the cafeteria hungover, their stifled laughter in the library, those first warm days lying on the lawn, movie nights, pregames. 

They’d have gone to bars together.

Or if not together, then run into each other. If Carter were to take Sloane back to his room, he would walk Marin to hers, distracting her enough from it happening so she cannot decline by talking about Prince songs and with the Paul Simon impression, which he is pretty sure was even better in college. She’d make fun of him still, her laughter rising up over the quiet quad, and she wouldn’t even notice what he was doing.

Teddy lingers on the fantasy of it outside a corner store where a cat sleeps on bags of chips. Across the way, in a warm, lit window on the fourth floor, a man leans over. There are books on the sill, their spines facing him, and he seems to be reading them. Teddy can see just the yellowed pages of the collection. 

It probably would’ve ended the same way, he thinks. 

That is how it works, isn’t it? But the fantasy is fine, pleasurable. At the very least, in this version, when they stop to eat on their way to New York, he knows to get her an Italian instead of a tuna club. And instead of texting Sloane, they’d have planned their drive together. 

Old friends—for real this time. 

A woman walks towards the man, who has now risen to show her a book. She points to the cover, takes it from his grasp, and flips to a page. Whatever she says results in the man nodding slowly and without answer. The woman turns away. What cannot be seen by her, but by Teddy at this vantage, is the nervous wringing of the man’s hands clasped behind his back, their fidgeting into his back pockets, then out of them. When the man grabs the book again, he holds it up. What is said is not as known to Teddy as the college girls, but he can see the small change it causes. How the woman’s shoulders slacken, not in disappointment but invitation. The man steps closer and she looks up at him. From the middle of his spine, Teddy watches the curve of his back where this man bends to kiss the woman. Closing her eyes and rising, her body in welcoming opposition to his, extends upward. 

It is slow, this closing distance.

It seems almost certain that the young girl who has left her friends earlier will reach her desire before these people here can reach theirs. No matter the closeness of their bodies, of what is almost in reach. The gap shrinking, their lips are just there, brushing, and yet, not meeting. Somehow, impossibly, the final space will not close. The man opens his mouth slightly, and she opens hers, in a phantom kiss. It is him. He has pulled back slightly, and the woman unknowingly followed. 

When she realizes he is not where he should be, she opens her eyes. They do nothing for a moment, the man’s hands bunching her hair, their curved bodies meeting everywhere, except the one place, and Teddy finds that even he is caught in what hasn’t happened.

What has started remains on the edge of occurrence, stuck in the realm of nearly happening, of something that is precariously about to happen. Someone has only to tip forward slightly, shift the weight, fall over the threshold of desire into satiation. 

She tries, tentatively, to be such a force, but he pulls ever out of her reach.

Teddy turns, sickly, and walks on. 

Is it easier that the fantasy had not happened, knowing less about her, or would it have been easier if it had? Would he miss things that he doesn’t yet know about her, or would there be satisfaction enough, in having answers to his questions? Turning onto his block he wonders if he could do it, truly, if there is a world in which this absence becomes something he can manage.

He prefers to believe another outcome entirely, that he’d have had time to convince Marin to love him. The kind of love one cannot part with. 

Then this night would be much different. 

He would be walking home to Marin. 

Teddy knows that to imagine this possibility will hurt more later, even if right now it gives him a euphoric sort of pleasure. But everything else is too painful, he needs just a moment, a break, from what he is living. To instead live in a world where Marin was at home, his home, that would be then called their home, waiting for him. 

These years have been painful to a degree he is not sure he would, if given the opportunity, go to a bar without her, but in the life he imagines, things are more pleasant. If it were this late, she’d be asleep. The shape of her under the covers, her body like an S, warm and containing a natural place for him to return to. His knees at the back of hers, his chest between her shoulder blades, the smell of her shampoo. She would wear to bed, he thinks, a pair of his boxers and a t-shirt of her own, the sacred heart one if it had been laundry day. 

On the corner of the bed, he’d sit, barely, so the mattress wouldn’t shift or stretch toward him and wake her. The awkward balance of his weight as he pulled off his shoes, dropping them so they fell with a softened thud onto the carpet. A couple buttons on his shirt he undoes, then his pants, the quiet shrug of his jacket at the door when he’d gotten there, avoiding the spots on the way to their bedroom where the hardwood creaked and settled.

Everything is done in such a way as not to wake her, not to disturb the luxury of her presence, so at ease, so sure that he would make it back to her. Yes, he thinks. To be that kind of man, unlike his father, to have someone who knows with certainty this fact. He wants to be that badly, wants to be what with Caroline he could not be. To crawl from his corner of the bed to her and lie his body atop her own, pressing his face into the space between her shoulder and neck.

She’d inhale, long, loudly. The expansion of her chest rises to meet his arm, which straddles her. He almost feels it, can imagine feeling it, hearing it. 

“Teddy?” She says, her voice hoarse.

He hums, “Expecting someone else?”

She releases the breath, and it is just as long.

“No.”

“Had to think about it?”

She nods, and the movement forces her skin against his mouth. It opens instinctively, closing again just after, with a sliver of neck caught between his lips. 

“I was going to say Tom Hanks,” She said, “But he’s old now.”

“Tom Hanks circa You’ve Got Mail.”

“Sleepless in Seattle.”

He hums, inhales her scent, “Good choice. Though I’d rather you to Meg Ryan.”

“That’s stupid.”

“I don’t think so.”

“Meg Ryan in Sleepless in Seattle, you’d give that up?”

“I wouldn’t be giving anything up,” He said. “I wouldn’t want it to begin with.”

“Fine,” She says, her voice still lined with a kind of lethargic slurred speech, but he knows her attention has been grabbed, pulled into lucidity. “I’ll have her too.”

“What is this world where you choose two people over me?”

“The real one.”

She says this, and yet, her legs part slightly, the blanket separating them. It is a thin partition, reminiscent of life before, when there existed, always, a distance between them that could never be diminished. Now, how easily he closed it, and Marin turning into him to close it further. 

Teddy rests his head in his hand, their noses almost touching.

“How was tonight?”

“Good. Would’ve been better if you were there.”

“So when I smoked a cigarette, we could Irish exit.”

“Ideally. Though I probably wouldn’t have wanted to leave so bad if you’d come.”

“I hate that bar, it smells terrible, and to be honest, it's lingering on you.”

“Should I shower?”

The whole world leans towards the probability of her yes, while the odds add up to her quiet, “No.”

His drafty room filled, suddenly with a heat that is flowing out of his and her body. They breathe together, their chests pressing tighter until it is almost a state of interlocking ribs, until they are almost just one person. Which would be nice, to never be in absence of her. 

Her free hand, first, finds the hair above his ear, petting, and falls to the mattress with the same soft thud as his shoes. What she is trying to prevent, he doesn’t know. Fingers spreading wide and testing, she watches him as the same hand moves under him. Her body sinks further into the mattress to allow the passage, but there is no agony in this separation because her hand is immediately there to take the place of what before had been blanket and leg. 

Their eyes do not leave each other. The only change is the widening of her own, when she finds the button and zipper already done, the opening already there to accept her presence. His mouth slacks slightly. Marin turns her head as her fingers find the waistband, and Teddy leans in, does not stop, does not pull away. There are other ways to know what she wants. 

The movement broke something which had been delicate and yet redundant once their mouths met, her other hand tugging his jeans down while her legs kicked away the blanket. Separation becomes unessential, his briefs at his thighs, her shorts tossed away lopsidedly still attached to one ankle, outside clothes under the covers; she’d reprimand him later. There is only what they want right now. Neither removing their lips at any point. Not until his hand at the small of her back lifts her hips, his own shifting forward. Her knees bend, closing around his sides. Her turn, to accept his presence. And she does. Warm relief. The final absence closed with a small shared gasp. 

Teddy’s eyes close.

Did he not deserve to have love, to be loved? 

Perhaps he did not. 

Lots of things adapt to their surroundings, Marin in Copenhagen, for example, or evolution, or something else that he didn't pay attention to in class and cannot now recall these years later. But it doesn't matter; he just knows that it can be done, that a person can become accustomed to circumstances worse than this. Maybe this was the most noble choice he could make, to accept her absence from him. To hold forever to this pain, which he has inflicted on Caroline, of loving a person who would not love you back. And there is comfort to this, to accepting the same pain for the rest of his life. To, somehow, always be at the mercy of Marin, because at least he'd be given something by her. 

Or maybe he is drunk, waxing poetic, pathetic. Maybe he knows nothing, maybe there is someone else waiting if he really tried.

Teddy turns toward the chainlink fence at his left and vomits. There is little preamble, no fingers in the throat, nothing, just the intense, unappealing feeling, of a life not just without Marin, but with someone else. He expels what has filled him.

Finally, inside his own apartment, he falls flat on his back into bed. He considers doing what he has always done, the hem of his shirt lifting and the band on his underwear precariously out. The fantasy lingers fresh in his mind. The relief, a life where the barrier between them was as thin as a blanket, the sight of her in his bed, her hair spread across the pillow, the blankets up to her ears from the cold, her warm hands slipping through the open fly of his pants, her palm at him. 

It would feel good, he thinks, the release. 

But he decides ultimately not to. There is a certain pleasure to this pain which he has now, for 5 years, grown accustomed to, and it is so much the shape of Marin that having it sometimes feels like having her. The end of his pleasure would be only that, the end of his pleasure. He cannot bear to give this feeling up, wishes to have it a little longer, because she is not here and will not be here, and this is as close as it will ever get. 

His head falling lazily, ear to the comforter, he sees outside it is snowing. 

This will likely be the last of this weather until much later. A time possibly where things will be different, maybe even better. He closes his eyes, considers this, wonders, hopes, that this is the coldest it will ever be again. And in the morning, he thinks, he will send a photo of the snow to Marin.