The Dark Space (13 page)

The soles of my feet were faintly purple.

“I don’t like to move,” I said.

I felt the lift of Cal like a kite string tied around my heart, tugging and tugging, but I was too heavy. I bumped along the ground, unsure.

“You know,” John said, “I don’t like it, either. After I finished college, I studied at Cambridge for five years. I’d been working toward Cambridge my whole life, it seemed, but I got on the plane and threw up in the sick bag when the wheels left the ground. My seatmate had a bottle of Pepto-Bismol in her purse, and she gave me a dose from a spoon she kept in there.”

“You never told me that,” Becky said.

“No.”

“What would you do if you had a time machine?” I asked John. Cal looked up, startled by the question. “Would you go to Cambridge again?”

“I don’t know,” John said. “Would it mean I would still have come home with a D.Phil. five years later, brooding, and run into Becky at that party? Would I have gotten this job or done something different with my life? Would I have Cal?” He shook his head. “I don’t believe in those kinds of questions.”

He was glowing such a soft, royal purple, so receptive, I had to ask. “What do you believe in?”

He smiled, but what he said was, “I remember you from my class, you know.”

“You could never think of my name.”

“No. But I remember
you
. You came to my office hours to talk to me about your final paper.”

“It was about
Agamemnon
.”

“Yes, but you wanted to write about Plato. I tried to get you to tell me so, but you wouldn’t.”

“You weren’t interested in Plato.”

“I was interested in what you would have said about him.”

“It was that part about love,” I admitted. “That love is neither beautiful nor good.”

At this, he glowed bright with satisfaction. “That love is nothing good in itself, but merely a means to attain things that are good. ‘Human nature can find no better helper than love.’”

Yes. That was the part.

Those were the words I’d highlighted in my textbook, traced on a notebook, wondered about.

Love wasn’t good. Love helped you find what was good.

Love helped you figure it all out. Who you were, what you wanted, where you were headed.

I glanced at Cal’s hands on the table, saw how still they were, how fast he was breathing, and then I had to look right in his eyes, even though it felt too intimate to do that at the table.

Scary to open my mind and my heart to him in front of his father, his mother, his life separate from mine.

Except I felt then, for the first time, that Cal’s life wasn’t separate from mine.

We sat at the oak table in the dining room of the house where he’d lived for twenty-two years, taken his first steps, and the energy that was Calvin Darling stretched out in every direction. Into the past, into his parents and their past, into their thoughts and his thoughts, into the future that was our future, into all the other possible futures.

He was here. I was here.

We were here together.

Repeat the statement until you understand the complete truth of it.

Winnie. Cal. John. Becky.

Past. Future. Present.

Love.

I reached out to touch his cheek. Rested my hand on his shoulder. Told him,
We are already doing this.

Yes
, he said.

“Let’s keep doing it.”

“Yeah. Let’s.”

That was the hinge, for me, the pin that everything that came after turned on: Cal’s eyes on mine, his hands on my knees, his big wide smile and my heart so full.

That was when I decided that everything that had ever happened, would ever happen, was going to be as real as I made it.

That magic would be magic if I saw it that way, or it would be spirit if I called it spirit, or it would fade and disappear if I assumed that into happening.

That Cal would be mine and I would be his as long as we claimed each other, and this stage of our lives would be an adventure if we called it one, and that every day could really be a pearl, so long as we wanted it to be.

“I didn’t know how to write the paper I wanted to write,” I told John.

He said, “You would’ve figured it out.”

Maybe I would have.

I have now.

I’m in love with Cal Darling, and my love isn’t beautiful or good in itself, but our love will lead us to beauty and truth. Our love will be the helper of our better natures.

Plato said it.

Professor Darling said it.

But what matters is that when
I
said it, Calvin Darling said yes.

Here’s a story.

The story goes that Becky and John were inseparable from the afternoon of that July weekend banquet. The story goes that they hadn’t seen each other for five years, not since they danced all night long.

In late August, after that July weekend when John found Becky, he stood in front of his very first students, on his very first day of classes. He had just learned, over a piece of toast Becky had burned but he ate anyway, that he was going to be a dad.

The story goes.

This story has never meant more to me than a well-worn storybook.

Familiar, so familiar, I stopped listening. Stopped turning the pages and started saying the words by heart.

It wasn’t really
by heart
, though, was it? What the heart knows is supposed to be sacred, not rote. The story the heart tells is a living story, a story that beats, a story that is
vital
.

If I ask my
heart
how this story goes, my heart tells me about evenings that stretched on for what seemed like more hours than possible. My heart tells me about bodies against bodies and impossible tenderness.

The story goes, Becky asked for a house, a big old-fashioned one, right near campus, with a dining room large enough for the heaviest, biggest table she could find.

My heart tells me she was afraid. Afraid of me, maybe. Afraid of what happens to the magic of finding someone again,
right where you had left them
, even, if you don’t pin the magic down with a house, a table, stone foundations sunk into a ground that has no choice but to stay where it is.

The story goes that John bought her the house, and the table, and it was such a near thing, he had to leave us in the hospital after I was born to finish unpacking, to put together the crib and have the table delivered.

My heart tells me Becky eventually figured out the magic was never in the house, in that table I did sixteen years of homework on, sat down at for countless meals.

Figured it out, but also, never thought the house and the table hurt.

When I stood in front of the doors to the theater, holding Winnie’s hand, getting ready to enter the dark space — our last exercise for Contact Improv — I believed our magic was something we knew by heart, and I believed we had a story.

But I was afraid, too. I wasn’t sure I wanted to dance in the dark space and have the lights turn on and discover that it wasn’t Winnie in my arms.

Winnie believed the dark space was something inside of us that tells us what we want, even when we haven’t discovered it ourselves. She believed the dark space was the source of light, that it was the concentration of our light, under so much pressure that it was dark, and that when we engaged in actions that were closest to the desires of the dark space — of ourselves — the light was released. Our actions were some catalyst for either suppressing the dark space or igniting the light within it.

The space of
yes
was the dark space.

Holding my hand, Winnie wasn’t afraid of the dark.

The story goes that Cal and Winnie sat in a circle of energy on a stage lit by a single light, which after a short time was extinguished.

Cal wouldn’t let go of Winnie’s hand, so this became their single point of contact around which they moved, and danced, breathed and took in breath for the other. Then this single point of contact was lost, melted into the darkness like a meteor entering the heat of the atmosphere, but there was another. Another point of contact, another dance.

The story goes that the more dances there were, the more the dark lifted.

No hand was unfamiliar, no movement unanticipated.

I know you.

You are just the same.

I will always know you.

A music developed from the sounds of feet dragging and leaping and hushing against the stage, syncopated by breath.

Winnie found Cal again and again, and their dance always started the same way. A reach for hands. The dark space spilling light between them.

The dark space is the source of our light.

We danced in the dark space, and it danced inside of us.

The story goes, when the lights came up, overbright and artificial, no one stopped dancing. Cal and Winnie were the last to stop. They had learned a dance by heart, and their hearts told them to keep going.

The dark space was nothing to be afraid of, because what was impossible to understand at the beginning was that nothing would ever be in the dark but you and everyone else that you had grown to know by heart.

That’s our story.

I’m going to love telling our stories, again and again and again.

“What is this shit?”

I squeezed Cal’s fingers. He was nervous. It would have been funny if the circumstances felt less fraught, but that morning was too important, so I just squeezed and willed him to pull back on the nonstop barrage of cynical witticism before I wrapped my hands around his neck and strangled the breath out of him.

I love Cal. I do. But that doesn’t mean I don’t sometimes want to shove a sock in his mouth. It doesn’t mean I don’t imagine the exact size and color of the sock, the material, the way his cheeks will bulge around it.

Men’s medium, if you’re wondering. Gray wool, midweight. Like a suckling piglet with a mouthful of apple.

Mmphf
, Cal will say, on the day I finally do this, and I’ll think,
Too fucking right, baby.

“Seriously.” He scratched the back of his neck, frowning at the room and maybe at what his neck felt like, his nape exposed by the haircut he’d given himself after his shower last night.

He’d cut his 1993 Kurt Cobain hair off, cut all those platinum tips and left just the roots, his real hair color, dark and shiny as a mink’s. Then he dug around in his mother’s bathroom closet until he found the clippers she used to use on him when he was a kid, and he made me buzz the back and sides, damp clumps falling on his shoulders until we were done and he had to take another shower.

The result was a coif that was only long on top, teased and gelled and styled into a tall hot mess over his forehead. With his glasses, he looked like Morrissey on the poster my babysitter used to have in her dorm room, which I think was the idea.

My Cal, ready to launch himself into the future with a brand-new retro haircut.

God, I love him.

“This song sounds like alley cats mating. It’s a fucking travesty. Who’s in charge of the music?!”

This last question he shouted at high volume, stepping over a pile of purses and messenger bags right into the middle of the room where twelve or fifteen of our classmates were standing around, bunched into groups, talking in low voices. He sallied forth, parting those people like Moses in electric-blue skinny jeans and scuffed motorcycle boots — an outfit he’d recently picked up at the thrift shop and decided worked in his favor when worn with a bright yellow crewneck sweater.

I hadn’t disabused him of this notion, you understand. I liked to watch him strut around campus like a peacock, shaking his feathers at anyone who so much as looked at him sideways.

Even when he’s driving me crazy, I like him.

Cal insinuated himself into the nearest knot of people, touching an elbow, grinning. Twenty seconds later, a burst of laughter from the whole group of them, excited energy flying up like a flock of parrots startled from their perches.

“Is this John fucking Mayer?” he asked. Beth’s arms waved around as she replied, her smile wide.

She looked better.
Felt
better, happier, more together than she’d been a few months earlier.

He got her here
, I thought.
His open heart. His energy. His persistent caretaking.

The two of them broke off from the group and approached the long, polished counter, where I could see someone’s cell phone hooked up to a set of portable speakers.

The counter was the heart of the abandoned coffee shop where we were having the morning’s photo shoot. It went out of business toward the end of our sophomore year, but before that you could order and get your drink and claim one of the stools bolted to the floor. You could sit and read, watch the baristas working, crush on whoever you were crushing on, feel like part of something.

I spent a lot of hours freshman and sophomore years with a mug of tea, reading for class and fantasizing about actions I never took.

If I asked her what she’s reading, she might tell me about her class, and then I could ask about her major, and then . . .