Eager to Love (4 page)

I’d spent the last few months tracking this
woman down, though. It seemed like a waste to turn back at this
late hour, but… I was shaking. In spite of the Louisiana heat, my
hands were shivering. I clutched them together.

I realized I shouldn’t be doing this. It was
rude, and it was wrong. I thought of Marty’s floundering attempts
at conversation and I knew that I was about to put my foot in my
mouth in exactly the same way.

I almost turned to leave when the door
suddenly creaked open, and a tired-looking Asian woman opened the
door. She had keys in her hand, and it was clear she was intending
to go out. She looked surprised to see me.

“Oh,” she said. “Hello. Can I help you?”

She was very pretty, and for an awful moment,
I couldn’t think of anything to say.

“I, uh. I’m so sorry. I was just…” I extended
a hand. “I’m Caitlyn Seager.”

The woman stared at me for a beat, then
looked down at my outstretched hand. Instead of taking it, she
immediately broke down weeping.

This. Was. Awful. Worse than I could have
ever predicted.

The woman bawled openly, her hands over her
face.

“I’m really sorry,” I said. “I just… I had to
see you.”

“No,” the woman said, gathering herself
together. She sniffed and wiped at her eyes. “I should be
apologizing. I’m such a wreck. Please, come in.”

“Are you sure?” I said. “You look like you
were just leaving.”

“Just errands. I can do them later.” She
extended a hand herself, and I took it gratefully. “Ana,” she said.
“It’s good to finally meet you, Caitlyn.”

Ana Nguyen had been my brother’s girlfriend
all the way up to a couple of weeks before his death. They had met
each other in undergrad and dated for almost two years.

“I know why you’re here,” Ana said after we
were seated at her kitchen table, she with a glass of orange juice
and me with ice water. “You want to know if he was depressed.”

I nodded, feeling guilty.

She shook her head. “He wasn’t. If anyone
was, it was me. Did he ever tell you why we broke up?”

It was my turn to do the head shaking.

She sighed and drank half her orange juice in
one long, delaying gulp. “I thought he was cheating on me. He
wasn’t—I’m convinced of that now—but at the time… I don’t know. I
was a stressed-out, insecure grad student. And he just seemed to be
‘busy in the lab’ a suspicious number of nights.”

“Other people in the chemistry department say
he was a very hard worker,” I offered.

“He was,” Ana said. “I mean, it’s obvious
now. Caleb was… He was a goddamn laser beam, you know?” She laughed
in a brittle way. “Once he got locked onto something, he was just—”
She raised her arms like she was holding an invisible sci-fi weapon
and made a ‘laser’ sound. “
Nyeeeerow!
”

I laughed. “Yeah, that was Caleb.”

“So, yeah. He was working on this big
Alzheimer’s breakthrough, putting in all kinds of insane hours and
blowing his co-GA’s and professors away. And I was becoming
increasingly convinced that he was seeing someone else. Stupid. I
was stupid.”

“So you broke up with him?”

She shook her head. “No, he broke up with me.
I was starting fights almost daily, and he said that he loved me,
but he just couldn’t take the up-and-down any more. Said I was
distracting me from his work. That’s what hurt the most, I think.
It made me furious.”

“You were mad at him?”

“Livid. For days after, even. But then, a few
weeks later, I called him to try to get back together with him. He
turned me down. Not a hard refusal, mind you. He just said he
couldn’t deal with a relationship right then and that we could talk
about it when his life was simpler. That flew all over me too. The
idea that I was something that had to be
dealt
with.” She
took another drink, and I caught a faint whiff of vodka
undercutting the OJ. “I sound like a crazy bitch, in retrospect. I
guess I kind of was. I was working on my thesis, and he had kind of
become the only solid thing in my life. When my work got harder, I
wanted to be closer to him. He was the opposite, I guess. When his
work got harder, he got distant. The perfect emotional storm,
really. I got clingy and desperate to close that gap at the same
time he was increasing it.”

I nodded, thinking about how astounding my
sex life with Jeffery got during finals week last semester. I
supposed we were both of the getting-closer variety. In that
hurricane of tests and essays, we became each other’s shelter. It
was like, when we together, none of the professors and classes and
grades outside the bedroom door even existed. Only he and I were
real. I couldn’t imagine how hard it would be if Jeffery pulled
away at the same time I needed him most.

“Well, I got drunk,” she said. “A few nights
after he’d told me he couldn’t deal with me. I got drunk, and I
called him.” She took a deep breath, and I could see she was close
to tears again. “He was in the lab. I knew he’d be in the lab. And
I called him, and I hated how cheerful his voice sounded. I hated
it. I was miserable without him, and I was miserable all the time I
spent working on my thesis. And there he was, chipper and bright in
a lab somewhere: delighted without me, delighted to be working. I
was so mad.”

She looked at me, then she looked away.

“I’ve never told anybody this,” she said.
“And when I tell you, you’re going to hate me.”

“I won’t hate you,” I said.

She bit her lip and wiped both of her eyes.
“Keep in mind, I was drunk. I was drunk, and I was so, so angry at
him. I think I’d meant to call him to cry and beg him to take me
back, but when he answered the phone so happy, it just threw a
terrible switch. I told him… I said…”

Her face broke, and for a moment I thought
she was going to start crying again. She steered out of it though
and stabilized. She took a breath.

“I said, ‘You know what, Caleb? You should
kill yourself.’ And I hung up. And then the next morning, come to
find out, he actually…” She did start crying then. She put her face
in her hands and leaned forward against the table. “I’m sorry. No
part of me ever considered that he actually would. He was so happy,
and so smart, and so good at what he was doing. Jesus.”

A cold ball had formed in my stomach, and I
realized she was right: I did hate her.

But it didn’t make any sense. Caleb wouldn’t
kill himself just because an ex-girlfriend drunkenly told him he
should. Something was missing. Or it was just a coincidence. And it
was clear that this woman had carried around a tremendous amount of
guilt over the last years.

I reached across the table and touched her
arm. She looked up at me, her pretty face marred and streaked with
tears. Her eyes looked tired beyond belief.

I thought that there were probably very few
opportunities in a person’s life in which they found themselves in
the position to absolve someone. Why not take it?

“It’s not your fault,” I said, and I smiled
in a way that showed I meant it. “It’s crazy to think he would do
that just because you told him to. Not that you’re crazy, I mean.
It’s just… can’t you see that’s absurd?”

She sniffed, and then broke into tears of a
different sort. And I knew they were tears of gratitude.

Half an hour later, as I stepped out of her
air conditioned house and onto the sidewalk, Ana’s eyes were still
red and puffy.

“It really was good to meet you, Caitlyn,”
she said.

“Call me Lynn,” I told her. “All my friends
do.”

“Okay, Lynn.” She gave me a hug, and I
started down the sidewalk toward Ashley’s enormous waiting
truck.

“One more thing, Lynn,” Ana said.

I turned and saw that she had a very peculiar
expression on her face.

When she spoke again, her words were halting
and carefully chosen. “If you don’t know what I mean when I say
this, then that’s all for the better, and I won’t explain. If you
do understand, then I earnestly hope you’ll take my advice. Stay
away from the Union.”

The hair on the back of my neck stood up, and
in a flash I remembered the very same words spray painted next to a
flaming skull deep in the bowels of the abandoned Huey P. Long
building.

Ana turned and went inside. The door clicked
shut with solid finality.

I stood on the sidewalk, still staring and
covered with goose bumps.

When I got back into Ashley’s truck, she was
playing her cell phone and the air conditioning was making her
springy blonde hair dance. “So, how’d it go?” she asked.

“Good,” I said numbly. “Will you take me to
campus?”

“Campus? But it’s Saturday.”

“I know,” I said. “I just need to go
there.”

Ashley, being a good friend, read in my voice
that she didn’t need to know any more. She dropped me off near the
parade grounds after making sure that I was okay, and she told me
to call her if I needed a ride, adding, “I don’t judge, even if you
get in my car smelling like another guy’s cologne.”

In another moment of paranoia, I thought she
knew, but then I realized she was just injecting her usual innuendo
to try and cheer me up. I forced a smile. “You just wish you had an
excuse to get Jeff for yourself.”

She rolled her eyes. “We already both know
you have an awesome boyfriend, okay? No need to gloat.”

I shouldn’t have brought up Jeff. The iron in
my stomach doubled.

“I’ll catch a bus later,” I said. “See you
back at the apartment.”

“Later, chica,” she said.

And then I was alone on LSU’s campus. I
didn’t catch a bus later. I caught one right then. And I didn’t go
back to our apartment.

Forty minutes later, I stood on another front
porch. But this was no ramshackle blue house with a flaking old
door. This was a borderline-mansion with bright, polished glass and
ivory pillars. I rang the doorbell, and Dr. Giacomo answered.

“Lynn. Well, this is a pleasant surprise,” he
said in a voice like marble. “Come in out of this heat.”

I obeyed, taking off my shoes as I entered,
as was the custom of his house.

Giacomo didn’t have a wife. Though much of
him was still a mystery to me, I’d worked out that much. No wife,
no family—or if so, then divorced and separated and somewhere far
away. No, I was the only cheater in this relationship.

He led me to a living room with a white
leather couch and an enormous plasma screen television. Books lined
the walls, and a brightly colored rug splattered the floor like
modern art. Unlike the more traditional opulence of Giacomo’s
office, his home was a testament to the conveniences of modern
living.

I’d come to know him as a man who appreciated
aesthetics. Of course his office would be the most exaggerated,
lush caricature of what a professor’s office should look like. The
decoration of the room was almost an art project for Giacomo: the
achievement of a precise aesthetic. His home, then, boasted
comfort, vibrancy, and recreation. Gone was the chalky, whiskey
smell and cigar-smoke haze. Replacing it was the perennial aroma of
freshly baked cookies and the sly, piney trace of cannabis.
Classical music played faintly from somewhere.

“Make yourself at home,” he said. “Do you
want anything to drink?”

“Yes, please.”

“What’s your poison?”

“Whatever yours is,” I said, and Giacomo
returned with two open bottles of Guinness Extra Stout. The open
mouths of the bottles smoked lightly.

He handed me one of the beers and sat down on
the couch next to me. “So, what brings you to my neck of the
woods?”

As usual, I couldn’t look him in the eyes as
I talked. They were just too intense, and I got distracted. So I
sipped my beer and told my story to the carpet.

When I finished, he put an arm around my
shoulders. “I don’t think Ana could have been responsible,” he
said.

I shook my head. “I don’t think she is at
all. I really don’t.”

“I don’t know what motivated Caleb to his
action,” Giacomo said carefully, “but he was a smart boy. I don’t
think the drunken anger of a girl would have affected him.”

“Me either.” I looked up to him. “Sorry to
spill all of this on you,” I said. “Something she told me just… I
don’t know. It shook me. I know you and I aren’t very… talky.”

He raised his eyebrows.

I blushed and looked away. “I just needed
someone to talk to.”

“Our relationship need not be one
dimensional,” Giacomo said, putting a comforting hand on my knee.
“If you want to talk, I’m here for you.”

That hand kindled a flame.

I looked back up to his eyes, suddenly hungry
for him. “I don’t want to talk,” I said. I placed my hand on his
leg as well, but instead of the knee, started much higher up on his
inner thigh. I ran my fingertips up to the hard bulge I knew I’d
find there. When I unzipped his pants and fished him out, he was
large as a roll of cookie dough in my hand.

I led Giacomo up to his bedroom by his cock.
I needed no direction. We spent the rest of the evening indulging
in each other over and over.

At some point, Giacomo told me to touch
myself. With only the slightest hesitation, I obliged, masturbating
as he watched. What began as awkward exposure soon turned to raw
lust. I was breathing heavily and building to orgasm by the time
Giacomo reached out and cupped my breast. As I rubbed my clitoris,
he plunged one large finger deep inside me, and I moaned. I
realized Giacomo was stroking himself as well. When I came, my body
convulsed in wave after wave of unadulterated pleasure. Giacomo
squeezed my nipple in a way that turned pain into joy.

“Where should I come?” Giacomo asked, still
stroking his member.

From where I lay on the bed, I watched with
strange fascination. He hovered over me, stroking up and down.