Authors: Sandra Novack
“Anyway,” I told her, “I’ve never been in love.”
“I believe you, because it’s very obvious. My last boyfriend was in love
all the time
. He was what we’d call a romantic. But you, you’re different. You’re terrified of real love. Trust me, I know it when I see it. It’s like looking in the mirror.”
“Okay.” I bit my apple.
“But the thing is, everyone should at least have some sort of story. Love, unrequited love, broken love, the search for love, recovery efforts, you know, stuff like that. And if you don’t have it, well, then, you’ve got to make shit up because the world requires conflict and heartache.”
What was I to say? I shrugged.
“You know what I think? You set the fires. You, Lucius, are the Lunar Pyro.”
“Get out of here,” I said. “I’m not a pyromaniac. I’m a comic-maniac, maybe.”
“True,” she said. “But let’s pretend anyway. You set the fires because your girlfriend—let’s name her Bertha—the light of your life, the fire of your loins, broke your heart, and when she left, something deep within you died. It’s the fires that make the pain go away for a time. Think of it, Lucius, the blaze, the energy, the excitement of it all. It makes you forget that you’re heartbroken.”
I turned toward her. “So what’s Bertha like?” I asked. “Is she at least a hottie?”
Lola rolled her eyes. “What does it matter?” She thought for a while, before continuing. “Fine. Bertha Copeland, twenty-one, blond hair, short legs, a little stocky—frankly, Lucius, I’m surprised at you—but generally soft-spoken, lacking backbone. It’s a wonder she had the nerve to break up with you in the first place, the few prospects that she has. She’s really rather quite homely, now that I think about it, but her ugliness has fostered in her a good soul, a kind disposition, and that’s what you loved.”
“I did?”
“Yes, you did. Pay attention.”
“Was she good in bed?”
“Hardly. But she had a way of looking at you after sex, you know, a meeting of the souls or something like that.”
“Interesting,” I said. “I’m starting to get horny. Can I call you Bertha?”
Lola flushed with embarrassment. She shook her head. She
picked up the dictionary from the coffee table and opened to a random page: “Effluvious,” she said.
“Effluvious,” I said.
“It’s wonderful when you do that.”
“What?” I asked.
“Play along.”
A
FTER THAT I STARTED
taking Lola out on bona fide dates. Movies, art shows held on campus, dinners at the Red Robin. By mid-October she was officially my girlfriend and I’d begun, for the first time in my life, to think of a life with Lola that spanned out beyond our exultant fucking. I realized that in Lola’s presence I was becoming a better person. It began to feel that our meeting was fated. I talked about going back to school. I thought eventually I could get a better job, and Lola and I might even get a small place with a yard and a dog. In actual conversation, though, I limited the scope of such thinking. I talked about what we might do for a New Year’s celebration, or how the following summer we might go to the beach for the weekend. When I discussed these things, I tried to ignore the look that overcame Lola, as well as the certain phlegmatic “maybe” she issued in response.
“So what’s the status update on us?” I asked one rainy day while we sat together at the Red Robin, sharing a sundae. Lola looked out the window to the dreary cityscape. “I mean,” I added, “do you have plans to take off to France anytime soon, get on the right side of the tracks?”
She glanced back at me then, picked up her spoon, and dug into the sundae. “ ‘Us,’ ” she said. “Weren’t you the one opposed to the notion of an ‘us’?”
“Initially,” I said. “But then I started working to support your orange juice cravings.”
“Okay,” she agreed too easily. “So there’s an us; but remember, two beings can’t share the same space at the same time. We’re not fused together or anything, Lucius. This isn’t like
Harold and Maude
, after all.”
“For the twentieth time, Lola, my name
is
Harold.”
She shifted. She pushed the sundae forward, toward my side of the table. “Lucius adds some distance to things,” she said. “Sometimes I find I require it.”
“Oh, you
require
distance? I thought you wanted a real boyfriend.”
“I wanted a place to crash initially,” she said. “Then it got complicated.”
“Right. Like your girlfriend begins evasive maneuvering just when you agree to care. Isn’t that always the way it is?”
She thought for a while. “Fine,
Harold
,” she said. “I’ll be your Maude. Still, a girl’s got to protect her heart, regardless.”
“Huh,” I said. I looked out the window. I waited.
She rummaged around in her purse, pulled out her keys. She got up. She left the bill, leaned in, and kissed me. “See you later, gator. I’ve got a date with Voltaire.”
“O
H, YOUNG LOVE!”
my mother exclaimed when I called and told her I didn’t understand women. It was probably then, at the moment I solicited the advice of an elder, that I should have known I was undeniably screwed.
“Because sometimes she seems distant,” I explained. “What’s up with that?”
“Look, Harold,” my mother said in an affectionate, doting
way. “I think you’ve got a good thing going here, so don’t over-think it. She’s in college and she’s smart—just like you, except she’s currently enrolled in classes.”
“Don’t push it, Mom,” I said.
She sighed. “On the subject of women and distance, buy her something nice. That’s what your father always did when I got distracted. Flowers. Cards. It’s the little things.”
“That’s it?” I asked. “That’s the solution to women?”
“Don’t knock it until you’ve tried it,” she said.
The next day, I bought Lola red roses from the corner store. Lola beamed. “Harold!” she said.
“It was my mother’s idea,” I confessed
Lola asked if she could call my mother. They talked for an hour, mostly about what I wasn’t doing with my life. Lola said, “He’s signing up for a night class in spring.”
I could hear my mother’s relief flood the wires. When Lola got off the phone, I said, “You’re joking, right? About the class?”
Lola rummaged under the sink for a vase. She set the flowers in water. “I’m going to pay for a class. You can consider it my share of rent or groceries. You could try an English class, maybe creative writing. You know, improve your vocabulary.”
“Lola,” I protested.
“Lucius,”
she said. “No arguments. I don’t like to argue. It makes me feel tense.”
“No arguments,” I said. “But thanks.”
She said, “Don’t say that, either.”
After that my mother stopped by on a regular basis, which was something she never did pre-Lola. She’d show up after work, dressed in a long skirt and ruffled blouse, her heels traded in at the end of the day for bobby socks and sneakers. She’d bury Lola in a wall of flesh. They’d sit and chat. My mother even crocheted
Lola a pair of mittens. “For winter, to keep you warm,” my mother explained. “You’re so skinny,” she added, patting Lola’s shoulder. “Where’s your family, dear? Tell me, are you on your own?”
O
N A COLD DAY
in December, when the light filtered through the tree branches and the sun hung low and birds darted overhead, Lola and I stood once again in front of Floyd’s. Lola had been somber for a few days—I realize this now—and she suggested we walk there. The wind whipped through her hair, and she shivered. She wore mittens my mother had made her. She reached and took my hand. “You know the thing about people with criminal hearts?” she asked. “They always return to the scene of a crime. It’s usually guilt that drives them. And look,” she said, waving with her free hand at the dilapidated structure, the boarded-up window frames, the demolition trucks parked in the lot next to piles of salvaged, blackened wood, “ruins.”
Did I smell death in the air? Transformation? Probably not. It started innocently enough. She said, “Bertha worked here, didn’t she? I mean, this was the first fire you set, after all. You’ve kept the police on their toes for months now. Still, you can’t hide the truth forever.”
“Oh good,” I said, squeezing her hand. “I like this game. As I recall, Bertha is a hottie.”
Lola said nothing. She inhaled and waited. “Lucius was here that night.”
“Of course I was.”
“Not
you
, Harold. The real Lucius. He was here with his stupid frat brothers,” she said. “It’s been bothering me that I never told you. Lucius Lee—what a stuck-up name, right? It was a
dare,” she said. “A stupid frat dare. He didn’t even care that I slept with you. He said he wasn’t in charge of my body.”
I let go of Lola’s hand. I remembered the big jock who shouted
Let’s see if you’ve got it in you
, but I said nothing. Something closed in me. I balled my first. It was all a show, and Lola had staged it. “You used me,” I said.
“
Use
is a relative term,” she told me. “You didn’t mind. You enjoyed it.” She smoothed her hair. She shivered and pulled her coat closer.
“You lied.”
“You know I take umbrage at that. Most people I know are pretty much serial liars. My parents, for example. They pretend to be happy, and everyone knows my mother is fucking her shrink. My roommate was doing it with Lucius, and I just smiled, pretending—lying, really—that it was all okay.”
“Were you fucking him still?” I asked. “After us?”
Lola fell silent.
“Jesus,” I said.
“Twice. Only twice. We haven’t really spoken in a while.”
I inhaled deeply, smelled the rank trash from the Dumpster next to the building. I stared at the wreck that was Floyd’s—the ashen, ruined quality of it. I wanted to destroy everything. I wanted to smash my fists against Lola. I saw myself as Lola saw me, dousing the building with gasoline, igniting a spark, watching everything burn. I was that incredibly jealous, angry man whose girlfriend had dumped him. I wanted revenge. Then, in an even stranger moment, I saw Lola and me in those flames, burning to ash and cinder.
I yanked her around, hard, and she jerked away. “Have you lied about everything?” I yelled. “Do you even know what it means to be real?”
Lola looked as if I’d slapped her. Her face was red, blotchy. She was on the verge of tears, and so was I. I didn’t understand what Lola’s tears meant, and I didn’t care, frankly, because I was still pretty pissed off about the Lucius revelation. I walked away from her, left her to her burned-down building. “I’m going home,” I said. “Maybe you should go sell your bullshit to your last boyfriend.”
I
T WAS AFTER MIDNIGHT
when Lola came back to our apartment. I don’t know where she went after our fight or what she did during those long hours. Perhaps she went to the library or the Barnes and Squat. Perhaps she went to see her old boyfriend. Women, I’ve found, can be impossible to know.
She threw her keys on the kitchen table and took off her coat. Her eyes were bloodshot and puffy. She pulled her hair back into a small ponytail, undressed, and turned off the light. When she slipped into bed, I said, “So, did you go and fuck the first Lucius? That would be just like you, I bet.”
“I’m exhausted,” she said. “So please don’t start.”
“You have no idea.”
She lay there for a moment. “At some point it stopped being a game,” she said. “Do you really think I don’t know how to be real? Do you think all I do is lie?”
“I don’t know,” I told her. That was the truth. “You tell me.”
“I don’t want to be with Lucius,” she said. “I mean,
that
Lucius. If you don’t know that, then you don’t know me.”
“No kidding,” I said. “Really.”
She didn’t speak for an hour. I don’t know what Lola was thinking about. Eventually I got up, went over to the couch, and
drifted off to sleep. I dreamed of Lola. In my dreams, I held her close, saying, “Lola, Lola, my firefly.”
T
HE NEXT DAY LOLA
dressed and left for class. When I came home from work later that night all her drawers were empty, the bathroom was stripped bare, and Lola was gone. That was it. Sometimes even when you sense the end, you expect that it will be drawn out and painful, but the truth is a lot of times people surprise you. They simply leave. There is that sort of ending, too.
The only thing she left was Boo, who swam mournfully around his fishbowl. I sat on my bed. I thought some troubling things as I sat there, things I’d never thought about before that moment. I thought: Eventually people just quit and leave you, whether you want them to or not. Maybe they don’t even really want to leave—who knows?—but they leave just the same. I wasn’t angry, but a quiet terror filled me.
I searched for Lola in the weeks afterward. I’d ride my bike to campus and wait while a flood of students poured out of the Arts and Science Building. I started to worry. I texted her at least a hundred times, but she didn’t answer. I thought, Even in this day and age, if people want to disappear, they can. A few weeks later, I finally caught sight of her. She was wearing jeans and a wool coat and high-heeled boots. I called to her, and, when she ignored me, I rode my bike behind her, pleading until she stopped.
“Lola,” I said. “We’ve got to talk.”
She repositioned her backpack. “I’m a liar, remember? A user? A bad person?”
“What did you want me to say?”
“You meant it,” she said, raising her voice. Some students stopped, some turned around. “And it was a mean thing to say, but that wasn’t the worst part. The worst part is it’s true.”
“Come on,” I said. “We’ll talk in private.”
“No,” she said. “That’s it. End of story.”
W
AS MY LIFE
so bereft before Lola entered it, before we agreed, for a time, to play along with each other, and pretend? I can hardly remember now, and yet, a year later, I still think about her with a fondness that is unmatched by any other. I’m telling you all this because, see, the thing that happens is you forget over time. I mean you remember this and that happened, you have a vague sense of events, but the feelings become blurred and foggy. I don’t remember the exact moment I needed Lola, and I don’t remember the exact moment of love and how it came to exist as its own force, in its own complicated proportions. But I know that I felt these things; I know Lola and I had
potential
. I don’t question that love exists, but I do sometimes question the mechanisms of it. Maybe love simply happens when someone steps into your life and opens up your imagination, and you can see yourself in new ways. I think it’s at least a possibility. But what the hell do I know? My name is Harold and I ride a bike to work, and in twenty-six years I really haven’t learned a lot, that’s the goddamn truth.