We sat together in the coffee shop, she and I. The tiny circular excuse for a table we shared was so small that our knees nearly touched. It was not a particularly private table, but private enough for what I had in mind.
I didn't know exactly why she had agreed to come here, but I had invited her with every intention of exposing my soul.
But she had agreed to accompany me here, surely that must be a hopeful sign. I knew that she didn't like coffee, but she had the idea that she should learn to like it because, she had said, almost no one ever thought to offer her tea.
So there we sat, the two of us, sipping ridiculously expensive coffee from tiny cups. I took mine strong and black, and as usual I had to wait for it to cool off. She took hers with heavy cream and sugar, trying to cover the taste of what to her was surely an unpleasantly bitter brew.
An usual we talked of unimportant things at first, the sorts of things on the same level as discussions of the weather between strangers; the difference was that we had known one another for over a year, and had been close friends for six months. So we talked about people we both knew, minor things that had happened to each of us, current events on campus, while I tried to summon the courage to swing the conversation to an important subject: to Us.
Although I was still paying enough attention to what she was saying to nod or chuckle in the right spots, a deeper part of my mind wandered. At first I tried to remember precedents, hopeful moments from the past I shared with her that would give me the strength I needed to explain the things I had found I needed to say to her. I remembered happy instants when ours eyes had met in just that certain way, sad times when I had been privileged enough to offer her comfort and solace.
Inevitably I remembered the bittersweet night when I had first confessed my feelings to her. Before telling her of my feelings, I had spent an entire night carefully weighing what I thought all her possible responses could be. I had come up with four possibilities, one ideal, one acceptable, and two bad.
Her reaction had been the second one: She had looked deeply troubled as she told me -- she wasn't ready to make any commitments, she liked me, we should be good friends. It wasn't as bad as it could have been: She would still talk to me.
That had been my biggest fear: That she would somehow see my love for her as a betrayal of trust, and would never speak to me again.
I nodded and laughed lightly over something she said, immediately forgot it, and took another sip of my coffee, remembering:
"How old is she again?" Edna, my landlady, had asked one evening a few months earlier, after I had unloaded some of my fears and doubts on her.
"Twenty," I'd replied.
"Well, she's still young, give her time," Edna had said, making her judgment. Edna bought romance novels by the bushel, so although emotionally I took some comfort from her confident assessment of my situation, logically I couldn't find much support for it.
Young. That was true enough, I thought: Twenty years really wasn't that long. Even my own age of twenty-three wasn't very old strictly in terms of time. But still, it didn't seem to me that I had ever really been young.
Among my friends I had always been the voice of reason and sober caution for as long as I could remember. I had always assumed adult prerogatives with my parents and with their friends. Conversely I always treated others as adults, and was sometimes irritated when they didn't behave that way. Young? I really couldn't relate to the word.
"... don't you think so?" she asked, jolting me back to the present.
"Sorry?" I said, panicking inside as I realized that I had no idea what she had just said. I smiled at her nervously, hoping she would give me a clue.
"Don't you think that somebody needs to bring Ted down a notch or two?" she repeated.
I felt a rush of relief, luckily this was familiar ground.
"Yeah," I replied, "if his head was much bigger he wouldn't be able to get through doorways."
She laughed that laugh of hers, and I felt warm for a moment, as I always did when she was happy.
I remembered when we had first met. There had been a time when I thought of her as a rather shallow person, concerned only with the doings in her sorority and the current romances between our coworkers.
I smiled as I thought of the blonde airhead act she'd been using when I had first met her.
"What they say about blondes must be true," she had said with a bubbleheaded giggle on one occasion.
"Hey, watch those stereotypes!" I had countered, gesturing at my own dirty-blond hair. "Someone might take offense!"
And later, in a more serious mode I had expressed my amazement at how she was able to coordinate all the things she was involved in. It was entirely true: I'm lucky if I remember to look at the note I made to myself the night before, let alone recall why I wrote it.
She had laughed at that, only half believing me. In darker moments that had often been an odd kind of consolation to me: The suspicion that my reactions might confuse her to almost the same extent she confused me. I don't think that she had really ever known anyone with attitudes quite like mine.
That dumb blonde bit had been one of her defenses against the world. It had taken me several weeks to convince her that I really didn't believe it, but once she had realized that it was unnecessary with me, she had stopped using it. Perhaps that had been the beginning of her trust in me.
My relationship with her was a strange one. It sometimes seemed very one-sided to me. Although we had common ground between us in so many ways there were some differences which troubled me deeply.
She had always been amazingly open with me. She often confided in me, telling me of problems and situations in her life that were incredibly personal, things she couldn't tell her parents and as far as I knew she didn't even share with her other friends.
I placed the highest value on the trust she put in me and was always careful never to do anything which might betray it. But while I was always happy to listen whenever she needed me, I always had incredible feelings of inadequacy and guilt, because only occasionally could I be so trusting of her. This always made me feel angry and disgusted with myself.
I shifted position in my silly plastic chair, and looked at that face of hers to which a photograph could never do justice. For a long time I had thought that this was only subjective: my belief that a picture could never capture her beauty, but it had since been confirmed by friends of mine who had seen the picture of her on the corkboard above my desk, and had later met her in person.
I watched the animation of her features as she talked, the slight shake of her head that she used for emphasis, the set of her jaw and half-open mouth when she said something serious.
Her wonderful eyes smiled with the rest of her face, boldly making contact with mine at the oddest moments. Her long hair fell in a softly shimmering cascade about her shoulders, an indefinable shade of blonde which I had never seen on any other person.
It had been her attractiveness that had first caught my attention, but oddly that had become a very minor part of the reasons for my love. It was something more in her that fascinated me enough to make me break three of my own hard-and-fast rules and ask her out that first time.
The first of my rules to fall by the wayside was my aversion to sorority girls. I had always felt that ultimately they were only after one degree: Mrs. It hadn't taken me long to discover that this was not true in her case.
My second rule was simple: Don't date anyone you work with -- no matter how things end up, you still have to work with them. I justified breaking it by rationalizing: It was only a part-time job, so it really didn't count.
The third personal rule I fractured had to do with not getting involved with women who were already in relationships. I had learned this rule the hard way, by getting involved with a girl who was engaged. At the end of our relationship, nothing had been gained, and much had been lost, including her fiance.
It had taken over five years for my psychic wounds to heal. Now I was very, very careful. I figured that there was little enough happiness in the world; I didn't have the right to destroy whatever small amount others had found.
It was only after I had already forsaken this rule, that I learned she hadn't been involved with anyone, something which I found difficult to believe of someone as pretty as she.
Our strengths are often the mirror-images of our weaknesses, and the qualities in myself of which I was proudest were usually the ones which gave me the most trouble. The strongest reasons that loved her were precisely the same ones that made it so difficult for me to tell her so.
In the time I had known her my own happiness had become irretrievably connected to hers: When she was happy I was happy, when she was troubled I felt miserable. And I knew that what I wanted to tell her would upset her. So I hesitated.
Somewhere in her current line of conversation, she dropped a name: Mike. I grinned. Now there was a strange situation. Mike was a good friend of ours, though the reasons for his friendship with her and with me were different.
For me, Mike was someone I could talk to. Someone who stood a fair chance of understanding what I was really saying. My feeling about him was that he knew himself pretty well, but unlike me, wasn't quite mentally screwed up enough to be a writer.
For her Mike was an object of physical reassurance, but not a threatening one: She could give Mike a hug without fear of it meaning anything besides friendship. She had told me once that she liked him because he was "safe" -- because he was engaged.
Offering her physical comfort was something I wanted badly to be able to do, but I was not the naturally physical person that Mike was; I could hardly even bring myself to touch her -- not because I didn't want to, but because without specific permission somehow it just would have been wrong.
She gazed at me past the rim of her coffee cup. For a moment she looked troubled, and I wondered if she suspected what I was thinking about. It always seems like my emotions must be obvious to everyone around me, but they hardly ever are. For some reason I must have a very good poker face. While this has certain advantages, often it is a liability.
I wanted to believe that she knew what I wanted to tell her, but believing that was a mistake I had made before. One night at work she had been very troubled, in the worst state of agitation I had seen her up till then. When I'd asked her what was the matter she had hesitated at first, then she showed me the notes.
Earlier in the day she had found a pair of notes stuck under her windshield wiper.
"Here," she had said, thrusting the crumpled pieces of paper at me.
As I read the notes, I went cold all over. They were from a guy who had been chasing after her for months, and whom she said would not take "no" for an answer.
I could see nothing intrinsically wrong in what he had written, only two things scared me about the things he'd said: The first was that they said things very like what I might have said to her. The second was her reaction to them: She was terribly frightened.
"I don't know what he might do," she had told me, and then in a lower voice: "I'm scared!" And she began to cry.
It was one of the worst moments of my life. I stood there, wanting, needing to take her in my arms and console her; to make her feel safe, but I couldn't. I was bound by my own stupid sense of ethics: Unless she told me it was alright, I couldn't touch her, and I hated myself for that.
I was limited to using words. Words and words, useless inadequate things that could never mean enough. I tried to make her feel better, but I doubt if I really did much good.
Eventually she recovered control of herself, but she was very subdued for the rest of the evening. Later I contrived some excuse to go over to where she was working and talk to her for a time. Again I tried to offer her the thin comfort of words. She told me some of the difficulties she'd had with the note-writer, and I listened, letting her unburden herself of her troubles. When she began to talk about how she felt sorry for the guy in a way, I stopped her.
"Look," I told her, "I don't care about him at all. It's you I'm concerned about."
"Thank you," she said, so softly that I could barely hear her. Almost, she began to cry again. "I think maybe you're my best friend," she said.
That had certainly taken me aback. I was both deeply touched and chagrined. It was a matter of trust again: This was the deepest trust she had ever put in me, and one I feared I must betray.
One the surface it seems that such a level of trust would be good. Good? Ha! In the beginning of a relationship it is better that there be a certain amount of distance: We are all afraid to be hurt, afraid to take that first step, to open ourselves that deeply to another. But if we are too close, too intimate on a different basis, then the potential for pain is multiplied.
There is no room to back off for minor adjustments, no way to save face or retract. Once the words "I love you" are spoken in trust and in honesty between two people who already know one another intimately, there is room only for bliss or for heartbreak. No defense against pain is possible.
I raised my cup. It was empty. I realized that she hadn't said anything for several minutes. I looked up -- directly into her eyes, full of concern and questions.
"Is something wrong?" she asked.
It wasn't the right moment. It never is. I took her hand.
"I love you," I said. "I care about you more than I care about myself. I don't know, you'll have to tell me. Is something wrong, or is it right?"
I watched her face, her eyes. What was it I saw there? Was it panic or relief? Was it joy or sorrow?
"You tell me," I repeated.