LITMIR.BIZ

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rub it in his face, the youth, the slim feminine attractiveness, the long legs? Hannah even wore a skirt, as if headed to church. Linen skirt as short as the month of February. Navy blue sparkly ballet flats. A cream top. Face deceptively “unmade-up,” yet fully made-up. Eyes moist.

      Chloe couldn’t pay too much attention to Hannah’s appealing exterior while driving down a zigzaggy two lane country road, but from a surreptitious corner of her eye, Hannah was looking delectable, not forlorn.

      “Hannah, why are you looking so pretty if you’re ending it with him?”

      She beamed. “He likes to look at me, that’s all.”

      “But you want him to like to look at you less, don’t you?”

      Hannah didn’t reply, busy eating her fingers, twisting her knuckles.

      To everything there is a season. That was another one of her mother’s mottos. This was emphatically not the season for college confessions. This was a time for lovers. Chloe cleared her throat.

      “Can I ask you about Blake?”

      “What about him?”

      “Don’t you like him?”

      “I love him, what are you talking about?”

      “Well, then, why …”

      Hannah waved at her. “You won’t understand, Chloe. You and Mason are so perfectly aligned.”

      “You think so?” Chloe wouldn’t have minded talking about it.

      “But it’s different with me and Blake. He’s so sweet, but …” Hannah paused, chewed her nails, stared out at the pines passing by. “Besides the physical, we have little in common. Don’t get me wrong. The physical gets you pretty far. With Blake, believe me, almost the whole way. If it was the only important thing, we’d be in great shape. But aside from that, what do we have? All the things I like, he couldn’t care less about, and all the things he likes I don’t get at all.”

      “Blake’s so into you. He likes everything you’re into.”

      “What do I care about junk hauling, or building things, or helping old people, or fixing band saws? Or fishing? And what does he care about Paris and museums, and classic literature, and pretty clothes?”

      “There are other things …”

      “Yes, we’ve done them.” Hannah sighed dramatically. “Do you think that boy will ever live away from his dad? He still helps him into the boat, for God’s sake. He wants to start a junk business. I mean, what am I going to do with someone like that?”

      “He also wants to write a book,” said Chloe.

      Hannah waved in dismissal. “He and a million others. Me, I want to travel the world. I want to learn three languages. I want to live in a big city. You and I both do. It can’t end with Blake any other way but this way.”

      “But that’s the thing,” Chloe said, her gaze on the road. “It’s not ending. If you ended it with him, that’d be one thing. But you’re not.”

      Hannah turned to Chloe, frowning disdain on her displeased face. “How do I do that? And then what? What do I do with us?” She made a large air circle, embodying by the broad sweep not just herself and Blake, but Chloe and Mason too. “We are all four of us together every day. We have one life. If I break up with him, what happens to the four of us? Do you even think before you speak? I mean, could you break up with Mason?”

      “I don’t want to.”

      “But if you did?”

      They didn’t talk for a while. The road was narrow, the pines tall, the ride long, what was there to say? Except what a hypocrite Chloe was, what a deceiver. She decided she would tell Hannah about San Diego on the way home, her heart falling through her abdomen at the thought of it.

      Chloe underestimated the open and public heartbreak a man near retirement age could display on the walkways of Orono, near the river on the University of Maine campus, when his eighteen-year-old lover told him it had to end.

      Chloe stayed as far back as possible. She couldn’t believe Hannah would do this on the avenue where students and faculty strolled on a warm May evening. But his reaction was so extreme that perhaps this was why Hannah had chosen the public square for his flogging; she had hoped he would keep it together. At first they walked arm in arm, overlooking the flowing waters, the mountains beyond. He smiled at her, squeezed her arm. They made quite a picturesque couple against the backdrop of the snow-capped Appalachians.

      Hannah spoke. He stopped walking. He took his arm away. She gestured, in her small elegant way, and he stood, a pillar of incomprehension. Then he started to weep. Hannah stroked him, embraced him, talked and talked, a filibuster of consolation. Nothing helped the gray man become less stooped.

      Chloe had to stop peeking at his despair. It was as if she had caught him in the shower, or them in a different sort of clinch. She became embarrassed, for herself, for him, for the passersby who slowed down, concerned at his distraught exhortations. He grabbed his chest, as if in the middle of heart failure.

      After an hour he was still crying! And Hannah was still rubbing him, talking to him, gesturing far and wide.

      Chloe understood nothing of this kind of emotion. Nothing. It seemed to her that logic must prevail in a grown man’s head when he spied himself standing in the middle of the college where he had tenure, bawling because his teenage lover had decided to move on. Not even move on, for Blake was the here and now, just … move sideways. Move back. Move away. How could the enormous common sense of that decision finally—finally!—not triumph over him?

      Chloe had been keeping an eye on the time—the thing she usually had least of, next to money—but after ninety minutes her eyes left the watch permanently to pitch silent poison darts in Hannah’s direction, hoping her friend would sense Chloe’s own despair at the tedium of spying on a stranger’s excessive distress. Come on, wrap the whole thing up, put it in a doggy bag, take it home. Let’s go, let’s go, let’s go! Chloe kept silently shouting. LET’S GO!

      There was pacing, but there was no departing.

      A hundred and ten minutes. A movie now. First a tragedy, then a comedy, then a farce, now Shoah.

      Wait. Something new was happening. The stooped old man nodded. He let Hannah hug him, pat him.

      Unfounded optimism. There he was, crying again. He could barely stand on his grieving geriatric legs. Carefully Hannah helped him over to a bench, and sat down next to her soon-to-be-erstwhile lover, continuing to cajole and comfort him.

      The girls had a three-hour ride back home.

      “Did you see him?” Hannah asked.

      Oh, I saw him all right. Saw him, heard him, memorized him. I could play him by heart on the piano, that’s how well I’ve studied him.

      “Yes,” said Chloe.

      How could she tell Hannah about college?

      She couldn’t. And didn’t.

      She wanted to ask if Hannah loved Blake half as much. Would she shed a quarter of Martyn’s tears when it came time to say goodbye to Blake? Would she miss him an eighth as deeply? What was it called when it wasn’t pain, but a fraction of pain? Grimly Chloe closed her hands on the wheel.

      “What happens next, Chloe?”

      “I don’t know, Hannah. What happens next?”

      It was going to get dark soon. Her mother would be worried. Nothing to do but drive on. “Remember Darlene Duranceau?”

      “Who

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