Little Reasons No

She couldn’t get over his shoulders. She kept staring at them. Down one side of his neck and out onto the widening plane, to the squared edge, and carefully down over the smooth bulge of one bicep. He was kissing her throat and so she breathed accordingly while she watched him. His neck was nondescript, exactly how she’d always known a male neck should be. His jaw and chin were firm and neat, with an appearance of enough weight to make them strong. He reminded her of every poorly written book she’d ever read, which wasn’t very many, but certainly enough to make an educated guess about the ones she hadn’t. He reminded her of something she might have imagined at nine, before she learned that no one really looks like that, and the guys who do are shallow anyhow. Before she’d discovered that real life, with its quirky humor, rounded shoulders, and endless complications, is more interesting by far than the handsome prince with his classically masculine figure and clean-cut Greek features, who wanted Cinderella because she was blond and petite, and married her without even asking what kind of music she liked.

            The boy looked up and smiled slowly. It was a straight, broad smile. Her urge to say something sarcastic withered. His eyes were a steel blue, his face well-planed, with lips that were sensitive-seeming without being overfull. Her mind began repeating inane thoughts in bold with exclamation points. Thought fragments and clips of unoriginal coherency. “Incredibly attractive!!” “Gorgeous beyond belief!!” She wasn’t as turned on as she had expected to be. She was more fascinated than anything, and captivated by his idealness. She had grown accustomed to being aroused by boys less perfect than he. Boys with thinner chests and sweeter faces. She wasn’t participating as much as she had expected she would. It wasn’t that she wasn’t in the mood to be kissed in such a passionate manner, she just wanted to look at his shoulders.

            She drove him to the train station. When she opened the car door it scraped the flank of a green van, leaving a delicate white line. They were late. The train was arriving.

            “I love you!” he yelled, running up the steps to the platform. People looked around towards them, with the half bored curiosity of travelers. She ran after him reflexively. She got to the top and he was entering the train. He turned and smiled. They stood, he inside the sliding door, she at the top of the steps. His smile was brilliant and helpless.

            “I love you,” he said again, holding his arms out a little. She walked forward and he seized her, so that they leaned over the gap between the train and the platform. The door would hiss shut in a moment, but he held her like he wouldn’t let go. When she glanced down she could see gravel and litter and the planks of the track, like giant stitches, closing the land. If the distance between us is a wound, she thought, the tracks hold it closed. But the image was meaningless to her. It was poetic and empty. She lost it to the feel of his denim jacket against her cheek and back. Then, before the door could shut, she pulled out of his arms and walked away. Behind her she heard the train begin to move. She was so thirsty. Probably from the pizza. Probably from all the kissing.

The train was gone. The soda machine wouldn’t give her a lemonade, but it dropped a Coke. A boy in a kipah hugged a middle-aged, dull-looking woman. She began to walk back to her car. Two men walking behind her were talking about the colors of the beards they had recently shaved. She wondered if any of the people who had heard the boy shout, “I love you!” were still around. She wondered if they felt anything when they saw her. She felt like a movie theater after the movie’s ended, with a few old women still collecting their coats and umbrellas at the front and an exhausted-looking teenaged couple making out in the back. With a stoic janitor sweeping between seats beneath the huge, blank screen. She felt like the part that isn’t in the plotline for more than a few pages or a couple of minutes, because it gets too boring too quickly. She suspected that part was a large part of life. In a strange way she almost liked it. Perhaps because she knew she wasn’t supposed to, and she had long ago sworn to the world that she would enjoy it, perhaps because it was wide and stark like winter. Something blank can always be painted. She thought vaguely that perhaps the more her life left her bland and naked, the more she would see of herself, and the more she would understand. It was a thought she couldn’t hold long enough to shape into anything pointed.

She approached the car, hoping the men behind her wouldn’t turn out to own the green van with the white scratch on its side. They walked past and she was relieved. She drove out of the parking lot, turning the music up and then down again. Everything looked different on the drive home. She noticed more, and she liked the details less. The seat beside her didn’t look as deserted as the last time, and she felt normal being alone. She tried to remember the boy changing back into uniform, transforming back into someone far away, someone with a strictly structured life she didn’t want to understand and goals that made her feel lonely to hear them. She couldn’t imagine him being anything except the boy who had smiled at her from the train. It was because he was still on the train, and until she knew he had arrived she couldn’t imagine him anywhere but where she knew he was.

I don’t love him, she said. It’s too soon and he’s too social and he has blue eyes and those broad shoulders. He wants to command a ship called a Destroyer. He likes beer. He listens to classical music, she added. That’s better than me. He can quote from my poetry. Who could ever remember enough of what I said to quote it in conversation? His chest is perfect. Exactly! That’s exactly why I don’t love him! He wears that so-clean, so-straight uniform, and underneath it he is just as clean and straight and perfect. She didn’t know why this was her reason, it simply was.

She turned the music up and sang along in harmony. When she got home, she decided, she would work. She wasn’t sure she wanted to find meaning in the day. She wasn’t sure she wanted to find meaning in the boy, and so she just let him slip away on his train, back to his ships and his friends who would probably vote republican for their entire lives. And when he wrote to her later, she didn’t write back. He wrote again, and again. At first his words came quickly, asking her, then begging her. But soon they slowed and she read them as a thin, hopeless line, like the last bubbled breath of a drowning man carried softly towards a distant surface he would never see again.

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