My Anna

     Walking into my closet, I sighed deeply, scanning the two feet of space I had reserved for all of my dresses.  I had too many thoughts going through my head to care about the clothes I wore that night, as long as it was a dress and it was clean--it had to be a dress because it was, after all, Thanksgiving dinner.  Some decorum had to be observed.  I picked out a dark green velvet one with lace sleeves, and pulled it over my head and buttoned the back without too much difficulty.  I turned back into my room, adjusted some of my hair pins, slipped on my black heels, and grabbed James’s dilapidated copy of Anna Karenina.  As I walked out the front door, shivering in the cold wind, I thought about my favorite line from the book, set in the midst of the most crucial scene of the entire story; Anna's innocent son had hauntingly "evoked both in Vronsky and in Anna a feeling such as a sailor might have who saw by the compass that the direction in which he was swiftly sailing diverged widely from the right course but was quite unable to stop, and felt that every moment was taking him farther and farther astray, and that to acknowledge to himself that he was diverging from the right direction was tantamount to acknowledging that he was lost.”  It had arrested me with its startling clarity and utter humanness.  The sheer melancholy of it was enough to sometimes keep me lying awake at night, mulling it over, trying to find a solution to the lovers' problem.  I started the car and turned the heater on after the engine had warmed up.  By the time I arrived at James and Lilly’s house, the car had barely gotten warm, and the last words “... and that to acknowledge to himself that he was diverging from the right direction was tantamount to acknowledging that he was lost” had begun to repeat themselves without my permission, slowly fading until they went unheard but remained present.
     I say without my permission because I didn't much agree with their highly moral implication.  As if the disaster in the novel came not from Anna's sheer insanity, but instead from her and Vronsky's illegitimate relationship and child.  I found Tolstoy to be a genius, yet a rather narrow-minded one.  He ended the paragraph with that momentous sentence, and moved consecutively onward with his prose, not bothering to formulate a solution to the sailor's dilemma outside of his completely lost state.  Remedies were never impossible, I thought, but for people with strict, immovable ideas for what life should rightly be composed of, I supposed they could be.  Besides--to arrest his motion on the unforgiving, stolid sea may not have been in his power, but to compare it in such a negative way to Anna and Vronsky's relationship was ridiculous: a sailor in a storm at sea was a bad metaphor, unless of course one believed in a right way and a wrong way, like Tolstoy, but life isn't so black-and-white.  I tilted my head as I drove, thinking through this while the words replayed themselves several times, and felt nearly uplifted by such clear-headed thinking.  I was clear-headed, but not closed-minded.  But I wouldn't let it get me acting all pretentious.  Then I'd be as bad as Tolstoy.  Using a novel to make a definitive judgment upon the morals of society, to make the point that adultery always leads to ineffably detestable guilt and will ruin your body and soul.  And women were more prone to such ruin, hence the melodramatic ending.  Yet, the wording moved me.  Perhaps because I was something of a Naturalist.  Helpless humanity, lost at sea.  But with remedies at hand, and more than Tolstoy offered. 

     The sky was already nearly dark and I could see soft lights coming from the dining room.  Glancing at the clock, I realized that I was ten minutes early.  A nervous sensation briefly passed over me, but I quickly brushed it off after I realized its utter irrationality.  What in the hell was there to be nervous about?  Not like anything ever surfaced in front of Lilly anyways.  Or in front of Allen. 

     Lilly opened the kitchen door before I was entirely out of the car, and her sensually beautiful face made me inwardly grimace.  I made a painfully self-conscious note to avoid all mirrors the entire night. 

     “Hurry up, come in, it’s freezing!  Plus, I need your help with setting the table… I’m so glad you could come!”  She clutched her crocheted scarf around her as she shut the car door behind me.  I think I gave her a passing smile as she put her arm around me; her overtly delicate touch unnerved me with a paradoxical annoyance that made me clench my hands as I wrapped them around myself to keep warm. 

      I shouldn’t have felt so hostile to her, and I knew it at the time and flipped between rebuking myself and justifying myself.  A lifelong friend should be treated better than that, and somewhere I felt rotten for knowing that I was too weak to make any concerted effort to change my feelings for her.  Something in me preferred to take the natural route.

     I held my breath as I saw James come down the stairs, adjusting his shirt and looking at me with a smile which constantly changed itself from dry formality to warmth of meaning.  I kept up the latter type of my own, but only when Lilly was turned away, talking to her other friends or her parents or checking on the food in the oven.  There were mostly her relatives there, only James’s widowed father sitting by the fireplace, looking through a stack of CDs by a stereo player.  I had talked with him only once or twice before, and he had seemed to take on a definitively loving opinion of me.  As if I was the daughter he never had but always wanted.  Thinking about this always made me much too prideful, yet pitifully so, because it was all invisible speculation on my part.  Henry Miller’s soft smile in the firelight directed towards me may not have come from much of any desires on his part at all.  Just a natural reaction to seeing a pretty smiling face from a friendly and smart girl. 

     I silently reproached myself for assuming so axiomatically that actions and words and looks pointed to things more profound than themselves.  It was an immature habit, to say the least.  I needed to break it, and I knew it.  The whole evening’s subjectively assumed significance was borne from it: I trembled as I unintentionally realized this, and felt my insides shudder in self-loathing.  As if I could shake myself off.

  All of the bodies in the rooms added to my annoyance at first, then received my silent thanks as I pondered the distractions they could cause for Lilly during the night.  The habit wasn’t breaking.  I looked again at James and wondered if he was thinking something like the same thing.  From his piercing gaze and slightly uneasy smile, I was strangely unable to deduce what I wanted.  My brow involuntarily wrinkled in slight confusion, and he looked up at my forehead and then over my face.  I thought, What are you trying to say?  What are you thinking?  and childishly hoped it was written all over my countenance and that he would answer.  He inhaled deeply and looked over my hair and shoulders, then back at my face.  He took a step forward, then back, and his hands started shaking as he wiped his brow.  I think I was making him nervous.  All he had to do was look away; but he was more rooted to his spot than I was to mine.  A gentle wave of confidence lapped against the shores of my former rebukes against myself, washing bits and pieces away and pulling them out to sea.  The waves would grow stronger someday, perhaps, and flood all of me, but for now this gentle lapping gave me the most peace I’d had in weeks.        

     Everyone else was talking but I was just standing and he was just standing, speaking without speaking.  Our conversation was cut short when Lilly pulled on my sleeve; I suddenly remembered that she had wanted me to help her younger sisters set the table.

     “Oh, right--sorry.  Where’s the plates you want to use?”

     “No, actually, Sam and Molly finished that up.  I just wanted to know if you’d heard from Allen this afternoon?  He won’t answer his phone.”  She appeared really concerned.

     “No, I haven’t.”  But I had let my phone ring and ring the day before as I watched it buzzing around on my desk; I didn’t feel like talking to him because I was journaling at the time.  He always talked for too long, and about things that I felt no connection with, like the different options for after he became an officer in the spring, or what he had learned in ROTC during the past week, things like what to do in flight emergencies and the order in which to start things up on different types of aircraft.  I always thought him pitifully dependent upon the organization to find his identity in life.  As if he couldn’t be or do anything important or worthwhile without it; yet, he constantly talked at me about how officer’s training was turning him into an independent man, an autonomous man, a man ready to solve life’s problems on his own.  In fact, he talked about it so much that it repeated itself out of its end, and became an empty concept that only tired me and made me feel like I was wasting time thinking about it.  I thought to call him back after I had showered, just to tell him that I was sorry to have missed his call, and that I couldn’t talk for long because I was exhausted but wanted to say goodnight and I love you and hopefully divert him away from any gentle tones--but it had slipped my mind. 

     Lilly bit her lips and looked over at James.  He quickly shifted his eyes to hers.

     “I could try calling him, Lills--no big deal.”  I dug for my phone in my purse.

     “Don’t you know where he’s been?  At all?”  Her voice rose a bit with the latter question, and I felt butterflies in my stomach as the people standing around us looked at us with mildly astonished faces.

     I clenched my jaw. Surprised at my sudden anger, I wanted to yell at her and ruin the dinner and go home to my apartment and cry in solitude, and seriously considered it, but never had the nerve to actually do it.  Or maybe I really didn’t want to be selfish and ruin the jovial atmosphere.  I have no idea what my motives were at the moment.  Maybe they were just impulses. 

     Lilly crossed her arms and waited for me to answer.  “Lills, couldn’t you ask the same of him?  Not like he’s called me lately, either.”  Lying came surprisingly easily at the moment. 

     “You’re his ‘girlfriend’ and he’s your ‘boyfriend’ and neither of you seems to know anything about what the other’s doing, or feeling.  It breaks my heart, and, worse still, it breaks Allen’s…  if only you knew.”  Her eyes starting shining with moisture in the soft light, and I watched her swallow several times.  I was glad she had lowered her voice, at least.

     The room had grown so quiet that I could hear Louis Armstrong’s rough, gurgling tones singing in the background.  “When I’m alone with my fancies, yes, I’ll be with you.”  Henry Miller had his eyes closed, bobbing his head in undeniable appreciation.  Some people continued to stare at us, small wine glasses in hand, while others resumed their conversations.  James’s father opened his eyes and looked at me with another gentle smile over Lilly’s shoulder.  “Weaving romances, making believe they’re true.”  I thought that she was crazy, bringing this up at such an improper moment; entirely unsuited to the atmosphere she had apparently spent all day creating.  Oh well, she was ruining her own party.  Let her.  Let her be her hyper-emotional self; let her annoy everyone there.   

    James came walking up behind me, and told Lilly not to worry.  “He said he may not even come when we talked to him a few weeks ago, remember?”

     Lilly blinked her eyes slowly and exhaled.  “Yes, you’re right.  I’d forgotten that.  But still, Carrie…”  She lowered her voice a bit, and then looked at James and the surrounding people as though she wanted to draw me away and whisper something to me.  She did.

     “Carrie, I need to talk to you.”  She led me up the stairs and to the guest bedroom.  I looked over my shoulder at James and he looked at me too, letting his chest rise with a deep sigh.  A burst of anger imploded all the former seconds of happiness, which, I thought, had begun to embody.    

     Lilly shut the door and led me to the bed.  I focused my eyes on the Americana quilt and its boring, regular pattern.  Mass-produced in a factory, most likely.

     “Why are you so serious?  This isn’t anything to worry about.  Let me call him.”

     “No.”  She stopped my dialing hand, then heaved a sigh as though about to begin a momentous prologue.

     “He’s started taking anti-depressants, Carrie.  He never told you, did he?”

      I stared at the blue wall in disbelief.  Allen was always so optimistic, almost to the extreme.  He loved life, and affirmed this so often with his smiles and joking with his friends and his popularity with his fellow Air Force cadets.  I grew yet more unaffectionate of him.  So he had hidden psychological issues: yet another reason to break it off entirely.  It was always one-sided anyways, I mean the love part of it.  I’d done whatever he wanted without thinking much about how it ran into me and I away from it; I’d let him think that I loved him, and acted like it, too, at least as best as I could, because I was always fascinated by people who live lies.  I took it up myself, and never got deceived for a second.  Besides, I figured that all of humanity was an essential lie, because people naturally live in ways subservient to their highest ideals.  Ideals are easy to fling up très haut and rarely come down to your level.  To abstract about them when you first wake up and still retain some of your pulled-away state is aesthetically pleasing, no doubt, and fills you up and over with blooming happiness.  But once that wears off and life becomes inescapably real, then you want to tell it to just f**k off already and wear away and make room for the birthing of something better, what you thought about as the earth moved you slowly to face the sun, in your bed half-dark and half-light, half-dreaming and half-mundane.  Reality never listens, and everybody knows that, and so their movements are just lies.  A great mass of people moving around on a planet in the middle of nothingness living the opposites or the mauled caricatures of their highest ideals.  No matter what I did it’d just be a lie.  Whatever brought me closer to truth was the best option.  And if I got lucky I just might get it.

     I think I also did it just to make James wonder or be jealous, and to control Allen like Lilly controlled me and her husband.   The only difference was that my control was never violated.   If the situation had been as I thought I wanted it, then I wouldn’t have inserted so much deception into my daily life.  Yet, I always knew that I probably simply had the idea that the grass is always greener on the other side, that the opposite of reality is always better than reality itself because then my ideas were thrown into the picture and I wasn’t so helpless.  Or rather, I wouldn’t be so helpless if I actually succeeded.  I always hesitated to let my thoughts go further in beyond this point, because I had an inkling of where they would pull me--down into a concrete realization that I was selfish and humanity was selfish and life only seemed to mean anything to me in imagined worlds because they were my own creations.  Detachment at its most maddeningly finest was, I subconsciously knew, simply a hopeless attachment to what could never be.  That hard fact shone with a light that an infinite number of imagined worlds could not put out.

     Allen’s new-found/mind-altering/serotonin-increasing pills were simply proof that the love he felt was somehow now echoing back to him, empty because unreciprocated, and he knew it and was deeply disappointed.  I resolved to remedy the situation next time I saw him.

     “No, Lilly… when did he start?”

     “About two weeks ago.  He didn’t want you to know.  But I think you need to.”  The last words were spoken firmly and as a euphemism for what Lilly should have always suspected but which I thought went entirely unnoticed by her.  My stomach cringed for a brief moment.  Lilly’s face was growing redder by the second.  I thought, She’s like her brother--able to quickly switch from apparent joyousness to deep-seated sadness, or anger.  Issues in the family.  Wonder what James thinks about this--or if she hides it from him all the time.  I hoped he knew about her apparent touch of bipolar and loathed it.  It was the first time I'd witnessed it so intensely in her. 

     Lilly stood up and glared down at me.  “You know he loves you, Carrie.  Anybody can see that.  Don’t you love him?  He doesn’t want to lose you, Carrie.  He loves you.”  She stared at me with too much passion.  I felt almost disgusted knowing how much she must have wanted to make me truly love him as he now wanted it.  My lie was unraveling, rearranging itself into something Lilly could use against me.  I wouldn’t let it hurt me, though, or hinder me: which was why I was mystified by the fear growing inside me.  I stood up, too, several inches taller than her because of my heels.  I decided to try to save the lie.

     “I know he loves me.  What makes you think I don’t love him?  And what we do is none of your business, even if he is your baby brother, Lills.  Do I ever demand to know what passes between you and James?” 

     “No, but that’s not the point.”

     “That is most certainly the point, Lills.  You can’t control what other people do.  It’s not right, and you know Allen can be a pushover, so you shouldn’t take advantage of that.”  (I felt slightly guilty.)

     “Neither should you.  Do you think I don’t see what you and James do?  How you spend more time lazing around outside with him than in class?  That Madeline saw you with him last week, alone by the lake, nearly every afternoon?"

     She started crying a little.  I knew then that the only reason she was trying to remedy my relationship with Allen was to direct my affections elsewhere.  I would’ve done the same too, but I can’t say I have a choice in such matters.  At least not in this instance anyways.  Does James feel like he has no choice, either? I thought.  Some vain part of myself still decided upon preserving the lie; it was inexorable.

     “Ask James what we do--I talk to him.  That’s it.  We've been good friends for months now.  In January, for instance, did you freak out when we spent time together?  Can you really blame him for helping me with that class; you know how good he is at it, and how much I have to struggle to keep up, and he passed it with an A, even though it was like four years ago.  Did you know that Allen spends time talking to people of the opposite sex?  Entirely normal, Lilly.  Really?  Are you upset over that?  Stop crying over nothing."  I felt like a mother soothing my preteen daughter.

     There was a knock on the door, and we heard Lilly’s mother ask if anything was wrong.  Lilly replied in a disturbingly cheerful manner that everything was fine, we were just fixing our hair.  I could smell the yams and turkey, and knew that everyone was sitting down to dinner.  Yet I didn’t think I could stand to eat anything.  But going home was also undesirable.  

     “We need to go down.” Her voice was considerably calmer.  “Forget that last sentence, Carrie… I don’t know what made me say that.”  She put her hand around my waist with an apologetic sigh, grabbing a tissue off the nightstand to wipe her eyes.

     For some reason I earnestly wanted to tell her exactly how things stood between me and her husband.  But there was no possible way she could have comprehended it.  I softly sighed as I thought of how some relationships cannot be transcribed or articulated.  For the moment the knowledge of my inescapable habit was hidden from me.  When I went downstairs the relationship would resume and perhaps become stronger someday.  But for now it remained rooted in the most reserved intimations of its kind.  And even those were too much, because more people than Madeline had noticed in the past few months.  I pulled it off with innocent obliviousness.

     When we entered the dining room, everyone was waiting for us, though I don’t know why because Lilly’s family never says grace.  There was a seat open next to James, and at the far end another amongst all the younger teenage cousins. 

     I was annoyed by the youth’s empty conversation and the overwhelming smell of the warm food and went to the bathroom, interrupting a slightly worthwhile conversation with Lilly’s uncle.  Shutting and locking the door, I forgot my former resolution and looked at my visage in the mirror.  My hair shone and fell in thick locks about my shoulders, my face was radiant, and my eye makeup light and natural-looking.  My dress looked good on my figure, too, and I spent several seconds staring at the rich fabric clinging to my hips.  My skin was burning with heat, and I could feel my stockings getting damp with sweat, so I pulled them off and shoved them into my purse.  I saw that I had forgotten James's book in my car.  Surely he'd retrieve it soon; I had the sudden impulse to flip through it once more, sitting on the counter, as I waited for the dinner to come closer to an end.  But everyone could see me if I went to my car.  So I splashed my cheeks with cold water and stepped out into the hall. As I looked up from my feet, I saw James slowly standing up, excusing himself.  I stopped and took a step toward the back door.  He saw me and walked with resolution.

     We both stepped out into the bitterly cold air, and began walking down the street.  We didn’t talk for several minutes, until we were headed in the direction of my apartment complex.  Lilly hadn’t been there since I’d moved in, so she didn’t know where to look, I reflected happily.  But he’ll have to go back at some point, either to do one thing or another. 

              

 ***

    

     The air was cold and dry, and cleared my head of inhibitions, including my usual doubts about letting them fade away entirely.  The former lack of self-confidence died off as I triumphed in knowing that my assumptions were right, not imagined or blown out of proportion.  I looked over at James, and noticed that he was staring at the pavement with a pensive expression.  Almost as if he was troubled.  I was pensive, too, but not troubled.  There wasn’t any need to be troubled.

     “James.”

     “Yes?”

     “Where are we going?”  I asked just to hear his answer.

     “Just for a walk, Carrie.”  He sighed as if slightly perturbed.

     “In the dark--alone--don’t you think Lilly would be mad?”  I was questioning my own confidence.

     “Yes. I needed to tell you something, though, Carrie.”  He stopped and looked at me with complete detachment.  As if he’d pulled himself out of the situation beside me.

     I didn’t say anything.  My vanity made me assume a slightly abstracted air.

     “Look, Carrie.  You can’t be so close to me like this.  It isn’t right.  Not for you, nor Lilly, nor my job.  I got called down the other day for spending too much time with you alone in my office.  You’ve got to stop.”  He shifted his gaze from each of my eyes.

     A second passed of indecision: would I remain vulnerable or entirely controlling?  I opted for both.

     “You’re as responsible as me.  You always asked to walk me back home.  You always seemed hesitant to let me out of your sight.  So if it has to stop, then you have to stop, too.”

     His grimace showed that he was perfectly aware of his implication.  I silently exhulted.

     “All right.”  He stared at the ground.  “I’m glad we could talk about this.” 

     “To make it stop?”

     He looked at me in bewilderment. 

     “You want it to stop?  About twenty minutes ago you didn’t, did you?”

     My throat felt stiff from the freezing air and utter honesty of my spoken words.  I was deriving the strongest euphoria I could possibly imagine from them.  I felt high.  I was reaching up for the ideal and could feel it brushing the tips of my fingers.  Maybe I even started standing on my toes.

     He was a living dichotomy, just like myself and everyone else.  I saw the dividing line through his skin, it seemed to me.  I hoped my imploring gaze and lack of any artifice would draw him into his better half.  His real half, because entirely accepted by himself.  I was feeling a lot of mine, and I loved him, and I couldn’t bear to see him turn away from his own.  It was living.

     James moved his body a step closer, and looked in the direction of his house, then in the direction of my apartment, then at me, then past me, up above my head, down my face, down at his hand, and finally he meshed it all together in the most perfect way when he grabbed my hand and said, “Well, where do you want to take me?  Where else do you want to take me?”

     With my own conquering embrace of what I felt to be true, I had helped to pull him out of his living lie.  His hand squeezing my own seemed to be a thanks for that.

 

                ***

    

     "...and that to acknowledge to himself that he was diverging from the right direction was tantamount to ackowledging that he was lost": what was the right direction?  I had earlier scoffed the implication of those lines, but now the greatness of the question loomed over me, relentless until I gave it attention.  I thought everything and anything went in life, that as long as it suited what I felt to be right, then it was all okay.  But there it was: my private notion of what was "right."  I couldn't deny that by saying all was relative.  If I gave up the notion of some way being that which I should follow, then all was nonsense, the world was nonsense.  That's why the world disturbed me at times--because I knew that all was not as it should be.  As it should be was undeniable.  In marriage: how was as it should be?  To ignore the common rules of rightness, in this case?  I convinced myself that James had just made a mistake that needed fixing.  I could fix it.  But what if life just made more problems, and then those needed fixing by someone else?  Nothing was either certain or fixed in any individual.  I forgot that as I deliberated on where to lead him further, seeing la vie en rose, blushing with curiosity, love, and--I barely registered it--ignorance.

     

     ***

 

     Early the next morning I felt myself to be a traveler.  I had travelled through and past limitations, and rejoiced in it, but at the same time realized the journey's irrevocableness.  Entirely past, experienced, and the standing outside of it was positively nothing like standing in the midst of it.  The earth moved us as we lay in bed, I barely awake and him still sleeping so peacefully.  I wasn't reaching up to anything anymore for the moment, and felt firstly confused and then contented.  For now, there was no reaching up, and I had to adjust.  So instead I reached over and stroked his hair, then his brow as he pulled himself from some dream, smiling as though happy to be awakened because here and now was yet sweeter.  I smiled, too, and he pulled me down into a kiss.  Pounding in the back of my awareness was Lilly, somewhere around, frantic, suspicious, and hurt.  We would face her together, go through some s**t, and in several months it would all be over.  Then James and I would resume what we dreamed about in such shy darkness for so long, and what we began last night.  The future could grow outward indefinitely and draw the past into itself and metamorphose constantly and we could be absorbed into it, floating in it, aware of its preciousness and never finding any end to it until we ourselves ended.  We could have more than what went before.  The brief, barely living melancholy dissipated above my head and went out the open window, into the cold wind and the sunlight.  I wrapped my arms around his head and forced myself to think about nothing.

 

           ***      

    

     Three years later to the day I found myself in Paris, in a small, old maison en banlieu with a view overlooking the Seine, in the twelfth arrondissement, sitting by the fire holding one-year-old Cecilia.  I rested her upon my distended belly, matching my breaths with hers and watching the outline of her fair head silhouetted against the fire, rising and falling with my breast.  I stroked her head with one hand and my stomach with the other, fascinated by both children, both half-parts of myself and yet not myself.  And half-parts of James.  I sighed and heavily laid my hand on the pile of books on the small, wooden table covered with my hand-made doilies beside me: I needed to get an enormous amount of reading done before class tomorrow.  Every time I thought contentedly of my children, as I did now, the harsh reality of my schooling always prevented it from swallowing me up entirely, yet I knew I could not do without it.  It was only harsh because I had to push myself harder at it now, but I knew that was a good thing.  And Emilie, my friend at the university, was proving to be a reliable baby-sitter.  Though she too was pregnant now, but only two months along; her boyfriend worked with James, so all four of us were good friends.  My students in the undergraduate philosophy class I was teaching were great people, too, and made teaching fun for me.  Paris was a dream to live and work in; La Ville-Lumière never grew old or tiresome.  The bills were paid on our home, both James and I had respectable salaries, and a healthy little girl and another child on the way.  All was as it should be.  Almost overwhelmingly so.  But I wouldn't let that bother me, only envelope me. 

     I looked at my wristwatch and decided to give myself the next half-hour to do what I had in mind.  I softly rose and laid Cecilia down in her cradle, kissing her nose as I did so.  She slept like her father: so peacefully, so deeply.  The deepness seemed to suggest that they dreamed vividly, for being so entirely shut-off to this world for hours on end.  I never had any sort of sleeping troubles, but always wondered if I looked such as they did while I slept.  I doubted it.  I think I would feel different during the day if I reposed with such a countenance for hours every night.

     I held my stomach and walked into the crawlspace beneath the stairs.  The light bulb had burnt out, so I grabbed a scented candle I had lit from the living room and took it with me.  Pulling off various blankets and several boxes and old books, I uncovered my small wooden chest I had reserved for "memories" since my twelfth birthday.  I had never dug through it, or emptied it and rearranged it, simply placed something which I thought a material memory into it when I could and immediately locked the lid afterwards.  There wasn't anything wrong with periodically sitting down and going through the contents, I knew, but I was never one to dwell upon the past extensively.  At least not my past.  Perhaps that was why I locked up everything that happened in the past in this box.  I could always know it was here, but there wasn't any need to think about it too often.  This afternoon was an exception, indeed.

     I dragged it out into the dim light of the hall, flipped on the light, and sat down where I was--I didn't want to be too comfortable, because then I may have stayed longer than I intended.  Just to look at his picture for a full ten seconds.  I knew I probably wouldn't get sentimental, or at least less so than the last time I had done this, right before I placed it in the box three years ago.  I did the combination--my birthday--and gently picked up the face-down photo lying on top.  There was Allen, in his uniform, squinting in the May sunlight, full-leafed trees rich with green behind him, the blue sky above his head and mine as we took dozens of pictures together that afternoon, laughing like little children.  The picture showed him not looking at the lens, but behind it, at me.  His smile revealed a vast amount of affection and, I knew, illusioned love.  He was seeing me and thought he knew me, all the while I reveled in tucking away who I was into my own corners.

     My eyes burned a little with tears.  I couldn't help it, for I wasn't so cold-hearted now.  That Thanksgiving afternoon he had overdosed on his Lexapro and died soon after.  From all the evidence the police gathered, sometime around four or five o'clock, while I was probably taking a shower and getting dressed, listening to my music and thinking about James and James only and what would happen and what I wanted to happen and why it may or may not happen, all returning to his tanned face and green eyes over and over again.  

     I bumped my head slightly against the wall and reprimanded myself for feeling any guilt.  How could Allen have known of my deception?  The answer was that he couldn't have.  And I had never told him any thing entirely untrue.  His temperament made it impossible to simply "be friends," and I truly didn't want to lose him, so I barely tiptoed across the dating line and reserved myself as much as possible for a constant air of abstraction; he just wasn't extremely observant.  I felt obliged to return his whispered vows of loving me with my own, before I changed the tone of our meeting. 

     You fool.  You said you loved him thinking that but also knowing he wasn't thinking quite that way at all and you let him with your actions.  To merely make James wonder.  You purposefully intended for them to be ambiguous.  I was younger then, and stupider, and desperate, and much more cold-hearted toward the things I subverted beneath what I thought to be my highest desires, because I thought them to be less holy.  Narcissistic to say the least.  Willing to throw myself into James but not into Allen because I didn't desire him.  Instead I left him to call out for me as I turned my back and walked onward and periodically turned around to give him a small kiss or spend an evening with him, lying provocatively across the warm summer grass or my dilapidated couch.  But at least I was only insensitive enough to let my eyes do the talking.  I gently gasped a bit in self-horror.  No--I did that because it was more maddening for him, less uncomfortable for me. 

     Who was I?  I stared into Allen's eyes and remembered how I had briefly mistaken true regret and sorrow for unrealized affection in those few weeks after his death.  I had missed him, and all the more intensely for the pain it caused Lilly.  Despite my expectations, she never harbored her former suspicions which she had briefly voiced that night in the guest bedroom; she truly shoved them off, but more from denial I think than true disregard.  Lilly was capable of that, capable of forcing herself to believe something until it assumed ultimate fact before her eyes, as long as it made her life more comfortable.  We had gone through the unnerving, constant knowledge of his permanent absence from our lives together somehow, while simultaneously James and Lilly separated and then divorced three months later.  More than anyone else, I was a silent spectator.  I had never felt more irony about my situation in my life.  Eventually it faded and was forgotten for most of my waking moments.  With it faded any guilt and shame.  Lilly had recently remarried a lawyer, a rather bland and extremely pragmatic and well-learned man to whom she quickly formed a deep affection.  She lived in the same house with him, took up teaching English at a Catholic high school, and saw her psychologist once a month.  We barely kept in touch now, and I don't think we would have at all had we not been inseparable friends for seventeen years of our lives; that was clearly changing now, but nostalgia would never understand that. 

     I jerked as the house phone began ringing, and quickly got up to answer it.  As I passed Cecilia's cradle, she still lay fast asleep, as usually happened when the phone rang; I smiled down at her and picked up the receiver.

     "Allô?"

     "Carrie--c'est moi."  James.

     "James--I miss you."  I heard him exhale on the phone in what I knew was a smile.  I suddenly ached with wanting to see him so badly.

     "I miss you, too.  I'm taking the train tomorrow morning."

     "What time are you leaving?"

     "I'm hoping for nine o'clock."

     "I'll have lunch ready for you, then."

     "That'll be great."

     "The conference, how was it?"

     "Very... productive, yet tiresome."  He laughed.

     "Eh bien, I'm glad it was productive."

      He didn't say anything until a few seconds later.  "How are the babies?"

     I smiled into the receiver.  "I think both are sleeping.  At least, one of them is.  I'm not sure about the other one."

     "Good.  It's good sleeping weather.  You should rest too.  At least more than you did before I left."

     "My work won't let...  besides, I'm really not tired.  Just achy."  Literally and figuratively.

     I heard him booking a single room; must have been at a hotel.

     "All the same I want you to sleep especially well tonight.  Tomorrow you have to catch me up on what happened around town while I was gone."

     "I'll try.  I'll see you tomorrow, then.  Be careful with your wallet.  Remember last time."

     He gave an exasperated sigh as he remembered the annoying hassle.  "You're right, I'll guard it more carefully this go-round."

     "Demain, then."

     "Demain.  Bon soir, Carrie.  Je t'aime."  We always closed with those words.  As if to keep each of us yet more fervent about seeing each other.

     "Je t'aime aussi.  Dormi bien."

     "Toi aussi.  A bientôt."

     "See you soon."

      I waited to hear him hang up.  After nearly ten seconds, he didn't, so I laughed and heard him laughing too.  Everyone has their childish tendencies.

     "I'm hanging up!  Je t'aime!  J'ai besoin de dormir, tu sais!"  I hung up; and it was true, I needed to read as much as I could and sleep well.  I walked into the hall, shut the box, fastened the lock, and slid it back into its place, among all the odds and ends of ordinary household items.  Anna Karenina rested on the floor, falling to pieces, and, I thought, surely belonged in my box.  I gently laid it in there and locked it once more.  Maybe someday I would relate to Anna Arkádyevna, but for now she was laid aside and figured out.  I shut her away with all her appealing beauty to that wondering part of myself and left the small closet.  For now, I no longer comprised two halves.