A Relationship in Presents, Part Six: The debt

No format yet because my ‘net connection is really crappy. I still wanted to get the post up, though.

Mixed reviews about the megabus. Cheap tickets, leg room are good. Crappy customer service, poor website design, and nonfunctioning internet connection are bad. More to come.

Email me if you’re in NYC and want to meet up for coffee/drinks this weekend or if you want to attend Sadi’s book launch! 🙂

**

We enter the restaurant. A hostess grabs our attention, leads us to a nearby booth. Dark wood surrounds us. Small chandeliers light the open rooms well enough.

She tries to look into my eyes as I slide into the same bench as her, but she can’t look deeply enough. I rest my feet on the empty bench across the table. My head rolls towards her, and she looks away. The fingers of both her hands click idly against the table.

I’ve looked forward to my birthday dinner for a few weeks. Charley’s is one of my favorite haunts. Their coke tastes so good that mixing in rum almost damages it, so I don’t. After an awkward moment, the waitress brings by a full uncut dome of bread. My left lip lifts in a smile as she sets the basket on the table.

I had brought Sarah here for the first time years ago. She had noticed confusion coloring my face and asked me what was wrong. “How are we supposed to eat it?” I had asked. She picked up the whole dome and wrenched off a bite with her teeth in answer.

Now I pick it up and tear it into quarters, careful not to smoosh it. I set a piece on her plate and one on mine. Sarah picks at the insides, leaving behind hollow crusts. I butter and eat it all.

I pinch her thigh through her sweatpants, and we laugh. She says, “You owe me over seven hundred dollars.” My hand drops to my side and my smile fades. I wonder if the amount will be more after tonight since I’m supposed to be the one who pays when we go out. I mutter an affirmation and wonder how I’m going to manage paying her back.

The waitress comes by, and I order our usual meals, mine a au poivre hamburger and her the angel hair primavera.  I had ordered the au poivre so long ago just to find out what twenty-five cents worth of browned onions tasted like, and I haven’t faltered since.

I say, “I’ll get a job soon, after school settles down. Just give me a few months.” But I haven’t worked, or even looked for work, since February. I put myself back past broke, back into maxed-out credit card debt, to participate in this relationship, but I can only handle so many Boston nights, so many trips to Seattle and Vegas and now, apparently, to Texas and DC soon, soon.

She sighs. Her hand falls on mine, resting on the bench between us. She says that’s fine. The money she wants me to pay back isn’t even hers, is her father’s, who has two planes and nine cars and bought a new house so that he could rip down and rebuild his old one. It’s hard for me to imagine that he wants those few hundred dollars back, but maybe he does. Maybe it’s Sarah’s way of coaxing me off of the computer and back into the real world. Maybe she just doesn’t like the idea of me living off of her father like she does.

“I didn’t get you a present this year,” she says. Her tone is flat, perhaps unconcerned with my reaction, perhaps hyperconcerned. Even after four years of dating, seven years of friendship, it’s hard for me to tell.

I reply that it’s fine. There’s the vacations we’re taking together, Steve’s upcoming wedding, and so on. Something fundamental has changed, but I don’t think about it. Even while we’re sitting here eating, my mind is on things other than Sarah; what job I’m going to try and find, my new responsibilities as a guild officer in my video game, whether or not I’ll sleep on the couch tonight. I haven’t slept in Sarah’s bed in months.

I try Charley’s apple pie with cheese because I saw it in Thank You for Smoking and have wondered how it tasted ever since. Sarah and I walk home hand in hand. When we get there, she turns on the TV and grumbles about her how laptop’s power cord is broken. I settle under my laptop for the night and don my headset.

Around two in the morning, she asks me whether I’m going to come down tonight. I take off my headset and ask her to repeat herself. Then I say soon, which we both know means no. She goes downstairs to sleep. Around two in the afternoon, when she usually wakes up on her off days, my eyes close. I just manage to put my laptop on the ground before I’m asleep, swallowed up in couch cushions.