Rita reminded Irving of the female leads in the after-school movies he had watched fifteen years before at his babysitter’s house (Rebecca: she was on the high school track team, her mother owned a travel agency, and her father lived in Montana). However, unlike most of those characters, Rita showed no interest in remaking herself—Irving had the satisfied sense that she would not be exchanging her thick glasses for contacts, amplifying her straight, shoulder-length hair into unnatural heights, throwing out her jeans and T-shirts and replacing them with mini-skirts and an inconsistent array of jackets and halter-tops, not in any scenario he could predict, at any rate.

They met in their last semester at college, in a seminar class about autobiography. He was taking the class because it was the last English literature seminar that was available, and he needed one to fulfill his graduation requirements. He didn’t feel he could admit his reasons on the first day, when the teacher asked them all to say why they were there—as if they had to explain to her, even, why it might be useful or at least interesting to someone—so he muttered something about autobiographies being his favorite type of book.

But Rita had a reason. She announced that she was interested in Helen Keller, and she was a student teacher at a school for the deaf, and she wanted to explore the differences between personal stories told by people who used physical, visual language and those told by audible speakers. She moved her hands as she spoke, passing them in curling designs, locking and unlocking them.

The teacher explained that they had a set reading list—Rousseau, St. Augustine, Mill, Franklin. Rita shrugged and let her hands fall.

When they both ended up staying in Austin after graduation, working their separate jobs—his in the research room of the main library, hers in the same school where she had been a student teacher—he thought that, for once, everything was working out the way it was supposed to.

So it was a bigger blow than he expected when she left at the end of that next spring—just up and left, took off for fucking England, where they didn’t even use American Sign Language, and she would have to learn a whole goddamn new way of talking with her hands. And when he asked her why, she talked about graduate school and research, saying acronyms he didn’t understand, but in the end all it meant was she was leaving, and he was stuck in town, alone, working at a job in a library basement, spending whole days watching the light of a photocopier slide back and forth as he duplicated dissertations that merged into a growing olio of formulae, block quotes, and graphs, so that someone else could mail them to the blinking graduate students—he presumed—who had ordered them.

Six months after Rita left, Irving started dating Kim, who worked in a different department of the library, Rare Books—still in the basement, but a ten-minute walk away, down an ideogram of dim and bright corridors. Kim was still in college, though she was planning to graduate that year, maybe. She might put it off a year, or at least until the end of summer or fall. In the meantime, all she wanted was to hang out in the city, see bands and go to festivals, just sit on restaurant patios, drinking margaritas and Mexican martinis. When he met her, she had dark red hair; now it was white.

They had been dating five months when Kim’s roommates—two women and one man—decided to give up their lease on their big, green, un-air-conditioned house. Kim couldn’t afford to stay there on her own, so she moved into Irving’s apartment while she looked for a new place—he had two bedrooms, and everything she owned fit into four boxes. They had essentially been living together for three months when they went to the party.

It was a strange collection of people, to Irving, at least. There were several guys from a nearby fraternity, the one where huge platforms blossomed before the college’s football games and disappeared the day after them. There were Kim’s friends, the three thin guys in the band, who sang songs about the Iliad and the Odyssey. There were the tenants of the co-op holding the party, twenty or so men and women of various ages who apparently, when they were alone in the house on a day-to-day basis, spoke only French, as well as tenants of other houses in the co-op system, each with its particular requirements: speaking other languages besides English or French, vegetarianism, marriage, playing an instrument, producing some sort of visual art, growing organic vegetables, volunteering.

The band—the Suitors—were set up in the dining room, facing the open arch into the common front room. They performed songs about Cyclopes and Sirens to the arc of students gathered on the other side of the doorway. Kim was generally in that half-ring of listeners, waiting to talk to her friends between songs. Irving alternated between standing in the line for the keg on the porch, shuffling around on the thin brown carpet in the front room, somewhere behind Kim, and slumping in one of the two sofas (green plaid and red velvet) against the opposite walls. He watched Kim: her ghostly hair flailed to the beat while the band played, and then it bobbed in time with her conversation in the breaks.

It was Saturday night, and he was out with his girlfriend—his younger girlfriend—at a party with a band. She knew musicians, and she knew when they were playing in house parties, and she could get you in without a cover. This was what he was looking for when he wanted to stay in town.

He wanted to concentrate on that fact and enjoy it fully, but all he could think about was his full bowels and all the time he had wasted playing chess on his computer earlier at home, some of which he could have spent trying, at least, to defecate. He didn’t want to use either of the two bathrooms in the co-op that, according to the block-lettered poster boards, were open to the public. One was next to the kitchen, and the other was in the hallway next to the stairs; lines of people drifted and curled before both. Irving thought about trying to sneak up the stairs and find something a bit less travelled, but he quailed at the thought of being caught by one of the house members, chastised in French he couldn’t understand: Alors! Lons-zee! Maisson non zut! And the only other option was to tell Kim that they, or at least he, had to leave the party, so that he could go home to his completely private toilet and shit in peace.

But the truth of it was, that was what he really wanted to do: go home by himself, take his own sweet time on the toilet, pour a scotch and soda, and drink it while watching television, drifting through whatever misty comedies or detective shows PBS aired on Saturday nights these days.

The band had just started another song, one with rapid, shuffling chords. Everyone was looking its way and bouncing to the rhythm. The people in line for the hallway bathroom had drifted back a few paces, and their backs were to the stairwell. Irving thought he might be able to slip past them. He stood up from the sofa, and he was nonchalantly inching across the room, scraping over the carpet toward the stairs, when the front door swung open. In the doorway, fiddling with her purse and saying something to someone behind her, stood Rita.

Her face looked strangely wide and barren to Irving; he realized that she wasn’t wearing her glasses. There she was, here in the city, without her glasses, with nary a prior word nor warning, there was goddamn Rita who was supposed to be in goddamn England. And then, right as the song ended with a low bass thump, Rita looked up and twitched—she twitched, because she had seen Irving.

Irving handed Rita the plastic cup of beer.

“Thank you,” she said. She leaned back against the railing.

“Sure,” he said. He turned, so that they were both facing the porch. “So. Who’s the guy? I heard the accent.”

On the other side of the porch, Rita’s companion was talking to a small crowd of party guests. They laughed wildly as he marched across the porch before them, kicking his legs high.

“Jesus,” Irving said. “What’s he, goose-stepping?”

“He’s telling a story, I imagine,” Rita said. “A funny one, obviously.”

“So, what, you’re moving back here now with him or something?”

“No. We’re just on a trip. A little vacation. Teddy wanted to see where I was from and meet my parents. We’re just stopping off here to see friends before we fly back.”

“Teddy.”

“Short for Edward.”

“How the fuck is Teddy short for Edward? It’s not short for it at all—it’s the same number of stupid syllables. It’s a nickname of a nickname of Edward, is what it is.”

Teddy glanced over. He took a step toward them, his eyebrows raised as he looked to Rita. She waved at him and shook her head, smiling briefly.

“Same old Irving,” Rita said.

“Why? Because I’m mad you left and showed back up with someone else?”

“Why would that matter now? I mean…”

The door at the other end of the porch opened and Kim came out.

“After all,” Rita said, waving vaguely in Kim’s direction.

Kim looked around, spotted Irving, and started to walk over, but Teddy said something to her as he gestured to the group of guests next to him, and she turned to them, responding to whatever he had said and wiggling her fingers in front of her face. The other guests laughed again.

“Look out, he’s after her, too, now,” Irving said.

“God,” Rita said. “This is why England was such a relief. I swear to God, I’m going there and I’m never coming back.”

“Just admit—just let me be mad about this. Give me that, at least.”

“You’re always mad about something. The littlest thing changes and you lose all perspective. Everybody has to tiptoe around, because nothing’s ever laid back with you. Nothing’s ever benign. It’s always the biggest, most-significant picture.”

“Speaking of, you got contacts, I guess. I mean, you saw me when you came in earlier, so you’re either wearing contacts or you got that laser thing.”

“Yes. Contacts. It’s not the end of the fricking world. They don’t mean anything—they’re not some symbol of anything. I just went to the eye doctor and got the prescription.”

“Sure.”

“Okay. I’m going to pee, and then I’m joining Teddy. Maybe you want to think about talking to your actual girlfriend for a while.”

“Thanks.”

Rita strode away. When she reached the other end of the porch, she spoke to Teddy. He said something back. Everyone laughed, and Rita went inside.

Irving watched the people as they talked and acted out things for each other. His lips tightened as he pressed his hand against his stomach.

His keys shimmered and jangled in his outstretched hand as he ran up the stairs past Kim.

“What the hell, Irv?”

“Sorry can’t wait!” he yelled back, jiggling the key in the lock and ripping the apartment door open.

He ran through the living room, tearing at his belt and jeans. In the bathroom, he kicked the door closed and yanked his jeans and underwear down. He managed to position himself above the toilet just before his clench broke. He settled carefully onto the toilet seat and waited for the torrent to slow, sputter, and stop.

Afterward, he fumbled with the toilet paper; it kept tearing, weakened by the sweat on his hands. He finally managed to gather enough of a workable pad to finish wiping himself.

He flushed the toilet, washed his hands, sponged the sweat from his face with the hand towel, and flushed the toilet again. Finally, he left the bathroom.

“Hey, what’s a gap year?” Kim asked. She was sitting crossways on the sofa, leaning back into one of the corners; she didn’t look up from the magazine she was reading.

Irving collapsed at the other end of the sofa. “It’s this vacation, kind of. In England and places like that, some people take a year off after college to just travel or whatever. Maybe before college, sometimes, too. I don’t know.”

“How do they afford that?”

“By being rich, I guess.”

“Huh.”

“Why?”

“That guy, Teddy, at the party, he said he was on his gap year.”

“Jesus.”

“What?”

“Nothing. That just figures.”

“You wouldn’t take a year off, if you could? Shit. I’d take all the years off if I could figure out some way to do it.”

“No, I mean, sure, I guess anybody would like to be able to do that. I could just tell that guy was the kind of guy who would be on his fucking gap year. Probably grew up with manservants and shit.”

“I don’t know. He seemed cool enough.”

She read her magazine for a few minutes. As she turned the pages, Irving caught flashes of swirling color—some sort of abstract art, or stage scenes, he guessed.

“So that was your ex-girlfriend,” she said.

“Well…yeah. Did she tell you that?”

“It’s just obvious. The way you’re acting.”

“How am I acting?”

“Like you’ve just been dumped or something.”

“Bullshit.”

Kim turned a page and studied the next swirl of colors.

“Seriously!” Irving croaked. “That was a long time ago. I don’t have any feelings about Rita now, not one way or another. Plus, she’s different. She’s not really like the person I knew.”

“And you’re the same?”

“I don’t know. Maybe. Probably not. Everybody’s different, I guess. That’s just the way it works, right? People change. Growth, and all that? But, you know, gradually. Usually not all at once like that.”

“If you say so.” She settled further into the corner of the sofa, flipped to the end of the magazine, and started reading the last page.

Kim’s new white hair kept sticking to his lips, distracting him; he turned his head and blew to the side. He kept circling his hips.

“Look, it’s okay if it’s not happening,” Kim said. “I mean—it just doesn’t seem to be…taking tonight, you know?”

“No, look, just give me a minute here. Don’t get all dismissive.”

“I’m not dismissing you. I’m just trying to say, don’t get uptight or anything. It’s no big deal. We’ll just…we’ll have a go again tomorrow.”

“Give me a minute, I said.”

“Okay,” she sighed. “Okay.”

Irving let his eyes nearly close. With them slitted, in the in the dim bedroom, Kim’s hair looked darker, and it was already straight, and it just reached down to her shoulders, and there.

“Okay, I think you’re ready,” Kim breathed.

He slipped into her. He moved slowly at first, and she began responding, shifting her hips up as he pushed his down, and then she groaned, and he felt himself softening a bit.

He closed his eyes completely and felt her hair on his lips, her dark, straight hair, falling down the back of a cotton T-shirt, and when she looked sideways through her glasses with her black plastic frames….

Irving thudded two, three times. Kim moved beneath him another few seconds, but then he slid out of her.

“Sorry,” he panted. “Kind of lost control there at the end.”

“It’s okay,” she said. “Like I said.”

“Do you want—”

“No, not right now. Look, we’ll just try again tomorrow, okay? I think now, I think maybe we should get some sleep.”

“Okay.” He lifted himself from her and lowered onto the cool swath of linen near the side of the bed.

Kim lay on her back, breathing in the middle of the bed. Then she slid to the other side, to the other strip of cooler sheet.

Irving and Kim lay at the edges of the bed in the dim room, faintly visible in the light from the hallway, their eyes open, listening to each other breathe. Irving kept thinking that one of them would speak, but neither made a sound. They just lay there, still, like they were trying not to frighten each other, or trying not to attract attention, while they waited for a distraction, hoping for some shift: sleep, morning, or something to say, just a string of four words that meant anything.

– Kenneth Gulotta