A Quick Short Story by Clayton Dean

Dear Jane,

Except for the fact that it was New Year’s Eve, last night was just like so many of our nights together; spent in near-silent companionship, so much going unsaid in order to maintain our effortless, and therefore seemingly preordained, course toward Love.

These nights started out as animated conversations in the coffee shops and diners that can be found in regular intervals along Whyte Ave. Really, they were all the same but in those early days we agonized over which one we would visit each time we met at the Safeway parking lot. Usually, the decision was differed until a pause in the conversation became uncomfortable and you would indicate one of the indistinguishable facades with feigned exuberance, “Oh, I haven’t been there in ages. Their hummus is the best.”

Invariably, I would order a coffee and a pitcher of water. You would respond that you felt like having iced tea tonight, as coffee no longer seemed to agree with your stomach. Not once did either of us presume to order for the other. It seemed understood that this was a boundary that must be respected regardless of the regularity of our meetings or the consistency of our orders. Eventually, a few of the servers at our more frequented establishments took the leap of faith that we could not and began bringing our drink order to the table without as much as a questioning glance in our direction. We never had to send anything back on these occasions.

I don’t remember how long these dinners went on but I do remember that it was you who was first to break the pattern by suggesting that we eat dinner at your apartment.

Apparently, you had a new recipe that you wanted to try out on me. I cordially accepted and walked over your threshold for the first time bearing the customary bottle of red wine. I had chosen a bottle of Chilean Cabernet Sauvignon that had been suggested as the perfect accompaniment to the cheese-heavy vegetarian pasta you had tempted me with.

The clerk at the wine shop looked like he was probably a freshman at the University. Most likely a Philosophy or Political Sciences major by the style of his glasses and his air of affected superiority. I like the type as a casual acquaintance though I have never wished to lead a life as full of doubt as they often seem to. I always like to picture them after twenty or so more years when they will be more like the rest of us. Tired of searching for all the answers to their ‘essential human questions’, they will slowly begin to accept the inertia of employment and social obligation and succumb to the process of spiritual domestication that the more pragmatic of us sidestep by making prudent decisions early on.

That first evening must have been a success, as it became the new template for our evenings together. We would meet at the door of one of our apartments, listen to ambient jazz or trip-hop while we ate our meal and drank our wine, and then retire to the comfortable furniture and talk. One evening, during a particularly stilted conversation about an independent art exhibit you had recently seen reviewed in one of the free weeklies, one that I had little interest in attending, you suggested a movie. It was one that I had seen before but I acceded out of a non-distinct desire for effortless comfort.

At some point during that first movie I found that you had leaned your head delicately upon my shoulder. I moved my hand from my own thigh to yours and it seemed as though your head slowly gained in mass as you relaxed more fully against me. This was to be the first of many shared positions that we found for watching the movies that were integral to our evenings together from that night on. Evenings and positions that both grew more intimate over time, stretching into mornings and shared morning meals.

It was during this time that the frequency of our evenings increased with the slow progress we had both come to expect and grown comfortable with. Twice weekly dinners became three and then four.

Then, in mid-October, you spent the weekend. It hadn’t been planned by any means, but it occurred nonetheless; another inertial decision. We awoke on Saturday in the late morning and stayed in bed until the sun was beginning to slide down behind the apartment buildings in the East. I got up first and made a simple meal. You came out of the bedroom when I called down the hall that it was ready, wearing one of my long-sleeved, collared shirts. Nothing else. The meal was eaten cold about an hour later. It was one of our few lapses into true spontaneity and we celebrated with our first consecutive sleepovers.

You met my parents in November when I took you out to their farm. It wasn’t only my parents of course, but my brothers, sisters, and various members of the extended clan. It was my mother, though, who took to you immediately. The two of you spent almost the entire day holed-up in her sewing room going over patterns and fabric samples. I offered my apologies in the car on the way back to the city but you insisted you’d had a good time. I’d had no idea you had an interest in tailoring, nor that you actually owned your own sewing machine. This was about seven months after we’d met. It no longer seems odd that it had never come up.

The next few months progressed as those particular months will. It got colder, the snow got deep and The Holidays passed. We spent Christmas together, dividing our time between your family and mine and being steeped in the possibilities of our situation by both blood lines. Marriage? Children? It occurred to me for the first time that perhaps you had been thinking about these things as well, though you had never broached the subjects candidly. My father even went so far as to take me aside one night after we had shared the better part of a bottle of Bacardi’s white rum, me listening to his stories as always, and showed me his mother’s engagement ring. As he tilted it to catch the light he asked if I thought it would suit your taste in jewelry.

I shrugged. I had no idea.

We are good together.

Yes, good.

We don’t fight. We like a lot of the same music and movies and can each tolerate the other’s selections which do not overlap with our own. We enjoy the same food and desire sex with roughly the same frequency. But it all seems too simple.

Maybe I’m wrong about those philosophical types and their ‘essential human questions’, I don’t really know. I am sure that I don’t want inertia to determine my way through life. I want a little anxiety. I want a little doubt. I want a little passion. It’s time for me to leave the apartments again and see beyond the limited stage of experience we have built for ourselves. Our cocoon.

If you’re bored, too, come and find me in the new year.

Sincerely,
John