Eat Your Heart Out (6 page)

“Graham didn't really love you.”

“What do you mean?”

“He cheated on you, all those times.”

“It must look so simple from the outside,” says Grace.

“Sam, he was
fucked up, he fucked up, but that doesn't have anything to do with how much you love people. I know he really loved me.”

“No, Grace, someone who really loved you wouldn't be able to do that to you.”

“I don't know. I thought it was that cut and dried when we broke up. I'm not sure now.”

Then Sam sees the sadness in her face again and thinks that maybe he's gone too far.

“You know what's fucked? I'd want Luke to cheat on me, if it meant he would look at me how Graham did, even once. I just want to know that someone else will look at me like that. But I tell myself that people love differently and that Luke does love me. I tell myself that it's not always obvious when people really love you. Maybe it can be under the surface.”

That's true, thinks Sam. You can keep it hidden. But it hurts.

“Jesus Christ, all this shit is just depressing,” she says.

The privacy of that kind of love scars.

“Yeah.” He doesn't know why he's laughing.

“Question,” she says.

“Shoot,” he says.

“Does Lily make you more happy or unhappy?”

He's thrown off kilter. “Happy! Definitely more happy.”

“Really?”

“Yeah, she's really smart, and funny, and, well, you know her.”

Grace thinks for a moment.

“I don't know her. She doesn't talk.”

Sam met Lily at the beginning of university and has always tried very hard to keep her and Grace apart. Lily is the kind of girl who doesn't follow politics. She can't remember the last time she fought with someone. She is studying to be a gym teacher and tries every day to wear one blue item of clothing. Her hair is always remarkably the same, somehow untouched and unmoved from the moment she wakes up in the morning. It took Sam two years to realize that she didn't wear any makeup at all.

She told Sam once that she hated the absence of him more than she loved the presence of him and thought that was the mark of a good relationship.

“Well, yeah, it's hard to know Lily. To really know her, but it's good between us. I can't complain, right? It's easy. And, it's been so long that sometimes I feel like if we broke up it'd be like losing an arm or something.”

Grace takes her drink, spilling some on her dress and the table, not noticing.

“Yeah! Yeah, that's kind of how it feels. I mean, breaking up, it's . . . it's a fucked-up concept in general, especially if you've been with someone for a long time. Think about it. One day, you have this conversation with someone who you've spent so much time with, and who you've been so intimate with, and the conversation can be one-sided, and you say, like, one sentence, like: ‘I want to break up,' and then however you acted before, whatever you were before, it's suddenly not allowed. Gone. That's bullshit! You can't erase everything that you feel for someone in one conversation. And for so long after that, the person is still so active in your mind, you know?”

“But some people break up for years.”

“That's my point. I think breaking up, in a real sense, takes a really long time. Like it takes months not to associate everything about relationships with that one person. I mean, I'm with Luke, at least for the time being, right? But I think I'm still breaking up with Graham. Everyday I'm a little further away from who I was with him, but it's not completely gone. It might never be. Don't you think breaking up is a fucked concept?”

“Yeah, but I don't know because Lily is my first real girlfriend, so I've never been through heartbreak before.”

“Maybe you won't have to. Maybe you guys won't ever break up.”

Grace is trying to be kind to Sam, but the thought of being with Lily forever makes him feel violently sick.

“Well, sometimes I wonder what it would be like to be single. Or just not with her. Sometimes I get curious for what something else would be like.”

“Yeah. It must be hard to be faithful, hey?”

Looking at Grace, it is hard.

“Sometimes it's hard. It's not hard at school because we're together so much, like she's in front of me all the time. It's not that I see new girls all the time that I want to fuck, but it's the knowing that I can't, couldn't. That's hard.”

She's drinking heavily.

“Only sometimes,” he adds.

“Do you like fucking her?”

Grace has an adopted bravado about sex. She talks about it roughly, as if that makes all her mistakes, all the hurt, matter less.

“Yeah. Yeah, it's good.”

“Good like great or good like good?”

He's not sure how to answer. Lily is the only girl he's ever been with, but Grace doesn't know that.

One night, not long ago, he pretended it was Grace he was making love to, but it was like Lily knew. He could have sworn her face became Grace's face. Her movements became Grace's movements. She was dominant, angry; an animal. She wrapped her hands around his neck. She let him pour everything inside into her.

When he came, she turned into Lily again.

“Good like, I don't know. Good like great.”

“Fuck you! I am so jealous!”

“It's not great with Luke?”

She looks at him like she's at a loss, as if she doesn't know what to make of anything, as if it's just her body present, as if it's not her Luke's inside of.

“It's sophisticated. Like we go and do stuff in the city and everything. We don't just fuck all the time, so there's a build-up. But it's really shitty sometimes. Most times.”

“Really? What's shitty about it?”

Sam doesn't know why he's asking. He doesn't want to know more.

“I don't feel like he really wants me. I think if I knew he really wanted me I could loosen up. And it's me too; I'm awkward with him. I know I was better with Graham. It's strange. We don't fuck and we don't make love. We just have sex.”

“I'm sure he wants you, Grace,” says Sam without thinking. I'm drunk, he thinks. Sober Sam would have never said that so casually.

“No, I think I'm too available to him, and it's unattractive.”

Grace pushes her glass away.

“How?”

“I just come running every time he calls. And we're always fighting and he's an asshole to me, but if he wants me to come over, I go. I don't even think that I really love him, but I stick around.”

“Well, why do you think you do it?”

Looking at her face, he has nowhere to hide.

“I don't know. Isn't that sad?”

“It is sad,” he says finally.

Grace opens her mouth to say something as Sam leans forward, but the waitress comes by again. Sam wants her to go away so he can hear what Grace will say next.

“Can I get you another round?” asks the waitress.

Grace says yes because even when she tries to drown her sorrows, they learn how to swim.

“Sam, order something real,” she says.

“Okay, shots?”

“Yes! Bring us four tequila, and I'll have the same again.”

“Okay, I'll have a double rum and Coke,” he says.

“Finally!” says Grace. “What were we talking about?”

“Did you forget already, drunky?”

“Yeah, kind of.”

Sam remembers what Grace was talking about.

“I don't really remember either,” he says.

“Do you ever
wonder why we even bother? Why do we try to figure this shit out? Relationships, men, it doesn't make me happy.”

“It must, somewhere.”

“Maybe at the beginning. That feeling you get at the beginning.”

“That feeling's bullshit.”

“What?”

“It's not real.”

“Do you ever think that maybe nothing is really real? That it's all just in our heads?”

“Maybe. What do you want?” he asks her.

Grace looks away for a second. The bar has become darker, and he has to strain to see her.

“To be with someone I love. Who loves me too. Honestly. That's it.”

“No, you don't.”

If that's what you wanted, we'd be together, he thinks.

But it is way more complicated than that.

The waitress puts
the shots on the table. Grace takes two and leaves two for Sam.

“To misery.”

“Eat your heart out.”

They take the shots, quickly, one after the other. The tequila's cheap. It burns.

“Wow,” says Grace.

“Sweet Jesus.”

“I feel a little drunk,” says Grace, pleased.

“Good.”

Everything around them is unfocused.

“So you don't think that feeling exists? Like that feeling that makes everything else not matter? The feeling you get loving someone?” she asks.

Words fall through Sam. For years, he's gone back and forth, telling himself his feelings are not real, telling himself she's not who he thinks she is, telling himself to let it go and be happy without her.

“For sure it exists because people feel it all the time. I just don't know if that feeling is grounds for a relationship. It's not realistic.”

“Huh.”

“I don't know if it's anything other than what you want to feel about that person. And when you build someone up so much, they can't be real to you. So I think it's bullshit. Because usually that person doesn't feel the same way about you, or is so different in reality that it's like two different people you are dealing with. I mean, arranged marriages are more successful than regular ones. Just think about that. Just think about that for one second. Clearly, a relationship needs a lot more than love to work.”

After Sam's said that, he feels safe again, but when he looks down at his hands, they're trembling. He rests them on his knees under the table, and when he looks away from them and up again, Grace is staring at him.

“That's fucked, Sam. If you aren't grounding a relationship on love, then why do it at all? Maybe people are not meant for relationships or monogamy. My parents aren't happy, your parents aren't happy. What the fuck is everyone doing?”

“Settling? Probably settling?”

Silence settles between them, but no one in the bar seems to notice. Strangers speak louder than before.

Then Sam looks at Grace, exactly the way she wants to be looked at, but she can't see it.

“Oh my God,
there's this fucking lunatic in Chicago, near my building, and every day he would call out to me, ‘Sweetieface! Sweetieface! You're such a sweetieface!' Usually, I'd ignore him, or wave, or give him the finger, but finally I was like No, this guy talks to me every day. He looks harmless, right? So I go up to him, and I say, ‘Hi! I'm Grace,' and he says, ‘Hi, I'm Mark or Dave' or something, I can't remember his name.”

Sam knows this is a story she's wanted to tell for weeks. It's rehearsed. She saves stories like this. She doesn't want to tell them to the wrong person, looking stupid or crazy, so she's waited, until she's drunk with someone who doesn't scare her.

For someone who is so interesting without effort, he's never met anybody more terrified of being plain.

“And it's fucking freezing out, right? This is, like, two weeks ago, so I ask him if I can buy him a coffee and then we start talking a little, and he says to me, ‘Sweetieface, there are two types of people in this world. There are people who play it real safe and never go for what they want, they might not even know what they really want. Then there are the people who know what they want, who feel it burning so much inside them, so that they have no choice but to just go out and get it.' Then he goes, ‘Usually, they don't get it, but they try. So there are people who try and there are people who don't try. The people who don't try, they look like they win because they don't obviously lose. But the people who try and lose, they win. Because they're brave.' And it really made me think, you know? Maybe it's not men and women. Maybe it's brave and not brave.”

“Yeah. Which one are you?”

For a moment everything is stripped from her face.

“I feel like I'm brave, but I don't know. I'm scared shitless a lot of the time. What are you?”

He's not brave, and he knows it.

“I want to be brave.”

Sam allows himself, for the briefest of moments, to touch her hand. He holds it gently at first, then tighter.

“I'm hammered,” she says. “Let's smoke.”

“You don't smoke,” he says, not looking away.

“I smoke when I'm drunk. Come on, Dad, let's smoke.”

Grace and Sam
stand outside. It's cold, and the street is buzzing with the feeling that exists only at Christmastime. It's the hope that change is around the corner, good change, underscored by the nostalgia of all that hasn't changed, all that will never change. Colourful Christmas lights shine on a tree above them. Tinny sounds of a radio carol float from some joint across the street.

It's good to be home, thinks Sam.

Grace takes her first real drag, and then can't breathe.

“I told you, you don't smoke!” Sam says, laughing.

“Fine, but it's still fun,” she says, coughing.

Grace leans on Sam, unable to keep her balance. Sam thinks it's the fresh air, or the cigarettes, or both, that's made everything go to her head.

“Sa-a-am, I'm cold,” she slurs.

Grace goes to sit on the curb, but Sam stops her, pulling her up gently, under her arms.

“You're ridiculous,” he says.

She takes a deep breath. “I think icicles are growing inside me,” she says.

“Take my coat.”

“But then you'll be cold.”