you! Fuck you, fuck you, fuck you, fuck you. Are you too fucking weak to even look at me?” Where were these words coming from? What hidden place? Already a riptide of remorse was swirling around her knees, and already she knew it would be worse than all of her previous remorses combined, and yet there was nothing to be done but see it through, and do what her body wanted, which was to collapse on Stephen. She rubbed her bare chest against his seersucker shirt, pulled his hands from his face and let her hair fall around it; and she could see that she’d really done it this time. He looked terrified.
“Just be sure, OK?” she said. “Be sure that’s all I am to you.”
“I can’t believe you’re doing this to me. Four hours after she left the house.”
“Oh, so four days would make a difference? Or four months? Four years?” She lowered her face toward his. “Touch me!”
She tried to guide his hands, but he was very strong and pushed her off him easily. He scrambled away from the bed and retreated to the door.
“You know,” he said, breathing hard, “I don’t really believe in therapy, but I’m thinking you could use it.”
“As if I could afford it.”
“Seriously, Pip. This is totally fucked up. Are you even thinking about what I’m feeling?”
“Last I checked, you were reading—” She picked up his book. “Gramsci.”
“If you’re pulling shit like this with other people, people who aren’t looking out for you, you’re not doing yourself any favors. I don’t like what it says about your impulse control.”
“I know. I’m abnormal. It’s like the refrain of my life.”
“No, you’re great. You’re wonderful, I mean it. But still—seriously.”
“Are you in love with her?” Pip said.
He turned back from the door. “What?”
“Annagret. Is that what this is about? You’re in love with her?”
“Oh, Pip.” His look of pity and concern was so pure that it almost overcame her distrust; she almost believed she had no reason to be jealous. “She’s in Düsseldorf,” he said. “I hardly even know her.”
“Riiiiight. But you’re in touch with her.”
“Try to listen to yourself. Try to see what you’re doing.”
“I’m not hearing a no.”
“For God’s sake.”
“Please tell me I’m wrong. Just say I’m wrong.”
“The person I want is Marie. Don’t you understand that?”
Pip squeezed her eyes shut, trying to understand it while also refusing to. “But Marie’s with someone else now,” she said. “And you’re in touch with Annagret. You don’t even know you’re in love with her yet, but I think you are. Or you will be soon. She’s the right age for you, right?”
“I’ve got to get some air. And you need to leave my room.”
“Just show me,” she said. “Come show me I’m wrong. Just hold my hand for a second. Please. I won’t believe you otherwise.”
“Then you’re going to have to not believe me.”
She drew herself into a ball. “I knew it,” she whispered. The pain of jealousy was delicious in comparison to the thought that she was simply being crazy. But the thought was getting stronger.
“I’m heading out,” Stephen said.
And he left her lying on his bed.
TUESDAY
She texted in sick to work, pleading stomach sickness, which wasn’t totally a lie. Around ten o’clock Marie came knocking on her door, asking her to say good-bye to Ramón, but the slightest movement of Pip’s body reminded her of what she’d done the night before. When Marie came upstairs a second time and ventured to open her door and look in on her, Pip could barely put any voice into the words go away.
“Are you all right?” Marie said.
“Please go away. Please shut the door.”
She heard Marie approaching her and kneeling. “I wanted to say good-bye,” she said.
Pip kept her eyes shut and said nothing, and the words that Marie then poured down on her were devoid of sense, were just blow after blow on her brain, a torment to be endured until it stopped. When it finally did stop, it was followed by the worse torment of Marie stroking her shoulder. “Won’t you talk to me at all?” she said.
“Please, please, please, go away,” Pip managed to say.
Marie’s reluctant departure was yet another nearly unendurable torment, and the sound of the door closing didn’t end it. Nothing could end it. Pip couldn’t leave her bed, let alone leave her room, let alone go outside, where the strong sunlight of another hideously perfect day might honestly have caused her to die of shame. She had half a bar of dark chocolate in her room, and this was all she ate all day, taking one bite and then lying completely still to recover from the reminder that she had a physical self—“so visible, so visible,” as her mother had said. Even to cry would have been a reminder, and so she didn’t cry. She did think that at least nightfall might bring some relief, but it didn’t. The only thing that changed was that she was able to sob at her loss of Stephen, off and on, for many hours.
WEDNESDAY
Thirst and hunger woke her up at dawn. With her senses sharpened by the need for stealth, she quickly changed her clothes and packed her knapsack and crept downstairs to the kitchen. Her one imperative was not to encounter Stephen, ideally for the rest of her life, and even though he wasn’t an early riser she didn’t slow down to eat anything but simply grabbed some food at random and stuffed it into her knapsack. Then she drank three glasses of water and made a stop in the bathroom. When she came out, Dreyfuss was standing in the front hallway, wearing his nighttime sweatclothes.
“Feeling better, I see,” he said.
“Yeah, I had a stomach thing yesterday.”
“I thought Wednesdays were one of your late days. And yet here you are at six fifteen.”
“Right, I have to make up for yesterday.”
Even the most transparent lies didn’t unsettle Dreyfuss. They merely gave his brain more to process, briefly slowing it down. “Am I correct in assuming that you’ll be moving out now, too?”
“Probably, yeah.”
“Why.”
“You obviously know why, since you assumed it, and so why are you asking
