“If I’m going to do anything important I did it already,” Ariel replied with eternal innocence. “Being a mathematician is like being an athlete.”
“A mathlete,” Rowan nodded.
“Now can I prove what I just said? No, of course not. Science is limited by the questions it asks, and the tools available to measure them, but math shares a border with poetry, with mystery; and I am absolutely certain there is life out there, an abundant consciousness, carbon-based or not, made of the same stuff we are.” He drew on the vanishing joint as it cycled back to him. “Which is starlight.”
“So right now we are just starlight contemplating itself. Wow,” Rowan said, his eyes half open, as he looked up from the viewfinder of the Galileo to take the joint back from Ariel, noticing me for the first time. “Where were you?”
“He was with one of the bridesmaids,” Ariel answered, before I managed to say anything.
“Which one?” Rowan asked.
“The one in the blue dress.”
“Dude,” Rowan looked to him, high as the moon by then, “they were all wearing blue dresses.”
“The one from Miami.”
“Thanks,” I said, cutting him off before he could continue.
Ariel realized what he had done, and looked to Nicola. Rowan held the smoke in his lungs, stealing a glance as he waited to see whether she would react. I did not have to look. I already knew the expression on her face.
“Why is everyone staring at me?” Nicola countered, peering ahead to the starlit sea. “We were how long ago?”
“I just walked her home. Nothing else,” I snapped at Ariel, before changing the subject. “Where did you find the telescope?”
“I rescued it from a box of things my mother put out to be donated, after my father died.”
He had gotten the telescope the summer of Halley’s comet, when we all received telescopes and spent lazy, monotonous nights gazing up at the sky from our rooftops in the city, where the light pollution made it impossible to see anything, until we came out here late in the season. It felt for a moment, as we sat wrapped in the half-fist of darkness, that time had bent back to us, and we had never left this beach, or known any of the wrinkled years in between.
Nicola took advantage of Rowan’s wandering concern to steal a last glance through the lens of the telescope before it grew too light.
“I’m just saying,” Ariel returned to his previous topic, exhaling another stream of thick, white smoke. “The universe has not yet stopped creating. Imagine all the implications.”
“They might annihilate us,” Rowan said. “We might annihilate them.”
“Doesn’t matter.”
“Is this sativa.,” inhale, “or indica.,” exhale, “we’re smoking?”
“Cross.,” inhale, “between Kali Mist and Northernlights.,” exhale.
Nicola looked up and rolled her eyes with incredulity, pronouncing them too high to take at all seriously anymore.
“Am I the only one here with real responsibility?” she asked jokingly, but with enough call back to reality to break the spell of suspended time, so that the evening and long weekend began to disperse.
I stood slowly, looking at each of them, glad for the hijinks; glad I had taken the trouble to come out here, instead of sleeping the few remaining hours before my flight, to bid farewell to those friends from whom I first learned friendship.
“Hey, I have a license for this,” Rowan protested.
“I was just making an observation,” Ariel went on, packing the telescope into its case with the utmost care. “I find the idea invigorating.”
The sky was ablaze red-golden by then, banishing the final darkness like a jester’s robes on the stage, as we began back up the beach to the house, the water receding behind us.
By the time we reached the house the first joggers had appeared on the beach, and a few people practicing yoga and tai chi, making us feel decadent and expansive as we said goodbye.
“My car is back near the hotel,” Nicola said. “Harper, you can walk me, if you like. Since you’re all of a sudden the protector of helpless damsels.”
I went with her in silence through the early morning streets, until her SUV materialized ahead of us. The day was already warm by then, and her nipples were erect against the interior fabric of her dress, extending the material in taut, barely visible circles, like the new snow moon.
She caught my gaze, and a sly smile dashed across her face under the green leaves, until she allowed herself the beginning of a chuckle. She had been my first girlfriend, and we dated from the end of high school until just after college. She was the most substantial girl I had ever met at seventeen, and twenty, and twenty-four when we parted. She had grown into a beautiful woman, and I was a sterling fool. I saw in her smile that she knew she still had an effect on me, leaving me to wonder whether she was upset, and what it might mean if she were.
“I am sorry for how things ended,” I said. “I was not ready. I had things to learn.” I halted, afraid, like all men who hoard their emotions, that if I let her know how vulnerable I felt she would see I was all vulnerability.
“I know,” she answered briskly, her voice quivering with complex emotion. “You still do. It took me a few years, but I’m over any of that now.”
“I just wanted you to know.”
“And I just wanted you to know I am a husband, two children, a mortgage, and an entire decade over it.”
I did the math and did not speak again until we stopped at her car, where we hugged, and parted, then considered each other, and hugged again. Held tight, and did not part, only pulled deeper into the comfort of our embrace and the memory of others deeper still, so that I felt in my marrow what I had been told but never understood before: regret is illumination come too late.
I pulled her tighter and felt her chest heave in time against mine, as my throat clenched around my vocal chords, and remained silent. I did not try to kiss her, afraid what would happen if I did. We clenched each other, absorbing the minute movements of each other’s body and the feelings that flowed between us with each circular breath. And in the silence between — all the words we used to say.
2
I was embroiled in a shapeless relationship at the time with a woman named Devi, who worked as an emergency room doctor. A romance? A love affair? I no longer understood its form, only that it felt like an entanglement without a future, which disquieted my conscience. It had never been my intention for it to grow so amorphous or continue so long. We had merely slid into the thing after meeting at a party. I had been standing outside on the balcony and she came out to smoke a cigarette. “I thought you were a doctor,” I said. “You smoke?”
“We all have to die of something,” she answered, holding out the pack. She was attractive and poised, if a bit high-strung, but otherwise excellent in every way. When we’d gone back inside, so obviously drawn together, the other men in the room envied my monopoly on her time.
We went home together that night, and soon settled into a pattern of meeting each Thursday, whenever we were both in town. We went to the theater and to concerts, and afterward shared meals, wine, easy conversation, the splendor of each other’s bed. It was a civilized affair. But our affection never grew and was never transfigured into love.
Our Thursdays had grown familiar, though, chronicling the domestic ups and downs of daily life, and in this way we had gotten caught in a limbo between lust and bliss. If it had broken free of the clay of the affair it had been, it also lacked the breath of a deeper bond. I decided it was time to become more serious or else end things, as it dawned on me how much I was wasting time. I had never tried to imagine a future together, but I admired her and it frightened me to know how pleasant and easy it might be to keep sliding.