Friends? by Carson Williford

Author’s note: I was on the second draft of a more realist version of this story when, last night, I reimagined it as a surreal piece with language and relationships that had to be different very different than the realist version. I couldn’t think of the first version as anything good after this new idea, so I wrote this today, having to force the end to fit it in. It is 98 percent bad (I’m sorry), but it’s enough, I think, to give you a trajectory of the story and an attempt at the surrealism stuff. To save from comments on obviously bad stuff, I’d appreciate it if you could focus in the general area of these questions:

·         Do you wish Paul and Marina’s relationship was different in any way (keeping the strangeness)? What do you wished happened that didn’t?

·         Does the second person present work? Can the future tense parts work?

o   Is it enough to bring Leah into the story in the future tense (assuming I flesh these out into scenes).

·         Some of the sexual stuff in the beginning may feel uncalled for because the ending has little to do with it, but I imagine an ending that justifies the explicit lines.

Pinterest: https://www.pinterest.com/carsonbwillifor/story-2/

Friends?

Away from Samford Hall and Auburn University’s campus, down Thatch, where bar music fades and steeples heave crosses over tired streetlamps, the lamplight strobing on the blacktop below, the blacktop rolling downslope through intersections of bass-shaken cars and sidewalks scattered with leaves and sodden copies of news both local and larger: a turnoff whose pebbled pavement dead ends to clay and kudzu, a log fence whose slats slant amiss, a house with mustard clapboard grown through by oaks and dirtied but beneath windowsills. A fire casts the shadows of those around it, each folded outward like petals, the whole thing a burning daffodil. You feel your rubber soles going soft. Careful. November leaves cover dead grass, all crisp underfoot and rumbling in the wind like the occasional distant engine. Roots protrude splayed and stone-like amid the fragile leaves and browned bunchgrass, these arborary veins meeting at the trunk of an oak whose thick bark splits from girth greater than providence. A limb sprawls overhead, leafless and nodding in the heat, quiet like fire. Hair standing where it shows. Your cheeks red against the unbidden world as it murmurs behind you. This November air frigid and trembling. Warm yourself, you and those you shoulder.

            You wear a hoodie over your flannel, a down jacket over that. You wear pajama pants beneath your jeans. You don’t remember it being so cold in Auburn, AL, since you were in middle school and it snowed. Across the fire, which is at your house, are your roommates, one of whom is your brother. Between them sits your friend Adam.

            “I hear France has a shit ton of orgies,” Adam says. You feel letdown, a palm lifted to the forehead of your mind.

            “From that Reddit post?” Ben, your brother, asks.

            “Yeah,” Adam says. “How close can you get to pornography?”

            “Can we leave the orgies in France?” you say. You say this because Marina is here. Marina is here because she is supposed to meet your girlfriend, Leah, who you have dated since your senior year at Auburn High. Leah, unfortunately, had a babysitting gig go overtime and, with a practice MCAT the next morning, has decided she cannot come. Marina is pretty, you think, and you have thought this since the first time you saw her, walking to school, though your thought was not directed at her face.

            Adam says, “But France is everywhere, Paul.”

            “I think you just got told,” Marina says. Marina’s saying this surprises you.  She is like everything you have seen before melded  into nothing you’ve known.

            “You don’t care?” you whisper to her. She looks at you and you are surprised her jaw does not do so much cold-jolting as yours. She is from Connecticut. That’s why she wears merely a coat. That’s why she made fun of your pajama layer when she saw them hanging from your jeans.

            “Not really,” she says.

            “Marina,” says Adam, “when was the last time you masturbated?”

            You cringe, which should go unsaid. Marina says that yes she does care. Yet, you are glad, because it makes you uncomfortable and sad when girls are so free about such things.

            “Want to go for a walk?” you ask Marina.

            “Yes,” Marina says. She stands up from the lawn chair she has been sitting in beside yours. These are old chairs, their twine-like fabric stiff and sticking to Marina’s backside as she stands. She wipes the back of her jeans, which are skinny to the ankles—a style you find attractive—and you try not to watch her patting the fibers off, but even as you turn toward the fire you can see them falling in your peripheral vision. This too great sight is something you are trying to accept, in general, too. You see it with Leah, who despite being pretty in the face and beautiful all over, as Marina is, and loving you and being plain good for you, the two of you getting along and sharing interests and finding yourselves first and foremost great friends—you see it in Leah because, compared to Marina and most other girls, her features are less bulbous. Leah knows this, has confided in you about how she feels less than other girls and disagreeably self-conscious because she lacks the curves that people like, say, Marina have. This all through her midsection. You agree that her features are not so exaggerated as most and you have told her this (though you made sure not to put it as just stated). But then you held your hand to her cheek and felt the sort of rapture that lifts all others from earth, and then you told her how much you still enjoyed her curves, and enjoyed them simply because they persisted, because they felt nice and were attached to a person such as her. You meant this, you did.

            You and Marina leave your driveway and your roommates and the fire and turn toward Thatch, which will take you to campus.

            “Sorry about them,” you say. You want Marina to feel comfortable. She and Leah are supposed to become friends. That is the whole reason, you think, why she is here. Leah’s two closest friends graduated and moved away this past spring. She has since been somewhat lonely, since you study more than she does. Tragically fortunately, though, Marina is in a similar situation. She lost her closest friends last semester after her ex-boyfriend broke up with her—because, as he put it, he “wanted something new.” You could say that Marina merely discovered ‘closest’ is comparative. Neither Leah nor Marina participate in neither sororities nor churches, which in Auburn are the two main avenues for girls’ friend-making. Leah since this past fall has felt even worse in her insecurities about her curves and its attendant shyness and timidity because she lacks friends now. You tell her she is beautiful, that she should know her smiles are dangerous for the weak-hearted and that she should find courage in that, this weapon she is in body and character and can brandish whenever she wants. She is sharp in both senses of the term, you say. She tells you love casts out puns. You apologize.

            So Marina is here to make and be friends with Leah. Marina was excited about the prospect and put-off at word of Leah’s not coming.

            “It’s OK,” says Marina to your apology for your roommates.

            “They aren’t always like this,” you say.

            “I’m sure they aren’t,” she says.

            Marina and Leah, besides having similar situations, are alike in other regards. For instance, they both played Tennis in high school (though it’s Marina who looks the part). They both enjoy reading and watching Netflix. They are both twenty-two. They have similar personality types (both self-identifying as merely mild introverts). They neither of the plan to stay in Auburn after graduating. They are both pretty, as you know and are OK with but of which you try not to remind yourself.

            You and Marina leave your little street and turn up Thatch. The house on the corner was recently remodeled by an elderly couple who you’ve since the summer seen directing workers around the house, inspecting the exterior baseboards and holly bushes and even the street and log fence to see what they can repair for this new stage in their lives. An Auburn University flag hangs from their front porch, the concrete and brick steps still so new that they look bad amid the other houses. Presumably wanting to feel open to the world, they put a bay window in the living room, facing the street. A large flat screen, bigger than you have seen, hangs from the wall. You see them change from CNN to Fox and you wonder what sort of people these might be.

            “Did your roommates’ questions bother you?” Marina asks. She’s tucked her hand in her coat pockets. Her coat is zipped, fitting tighter than looser, shirt-length.

            “I wasn’t sure how you would feel,” you say.

            “Do I look that innocent to you?” She smiles as she says this.

            “Their last question got you,” you say. Marina shrugs. Her feet cross over each other as she walks. This on purpose, of course. You say, “I’m just not used to girls being open to talk like that.”

            “Is Leah not?”

            “No way,” you say. “She was like her parents’ ninety-five theses against the world.”

Marina raises an eyebrow.

“Well, that may be too harsh. She had a stereotypically Southern raising and kept some of the ideas, like that hooking up is bad and that sex is sacred and should be had with only the person you spend your life with. So she finds my roommates and especially Adam disrespectful most of the time.”

            You think just after finishing this that you should not have even started it. Leah’s raising was hers to tell when she and Marina met.

            “I have sympathy for some of that,” Marina says. “Don’t think I sleep around or anything. I’ve only had sex with three people and each one was my boyfriend at the time.”

            “But that,” you say—you point at her when you say it. “You say things like that and I’ve never heard a girl, unless she does ‘sleep around’ say something like that.”

            “I mean, sex is something people do, she says. It means a lot, but it’s nothing to hide. How many people have you had sex with?”

            You should not tell her, you think. Not because you are ashamed but because Leah would disapprove of you talking about this, especially when she sees what Marina looks like. It would take Leah months to share this with Marina. But Marina is asking you. Sex is something people do. Her question and the way she asks it, unflinching, breath fogging just as it was before she asked—it makes curiosity an emotion.

            “Just with Leah,” you say. You have shared this with no one besides your roommates and Adam, and when you shared it with them you felt proud because their minds were on the opposite pole.

            “Really?” she says. You tell her yes, it’s the truth. “I expected more than that.”

            It’s this comment that first sends ripples through you like a pebble through a pond. Only, this pebble can swim, and so it does not sink into you so much as wriggles its way through your waters. The ripples from this thing swimming lap at your shores, the fringes thinning and wet. Marina is aware, as you are, that her comment has said more than she wanted known, what you will later find out is more than she knew. You should not respond, you think. Yet, you do not get many moments like this, you have not taken moments like this. You have stayed in the boundaries and arranged for a life with Leah, who you plan to move in with in grad school less than a year from now. But this moment, which is to you opposed to the order you’ve lived while maintaining a 3.93 GPA to your senior year and with a steady girlfriend who you feel largely devoted to, is one that you do not want to let skimmed off the surface of your life. It feels realer than the life you’ve known, suggestive of a world you’ve missed completely. This moment, you think, is one you will remember when you’re old, when, regardless of whether you and Leah remain together, will warm you up when you’re wrinkling in the retirement home. And so you look back from then, and you remember Marina before you, and you remember this ripple, this tingle that you haven’t felt with Leah in quiet some while, and you feel that you should continue. College is where you make memories, you have been told, and this is one you have, before even living it, already made, looking back from the far future you imagine yourself in. You act from far ahead of yourself, a sense of responsibility lifted.

            You will in a week want to tell Leah about how you feel and what you have done. Your thoughts by this time will be dominated by this: If this one girl, Marina, who in is several respects seems, you hate to admit, better than Leah, exists, this one girl from one town of one state in your one country, then who else? The possibilities fly like shrapnel. You will know these thoughts will hurt Leah, and so you will decide to ask a preliminary question. You will ask, “Do you ever wish you could move somewhere all on your own, just to see what it would be like?”

            “No,” she will say. She will be lying on your bed, you sitting at your desk in your room. She will say that you have been acting strange. “You have been quiet,” she will say. “Now this?”

            “Leah,” you will say, “I was just asking. It’s curiosity.” You will be glad you did not share your full thoughts.

            “But we’re going to grad school,” she will say.

            “Yeah,” you will say. “I’m not talking about that.” And you will mean this. You will partly hope that she has an answer for your question, for the explosion of other potential girls who may be better fit for you.

            “How can you say that?” She will say.

            “I’m just thinking,” you will say. “You can think things without acting on them.”

            “Not this,” she will say.

            Then you will realize she is right in what seems like narrow-mindedness. That one cannot walk outside of love while still feeling it. That the person who is in love lives in a world in love. The best person is the one you love, you will think. You will struggle to console her, her and yourself.

Where Thatch enters campus, past the naked crepe myrtles that line the sidewalk, you and Marina turn on the walkway in front of Samford Hall, a large brick building with two shingled peaks that stair-step up to a spired clock tower. On top of the tower is a wind vane whose welds have broken—both the arrow and the directions spinning in the wind. The hall is stage lit, the words ‘mechanics’ and ‘agriculture’ embossed on the front. Stained glass of orange and blue, the school colors, shines backlit above the president’s door. In warmer months, students hammock and throw Frisbee on Samford’s lawn, where walkways snake out from brick around the entries like the veins of a plexus. But the only people we see are three girls running barefoot past us, each holding their heels, hugging themselves, shrieking drunk in the cold. Rap music from the bars ahead hangs in the air, though magnolias and cedars and Langdon, the University’s main lecture hall, block them from sight.

            “The seal,” says Marina. She means the University seal, which is inset in brick in front of Langdon. Rumor has it that stepping on the seal prevents you from graduating in four years.

You walk over it. “The seal,” you say.

            You cross Magnolia Avenue and take the sidewalk by the Bank Vault and Balcony Bar and SkyBar. Pink and blue and green lights weave blankets of comfort and warmth across the rooms inside. Bands play, their music clear in the streets. Posters for the bars and their events—one a drag show—plaster the lampposts ground into the sidewalk. Layered in with these are postcard-sized tracts from churches with Bible verses encircling their logos.

            “So what made you think I had slept with more than one person?” you ask. You are on the offensive, obviously, but you will not be aware of this until it is too late.

            “Are you really asking me?” Marina says.

            “I suspect it’s just something people do,” you say.

            “You’re attractive,” she says. “And you seem like a rather nice person.”

            “You’re saying that even though I have a girlfriend?” you ask.

            “You wanted to know. I told the truth.”

            You will later act differently around Leah, as you have seen. You will feel uncomfortable. You will not want to ruin what you have with her, and yet she will feel to you just like another girl, pretty in her own right but otherwise dull; an abundance of pretty things calls for more than pretty things. You will want to tell her how you feel, because she is Leah, the person you tell your feelings to. You will not tell her now, and you will try to act as though nothing is wrong, which will make something appear wrong.

            “You know you can tell me anything,” Leah will say.

            “I know,” you will say. But you think sadly that she is lying unaware of it.

You and Marina cross Magnolia back to campus. You plan to walk back to your house now.

            “I think your too,” you tell her. You feel that as long as you don’t do anything physical all is well. You will tell her this later when you ask her to go walking again.

            “Why is that?” she asks.

            “Because one, look at you; two, you’re open about this sexual stuff in a way I haven’t seen but feel is right; three, in general you seem to understand.”

            “I’d say about the same for you.”

            “Do you expect anything to come from this?” I ask.

            “Who knows,” she says. “Are you and Leah planning to get married?”

            “We’ve talked about it and decided we don’t want to right out of college. We don’t know when though. I imagine us being together until, you know, whenever forever ends, but I don’t imagine marriage itself. It’s odd.”

            “So you don’t conform to the senior year deadline? That seems like the thing around here.”

            “No, though her parents have asked her when she thinks I’ll propose. And I guess going to grad school and moving in together is basically marriage.”

            “So you’re committed to her while you’re attracted to me? I take it this isn’t just a simple ‘you’re cute’ kind of attraction.”

            This is the question that will lodge in your mind and persist beyond desire. You will ask yourself this tonight when you get home. It will keep you up and make you regret your night more than your lack of sleep. This girl and this discussion that seems to open a new world to you, to free you in some sense, traps you between it and the world you have known. You will, as you have seen, ask yourself this while you are with Leah, while you sit in the same room with her and in bed with her. In the full guise of love and commitment you will ask yourself this. The question will linger through finals and even past then, into winter break. Marina will fly back to Connecticut then. She will say goodbye and then, like on this night when you get home, you will not hug her for your fear of touching too softly, too sweetly. And just as how she drives off on this night and leaves you alone, wishing this new thing could persist, the old world toppled and this new layer written on the palimpsest of your past, you will wish the same as she drives to the airport and flies away. You will have carried on a conversation through text messages for two weeks by then. This conversation will have disclosed much more of the same as tonight: reasons why, statements of attraction, insistence that nothing will happen. She will use the word Platonic to describe the two of you. You will agree and still feel unsettled. This unsettled feeling will have burrowed into you long before she uses the word though. You will have felt it for the same two weeks you have texted Marina, the same two weeks since walking around campus with her. This unsettled feeling will urge you to tell Leah that you are confused about the future—(remember, the two of you are great friends). But you cannot tell her because it would prove, as Marina’s friends did to Marina, that you indeed were not such great friends, that you were sly and went behind her back.

Over the winter break, though, as you focus less on school and spend more time with Leah, you will begin to find her less dull. Her smile will seem again to make your heart palpitate. You will have stopped texting Marina, one of you having not responded and for whatever reason the conversation having not picked back up. You will look at Leah and will realize all of the truths you once tried to assure her of: how she is beautiful in face and body and soul. The world will begin to love her again. She will become the best because you love her.

You will be back to where you initially where before you met Marina, loving Leah again, feeling assured, looking to grad school, only you will have gone through this Marina thing, which you cannot change. You will still feel unsettled, having this thing between you and Marina undisclosed between you and Leah, the girl who is your best friend and who you tell everything to. You will want to tell her, to remove the swelling thing between you two and feel even again, feel not just face-to-face but of the same face. Your problem, though, of course, will be how to tell her. Your greatest fear for your greatest friend will be to make her feel worse about her body and herself and her hope in her boyfriend; here, however, the only way you will be able to do this will be by withholding from her your own insides. This incongruity, you will feel, will be between you always, this ineliminable distance you will wish you could crush but will be instead forever between you to, so long as you keep this secret enough to retain yourselves.

And so when Marina returns from Connecticut and becomes friends with Leah, real friends that hang out, you will feel sad. Not scared or nervous, since you will know that Marina feels the same way you do. So you will go your whole life this way, wanting to tell Leah a secret you can never tell her, wanting to feel aligned and mated with her but forever unable. When you think of this, you will feel sad for more than her sake alone, and then you will love her a more, for more than her sake alone.