always the same: the awkwardness of first reunion would yield within hours to a feeling of comfort that I knew was false, ripening over the days into a desperate, melancholy longing punctuated by moments of unfocused anger. Often we quarreled as the time of Joe’s departure neared, but the final moments were the same: I would always cry.
Our last night, we ate dinner at a hamburger restaurant near Harvard Square, a single large room, as harshly lit as a bus station, with an open grill behind the counter and sawdust on the floor. A rowing shell was suspended upside down from the rafters; the room was packed with students, stuffed into booths and wedged shoulder to shoulder at the counter. Joe ordered a T-bone, thick as a Bible; he was always hungry. I watched him eat, already missing him, but something else too: I felt like I was missing my life.
He finished his meal and lit a cigarette. “Aren’t you going to eat?”
I had barely touched my cheeseburger. I tried to smile. “It’s just the heat. And the onions.” Everybody in the room was wiping their eyes.
“My father used to come here in the thirties,” Joe said. “Everybody complained about the onions then too.”
We were seated in a booth at the rear of the restaurant; my back was to the wall. For a moment I let my gaze wander the bright, busy room. Didn’t college students go home for Christmas? But I had no idea, really, how such people lived their lives. At a large round table in the center of the room, six of them, five men and a woman, all in bulky sweaters and jeans, were engaged in a fierce conversation, the subject of which I could glean only from single phrases that punched through the din of voices in the room: “diminished capacity,” “elements of negligence,” something I heard as “actual and proximate cause and damage.” I realized they were talking in turns; one would stop, close up his notes, and then the discussion would resume as another began to speak. A pitcher of beer sat on the table; when it was the woman’s turn to lead, the man to her left offered to fill her glass, but she held her hand over it and shook her head: no. She took a sip of water instead. Then she opened her notes.
Joe glanced over his shoulder, following my look. “Somebody you know?”
“Very funny.” I shook my head. “Do you ever wish you’d, I don’t know, gone to Harvard?”
Joe laughed a cloud of smoke. “Me? I don’t think so.”
“College, then. Somewhere.”
“The subject never came up. Really, Luce. Be serious.”
“Your father did. Why not you?”
“A thousand reasons.” He was looking at me incredulously. “What’s gotten into you?”
At the center table, the woman was still speaking from her notes. Though she was sitting I could tell she was tall and athletically built; she played a sport, I guessed, or had, something interesting and maybe a little fancy, like fencing or squash. Perhaps before law school she had rowed for the college crew team, and liked to come here with her friends because of the shell that hung from the rafters and the happy memories it gave her. She had fine features and auburn hair pulled into a thick ponytail; as she read to the men at her table, one hand or the other would lift from time to time and move in small circles in the air, following her thoughts.
“You could have,” I said.
Joe’s face darkened. “I could have done a lot of things.” He crushed out his cigarette and waved for the waitress. “Come on.”
We paid the bill and left. Outside the rain had yielded to an easy snow; already an inch had fallen, clinging fast to every surface, like cake frosting. In the windshield of a Karman Gia parked at the curb somebody had written, in letters carved by a thick, gloved finger: “Make love, not exams.” We did not head back to the apartment but instead walked south, searching for the river. A maze of dormitories and classroom buildings, their courtyards sealed by iron gates, and then we emerged on Memorial Drive, a busy four-lane road separating the campus from the Charles. Cars thrummed by, their hoods and fenders washed by the damp, pushing cones of snowy light; across the river, a ribbon of darkness uncoiling through the city, the Prudential Building stood over all like a great, glowing monolith. My feet were soaked, the snow was falling