21: The origins of adamancy
A phone call is by no means the worst sound to wake up to. The chirping shrill of it is a bit harsh for the morning peace, but with it comes a sort of exhilaration, of pleasure over knowing that someone wants to talk to you. Of course, it’s never fun when that assumed admirer is actually a solicitor, or someone calling to follow up on the money you owe them. But even in cases where the person on the other line is a stranger or an enemy, the call can be ended with a brief click, the phone firmly switched off before being tossed across the room. Relatives? That’s another matter.
The morning after the spontaneous dance party, at seven thirty in the morning, my dad called. He’d always gotten up early, although sometimes I found that the preference was little more than an excuse to ridicule my lazy sleeping patterns. I looked at the caller I.D. for a few seconds, considering the option of faking sleep, but quickly decided it was better now than never. I didn’t hate my dad, but talking to him tended to entail long chains of not so subtle insults at my life choices.
“Hey, dad.”
“Hello Cassandra.” He was the only one who ever called me by my full name. I yawned and threw my pillow at the ceiling. “It’s been awhile.”
“So it has. How are you?” Perhaps I was being a little bit emotionally barren, but attachment was usually wasted on my father. He had a low tolerance for affection that had only decreased with age. Even a casual “I missed you” would probably be countered with a remark about how he’d only been a few hours away the entire time. That, or some stab at my capability of living on my own.
“Oh, I’m the same as always. Work, work, work. Your sister visited recently. She’s eight months pregnant now, I think.”
“You excited to be a grandpa?”
“Not really. I hope they don’t ask me to babysit.” He’d never been one for a little white lie. I thought of my sweet, soft-spoken sister Ellie and her picturesque little life. She’d been everything I never was: not particularly bright, but focused and studious, with clear, fixed plans for a future of homemaking and happiness, no tolerance for a good party, and a despairingly absent ability to rebel against much of anything. She’d never been a pushover though—it was the one trait we truly shared. We had our own views on how life should be lived: she was passive; I was aggressive. But we were confident in our perspectives, and never let the other one forget how wrong they were.
My dad cleared his throat, “So how’s the Golden Gate treating you? I’m assuming you managed to get settled in?”
“Oh, yeah. Yeah. I love it here. Sometimes I miss the sun, but it’s a totally wonderful city.” I started to say ‘you’d like it here,’ but stifled the remark instead. Los Angeles was vibrant and wild, but it was remarkably deadlocked in its ways of fame-seeking and status boundaries. San Francisco was far too progressive for my father—too susceptible to change and chaos and revolutions. I went on, “I’m actually sharing an apartment with two other people. I met them on my first day and they had room for one more.” I considered lying and explaining that I’d signed some sort of contract to be a tenant, but lies were often wasted on my father, because his opinions were usually unchanging no matter which picture I painted.
“You’re living with strangers?” he asked, not hesitant to include a good dose of parental disapproval.
I sighed, “Yes, dad. They’re friends now, but I guess at the time they were strangers.”
“I’d been hoping your judgment had improved a little with age, Cassandra, but it’s your life,” he paused. I heard footsteps in the hallway, and wondered whom they belonged to. “Are they nice? The girls you live with?”
“The men I live with are very nice, yes,” I corrected quietly. On instinct, I held my breath to await the criticism. My father had never been clingy, or even remotely interested in how I faired as I combated teenage hormones and drama with friends. But enter a man into the equation, and even the most distant of guardians will offer their overprotective attention; my dad was no exception. I’d often wondered if his struggles with my mother contributed to a general distrust of the whole idea of love and interaction with the opposite sex. He was far too self-containing to ever verify or refute that theory, but I often used it for reference.
“Have I taught you nothing? You move to a strange city and the first thing you do is move in with boys you’ve never met before? I’m genuinely surprised that you survived long enough to get this call! And you never thought to let me know? You couldn’t remember to ask for my approval? I can’t…”
“Dad, I’m not sixteen. And before you start ranting about my virtue, they’re gay.”
He wasn’t responsive when events contradicted his assumptions. A heavy silence buzzed in my ear. “They’re what?”
“Gay. They’re dating each other. I’m not in danger of whatever you think you should be worried about.”
“Oh, well…” he struggled for words, “I still don’t like it.”
“I know, dad, but if you’re calling to tell me that I’m not sure what you want me to say. I’m happy, I’m more than safe, and I’ve even gotten a good job as a teaching assistant for a psychology professor.”
“Don’t get defensive. I’m allowed to worry about you. But I’m happy that you’re happy.”
“Thanks,” I returned. I knew he meant the statement, even if he wasn’t quite aware of that fact himself. He was a good person, but the struggle of a messy break-up with the woman he’d loved had left a severe damper on his capability for compassion. All through my childhood, I remembered his rare moments of sincerity; the fact that they were so rare almost made them more precious to me. I realized at an early age that playing the blame game would only lose me the one parent I still had, and so I appreciated my dad’s incidents of sentimental behavior, and calmly tolerated his usual, strict coldness.
Likewise, my father understood that I’d inherited adamancy on his account: it was almost required of me to reciprocate his clipped manner of speaking and lack of romanticism. He’d never taken it personally, and I’d always been thankful that although he was many things, my father was not a hypocrite.
“Well if that’s all…”
“Yes,” he agreed. For a moment, his voice wavered, and he released a strange, warped sigh of vulnerability. Before I could decipher what it meant, however, his usual tone had returned. “I’m glad you’re okay. Don’t hesitate to call if you need anything. Goodbye, Cassandra.”
***
Apart from the odd conversation with my dad, the day was supposed to have been normal. I was supposed to spend the late morning with my roommates, depart for class with Adrian, then spend two hours at his apartment again to grade midterm exams. Nothing was supposed to happen—and nothing did, really, until the doctor and I found us in the waning minutes of our time together.
Looking back, I should’ve known that with each instant I spent with him, the more vulnerable I became—the more likely it was for me to lose hold on whatever wall I’d built up. Unlike that of my dad, my stubbornness was not difficult to penetrate. It only took one slip-up to shake my faith in my once-secure mindset and send me reeling through self-doubt and reconsideration.
Looking back, I shouldn’t have thought the day could’ve been normal. But no one ever expects abnormality.
Adrian and I had been sitting at his kitchen table, sharing a half-loaf of banana bread he’d bought last week at a bakery. We were talking about his home back in England—a pretty, charming town called Kettering. I pointed out that the name seemed particularly English, given that Kettering sounded like “kettle,” and tea was what I considered a staple of British culture. Adrian laughed easily, amused, but without a particular response.
I couldn’t distinguish the barely perceptible change that washed over the room. But suddenly, each movement we made carved through the air like a blunt knife through paper—scratching, gnawing, and ripping through complacent peace.
Again, his eyes: over and over, rolling toward me and drenching me with intelligence. Why hadn’t I noticed them before? Why hadn’t I noticed—truly noticed—him? Or perhaps I had all along, on some level far beyond what I was capable of accessing: maybe, only when separated from the distraction of a musty lecture hall and from the cold air of formality, it finally chose to surface. No. Surface was too tame a word. The realization didn’t seep its way into consciousness, the way an ice cube dissolves on hot pavement: instead, it beat me over the head with a boulder; it spent five minutes belting show tunes through pulsing neon lights. It degraded my self-confidence to the point where I felt immensely stupid for missing something so completely obvious—something so present, so suddenly impossible to push out of my mind. Something I couldn’t bring myself say.
“Cassie?”
It was an invitation, a decision; it was the subtle sort of permission too strong to go unnoticed, yet too faint to provide the kind of assurance that would triumph over uncertainty. The melodic, lilting charm of his voice, the way his accent picked up my dreadfully standard name and caressed it with beauty and excitement; the question mark painted in his eyes, on his lips, on the sculpted lines of his face, the—
“It’s late.”
“It’s gone.”
“What?”
You. The way you just looked at me.
“The time,” I fumbled, tripping in my haste to remove myself from the chair, from the room, from my own scattered, ridiculous thoughts. “The time is gone.” And with it disappeared the opportunity. I wasn’t crazy: deluded, lonely, idealistic, perhaps, but not crazy. In two syllables, for two minutes, Adrian had prompted the question I hadn’t realized I wanted to answer. But in my delay, in his understanding of potential repercussions, he had withdrawn as quickly as he’d emerged, leaving me with the kind of foggy, painful afterglow like the flickering colors you see through closed eyes after staring into the sun.
“It is,” he murmured. His voice was delicate, tentative, calculating. Could someone leave such a strong impression on another—something that transcended a meaning that my above-average vocabulary could convey—without realizing what he’d done? Adrian could flirt with genuine innocence, but this time his eyes didn’t tell a story of mindless flirtation. What did they tell? What hidden, transparent message was I so intent on picking up? Why couldn’t I muster the courage—the brazen, idiotic strength—to answer my own question?
I called Dominic to pick me up, who, after an excuse I didn’t quite catch, insisted that he send Taylor instead to retrieve the mess of emotions and incoherent thoughts that I was. Adrian had offered to take me home. I wanted to say yes because I’d suddenly remembered—though from what memory, I couldn’t say—that I’d loved the smell of his car. I wanted to say yes because I wanted force myself to reach the absurd conclusions only he seemed to inspire in me. I wanted to say yes because I didn’t want to say no. But I refused, gushing about something involving gas prices, because I didn’t know how to accept even the most trivial invitation.
As we passed the minutes with banter about the next day’s lecture, I fought to return my thoughts to the casual tone they’d once possessed. But the mindset was galaxies away, and no matter how hard I pulled at the comforting knowledge that Adrian was untouchable, that I was uninterested, it was too far away. And what was worse was that I couldn’t even pin down what had changed, or when it had changed, or even why. Nothing had been said or done. It was the erratic, accidental collision of two things that weren’t supposed to meet, because it was easier when they hovered at a distance.
I wondered, as Adrian excused himself for a moment to clean up the banana bread, if he even noticed that I couldn’t meet his gaze.
He said goodbye in a warm, friendly manner, which I tried and failed to return. At some point, I’d become less preoccupied with the professor and more with the fact that my own head was producing flurries of emotion that I didn’t know how to translate.
Taylor picked me up in a taxi, with it being too late to walk and too cold to endure a cable car. He said hello; my attempted response got halted somewhere in my own, internal traffic jam of chaos.
“Oh,” he exclaimed finally after a minute of silence. “I figured it out.”
“What, me? I’m just tired.”
“Fuck that,” he laughed. “Your mind is racing and you’re sick because you can’t keep up with it. You’re suppressing an irrational bout of convulsions that you didn’t even notice until I mentioned it. You feel stupid because you don’t know how else to feel, and though you’d give anything to feel how you did yesterday, you can’t begin to imagine or even remember what it was like. Everything’s different and new, and trying to interpret it is like learning a foreign language. And now you can’t believe that the words I’m saying are real, because no one should be able to pin down the tornado in your mind when you can’t even see what cloud it’s coming from.”
I stared at him. In the dark of the taxi, he took my hand.
“You won’t admit it, and there’s always a good chance that in your haste to deny it, it’ll disappear. You won’t believe it because you’re not sure you want to, not sure if you’re even allowed to. You don’t know what changed or what happened; you just know that it has. You don’t know why it took so long, but now you realize there was nothing else that the future could have entailed.”
“What are you on about?” I whispered.
“You’re falling, but not in the same way I am. Don’t be scared of it. If you’re so busy resisting, you might not remember to look up when you realize that someone has already caught you.”
“Taylor, what the hell are you saying?”
“Love, Cassie. Affection, confusion, surrender, and hope all looped into one.”
“Love?”
“Oh please,” he sighed, his blue eyes flickering with pleasant and energetic excitement. “It’s never anything else.”
It’s never anything else. It couldn’t be. Of course it couldn’t be. Adrian Tennant, what have you done?
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I don't think this chapter actually makes much sense, but I love it. :3
Is that narcissistic? Damn it. .___.