Heart the Lover

by Lily King

‘Tell me everything, bar-none everything, that comes to mind when you think about James Joyce,’ he says.

‘This shows future promise.’ He grimaces. ‘It was probably the first paper you’d ever gotten back without the word “genius” or “incandescent,”’ Sam says, ‘at the bottom.’ ‘It’s not that. It isn’t. But “future promise”? Like someday far from now I may show the faintest flicker of talent?’ ‘So you never took another one?’ I ask. ‘No.’ ‘He didn’t even take that one,’ Sam says. ‘He dropped it after three weeks.’ ‘None of the writers I admire ever took a class in creative writing,’ Yash says. ‘I think I’ll be okay.’

Ivan teaches us a new card game called Sir Hincomb Funnibuster that some girl from Connecticut taught him. He removes the fives, sixes, sevens, and eights from the deck and with the remaining cards explains that each suit is a family, every king the head of his family: Spade the Gardener, Club the Policeman, Heart the Lover, and Sir Hincomb Funnibuster, who is the king of diamonds.

I laugh. I’m incapable of understanding his dilemma. It feels completely made up to me. I’ve noticed that about people who had stable childhoods. They like to create their own problems.

‘Have you read that story “The Last Fall” by Ray Hart, about a guy who stays at college for an extra semester?’ ‘Do tell. The plot sounds positively riveting.’ ‘It’s beautiful. All his friends are gone and he sees the back of the neck of an old girlfriend in class and marvels at the feelings he once had for her and he’s got this housemate who only plays an album called Country Greats and the leaves are falling and the cold is coming and he has this thing with another girl that’s not really serious but there’s this gorgeous moment next to a soccer field when she fastens and unfastens a button on his jacket.’ I can’t read the expression on Yash’s face. ‘It’s just this long tender farewell to youth.’ ‘I’d like to read it,’ he says, and nothing else. No quip, no barb. ‘I haven’t done it justice.’

Henry James, upon hearing of the writer Constance Fenimore Woolson’s suicide, went directly to her apartment in Venice, destroyed his many letters to her, and tried to drown her dresses in the lagoon, but they wouldn’t sink. Yash acts out this story with much élan, gripping the gondolier’s pole James used to push the gowns underwater and recreating his haunted face as they floated back up to the surface.

I’ve never burned anything anyone has written to me in my life, but I take that note straight to the gas stove. I light it and watch it curl and blacken in the sink. I wash the flakes of ash down the drain.

If Sam and I had this conversation, he’d ask for the check and not speak on the way home. But Yash looks up and grins and asks me if I like bread pudding.

When we read The Aeneid he pauses on a line then reads it again: ‘Someday we will remember even these our hardships with pleasure.’

These scenes that didn’t happen concentrate and distill the emotion of what did. ‘The truth has nothing to do with the facts,’ one of my professors said Faulkner said. Professor Felske shows me what that really means.

But I’m not good at saying that I feel hurt or forgotten or rejected. There had been no room for that growing up. I’m more skilled at burying those emotions. Or hiding them in my fiction.

I remember Dr. Gastrell saying that Ezra Pound invited James Joyce to stay with him in Paris for a week and Joyce stayed in the city for twenty years and wrote Ulysses and Finnegans Wake.

two things that bring perspective and revelation to a character: time and distance. I think I have to go.

He stops outside the terminal. He says they fine you if you get out of the car, so we say goodbye right there in the front seat of the Nova. I cry and he doesn’t. He seems so far away, out of reach already, and that makes me cry harder. It feels like a mistake to leave.

I laugh. The three dark heads on the beach search for more flat stones. ‘First time I’ve seen him in years.’ Twenty-one years. ‘Ah.’ ‘Yeah.’ I love how fast women get things.

What do you know about taking risks, I want to ask him. You played it so safe. Mr. Cautious. And I protected you the one time things went off the rails. It is an unpleasant feeling, having this anger at someone who is dying.

‘You know how you can remember exactly when and where you read certain books? A great novel, a truly great one, not only captures a particular fictional experience, it alters and intensifies the way you experience your own life while you’re reading it. And it preserves it, like a time capsule.’

‘You got away all right.’ ‘I was pushed.’ He shrugs. ‘He pushes everyone away at one time or another. It’s temporary. You knew that.’ ‘I didn’t. I didn’t know that. At the time it felt like the end of the world.’

We got room service. We played cards on the bed. We always stayed in one room, two double beds, and I’m not sure I was ever happier than when we were all together in a hotel room.

Was that because I wanted to share the experience with him or to distance myself from the day by making it into a story?

As soon as his voice is gone I have that feeling I often have when I’m away from my family, like they are moving farther and farther away from me, beginning to flicker faintly as distant stars and I will never ever reach them again. It feels like a premonition of the fact that someday, one by one, we will be separated from each other forever.