The Opposite of Loneliness: Essays and Stories Read Online Free Page A

I felt suddenly and extremely claustrophobic. The whole world was stark and bleak and I realized I couldn’t think of a single thing I was looking forward to. Brian had begun to be that for me—the thing at the end of the day I could think about when everything else was boring. I looked through the open door to his room and saw that his bed was still unmade.
    “This is Claire,” William said. Tactful enough to stop before attempting to label my relationship. I held up a palm to the room and I wondered if anyone else had needed to be introduced.
    “Claire,” his father said. “It’s good to see you.” He sounded genuine.
    We’d gotten along at that brunch, though the whole thing was kind of an accident. Brian and I had slept late and when his parents arrived at his house at eleven o’clock, I was still in his bed, naked. I got dressed quickly—embarrassed to put on my heels from the night before—and was invited by default to eat eggs at Mirabelles. We laughed about it later.
    “Good thing you weren’t some one-night stand.” He bit at my ear.
    “Good thing,” I said, and punched him.
    * * *
    Brian’s dad gestured toward the untouched food but I said I was fine and moved over to the circle of his friends. I could tell at least one of them, Susannah, didn’t want me there. You don’t know him, I’m sure she was thinking. We don’t know you.
    Apparently, they’d all been together at the hospital on Tuesday night and they were sharing stories in hushed voices about how and when they found out and waited, how and when the congenital aneurysm took place. I wanted to ask exactly how it all worked, how it all happened, but I couldn’t really engage. I kept looking into Brian’s room at the lump of a comforter piled on his sheetless bed, at the light spilling in from his window, speckling its folds, and decided it was the saddest thing I’d ever seen.
    * * *
    When Lauren Cleaver walked down from upstairs, everyone turned. Her face was swollen and red and she was breathing in staccato bursts. She must have gone upstairs to collect herself. To calm down, stop crying. There was an older boy with her whom I recognized from pictures as Brian’s brother. He was holding her by the shoulders and saying something into her ear. My mind raced, imagining the dinners she must have had at his family’s table. The trips she might have taken with them, the grandparents she must have met. She’d have watched movies at his real house clad in sweatpants and sweaters. Spent time with his brother, his mother, met his dog, his uncles, his high school friends.
    Lauren looked thin and beautiful as she walked down the stairs and I realized that of course I wasn’t the girlfriend. I can’t explain how or why, but it filled me with a profound, seething anger . . . followed, inevitably, by waves of a familiar self-disgust. Brian was mine, I wanted to cry. My nose he’d kissed on Friday, my shirt he’d slipped his hand inside. The last time he’d kissed Lauren was in June and I knew they no longer talked. I imagined for a moment what he would have been like if Lauren died—if he would have romanticized their relationship and lamented the loss of their potential reunion. But it didn’t really seem like she was engaged in rationalization, just that she loved him a lot. Or had.
    I knew, of course, that their breakup had been mutual and long coming. Brian and Lauren were beyond associated, and their collapse was slow and necessary. I also knew that only days before, I’d engaged in late-night deliberations with Charlotte over whether or not to break things off—that only days before I didn’t think of Brian the way I thought of him now—but neither of those things seemed to matter. Lauren was harrowed, drastically, and my cheeks were smooth and dry. I felt inadequate, cold; my relationship with Brian abruptly grounded.
    For some reason I hadn’t until just then tried to think of the last time I’d seen him. But it must