31 Hours (8 page)

“That would be perfect on a day like this, thank you, but please call me Carol, okay?”

Vic nodded mutely, and they both stepped into the open kitchen—really just a counter, a stovetop, an oven, and some cabinets for glasses and dishes.

Vic put on the water and pulled out three boxes of tea bags so Jonas’s
mother could choose, and while they fussed together in the kitchen, Jonas’s mother asked about the dance company, and how practice was going, and when the performance would be, and how Vic’s parents were, and Vic answered on autopilot, wondering all the while what this could be about. She wondered if Jonas’s mother knew about the unexpected outcome of the camping trip, and how it had changed the status between Jonas and Vic, and if she would say, “You’re not good enough for my son; stay away from him.” But those were lines from some B movie, and Jonas’s mother was nothing like that; she was much more tolerant and classy. Besides, she liked Vic; Vic was sure of that; she always had.

Freshman year. Jonas and Vic were in a physical science class together. He’d skipped a grade and was the smartest kid in that class, but he didn’t look the part. Jonas was not nerdy. Yet he had the face of a scholar. His eyes were set a little too close together for beauty, but it was the ideal flaw because it made him look focused. Which he was. He also had no idea how attractive his shyness made him. And then there was his curly blond hair—who could resist that?

Vic already loved dance, and that contributed to her indifference as a student. She was one of those
you-have-such-potential
students. When she needed help in science, as she inevitably did, she asked the guy who sat two seats in front of her. Jonas. She found out they lived near one another, and that was how they started. Study partners. Two times a week for the rest of that year, and they kept it up over the next three years. In the beginning, Vic was sure heads bent over a book would develop into something else. And then Jonas didn’t seem interested, which surprised her. Vic was accustomed to boys’ interest. But she accepted Jonas’s indifference. He was too moody and serious for her, anyway, she decided; she had wild oats to sow. Besides, he was a great
friend. She was glad to have him for that. Still, every now and then she would become aware of the golden skin of his forearm or the way his back curved sweetly before it reached toward his legs, and a lusty thought would pass lazily through her mind. But mostly, before August, she’d just thought of him as study-buddy, steady-buddy Jonas.

Finally with the tea ready, Vic puffed up the pillows on the couch and the two women sat together. Vic couldn’t call Jonas’s mother Carol, so she decided to just call her nothing. They pointed their knees in each other’s direction, and Vic waited.

Jonas’s mother sipped her tea, then took a deep breath. “I feel a little silly,” she said, stumbling over her words a bit. “I’ve been worried, and maybe I worry too much, but then I thought,
Well, if anyone would know, it would be Vic
, because you two are so close and you’ve been that way for so long.”

She looked expectantly at Vic, but so far there was nothing for Vic to reply to, so she just nodded encouragingly, aware of her heart moving up into her throat even though she couldn’t say why.

“Well, okay, here’s the thing, I don’t know, Vic, but I don’t think he’s going to any classes anymore, even though he told me a couple weeks ago that he was. And Jonas doesn’t normally lie to me, at least I don’t think so.”

“I . . . I
thought
he was going to classes,” Vic said. She knew Jonas considered many of the classes to be “dishonest”; that was how he’d put it. But he hadn’t mentioned to her that he wasn’t attending at all. It wasn’t impossible to imagine. Jonas had already dropped out once, midway through freshman year. He’d spent a year traveling around Europe—the United Kingdom, Sweden, Norway, Italy, and France—and then he’d returned and begun to work at that center he loved so much—the World Understanding Center or something like that—answering
phones and preparing class cards in return for a small salary. He studied comparative religion and meditation there, Ayurvedic medicine, Kabbalah and Sufism and who could keep track of what else—searching for something, a quality Vic found endearing. Then his parents insisted he start classes at NYU full time again in September. It seemed to be going pretty well, although, come to think of it, he never mentioned classes. But after all, it had only been—what? Ten weeks? They’d had other matters on their minds, the two of them.

“It’s not only that,” Jonas’s mother said. “He’s been strange, distant. Oh, I know it’s normal for young men to pull away from their mothers. But this feels bigger than that. I mean, I can’t reach him, and . . .” She pulled a little on the fabric of the couch. “He came over two weeks ago, and he didn’t look good,” she said, almost as if she were speaking to herself, her gaze on some middle distance. “His face was gray. He carried his body like it weighed a hundred tons, though he looked like he’d actually lost weight. I asked him how he felt. He said fine. ‘Any fatigue or anything?’ He turned angry suddenly. He called me a nag—” She cut herself off, and Vic could see a flash of hurt in her expression before it cleared. “Later he was in his room—his old room, I mean—he was looking out the window, and I came and stood behind him and grabbed his waist, tried to scare him, playfully, you know, and I guess I did scare him because he jumped and turned. He was hanging on to that old stuffed elephant of his, and he looked so worn. God, he looked ancient.”

Jonas’s mother’s eyes were shiny. She took a sip of tea. Vic thought about patting her hand, but that seemed the wrong gesture between them. “You know how he is,” Vic said. “Sometimes he carries around the world’s problems like an overstuffed suitcase.”

Jonas’s mother didn’t seem to hear. “I asked him what was wrong.
He said nothing, and then he got mad again, then apologetic, one right after the other. Then he left.”

Vic sipped her tea. “Well,” she said after a minute.

“I know.” Jonas’s mother ran a hand through her hair and kind of laughed. “Oh, I know, it doesn’t add up to much, the way I’ve told it. But a mother can sense things. Something is wrong.” She worried the fabric of Vic’s couch a moment more, hesitating. “Do you think, could it be
drugs
or something?”

Vic smiled; she even felt some relief because this was beginning to feel like a typical parent conversation. “No, Mrs. Meitzner. Jonas doesn’t even drink.”

“Of course. You’re right. But something is . . .” Jonas’s mom trailed off and reached her left hand back to rub the right side of her neck. “For three days, I’ve been calling, leaving messages, and he doesn’t answer and he doesn’t call back. That’s not like him, either. And today I went by his apartment and—no answer. So I thought maybe . . . maybe you would know something. When did you last talk to him?”

“I think it was . . .” She’d thought of Jonas often, for sure, and made repeated calls, but how long exactly had it been since they’d spoken? With dance rehearsals, and then the drama with her mother and Mara, the days had begun to blur. She couldn’t sort it out right now, not with Jonas’s mom staring at her. “Last time I talked to him,” she said, “he seemed—” Tired, maybe, and busy, but mostly he’d seemed romantic every time she’d spoken to him over these past few weeks. And intense, and passionate. And full of life and desire and longing, and now she suddenly remembered the last time, a week ago Tuesday—longer than she’d realized. It had been a quick conversation, and she’d been on the street headed to rehearsal, but still she’d felt it all when she’d heard his voice on the phone, and she’d wanted to see him, to hold his face in her
hands, and would have found a way to do that, to meet him at least on some street corner and kiss him, kiss him in some private place, if she hadn’t already been late. “He seemed fine,” she said.

“Okay. Well, good,” Jonas’s mother said, though she sounded unconvinced. She was silent a moment and then made a motion as if dusting off the palms of her hands on her pants. “Enough. You’ve probably got plenty to do on a Sunday afternoon.”

“No, no,” Vic said.

Jonas’s mother rose and took her cup into the kitchen, set it in the sink. “He was such a funny baby,” she said. “So serious, even then. But one time, he was maybe eleven months then, and he was sitting in his high chair in the kitchen, and suddenly, out of nowhere, he started laughing, and that made me laugh, and then he laughed at me laughing, and on like that, as if the laughter itself were an entire conversation.” She gave a small, sad smile. “If you . . .” she hesitated, “if you talk to Jonas in the next day or so, Vic—I don’t want to sound pathetic, but tell him to call his old mother, okay?”

As soon as she was gone, Vic tried Jonas again on his cell. It went immediately to the message, so he either had it off or was underground somewhere. She tried to remember whether it had rung when she’d called him from the theater. She dialed his apartment phone, and there was no answer—but she knew he rarely answered his landline; it was just something his parents had asked him to do, to put in a phone. She called his cell again to leave a message.

“Hey, you, it’s me. Me on Sunday afternoon. Maybe you have time for an early dinner tonight? Even if you don’t, call me, okay? Your mom was here, which was a surprise, but nice, except that she thinks you’ve dropped out of sight for too long. She’s worried, Jonas. Give her a call. And then, busy or not, call
me
.” She hung up and then
dialed Jonas’s number again. “If I don’t answer, I’m in the shower. So leave a message. Or better yet,” she dropped her voice, trying for comicseductive, “come on over. Quickly.”

She sat cross-legged on the floor for a minute, trying to remember one of their most recent conversations. A couple weeks ago he’d taken a few bites out of a graham cracker and tried to persuade her that it resembled a person’s head, and then he’d made it into a talking man begging to be inside her stomach, and she’d giggled and opened her mouth wide and eaten the man entirely. Sometimes they talked about places they wanted to visit, a favorite topic. Sometimes they shared details about past lovers—lovers they’d known about back in the days when they’d been only friends, but then they hadn’t listened for quite the same details, or with quite the same attention.

He told her about a girl in Sweden, who didn’t seem to mean much, and another in Ireland—Deirdre was her name, and she made a stronger impression. Jonas grew so concentrated while recalling her. He didn’t talk about the way she looked or her temperament. He talked about her past. During the Troubles, when Deirdre was eighteen, she drove a bomb-laden car for the IRA from Belfast to some nearby town and parked it near a police station. She left the car and took a bus, and by the time she arrived home, she flipped on the news to find that the car bomb had detonated, killing several people.

“A terrorist? Your girlfriend was a terrorist?”

“One man’s terrorist . . .” Jonas began.

“But really,” Vic said. “People died.”

Jonas shook his head. “She had this . . . conviction, maturity. She was twelve years older than me, but it wasn’t her age; it was how committed she was to her decisions. Made me feel like a kid.”

“Didn’t she feel guilty?” The whole topic made Vic uneasy. She
couldn’t tell if her unease was fueled by simple jealousy or something else, but she hoped Jonas would pronounce some judgment against this Deirdre to make her feel safer.

“Only difference between the statesman and the terrorist leader,” he said, “is that one is still in a position of weakness, while the other is part of the government. Sometimes it takes physical force to prevent an issue from vanishing.”

Jonas’s eyes had a faraway look that made Vic long to bring him back, so she climbed on top of him. “Okay. Physical force. So this issue. Doesn’t vanish,” she said, and began kissing him, pulling him away from those old-girlfriend memories and returning him to the moment with her.

Vic was the more experienced in the arena of lovemaking; they’d both always known that. She’d wondered if this might make Jonas jealous, but it seemed only to make him laugh. Once, after they’d rolled together on the bed, almost like children, for hours, he sprang up naked and knelt on the floor and bowed a few times and said, “Thank you to all your previous lovers, because everything they taught you, I am now gathering that fruit and it sustains my life.” She laughed and pulled him back to bed, wrapping her legs around him again.

Once not so long ago, he held her hand over his chest, spread her fingers out, and they lay there breathing together, matching each inhalation and exhalation, alert but as still as if they were jointly meditating. He seemed about to tell her something, even began speaking a word she couldn’t make out, but then he broke off. She didn’t press him because she figured it was about them. About the unexpected quality of this romance, its intensity and resonance. He’d already said some of that, once or twice. She smiled, thinking of it, and wished he were here right now, sprawled on her couch.

She was more circumspect than Jonas in expressing her emotions. Experience had taught her that what seemed real was too often revealed to be false. She’d learned that lesson early in high school, observing her friends who claimed to be “in love,” and her skepticism was only reinforced by her parents’ split, which Vic knew, even if neither her mother nor Mara did, had been a long time in coming. Maybe as a consequence, whenever Vic began to feel strong attachment, her throat invariably grew tight, making endearments reluctant to emerge and awkward when they did. It was as if vulnerability caused a physical reaction that left her close to inarticulate. Jonas never complained about her reticence; he never even mentioned it.

But maybe she’d been too guarded this time. She didn’t need, after all, to get caught up in considering the future, what would and wouldn’t be, what might
change
, as her mother had warned, because this moment was what existed now, and for this moment, it was good—better than good. Besides, this was Jonas. She trusted him, had trusted him even before. And now, when she was with him, she felt something that had been clenched within her opening, wide and wider, causing a delicious sensation, the sensation of possibility. Greater courage in the face of emotional exposure: maybe that was what Jonas could teach her, because in this arena, she was a virgin. So maybe next time she saw him—maybe tonight, in fact, in the midst of ravaging his sweet body—she would bypass her caution, put her hands on his heart, and let him know what depths she held inside.