Never Ride Without Your Helmet

I answer the door and there is RC in the hall with his bicycle.  He wears jeans, a faded violet tee-shirt, a jean jacket and his helmet.  The helmet seems well-chosen.  We broke up only a few days ago — this time for real — and I’m still upset.  He might need protective gear.

He says,  “Hello,”  in a voice that is cheerful but does not conceal his anxiety.

“Hi,”  I say.  I am sullen.  I do not meet his eyes.  I stand aside so he can wheel his bike into the foyer and lean it against mine.  A large envelope and a copy of The Sea The Sea by Iris Murdoch are secured with a bungee cord to the metal rack behind the seat.  The envelope is for me — books I lent him.  The Iris Murdoch is because one never leaves the house without something to read.

I’m not sure if I want him to stay.  When he called this morning, he asked if he could drop by with the books.  “Fine,”  I said.  He hesitated.  “And maybe we could do a loop around the park?”

So soon,  I thought.  So pushy — everything the way he wants it.  I didn’t say anything.  I took a sip of coffee and read the headline:  In a Shaken Tel Aviv, Fear Now Rides the Buses.  “I don’t know,”  I said.  “I’ll have to tell you when you get here.”

He almost laughed, as if my answer was better than he had expected.

“One has to ask for what one wants,”  he says.  He always asks.  He always negotiates, analyzes, evaluates.  In his self-deprecating way, he describes himself as a whiny, anxious, balding, Jewish middle-brow intellectual.  Middle-brow, not high-brow like his ex-wife, not quite invited to sit at the table with the grown-ups, as he says.  At 46, he can still tell you his SAT scores.  And hers.  (His composite was higher, but she got an 800 on the verbal.)  He has not cried for more than thirty years.  Not when his father died, not when his marriage ended.  When I met him, he could barely move his neck — a disk had fused high up on his spine.  A small piece eventually broke off and lodged in his spinal canal and had to be removed by a surgeon.  I suggested there might be a connection — so much repressed pain, a spine that is growing rigid.

“Ridiculous,”  he had said angrily.  “Sometimes, as it turns out, an injury is just an injury.”

He hands me the envelope.  “So, do you want to go for a ride?”  he asks.

“No,”  I say, watching with satisfaction as his face reddens.

“OK, fine,”  he says.  We look straight at each other for a moment, then he begins to wrap the bungee cord around the Iris Murdoch.

I am clutching the envelope to my chest.  I turn away from him.  “You sure are quick to try to put things in their new place, aren’t you?  I say.

“No,”  he says.  “I wasn’t sure what to do, but I like you.  I want to be your friend.  I figured you could say no, you didn’t want to see me, you didn’t want to go for a ride.  You could tell me to drop the books off at Columbia or leave them with the doorman.  I could have put them in the mail.  But I wanted to see you.  We can do anything.  We can stay here and talk, we can go get lunch, go for a ride…I don’t expect it to be easy but I’m willing to do whatever it takes.”

He sounds so reasonable.  He is always reasonable — courteous and reasonable.  I feel the blood coursing through my shoulders, down my forearms.  My veins feel constricted, overburdened.  I put the envelope down on a table.  I want to scream and cry and hit him with my fists.

I take a deep breath.  “Do you want some tea?”  I ask softly.

“I’d love some,”  he says.