Let It Snow Part 7

"Unless the lie is manifest," Eric says.

"Unless we enter the room," Max says.

"I just don't like what it says about who we are, or how it presumes ugliness in our private truths. I don't believe that's the case for most people," Eric says.

"But if we weren't ugly in some way, what would we have to aspire to?" Max says.

"That's a deeply cynical thought, Max," Eric says. "When did you become so cynical?"

"About ten years ago, I'd say."

"What happened ten years ago?" Wendy asks.

"Does anyone want seconds?" Annie says, stopping the flow of conversation.

"I'm fine," Tim says. "But everything was delicious."

"Yeah, everything was great," Wendy says.

Michael, Holly, and Annie's plates all look about the same as they did when they were first served.

"Is everything alright, Michael?" Annie asks.

"Yeah, I'm sorry. I guess my appet.i.te isn't quite what I thought it was, but I'm still working," he says, and dutifully eats a mouthful of mashed potatoes.

"Michael," Amy says, "Isn't there something like the room from Stalker in Judaism? I mean, not that it can see into your deepest desires or anything, but that it was a mystical place where G.o.d existed or something. Do I have that right?"

Michael furrows his brow for a minute, finishes chewing his potatoes. "I think you're talking about the Holy of Holies in the Temple. It was a small room at the back of the tabernacle, a ten cubit by ten cubit s.p.a.ce separated from the rest of the tabernacle by a veil, where the presence of G.o.da"supposedly the literal presence of G.o.da"dwelled in the temple. Is that what you mean?"

"I think so."

"Yeah, I'd say it's different from the room in the movie for many reasons. First of all, no one other than the high priest was permitted to enter the room, and even he could only enter the room on Yom Kippura"the Day of Atonement."

"What'd he do on Yom Kippur?" Wendy asks.

"Well, the room was supposed to containa"at least in the first temple of Jerusalema"the Ark of the Covenant. When they rebuilt the second temple, they still had a raised spot where the ark of the covenant used to sit, and on top of that was what was called the Divine Seat, and the High Priest would pour sacrificial blood over the divine seat."

"And the blood, the sacrifice, was to atone for the sins of the Israelites?"

"Right, or also, more generally, just a gift to G.o.d. You know, a please-have-mercy-on-us-and-we-are-your-dutiful-supplicants kind of thing."

"Don't those rituals seem so bizarre now?" Holly says.

"Right, except for the rituals that still go on and seem less bizarre only by our proximity to them," Michael says.

"Meaning?" Holly asks.

"Meaning that we can enter almost any present-day church, mosque, or synagogue in the country and still see rituals. And to see how commonplace rituals still are might make those particular rituals seem less strange than rituals that are relics to the past," Michael says. "In other words, animal sacrifice is made more strange by its distance in time, and by the fact that we wouldn't find it happening at any neighborhood church. Though, admittedly, partaking in the symbolic body and blood of Christ would be a downright absurd idea to a person completely unfamiliar to Catholicism. And, if that practice were abolished tomorrow by the Church, in a generation or two, it would seem just as absurd to those future Catholics as it might to outsiders now. And look at baptism. Tame as it may be as ritual, it's a very peculiar idea to believe that you can wash away your sins so simply. It's a very rudimentary solution, a tradition based almost exclusively on metaphor, and yet millions of people truly believe it."

"But it gives them comfort. There's nothing wrong with that," Eric says.

"Right, and when religion is gone, what will bring people comfort?" Annie asks.

"But I'm not criticizing anyone," Michael says. "I'm just sayinga""

"Are you both religious now?" Max asks.

"No, not particularly," Annie says. "But I can understand why someone would be."

"Sure, it's a compelling idea that one can pray away, or wash away their sins," Max says. "It's a convenient way for people to feel they're off the hook for their unspeakable thoughts or actions."

"Do you really believe that it makes people feel that they're off the hook?" Annie asks.

"For some people, I do. People have a way of rationalizing all the terrible, hurtful things they do or say."

As far as Annie's concerned, there's no question that just about everything Max is saying is directed at her and Eric. She only hopes that it's not as transparent to everyone else.

She looks at Eric and he seems to know it too. He looks annoyed but confused by Max's thinly veiled hostility. And he has every reason to be confused. There's so much that he doesn't know. So much that he never understood about Annie and Max. He's been confused by Max's anger since she and Eric were first engaged. And Annie certainly could've done a better job of taking the layers off their history for Eric, but things were tenuous enough in the beginning. She always thought there would come a day when things would be more certain, more comfortable, and she could tell him all about their relationship, and how intense, how serious things once were between them.

And maybe there is some truth to what Eric said about secrets being a form of lying by omission, or at least there's truth in the idea that keeping a secret can feel like a lie. Maybe this has something to do with why she never could tell him about her and Max. The intensity of her and Max's love has always felt too close, too alive for her to express it without surrendering its truth to Eric.

When Max arrived in Boston, the cab ride to see Anniea"for the first time in more than three yearsa"was excruciatingly long. She stood in front of her apartment building waiting for him, and, as he approached, something woke up inside him. Though they had been talking regularly for three years, seeing her was a shocking experience. There was something new and immeasurable about his emotions when he saw her again. It became immediately apparent to him then that they had built something truly substantial in the past three years.

Annie still remembers how much of that youthfulness had disappeared in his face. His face was thinner, but stronger and sharper than she remembered. His eyes, always clear and focuseda"always moving from here to there relentlessly absorbing the worlda"were as clear and full of his emotional tells as ever.

For Max, she was more beautiful than he remembered. There was something different about the way she carried herself. She moved with a special kind of self-a.s.surance. She was obviously more comfortable with herself, and more at ease with her body than he remembered. Her face had grown softer somehow, the youth of the flesh giving way to something more adult, more feminine. Her hair was shorter, but framed her face better than her long hair once did. When he last saw her, he suddenly realized, he had left behind a girl, and now he was standing in front of a beautiful, confident womana"a thoroughly different woman.

It wasn't as if they were strangers though. They had obviously been talking constantly on the phone. There weren't going to be any surprises in their conversation. So, it's not as if there was any catching up to do. They didn't have new stories to tell. But, seeing each other, realizing how foreign the other's face, the other's body had become, threw them both for a wonderful loop. And as she greeted him on the sidewalk in front of her buildinga"his new homea"they stopped and stared at each other for a long time. But when they finally embraced and kissed, it was a long, slow kiss, a dizzying kissa"three years long.

When he saw the apartment, he was shocked at the size of the place. She'd said it was small, but he hadn't been prepared for it to be as small as it was, or to see the poor shape it was in. She had furnished the place warmly, and it was clearly nicer for her care and attention, but it was a dump. It was an efficiency studio, and only slightly larger than Max's childhood bedroom. The hide-a-bed they would sleep on hid a small portion of a badly water stained wall, and it faced a poor approximation of a kitchen. The bathroom was essentially a closeta"a curtain in place of a doora"with a toilet and a tiny standing shower. There was only one window, a large one that displayed a pretty nice view of the city. It was the one thing that saved the apartment from feeling like a dank tomb.

But, even with all the apartment's faults, it was difficult to complain. It was true that they were new to co-habitation and didn't have a lot of money, but they were young, in love, and excited for the opportunity to be together again. And, besides, his thinking was that this arrangement was all very temporary. They would remain in Boston through what remained of her spring semestera"a little less than three monthsa"and then everything would change after her graduation. But, in the meantime, there was a great sense of newness and adventure in the prospects of learning each other so intimately again.

And it didn't take long for them to find a rhythm in this shared life. They didn't get in each other's way, and they just genuinely enjoyed the experience of playing house, reacquainting themselves with the other's body. Three years is a long time to desire someone only to have those desires go unfulfilled. So, for the first month, they spent almost all their time in bed. And, when they weren't together, she was busy with school, and he was going to the movies, or exploring Boston, thinking about their future.

One thing that he learned quickly was that Boston was a wonderful place to spend a few months, but it wasn't a place he wanted to live longterm. He felt very much like a west coast man now. He could hardly imagine living through a northeastern winter ever again. And there was noise. It wasn't just something he could hear, but it was something he could feel. The perpetual sense that business was being done, a general feeling of hurriedness in the air, was almost too much for him to bear some days. He missed the relative calmness of Stanford, and, if not Stanford, than he had aspirations toward the upper northwestern states.

Once Annie graduated, he just a.s.sumed they would leave Boston. Of course, he knew to tread lightly on the subject with her. And when they did talk about the future, they spoke about it in cautious, vague tones, as if they both knew that speaking specifically about the future meant having to define it. And he wasn't so sure that defining the future was such a good idea yet. They had, after all, only gotten back together. Still, he knew that Annie loved Boston, but he had heard hints that she didn't see herself staying a Bostonian.

Mostly, when they would talk about the future it was about how they intended to spend their futures together. They had spent all that time apart, and spent so much time and energy thinking about ways that they could get together, that when they were together they realized they had to synchronize what it was going to mean to stay together.

The love was there, but that was never the question. It just took time for other questions to arise above the noise of love.

Eventually, though, simplicity gives way to complication. Joy gives way to reality.

Max was the first to seriously contemplate where they were heading. He spent a good deal of his free time considering their future. He was alone for long stretches during the days while Annie was busy going to school. Her studies kept her from fixating and planning the way Max was starting to fixate and plan.

But Max was fixating, making plans, letting the future unfold in a million different shapes in front of him. He created scenarios where he and Annie would go west. He would attend graduate school. Annie would play her music. In some ways, to him, this would be an ideal existence. Of course, he didn't take into account Annie's future expectations. He just a.s.sumed he understood what would make her happy. There was a part of Max, an overwhelming part, that entertained no other possibilities. He believed that Annie would be happy just being with him and having the freedom to play the piano all day. Never mind the fact that he hadn't bothered to talk to her about her career plans. And, even when they did talk about what they would do in the future, he was careful to speak in a.s.sertions rather than questions, always trying to feel her out without having to ask her directly what it was she was planning. If he asked for specifics then he was inviting the possibility of an answer that didn't match the stories he had been telling himself.

Besides, they'd been through this once before.

So, in order to avoid all this uncertainty, he began to think of ways that he could show a deeper commitment to their future. He wanted to let Annie know that he intended to make this relationship last, even as they struggled to maneuver the tenuous crossroads of starting and merging their adult lives. He concluded that if he were to, at least, make the symbolic gesture of asking her to marry him, there would be no doubt that he was serious about their future.

There was no question that they wanted to be together. They had expressly established that they wanted to be together for the long haul. But a question was always lingering: What might get in the way? Max reasoned that a promise of commitment would keep the things that did get in the way from becoming a crisis, or at least might make them feel more obliged to work out a solution together. This was almost as crucial for him as it was for her, since he had a tendency to overreact when things didn't happen as he'd planned. Essentially, he wanted to take out an insurance policy against any potential bad news.

So, he withdrew a large chunk from his ever-shrinking savings and bought a ring. He didn't want to go too far overboard on a proposal. Neither of them were the type to make a spectacle of themselves, and he thought the theatrics of the moment were entirely self-contained and needed no added social element. And his paltry financial situation, further complicated by the excessive cost of the ring, also helped determine how he would ask her to marry him. With his options dwindled, but his intentions clearly of an intimate nature, he decided to ask her that night in bed, in the light of their afterglow.

Annie remembers that he seemed nervous and preoccupied that night at dinner. She had been planning on talking to him that night about his plans after she graduated. She had recently found several application packs from universitiesa"all from the west coasta"tucked in the drawer of his nightstand, and it alarmed her. She was starting to panic about what was unfolding in front of her. Not only was she about to graduate from college, but she was about to be thrust into the real world without any real clue about what she was going to do. It was going to be the first time in her life where there was nothing but possibility in front of her. She wanted some time after graduation to think about what all this was going to mean, and she wasn't so keen on Max deciding what that world would look like for her.

But she waited.

She decided that, since he seemed so preoccupied over dinner, they would talk about things when he was in better spirits. They still had time. She was still weeks from graduation.

But she waited too long.

That night, after they made love, he kneeled beside their hide-a-bed in their tiny, nasty Boston studio, and, with the sound of the city streaming through the open window, the twilight washing over his skin, he opened the case to a small but elegant engagement ring, and asked Annie to marry him.

It was perfect.

She was shocked, truly stunned. She was so taken aback that she was struck utterly mute by the moment. And she was silent for a long time. She can still remember him saying her name, 'Annie?' And she just stared at him, saying not a word, not an ounce of articulate in her brain.

And Max stared at her with those eyes that said so much, and now all those eyes could do was scream from fear, and there was an intense vulnerability in that starea"so full of hope and terror and love and anguisha"that she's never forgotten that look, and, to this day, if she hangs on that image too long, she will cry as if it were happening all over again.

Of course she wanted to marry him. There was a part of her screaming 'Yes! Yes!' But there was a stronger part of her that kept that voice silent. She knew that she couldn't make that promise when she hadn't made a clear decision about her future. She needed timea"a month or twoa"before she could give him a answer.

Later that night, once she collected herself, she tried to explain all of this in the most thoughtful, gentle way possible. But no man wants to hear anything other than yes when he asks a woman to marry him. He had clearly placed himself in an incredibly vulnerable, yet hopeful position, and she gave him nothing. Just silence. And he was appropriately crushed.

She was determined not to let him go to sleep angry, and he did his best to hide his anger. She could tell that he was hurt, and that her verbal rea.s.surances, her timid touches, only annoyed him with their cold uncertainty. Everything she did came off as patronizing, and she knew he loathed nothing more than that.

She didn't sleep much that night, laying in the cool of a Boston night in Maya"the traffic still audible out the open window. She watched him that night, constantly looking over at his beautiful, strong body bathing in the city's brilliant blue light. She wanted to wrap herself around him and never let go, convince him that her love was as real, and as deep as any love. She wanted to a.s.sure him that he was her life's anchor, but she knew that he was a prideful man, a stubborn man, and thingsa"no matter how she struggled to keep them afloata"would never be the same between them.

Though she had no idea to what extent things might change.

In the morning, Annie slid quietly out of bed, careful not to disturb him. Max appeared to be sleeping, which was odd because he was usually the first out of bed in the mornings. Of course, if her night was in any way indicative of his, then it wouldn't be a surprise if he hadn't fallen asleep easily.

She quietly got ready for her day, walked over to his sleeping body, kissed him softly on the cheek, and left the apartment.

It was the last time she saw him.

When she got back to the apartment later that afternoon, his stuff, or any trace of his past presence was gone. The only thing left behind was a note, written on the back of a restaurant receipt: 'Now, you'll have time.'

Once again, he had left her after she'd told him something he didn't want to hear. It was suddenly clear to her that she wasn't the only one who still had some growing up to do. Instead of talking about this with her, trying to work things out, giving her a little s.p.a.ce to figure things out, he just disappeared. Still, being aware of his immaturity, of his gross overreaction to the past night's drama, did not make his absence any less hurtful.

From his perspective, though, as was the case after they graduated high school, love is a certainty, not a thing we question or second-guess. It's hard to imagine anyone truly in love not having an immediate and certain answer to a marriage proposal. If there are questions, then the love must be questionable. That was the kind of black-and-white world Max lived in.

But she did love him, and she worried that she'd made a terrible mistake. She should've said yes. She wanted to say yes. It was, after all, only an engagement to be married, not the marriage itself. She could've easily taken the time over that summer to consider what she might do with her self. After all, she knew how sensitive Max was about these things. How did she think he would react? But, then again, it wasn't as if she expected him to propose. She simply didn't have the time to think rationally about what her reaction should be.

But she also couldn't escape the fear that having Max around would influence her decisions. She just knew that one morning she would wake up somewhere on the west coast, thousands of miles from home, and even further from finding her own ident.i.ty. Suddenly her ident.i.ty would be intertwined, inextricably, to Max, and her choices would be limited by his choices. She had seen what that kind of life did to her mother, and it terrified her. She loved her life with Max in the abstract, but when you started to add the details of a longterm commitment, things became more and more claustrophobic. Control over the direction of her life was only just beginning, and having the freedom to choose her futurea"on her own termsa"was of paramount importance.

She tried to call him that evening, but, as she expected, he didn't answer his phone. He let all of her calls that night go straight to voicemail. And, after several days of silence, she finally called his parents to see if they had heard anything. He had left for a summer trip, backpacking across Europe. She asked if they knew of any way she could get in touch with him. They didn't. He'd left his phone behind, and made a point of expressing his wish to be untethered on the trip. He had promised to check in with them from time to time, and they said they would tell him to call her next time they talked.

But she knew he wouldn't call.

She knew things were bad after he proposed. And she knew they were in a situation similar to what they faced after high school. But she had hoped that he'd matured enough to try to deal with this practically. But, no, he just ran away again. It occurred to her that when you fall in love with someone as sensitive and full of emotion as Max, you have to accept all the tumultuous lows with all those glorious highs.

Now, she knew she wouldn't see him at least until the end of summer. This made her desperately sad. The hole he had left behind was too large and ever-present. The despair left by his absence was constant. The stark emptiness of knowing she couldn't see him, that he was far away, marching across another continent, made her perpetually ache for him. Missing him was never not a part of her.

Luckily, though, those last several weeks before her graduation were very busy, and she spent every free second at school practicing for her final recital. Unknowingly, he had left her right when her playing could most benefit from the emotional turmoil of his absence. She put all her energy in her playing, and when she finally played in front of the students and faculty of Berklee, she knew she had accomplished something great.

But the next day no one was waiting for her to play. No one was there to applaud her, pat her on the back, or tell her how great she was. One day she was too busy to obsess about Max, and the next she was done with school, and could do nothing but obsess about him. She couldn't last long this way, being trapped in the city with no school, no job, no plans. Eventually, having this much time would eat her alive inside. So, she had a choice to make: She could either get a job in the city, keep her apartment and figure out her next move over the summer. Or she could go back home, try to regain some of her equilibrium, and clear her head.

At first, she didn't know what to do. She didn't want to make a rash decision based on how much she was missing Max. But, after a few days of wallowing, she knew there wasn't anything left for her in Boston. She'd spent those last few weeks of school trying to delay her loneliness, but now that she was unavoidably alone, and was finally dealing with the pain of it, she couldn't escape the loss of him. And it was particularly cruel because she knew he was out there somewhere, that he loved her, had asked her to spend the rest of her life with him. It was just too much to bear. So, even though part of the reason that she had put Max off was so that she could control her own destiny without his influence pushing her into one direction or another, she was suddenly realizing how naive she had been. Here she was, in her tiny Boston apartment, and the pain of losing him was forcing her home. He was still influencing her decisions, even in his absence.

So, she packed some things, left some things behind, and moved back home to her parents' house.

The summer back home was a very close copy of the summer she spent there before she moved to Boston. There was a lot of time spent in bed, listening to sad music, intermittently reading and daydreaming of Maxa"where he was, what he might be doing. She spent many a night watching one of the movies that her and Max had watched together, movies that they had both loved together. Or she would watch movies he had seen while in Boston and told her she should watch but didn't have the time to watch before. And there were late night summer walks, contemplating the future, wondering what shape her life would take on.

It was easily as miserable as that last summer at home, but it felt worse somehow. During that first summer without Max, the futurea"going away to schoola"was still some secure thing she could latch onto. There was at least an illusion of hope and promise in front of her. Not so now. She had no idea what the future would hold, and the uncertainty was anything but exciting. For many people Annie's age, it was the uncertainty of the future that drove them, pushed them toward their goals. But, for Annie, it was scary as h.e.l.l, and she wished she had Max to help talk her through this tumultuous time. He was, after all, not just her lover, but her best friend.

Annie's parents kept encouraging her to get out of the house and do something, softly pushing her to make her next life decisions. It was clear to them that she had reached a point of aimlessness. But she didn't feel like she knew anyone in town anymore. Most of her old friends from high school had moved, or, even if some of them had remained, she wasn't prepared to expend her energy on some awkward reunion.

So, she started spending a lot of time at the university's music library. She went mostly to get her parents off her back, but it was nice to be out in the world again, if only to feel as if she were doing something, though she was doing mostly the same stuff at the library that she had been doing at home. She would sit in the listening area of the library and play old records. With the headphones on, she could still wallow in self-pity, but she could do it in a completely new environment. She spent a lot of time listening to Glenn Gould's interpretations of Bach's Goldberg Variations. And, eventually, she found that, for the first time since her spring recital, she really wanted to play the piano again.

Her mother had been pushing her to play more at home, encouraging her to not get out of practice. And she did play from time to time from her old songbooks. But nothing in those books was particularly challenging to her anymore, and she found that her playing was more automatic than it had been in a long time. At first, she blamed her robotic playing on the music. Then she blamed it on the piano. But she knew the problem was her own. Her playing had become more technical than emotional. She wasn't playing with any feeling, simply playing what was in front of her like someone had flipped a switch in her brain. She just couldn't ignite any of that old pa.s.sion. She felt genuinely uninspired, and her playing felt tired and lifeless. She was frightened that she was becoming bored with playing. Scared because she felt that music was all she had lefta"the one thread that held the rest of her life together. It had been all that still made sense of life. Without it, she would be an empty vessel, unmoving.

But hearing Gould, hearing the energy and the effortlessness of some of his later recordings in particular, she could hear the delicate ease of his phrasings, and the delight he clearly found in the music. Hearing him hum over the tracks made her remember how much joy one could find in playing the piano well.

And, so, one afternoon, she got up from the record player, set the headphones down by the player, left the library, and started searching the rest of the music building for a piano.

She found a room near the library with an old, ragged upright piano sitting in the back of the room. The door to the room was open, and though the lights were off, she didn't hesitate to go inside and sit at the piano. She stared at the keyboard for a long time. She lightly touched the keys, stroked them without pressing them toward music. She played a few scales to get a feel for the piano, learn its character, its sound. And then she playeda"just played. She didn't look at any music. There was no music to see. She didn't play anything from memory because none of the old music felt real to her anymore. She needed a different sound, something new to dance on. So, she just let her fingers skip across the keys, let out all her frustrations, her sadness, her fears, her desire. She felt, for the first time, that she was speaking the words she had been unable to articulate the past few months. For the first time since the last time she saw Max, she felt like she was finally getting all that hurt and anger off her chest, and it was rolling off her with such little effort that she even caught herself humming over the song.

After several minutes, she stopped, took a breath.

"What was that?" a voice asked from behind her.

Annie jumped. She hadn't known anyone was there.

"Sorry, I didn't mean to scare you. I was just walking by and heard someone playing, and I had to stop. It was amazinga"whatever it was."

She turned to get a closer look at him. "Eric?"

"Annie? I had no idea."

She got up from the piano and moved toward him. "How are you? It's beena Well, it's been a long time."

"It has. What? Five or six years probably," he said. "What are you doing back in town?"

And they proceeded to talk for a bit in that dark, empty music room. They talked about Annie's playing. They talked about the jazz records Eric had tucked under his arm. And they spoke about what they'd both been doing since they last saw each other. They stood in that room and talked for a long time, neither one of them wanting the conversation to end. So, he asked if she had time to get a cup of coffee. And it was so nice for her to have someone, other than her parents, to talk to again, and it was so good to feel like someone wanted to listen to her, that there was someone she genuinely wanted to listen to, that she said yes. She did have the time. She had nothing but time.