He isn't actually in love with her.
People say he is, gossip about his habit of watching her, but he's not.
They've been friends forever, since before he met his ex-wife. They have their own special patterns, rhythms, reasons; they hold each other when things go wrong. She is the spit & string keeping him together. But he isn't actually in love with her.
Even if it seems that way.
****
They went out for drinks that night. Everyone did, except Leo & the President of course, and they all got drunk. Because that's what you do when you work at the White House and it's 'Big Block of Cheese Day,' and you suddenly find yourself questioning everything. When north and south are interchangeable and you realize you're no longer a radical. When you can't find yourself on the map. You get drunk and hope there are no photographers lurking behind the bar.
"I am the man!" Josh is standing on a chair, boasting that he has cheated death yet again. The banana that hit him earlier has somehow morphed into a rock, a bomb, and a knife in various retellings of the story. He falls off the chair and into Donna's lap. "Donnatella, Donna, Donna, Donna- what a pretty name. Donna."
He's gently stroking her hair as everyone stares at them in amazement.
"All right, Josh, that's 'nough for you." Donna's words are slightly slurring; she decides it's time for them to leave. "We're going home." One look at the green tint to Sam's skin and she adds, "You too Sam. C'mon boys, let's call a cab. CJ, Toby- you wanna come with?"
They're barely tipsy, CJ decides, and she answers for them both. "Nah, we don't want to leave until we can't stand up anymore. You guys go ahead."
And they're alone, in a bar, drinking themselves together. They're not in love, not really, but they find themselves repeating certain patterns. Like this. This is what they do best; this is their map. So they order a new round of drinks and try to find their way home.
"You'd get drunk a lot faster it you'd give up on those grasshoppers. Drink a real drink. Like a man."
She smiles, "I'm not a man."
"I know." And he does.
But he's not in love with her.
Even if, after a few too many drinks, he finds himself making heady declarations he can't really mean as they dance to bad eighties power ballads. And he kisses her in a drunken haze, and she lets him.
And the patterns, rhymes, reasons continue as they have for years.
"I told you- you want to make out with me."
"You're drunk."
"Toby-" She's trying to reprimand him but giggles instead. "To-oo-oo-by. Toby. To--by." She plays with his name, lengthening it, splitting it like an atom. She's playing with him, the game of words, of language distilled into pure sounds. Vowels. Consonants. It's his game, but she plays it well; the syllables hold them together like the tape on her nephew's Ford Escort.
"We're going home."
She kisses him on the cheek. ::smack:: She can't seem to find his mouth; it keeps moving on her, swaying back and forth with the room. She only gets this drunk with him.
"Mmkay."
*****
And he walks her to her door because that's what gentlemen do; it has nothing to do with love when he opens the door and follows her inside. It's what they do, time and again, when they no longer know who or even where they are.
She's leaning against the wall as he attempts to manage the intricacies of the deadbolt. And she can't stop laughing, suddenly, at the dire predictability of their friendship. They've done this countless times before, in 43 out of 50 states and this one time in France that neither of them can completely piece together, this coming together too late at night after too much to drink. They circle the inevitable moment through months of sobriety only to crash together with a Jack Daniels and a grasshopper. She falls to the floor, sitting with knees bent in front of her and her back against the wall. He sits against the door he's finally managed to lock.
"I'm not in love with you." He states the obvious, as he's done since the beginning. Since the first time.
"I know."
And they sit in silence, the map changing imperceptibly as they dream about latitude and longitude.
*****
When they wake up, the sun's too bright, and they're sore from a night spent on her hardwood floor. And he looks at her, and she at him, and Africa's suddenly too big and Greenland barely exists. He's no longer a radical.
So they shield their eyes against the harshness of the morning and stumble to her bedroom. It's Saturday, and for the first time since they can remember, they're not going to work. He forgets about Shul. They're tired and hung over, and he follows her to her bed. Where they lie down and fall asleep tangled in each others arms. Their old map is obsolete, and they sleep together for the first time fully clothed.
Which doesn't mean they're in love, not exactly.
*****
They wake up to a setting sun and a ringing phone. Her mouth is dry, she can barely croak out, "Hello," so he gets her a glass of Orange Juice that she swallows in one gulp. He stares at her and listens to her end of the conversation.
"Toby made sure I got home all right." She rolls her eyes and mouths the words, 'It's Josh.' He grabs the phone from her in time to hear Josh say, "And where did the ever-thoughtful Mr. Ziegler wake up this morning?"
"On the floor in her living room. Good-bye Josh."
He doesn't know why he does it, only knows that everything's suddenly different and he's struggling to decipher their new world. He leans over her to hang up the phone and she slaps playfully him on the arm.
"Well now that everyone knows, the least you can do is make me breakfast."
"But it's-" he squints his eyes at the clock "-almost six o-clock at night."
"And I feel like pancakes. So scoot."
*****
He burns the pancakes, predictably, and she eats hers with strawberry jam. He complains that she doesn't have any syrup.
"I don't like it, so why should I bother buying it?"
"I like it."
"So now I'm supposed to do my grocery shopping based on your likes and dislikes?"
They stare at each other with the abrupt awareness that she's not asking about food. This is suddenly about sound and language, radicalism and the rotations of the Earth. Their old map is obsolete; they're attempting to build a new one out of grocery lists and maple syrup. So he answers the only way he knows how, following the newly discovered contours of the continents of their relationship.
"Yes."
They are Africa, suddenly infinitely bigger; they are Europe, unexpectedly a mere speck. They are a sphere that someone's trying to pound into a more manageable rectangle of paper, stubbornly clinging to their rotundity. They've contorted themselves into simplicity for far too long; they fight it now because, finally, they can.
*****
Hours later they return from the supermarket, and he sets a bottle of syrup on her shelf.
"We're having pancakes tomorrow morning, like normal people, with butter and syrup. Normal people pancakes."
She laughs, "Normal people pancakes? That's the best you can come up with?" A pause. "And who says you get to be here tomorrow morning?"
"The Cartographers for Social Equality?"
"Well, as long as they've given their permission."
"And Solzhenitsyn--"
"The Russian poet?"
"This kid at the protest today. The leader, if you can really call him that. He thinks I need to spend more time with you, so you'll be too distracted to talk him out of cameras next time."
"Hmmm," She wraps her arms around him. "Then maybe you should leave."
He kisses her, softly, and whispers into her mouth, "Probably."
They're kissing, and the continents keep shifting shape in her head as he struggles to distinguish north from south. He pulls away and leads her to the living room; he needs the solidity of words, diphthongs and stop-plosives combining to form meaning, to piece together a suddenly fragmented world where north is south but east will always be east, where the foreign and the familiar clash together with alarming alacrity.
"In the Cyrillic alphabet, there's no one letter for the English 'J' sound. That's because it's not actually one sound; it's two- the 'd' sound and 'zh.' They combine to form what we interpret as a single sound."
"So my name's actually C-ee-D-ZH-ay." She enunciates each sound separately, rolling them on her tongue. "Two sounds coming together to form one. Like diphthongs, like 'ay' and 'i.' A-ee. Amazing."
"The alphabet's just the map, the guide to piecing together language. It differs from culture to culture, shifts throughout the ages, but it's a representation of the same basic thing. Sound expressing thoughts, ideas, emotions. The map's not important; the reality's what counts."
"The map." And suddenly she doesn't care if Australia is on the top or the bottom. The world is spinning through space, and concepts like north and south are irrelevant in the vastness of eternity. Because sometimes up is down and left is right, but some things are constant. Like this. Like them.
Because the words are only the map, and sometimes 'I'm not in love with you' means something else entirely, like 'I'm tired,' or 'I'm scared,' or even 'I love you.' Because even 'I love you' is only a juxtaposition of sounds, a flat representation of a spherical entity and not at all depictive of the truth.
Which is, of course, that they're in love.
"The map," he repeats. He holds her hand against his heart, their fingers as irrevocably entwined as their souls, as she kisses him. They move beyond the need for maps, words, simplicity; they have found their way home without them.
fin.
[once more into the fray]