Coda: Sympathy for the Devil (written in late 2008)
The first snow falls on a Tuesday that year. Afternoon is blending into evening and there are lights everywhere, as if the world just suddenly decided to go all bright and shiny. If she squints she can just make out the forgotten barbecue grill at the back of her neighbor’s yard, covered in white powder, lid hanging half-way off in a sad salute to a summer gone by too quickly.
She’s not sad. Neither is she lonely. She’s alright now.
Sam rings the door bell exactly 6 minutes later.
***
Even as a little girl she’d hated summer. It made her feel inadequate somehow, dry and cold like someone who didn’t know how to respond to the most basic aspects of humanity. Sam looks like he misses summer. He’s huddled up in a coat and scarf the same colour as the rental car parked by the side of the road, and his gaze shows a trace of annoyance. But maybe that’s because he’s had to fly all the way over here just to see her; she can’t tell anymore.
“Sam. Why are you here?” Not ‘what are you doing here’. She didn’t think she’d be this hostile still.
He looks at her for a second before his gaze slips away and he brings his hands up to his face. “I might have had something to do here.” Testing her. At her skepticism he readily gives in. “Yeah, I don’t know. Just one of those spur of the moment things. I thought you wouldn’t mind. Terribly.”
It comes back to her in bits and pieces, when he takes his clothes off; how beautiful he is. It’s like every layer shed brings a little more light into the apartment where she lives, like a warm fire starting up in a hearth that was never there before. Sam puts his gloves on the table next to today’s paper, then turns his cell phone off.
For the first time in over a year, her smile feels genuine.
***
“I have things to do tomorrow. There’s a reason one doesn’t do this, you know.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean not everyone finds it prudent to fly across the country without advance warning. You came here for what, Sam, a week?”
“Maybe I did have reasons besides you,” he says and she feels a flashback coming on.
“Sam…you just did. Just now, out there.”
“No, actually what I did was make a joke about being in the neighborhood. There is no reason to believe that a spur of the moment decision must include one thing and one thing only. I feel like there is a lot in this town that I have yet to discover.”
“Oh my God, Sam.” She looks at him, hard, and can feel the doubts gathering behind her eyes. She’s quick to look away. “You want a cup of tea?”
“Yeah, thanks.”
When she goes to bed that night her heart feels like a bullet lodged in her chest. She can hear Sam moving around in the kitchen downstairs, probably aiming for quiet but ending up somewhere closer to clumsy. She closes her eyes and prays that next day will be as free of mentions of him as today has been, but she’s never believed in any God, and she’s never been too good at asking for help.
***
They’re both morning persons, stumbling into each other at the bottom of the stairs before either of them has to be up. She wants a cup of coffee, he needs to take a shower. Sam’s smile is bright and easy in the pale light of dawn, and she dares to hope that he’ll understand why she did it.
Of course, she forgets that none of Sam’s positive traits include normal social interaction.
“You know you never see this kind of light on the west coast?” He’s dressed in a baby blue shirt and slacks now, academic glasses perched on his nose as he expertly surveys page 2 of the morning newspaper. She smiles at the top of his head.
“Yeah, that’s one of the reasons I moved here.” She doesn’t realize that’s the wrong thing to say until she hears his reply. “Come again?”
“I said, he fired Megan last month. She asked him why he never addressed her in meetings anymore, and he told her it’s because she’s an incompetent amateur and then he fired her.”
She doesn’t know what to do with that. She feels like she should want to throw up, hearing that she’d been right all along.
“That’s the worst crap I’ve ever heard.” She looks at Sam, who’s staring at his coffee mug without really seeing it. “Did he fire David too?” she asks.
When Sam shakes her head no, she lets the door slam behind her.
***
They go out to eat on the evening of the third day, at a small trattoria a few blocks away from where she lives. Sam’s an awful cook, and she just can’t be bothered. They’ve only just sat down when Sam, for the first time since he’s arrived, launches into one of his idealistic ramblings. Something about the wonders of the Italian cuisine, and the discrepancies in its government. She welcomes the break.
“I mean, you, did you hear what he said about Obama? Tanned? Really; tanned?! And the bread here is so delicious!” he practically moans.
She takes a sip of water and rests her chin in her hand. “Does Lucy still make you cry?”
“She never made me cry!” he shouts and flings the piece of bread at the end of his fork towards the kitchens. “Besides, the atmosphere these days isn’t exactly conducive to debate-“
“You mean daydreaming.” He shoots her a dirty look.
“-debate, not like the good old days. It seems, ah, it might have withered along with the increase in power.”
“What, Julian can’t find the time to debate policy in between him firing all his friends and being the biggest asshole on the planet?” she bites out and then neatly proceeds to choke on her own words. Sam looks at her, and maybe now he does understand.
“Something like that.”
They go out for beers afterwards, and Sam gets absolutely hammered. He gets three songs in with a busty forty-something year old before she drags him back to the table, where he proceeds to start in on tequila shots. When he later snaps at a flirty bartender, something cold and cruel entering his eyes, she realizes that she’s not the only one suffering.
***
There is a snow storm rolling in from northwest. She decides to tackle her unapproachable driveway anyway, and as she does she thinks about decisions and people and giving up. She doesn’t want to believe she’s given up; she never wants to believe that. But something about Sam coming here resonates with a part of her that she’s been too scared to look at.
He’s at the table nursing a cup of coffee when she comes back in, looking her up and down with bleary eyes. “You know there is absolutely no purpose to what you’ve been doing out there. It’s going to be covered again in an hour.”
“I know,” she says. She puts on a pair of warm socks and sinks down in the chair opposite him. “And how are you feeling today?”
“Like I drank tequila and exhibited bad taste in women last night. How bad was I?” he asks.
“As bad as you get when you switch over to tequila shots after five beers,” she answers truthfully and shrugs. “But I’ve seen worse. I’ve even seen worse involving you.”
“Ok,” he shrugs back, and she thinks everything is fine just before it’s not anymore, and Sam kidnaps the topic and gives her a whiplash all at the same time.
“I think we should talk about Julian.”
The hesitation in his voice tells her that he’s almost as reluctant as she is. She wonders why she was so naive, why she thought he would be a coward about this.
“Ok.” Her own voice sounds weak and scared. She tries, and fails, to fight the need to automatically go on the defensive. “But I honestly don’t know what you want me to say here, Sam. Do you want me to say that I left, that I gave up? Fine. I did that,” she bites out, Sam’s vary expression echoing inside her. “But I can’t be with someone who turns into a psychopath the minute I turn my back on him.”
Sam looks at her and slowly shakes his head. “You know Julian’s not a psychopath, my God, don’t be-”
“Yes, oh my God Sam, I know Julian’s not a psychopath! Ok? I know he’s not a psychopath. That’s not the point.”
“So tell me what the point is.” And she hates when he takes the ‘tired and patient’ tone with her. She presses her lips together and shakes her hands to loose some of the tension in them, coming out looking like a boxer preparing for a fight in the process.
“The point is, well the point is. I don’t want to be his anymore, Sam. It’s like something I just can’t bear to even think about. I just. One day; it happened. And I couldn’t shake it. Have you ever felt that way, like your body shuts down on you because it has to?” She stops and stares at her hands.
“Do you know, I feel so stupid right now?” she continues after a while. “I never thought I’d want to change someone. I thought I was better than that.”
“But you want to change everyone, that’s kind of your thing,” Sam says and she lets loose a strange hiccup-laugh.
“I do?”
“Yeah.”
“Oh, that’s awful,” she grimaces. “Well, I don’t know. Maybe I knew that. I think I knew that. I just didn’t think it would apply when I found someone I-“ She stops herself almost involuntarily, changes course. “I know Julian, and I know people think Julian’s a brilliant man, that somehow he gets away with things because of that. Because he’s brilliant, or whatever. But I can’t be the one you come to when he needs a sounding board to crash into.”
Sam frowns. The minutes tick by as they sit in silence.
“He fired Megan,” she then says, breaking it. “He’s an awful man who’s not as awful when he’s with me. And I don’t know what to do with that. And I shouldn’t have to feel this awful, it’s not my fault and it’s not fair.”
“That doesn’t necessarily mean you were in the right though.”
“I guess.”
Sam reaches out and touches her hand, looks away out at the twirling snowflakes. “You don’t have to make everything so complicated. It’s stupid, not taking what you want.”
“No, Sam, it’s not stupid,” she says grumpily and snatches her hand away. “Just because you don’t get why it’s not simple, you don’t get to-“
“What, why, why don’t I get that it’s not simple? Because it is?”
“No! Don’t you see that there are, there are things in the way? In getting what you want, sometimes you can’t just take it! That’s not, that’s bullshit. Bullshit, Sam. Give me a break. I know what my issues are. I know what they are and I know I’d feel better if I could get over them, but you never even try to understand where I’m coming from. And I try, all the time, Sam. I try.”
She folds her arms across her chest and glares at him. Sam, strangely enough, glares back. She tries not to acknowledge the fact that everything she just said screamed ‘fuck my issues, I’m right!’, even though she really tried to make it sound less arrogant than that. Then Sam winces and lets his head fall back on the mercy of his hangover, and she thinks blow this.
“Oh, whatever. I thought maybe I’d stay. Or go. I never knew if I’d come out of this looking non-judgemental about staying or self-reliant for walking away. Now I just feel like shit anyway.”
She surprises him into laughing. After a beat he puts his head down on the table; she puts hers next to his. Together they watch as the world tumbles down on a wave of snow.
***
The day before he’s due to leave again, she realizes that Sam is really mad at her. She feels that that’s all she’s been doing for the past decade; realizing things that either make her seem stupid or arrogant or wrong. Only apparently not even yesterday’s fight got her to figure this one out, so she thinks he must have been hiding it spectacularly well.
He receives a phone call. On his other cell, the one he didn’t tell her about, the work cell. He picks it up after dinner and she watches in fascination as his face slowly crumbles and then struggles to pick itself up again. She’d know who it was even if she couldn’t hear the inflection of his voice at the other end of the line.
After Sam has finished talking, he looks at her and there is something helpless about him. Like he can’t help looking at her, like he can’t help hating her just a little bit.
***
The drive to the airport is spent mostly in silence, and it takes them longer than expected due to the ever present heavy snowfall. When they arrive Sam has just about 5 minutes to spare.
“Sam, I...” she starts and looks at him, fighting through the irritation she feels with him, herself. “I can’t talk to you about this. Because honestly, I don’t care. If I cared, I’d hate you for blaming me, even just a little. It’s not my fault he’s stupid.”
“Yeah,” Sam says and nods his head absently, reaching down to pick up his bag as they hear his gate being called. He gives her a crooked smile and she gives up her bad mood long enough to step into his embrace.
“Hey,” he whispers into her hair.
“Hey,” she whispers back and hugs him tighter, trying to retain some of that summer for herself.
“Oh Sam?” she shouts after him seconds later, and he turns back around just before he’s about to go through security. “Just… Don’t believe all that crap about brilliance paying off in the end, ok? Think about yourself for a change. I know you came here more for yourself than for me anyway!”
Sam’s hand motions for her to leave it alone, but she can see the smile still playing at the corner of his lips. And she at least has the time to feel grateful for that.