Water Seeks Its Own Level.

Below is a part of the story of Skip and Lee Halliday. You can read a later chapter of their lives here. If you’re not in the headspace for fiction, I simultaneously published a fashion-oriented post here today.

Skip sprinted down a moonlit Volta, his dress shoes crackling sharply on the pavement. Georgetown was a December study in chiaroscuro, the old shutters and brick illit, then illuminated, as he ran beneath the street lamps. The shoes he had borrowed from his hall-mate were a size too small, but he suppressed this awareness as he did all unpleasantries in his life, turning his face from them, permitting them no air to breathe. He glanced at his leather-strap watch — 8:02 — and then picked up his pace, his cheeks ruddied now from the chill rather than the three pints he’d just consumed at The Tombs, where we’d worn his shirt unbuttoned to mid-chest, and his black bow tie slewn around his neck. Molly McBrien had fawned all over him: “You’re just like James Dean,” she had whispered. He had smiled uncomfortably. He hated the way girls like Molly said things like that, whispered and performed privately, because, to the group, she was all eye rolls and “that asshole!” Besides, there was Lee. Not his Lee, but the promise of her. She was willowy, swan-like, the curve of her ivory neck a thing of spectacular grace, and Molly seemed orders of magnitude less by way of comparison. He knew this was callous, that the comparison was ill-conceived, but he couldn’t help it:

The way Lee tilted her head back, let her eyes linger long and searching as she listened. She was shockingly comfortable in her own skin. She seemed never put out by the conversation around her, never part of it, exactly. She could participate when she wanted and then withdraw into her feathers when she did not. Was it her tremendous wealth that had made her this way? Or some inborn elegance?

She had said: “Skip, are you busy on Saturday?” And her eyes were pools reflecting the moon. “My parents are having a formal party, black tie. Would you come?”

Skip had blustered through a response — didn’t think he was busy, no, I think that would be fine, yes, a tuxedo? OK, yes, thank you. It sounds fun. Thank you, yes. Where was it, and what time? She had watched him with a sweet smile, her arms behind her back, her head tilted to the side, standing by the front doors to Lauinger Library. She was wearing a short plaid wool dress and a wide black headband. He didn’t know anything about clothing, but she looked expensive, of a different era, untouchable. Only — he’d seen her at Sugar’s that morning earlier in the fall, before his lacrosse injury. She’d been wearing her boyfriend’s sweatshirt. It had to have been his, as she looked minuscule in it. It cascaded to her tanned mid-thighs, and the edges were frayed, and it did not compute that anyone so lovely could own anything that showed such careless wear, so it must have been his. Her boyfriend had been thoroughly engrossed in her. They were sitting in a stream of sunlight in the window, and he had his hand on her leg — possessively, and could Skip blame him? She was caught in laughter, her head back, her eyes closed. Skip didn’t know her then, but had to refocus on his shoes to keep from staring. He was wearing sweaty mesh shorts from practice, and even though he understood the effect he had on most women — he was tall, with a strong jaw and lacrosse physique, and once, his mother’s friend Mitsy had introduced him as “a long lost Kennedy cousin” while clucking her tongue knowingly — he felt, for one of the few times in his life, irrelevant. There was something cinematic about Lee, something beyond the page. She was the stuff of film, vaunted and technicolor. He felt plain text by comparison.

He still thought of that borrowed moment frequently. It felt illicit, to hang onto it, to imagine himself as that boyfriend of hers with his hand on her leg at 10 a.m. in the morning, wearing his old sweatshirt. Had she brushed her teeth at his apartment? Put in her contacts in the bathroom mirror? Forgotten her hairbrush on his dresser? It seemed impossible that such pedestrian details could belong to her.

“Okay, Skip,” she smiled. “I’m so glad.”

So there he was, running through Georgetown in too-small dress shoes, wondering what the night meant.

He knocked on the double wide door, taking in the mansion in front of him, which took up nearly a full city block. A butler opened the door:

“Sir,” he said, “Good evening. No top coat?” Skip suppressed a sarcastic comment, shaken by this lob of condescension.

“No,” he replied, batting the insecurity away.

The butler gestured Skip down a long hallway with glossy, polished floors, amber candlelight, enormous cut glass bowls of flowers. It deposited him into a ballroom of sorts, in which wealthy-looking older people congregated in small clumps, drinking champagne and speaking politely to one another in a collective hum. Skip stood at the doorway with his hands in his pockets, skimming the room for Lee. He should have known this would be an awkward rencontre. She seemed always so loose on details, as though they were beneath her notice. The logistics of everyday life did not appear to reach her. A server came by with a tray of wine, and Skip took a flute of champagne. Then he began an ambling circuit of the ballroom, attempting to look calm and unbothered. He tilted his chin at an angle, an affect he’d picked up from a classmate at Deerfield Academy, and it ballasted him through his reconnoiter. Occasional peals of laughter followed him through the room. He eyed, for a moment, an enormous oil painting on the far end of the room — an old family portrait of a stern-looking couple, a greyhound, and two imperious-looking children. Crystal bowls and silver platters of shrimp cocktail, beef tenderloin, oysters, strange squared canapes spread across a long buffet beneath it. He continued to walk, then paused and took another look around the room. Not a familiar or friendly face in sight, and then –

Outside the French doors lining the ballroom, in some kind of inner courtyard, her lithe body in a pastel blue gown, jewels in her ears: one long brushtroke of lustrous, aqua paint. Skip made his way to the door, tried to open it, but found it was shut to him. He tapped on the glass.

“Oh, Skip!” she smiled, her voice muffled, and she made a delicate movement of her wrist to the tall man standing with her, excusing herself, and disappeared. She emerged in the ballroom doorway, and the room seemed to percolate and prickle with awareness. Guests turned to touch her arm and say hello, an audible “ohh, isn’t she gorgeous?” followed her like a train, a colloquy of silver-haired women tutted over her dress, and then she was standing in front of him and putting her arms around his neck and kissing him just under his jawbone.

He couldn’t decide whether the kiss was more thrilling because of her or the audience, but his cheeks flushed pink and he found himself toeing at the herringbone floor.

The night turned blurry from the booze but he never achieved the loose and unbuttoned feeling he was after. He found himself speaking in a strange, strained voice, a half-octave too high, and strangled in conversation. He worked his way through introductions to a stream of older, important-seeming people who appeared only interested in him inasmuch as he was connected to Lee. Lee, Lee, Lee. They breathed her name, twinkle-eyed and awed. She shone in their audience, saying all the perfect things, and continuously returned the conversation to Skip, which he both resented and appreciated. When the string quartet came out, she asked him to dance, and he did, clumsily, and she laughed with forgiveness. Around 11, she told him she was tired, and would he walk her home?

She walked carefully through the night, rubbing at her arms. Skip pointlessly offered her his tuxedo jacket, aware that it wouldn’t fit over the tidy wool coat she was wearing. Halfway down Volta, halfway through a pause in their conversation, halfway between the two wild galaxies in which Skip had found himself that night, she asked him whether he was dating anybody, and he said no, and within two weeks of that night, Skip Halliday had all but moved into her off-campus apartment.

Skip occasionally stopped back at the dorm room he shared with Kirby Kittridge and J.P. Dunning to change clothes, or track down a book, or nurse a hangover. Kirby found his allegiance to Lee a subject of infinite derision and jest, calling him “Whipped Skip,” and rolling his eyes whenever Lee’s name came up. Skip took it all on the chin, shrugging and opening up his hands as if to say: “I guess.” Skip had considered Kirby’s outlook on women suspect ever since he watched Kirby’s mother tumble out of a black Suburban that was double-parked on 37th Street, leaving her door swinging open so that no traffic could get by in either direction, and walk over to Kirby on her spindly heels and over-tanned legs, and Kirby had lambasted her with such intensity that Skip, and J.P., and the other lacrosse boys had kicked at the grass and squinted into middle-distance as though engrossed in a riveting phantom conversation, so as to keep their eyes averted. Kirby’s mother had given it right back to him, but the entire exchange felt sad and lopsided. After, J.P. had said, “Jesus, Kittridge.” And Kirby had looked surprised. Skip had known, then, to avoid Kirby in any matters of the heart, and he grew standoffish, uneasy whenever Kirby seemed entangled with a new girl — not that there were many. Kirby routinely acted as though women were too much trouble to mess with, even the Molly McBriens, who made dating almost effortless.

But one day, while Skip was grabbing clean gym shorts from the dorm room, Kirby made a passing comment about Lee as a fallen saint, and Skip’s game smile dropped and he said: “If you say another word about Lee…” and he didn’t need to finish the threat. He was standing within an inch of Kirby’s face, towering.

“Hey, hey, hey –” interjected J.P., nudging the two of them apart from one another. Skip said nothing, but stood his ground.

“Goddamn it, Halliday, what the hell?” spluttered Kirby, pushing back from Skip. “She’s really got you whipped. You’ve got to be careful about those girls. I’m trying to do you a favor.” Skip blinked, unanswering. “Skip, man. She’s high maintenance. She’ll drain you. And, and — those girls have daddies you don’t want to mess with.”

It dawned on Skip that Kirby was coping by way of projection, that he was grasping at loose straws in his loneliness, and Skip sighed, and scratched his neck as if in consideration. His roommates were plying him, and Kirby was still mouthing off about siren calls and rich fathers. Skip looked out the window and across the greenswards dotted with moving students beneath, and felt for the first time that perhaps he had been spending too much time with a college girlfriend. He loved her, was obsessed with her, even, but — the world was vast and complex, and there were thousands of lives to live. These thoughts left him feeling alien to himself.

At Lee’s apartment that night, he sat on the kitchen stool with a beer in his left hand. Lee was making dinner in the unhurried way she did everything. Skip’s eyes darted from the nearly-overflowing pot to the knife precariously perched at the edge of the counter.

“–and then, I realized how hard it must be for her to be so far away from home,” she was saying, looking off distractedly, as she recounted a conversation with one of her girlfriends. She had a dreamy look in her eye — not uncommon for her — and she sidled up against the counter, one hand draped around her waist. Skip stood and moved the knife back a couple of inches from the edge.

“Anyway,” she said, and she trained her eyes on him. “How are you? How was your day?” She moved toward him, and put her fingers in his hair.

Skip felt deeply adrift. Life had been so easy when he had folded into the masculine pack of his friends, when he was one fish in a forward-moving school, when the girls didn’t matter, and even the lacrosse felt — though seriously undertaken — ultimately unimportant. After all, he knew he was not going to play lacrosse after college. He had laughed at locker room jokes and enjoyed taking his pints of “Beast” at The Tombs and slept well and long in his twin bed. Lee had changed everything. He loved her, for one thing. He wasn’t sure he’d loved anyone before her. Yes, his mother, but he had to admit it: even that love felt schematic in comparison, and not just because it was a different kind of love than the one he shared with Lee. He felt fully himself in front of Lee, and she made that self seem interesting. She would study him carefully while he spoke, and reference his observations in later conversations, and ask, “What do you make of it?” as she’d squint her opalescent eyes at him. He found it difficult to communicate his cleverness and sensitivity to nearly anyone in the world, yet she not only saw but drew out these qualities in him, as though metal filings to a magnet. One day, Skip had off-handedly mentioned the way he sometimes sat with his childhood dog, Wrigley, on the back porch of his parents’ Connecticut home, and that watching the rise and fall of the dog’s chest made him feel profoundly happy, and he couldn’t explain why. Lee’s eyes had welled up, and she had said: “I know, I know, I know.”

Lee was herself complex, and her complexity had also changed Skip. She was hungry and curious and unnervingly smart, although the ruminative way she moved through life suggested otherwise. It had taken Skip a minute to understand the way her languor camouflaged the quicksilver of her tongue, her mind, her mood. Once he witnessed this dimensionality, he felt, with some internal embarrassment, as though initiated. She was a Woman, not one of the girls he’d dated at Deerfield Academy. She contained multitudes. Somehow this apprehension made him feel much older, more sophisticated than his hall-mates, and he sensed this was why he’d reacted so brashly in the dorm room. But it was also precisely her multiplicity that left him unmoored, as he felt no more secure in her company than he did with his hall-mates: she would be marveling, free-wheeling, meandering, and he would always have one eye on the knife’s edge on the counter. And so he was caught between the simplicity of his former self and the prismatic relationship in which he found himself with Lee.

“Skip,” she said, and she had her palms on his shoulders, and she waited for him to speak, and so he did. He told her about the adriftness, the way he’d split open in the dorm room, the many lives to live. Lee listened carefully.

“I think,” she said, “That water seeks its own level.” She laced her fingers through his. “I went through this with some of my girlfriends, too, and the gradations are excruciating.” He saw now the way he’d been swimming against the grain, in search of something upstream. He saw also the way those movements had liberated him from the narrowness of lacrosse practice and summer internships, how he’d been able to imagine a thousand alternities, and how essential Lee was to each. She drew her arms around his neck, and he understood it wasn’t loneliness he’d felt — it was the re-anchoring of his world. Home had shifted coordinates.

P.S. More fiction here, here, and here.