The Life of the World to Come Read Free

in the movie?”
    â€œYou’re the only person I know here who maybe won’t talk about the film or about me,” she explained as her eyes darted frenetically between the smattering of assembled students, looking for recognizable faces from which she could shrink.
    â€œWe don’t have to talk about anything,” I answered with my still eyes on hers: twin hazel atoms, agitated, whizzing suspiciously around the room.
    â€œBecause we don’t know each other, I mean.”
    â€œI’m sorry?” I inquired, suddenly and strangely and intriguingly hurt.
    â€œWe don’t really know each other, so we can talk about anything else. We can talk about the Giants, for example, because I don’t know how you feel about them yet.”
    â€œRight, I—”
    â€œAnd you don’t know how I feel about them either.”
    â€œRight, so I don’t really—”
    â€œI hate them. I hate the Giants.”
    â€œAlright. Do you mean the New York Giants, or—”
    â€œSo we shouldn’t talk about that, probably, but what I’m saying is that we can basically talk about anything, just please not the film and not me. Not me in the film, I mean. Not acting.”
    â€œFiona, we don’t have to talk about anything. It would actually be … rude, to talk, you know? We’re at a movie, and everyone will be—”
    â€œWe’re at a film, Leo,” she breathed, almost inaudibly, and in that moment I saw for the first time in my life a whole beautiful future.
    I am not a sudden person, but something in her chased that all away. Stardust, maybe, though looking back it’s difficult to say what parts of that were real. Even then, Fiona seemed infinitely more alive, and yet less lifelike, than the rest; she was ruled by other impulses, governed by other laws passed down from brighter bodies. And right then and there, in the gaping mouth of the campus theater, she snapped me from my present.
    Within a week, it was decided that if we were going to be the perfect little love of the century we were going to have to do everything in double-time. And so it was: days of lunch and dinner, days of breakfast and lunch, afternoons spent hastily Venn diagramming our respective circles of friends, nights spent studying each other for the big quiz that seemed certain to come at the close of the academic year. If our nearest and dearest were shocked by the velocity of it all, Fiona and I neither noticed nor cared. Fast love was a business, and at graduation we took dozens of photographs together, correctly suspecting that our later selves would think us smart anticipators.
    *   *   *
    To those who don’t know her well at all, Fiona is a dazzling cartoon mouse of a woman. Lithe and full-throated, perpetually bright-eyed and winging, she was impossible to miss, even at those times—and there were many—when she wanted nothing more than to be some icy and long-forgotten planet, rather than the gauzy, centric sun of every eager solar system she happened to flit through.
    I learned this and everything else about her that summer and in the three following years. We moved into an apartment together on the first of September—I know, I know, but we did—four days before my first day of law school. The place was, by any metric, stark and sunless, but it provided untold gallons of renewable fuel for Fiona’s acting machine; to her (she of the Great Midwest), it felt more like the Eastern Bloc than Brooklyn, a perspective that served to authenticate her entire artistic creaturehood. To me, the apartment brought to mind nothing more than striving, as of two young, squawking lovebirds barnstorming their way through life’s challenges, shitting on the windshields of all who dared to question their liberal arts degrees. We were twenty-two when it started.
    Becoming an adult is a funny thing in much the same sense that love is a funny