Your life falls into the cyclical patterns of your class schedule. You catch up on your homework and actually start enjoying your classes. You’d always wondered over the years whether you would have been able to hack law school, rather than just settling for your paralegal degree. In idle moments you find yourself considering it, all but forgetting what it is that you came back for. Inez, after all, is a stranger to you. The only emotional investment you have in winning her back is that it would put things back to the way they were before. Whatever that was like.
And then one day you’re reading de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America in a booth at the student union coffee shop when you spot Inez sitting at a table by herself across the room. Seeing her, everything floods back to you at once. The urge to set everything back to normal, of course, but there's more than that. The intimacy of that two-person bedroom back at the house. The curtain of dresses suddenly hanging in your closet. The pair of toothbrushes in matching cups. The photograph of the two of you together – and the smile on your face in that photograph.
I many never get a better chance, you realize.
You sit for a little while studying her, trying to figure out the best way to approach this. The more you look, though, the more something starts nagging at you. There’s something odd about her, and it takes you another minute to figure out what: she isn’t reading a book, she isn’t texting her friends, she isn’t talking with anyone. She doesn't even look like she's meditating. She’s just sitting there without any distraction whatsoever, contenting herself with the fine art of doing nothing.
She seems so untroubled that you hate to interrupt. But you know that you can’t miss this chance.
You stand slowly, tucking your book under your arm, and stroll casually across the room to her table. You have no idea what you’re going to do when you get there. You decide to trust that you and Inez were meant for one another – that the connection will form naturally.
Without a book or phone to distract her, Inez spots you when you’re still ten paces away. You smile, and she watches you blandly.
“Hello,” you begin.
What charm! you think. How can she possibly resist you?
“I noticed you from across the room,” you continue. “You were sitting so quietly. I was curious what was keeping your mind so occupied.”
She smirks back at you. “You think I’m going to tell a complete stranger my thoughts?” she asks.
“Probably not,” you admit. “I just wanted to say that you've got a beautiful stillness.”
“So you had to come disturb it,” she notes.
One more misfire, you can tell, and you’ll be going down for the third time. But then you notice the pendant around her neck: the letter “I.”
“Tell you what,” you say. “Give me three chances. If I can guess your name, then you’ll let me join you. If not, I’ll go away.”
Her eyes narrow and she reaches up to touch her necklace. You have to say this for her: she’s sharp. You’d been hoping to start with a “Mary” or “Sue” just to make it look hard, but now your biggest challenge is going to be coming up with two other women’s names that begin with I.
“Deal,” she says.”
Uninvited, you slip into the chair across the table from her. “Isabel.”
“No.”
“Eileen?”
“Eileen starts with an E,” she tells you.
“Does that mean I still have two chances?” you ask.
She crosses her arms and purses her lips. “No.”
“Hmm.” You lean forward across the table, narrowing your eyes and screwing up your face, putting on a good show. “Inez,” you venture, finally.
Genuine surprise crosses her face, and then suspicion. “Someone told you.”
You gesture to the room around you. “Who would have told me?”
“It’s still a trick – I’m sure of it,” she says.
“Does that mean I don’t get to join you?”
After a pause, she smiles. “No.”
* * *
You end up, inevitably, at The Slice. Try as you might, you end up falling back on the usual first-date chit chat.
“Philosophy major?” you ask her. “What on Earth are you going to do with that?”
“Think,” she answers simply.
“That I can understand, I guess,” you say. “But I want to think about things I can do something about. That’s why I’m studying political science.”
“So which one are you?” she asks. “Political or scientific?”
“Neither, actually. I’m thinking of going to law school.”
She winces and sucks in her breath. “Oooo. And I was just starting to like you.”
You grin. “I’m serious, though. What do you do with a philosophy degree?”
“We’re back to the sitting-at-the-table-doing-nothing conversation again,” she says. “Why does it have to be for anything? It just is.”
“All right, then let’s put it this way: what’s the appeal?”
For the first time, a fully serious look crosses her face. “I want to know things,” she says. “Why the Universe is the way it is. Why things happen the way they do. Don’t you?”
“Well, sure,” you admit. “But do you really expect to figure out the answers?”
Her grin is back again, and she shakes her head. “We’re back to the sitting-at-the-table-doing-nothing conversation again,” she repeats. “Again again.”
“I obviously have a lot to learn about doing nothing for the sake of nothing,” you say.
“The Taoists call it ‘wuwei’ – ‘action through inaction.’”
“Okay, you’re going to have to walk me through that one.”
“’The Master acts without doing anything and teaches without saying anything. When her work is done, she forgets it. That is why it lasts forever.’”
“Okay…” you say hesitantly.
“Lao Tsu,” she says.
“Gesundheit.”
That gets an actual giggle out of her. Thank goodness the woman has a sense of humor.
* * *
Back in your dorm room that night, you marvel over the wealth of new knowledge you’ve picked up from just one conversation with Inez. You can see that, if you pursue this relationship, it’s going to take your life in a whole new direction.
And for just an instant, you catch yourself asking if that’s what you really want.
I mean, that’s what you came all the way back here for, isn’t it? It’s the way things are supposed to be.
Isn’t it?
* * *
“You’re different,” Jim says.
The two of you are sitting in the laundry room of the dorm, waiting for the spin cycle to end.
“What do you mean?” you ask.
Jim frowns. You thought he was about to start teasing you but this seems to be something he’s genuinely concerned about. “I don’t know. For the last week or two you’ve just seemed more serious somehow. Less goofy. You know how you get.”
“More grown up?” you venture.
“Oh good Lord I hope not,” Jim says. “That shit’s contagious.”
“Is it a problem?” you ask.
He shakes his head. “It’s just … different. It’s got to be this new girl you’re seeing.”
“Oh, I don’t know about that,” you tell him. “We’ve only gone out for dinner a few times. I wouldn’t even say we’re dating.”
“Well, whatever you old timers call it,” Jim says.
“Maybe I just got sick of being jealous about how happy you and Kathy are all the time.”
Jim scoffs. “I hope you can manage more than that.”
“Problems?”
“Nothing big,” Jim says vaguely. “It’s just not always as easy as we make it look is all.”
And then it strikes you. You’ve been so focused on the reason you came back that it never occurred to you before that you have the opportunity to change other things as well. It broke your heart when Jim and Kathy broke up. No – “broke up” isn’t strong enough. They refused to ever talk to one another again, and neither of them would talk about it afterwards. It made spring semester of senior year torture for all three of you.
Yes, you’ve come back to put your own history right. But that doesn’t mean you can’t change a few other things along the way. How much of a problem would it be? After graduation, you hardly ever heard from either of them again. You could keep their relationship from imploding without changing your own history too much. You think.
Father would never approve, of course. Not that he ever had to know.
“You see?” Jim says. You glance up to see him studying your face carefully. “More serious.”
You don’t know what to say to that.
* * *
There’s never really a point where you and Inez change from “going out to dinner” to “dating.” Suddenly, it’s not a question anymore of if you’ll be spending time together but when. From there, it’s a short hop to the foregone conclusion that you’ll see each other each evening. All of this happens before the two of you even kiss.
It’s romantic, but not in any way you’ve ever experienced it before. It’s a romance of the mind, not the body. Almost as if adding a physical element to the relationship would dilute it somehow.
Not that you aren’t attracted to her. The more time you spend with her, the more you begin to see how attractive brunettes can be. Her bronze skin. Her sleek black hair. Her small, coltish body, small-breasted but wide-hipped. You think about it. Imagine it. But still you hold back – almost as if delaying the pleasure as long as possible will make the inevitable surrender all the more satisfying.
It seems like she feels the same way, you suppose. Or maybe she’d just genuinely not attracted to you. Most of the time, you can’t even tell if this is flirting for her or just friendship.
Then comes the inevitable: meeting one another’s friends. Inez is part of a loose group of other philosophy majors: more of a book club than a social life. They sit around drinking coffee and letting the conversation meander from one insightful question to another – all of it going way over your head.
Next, it’s time to introduce Inez to Kathy and Jim. They’ve been badgering you about meeting her for over a week now. You couldn’t be more nervous if you were taking her home to meet Father. So much is riding on everyone getting along.
The Big Event takes place, of course, at The Slice. It doesn’t take long before you realize what a mistake you’ve made. The conversation focuses on the one thing the three of them have in common: you.
“So there have been other women?” Inez asks.
“Lots of them,” Kathy says. “The problem with this one” – she waves a hand in your general direction – “is the short attention span. Not ‘Miss Right’ so much as ‘Miss Right Now.’”
“I’m sitting right here, you know,” you tell them both sourly.
“You’re complaining?” Kathy asks, fixing you with a hard look. “We’re doing you a favor. Or would you rather she and I were having this conversation behind your back?”
You look over at Jim for support. He’s staring down at his lap.
But Inez leans into you, grabbing your forearm in both hands. “I think I’ve learned about as much new information as I care to know.”
Kathy shrugs. “Suit yourself.” And she downs the second half of her beer in a single swallow.
Inez turns to Jim. “So what are you majoring in?” she asks brightly.
One long awkward dinner later and then you walk Inez back to her dorm. It’s late October – too chilly out for the jacket you’re wearing.
“You have to explain this to me,” Inez is saying. “The way Kathy was talking, you’ve never really been looking for a relationship.”
“That was then,” you say simply.
But Inez shakes her head. “No. That day at the student union, you made a beeline straight for me. You weren’t shopping around. You were buying.” She stops walking, and you turn back to her so that you’re standing face to face. “That’s more than just an infatuation. And don’t give me any crap about ‘love at first sight.’ I know you don’t believe in that sort of thing. So what are you really up to?”
Damn, she’s sharp, you think to yourself, and not for the first time.
You glance down at your shoes and back up into her eyes. Huddling deeper into your denim jacket, you