Short Story - Two Ships Passing

He was striking, mid-twenties perhaps, dark-hair, dark-eyes, and remote, wary almost as if he were watching you even when his back was turned. As he bent over the bench press bench in the university weight room, no one would have overlooked the hard angle of his jaw. It indicated a life where slack of any sort had been tightened bow-string taut, leaving him edgy and intense. It prompted most to keep their distance. But the lone woman in the weight room that day was drawn toward intensity. His presence caused her to turn and regard him. She’d not seen him before.

He began adding weights to his bar. She was stretching. Any woman in a weight room in the mid-1960s was an anomaly. She, however, had a plausible explanation. She was the wife of a competitive weightlifter and lifting weights just caught her fancy. Mid-afternoon was the slow time in the room’s use and that’s when she chose to work out. Later in the day, it filled with men and in that environment, she felt awkward. Even just one man created some ill ease in her and this particular man more than most.

Finished stretching, she started her exercise routine, continuing to ignore him. He sat on his bench, watching. He made no attempt to be coy or surreptitious. Neither was he rude nor boorish. It appeared rather he had no interest in the tedious games of polite interplay and their many deceits.

“You’re new here,” she said finally without looking at him. It was mid-semester at the university, and the weight room crowd didn't usually change at that time of year.

“That I am,” he replied in a monotone without reducing the directness of his stare.

“You in graduate school?” There was more latitude for graduates and that would explain his presence now.

“I’m not sure yet.”

“They let you in on that basis?”

“They don’t know what my basis is.”

“Ah, I see.” She smiled and chuckled softly.

“No you don’t.” The words came with certainty. He was a man setting some rules of engagement, which she noted. It tempered her jauntiness but not her curiosity.

She picked up her dumb bells and started her next repetition. Unsure as to how to respond, she took a risk.

“What don’t I see?”

He didn't answer.

When she finished the set, her dumbbells now at her sides, she turned to look at him. “What’s your degree program in?”

“Philosophy.”

“A study I find quite interesting,” she said.

“It’s not a study for me.” Again the response was uncommonly frank.

“A path then, a way to understand or make sense of something?”

“That would be right.”

She put her weights down and straddled one of the other benches, so as not to have to continue looking at him directly.

He stared openly at her, gauging her. “What would you say if I told you I just got back from Vietnam, then went AWOL?”

With that question, she turned toward him. “That’s why you’re here in Canada?”

“Yes. I need time to figure things out. They’ll be looking for me; my rank, my status, what I've seen, what I know. Then they’ll be coming for me.”

“I have no use for that war. My husband’s a dodger. That’s why we’re here.”

“Your husband? You don’t wear a ring, why is that?”

She glanced vacantly at her left hand. “We were forced to get married when we crossed into Canada. We haven’t reconciled to that yet.”

A droll smile flickered across his face. “So you’re free to come and go.” He offered it more as a statement than a question, taunting almost. His eyebrows raised in invitation. He sat there otherwise motionless, his eyes unblinking, aware.

No one had ever challenged her on marital status before. She continued to stare at her left hand as she tried to recall how long she’d been acting like a single woman, having her own friends, male and female, holding herself beyond a husband’s dominion, yet staying clear of infidelity. It was a game she’d been playing, but pretending otherwise. He’d just called her on it. His soft chuckle broke her focus. It wasn’t a mean gesture, just recognition of the ironies that lying always creates.

Wanting to change the topic, she asked, “Why did you go to war?

“A family of war heroes. My father and grandfather graduated from West Point. A man’s got to find out who he is sometime. That’s the way I chose.” His response came across as matter-of-fact, as if there had never been any real choice.

“Did you find out?”

He shrugged. “Easier to ask than answer. The short version: I found out what a load of crap war is. And I found out that there is a limit to how long I’ll lie to myself. That month I had to wait for an honorable discharge was a month too long. He looked down at the floor and shook his head as he huffed air out his nose. Then raising his head, he stared at her. “My father said, ‘Couldn't you have waited one more month? What a mess you've made of your life now.’” Though his eyes never left hers, they softened as his expression wearied. “I really think he thinks that if I had just been discharged honorably, I’d be fine now. Fine…now.” His eyes drifted off for a moment, then he dropped his head, moving it slowly from side-to-side. He snorted. “What a fucking joke.”

She looked away. Her attraction to him, which was building alarmingly, brought with it an uninvited tug toward truthfulness. It wasn’t about resolution. That wasn’t going to happen. She now knew first-hand how not going to war could damage a man as effectively as going to war? Her mother said her husband was a coward. End of story. She thought her mother was wrong, was just being mean, and once again ready to deny her daughter the freedom to live life that way it felt true to her. And yet, here she was in this wreck of a marriage.

As she turned back toward this stranger, she caught him sitting astride the bench press bench still unabashedly staring at her, his expression impassive. She couldn’t hold his stare and lowered her eyes to the floor fighting hard to keep the tears away. Against the measure of his integrity, she could clearly assess what she’d done, how far she’d strayed from her dreams of a different sort of life, one where love secured its promise of deep, impassioned connection. In that moment, his respect seemed all important, and yet he’d already caught her in one lie. So if not respect, she wanted at least to appear brave enough to be honest now.

He turned around, lay on the bench and grabbed the bar, rotating his hands to get a good grip. 

“You need a spotter?” she asked. He had a lot of weight on the bar.

“Yeah, that would be good.” He sounded almost casual.

She came over and stood at the head of the bench, ready. Being this much closer to him felt alarming. She couldn’t recall anyone ever having this effect on her. What was happening? Who was he that without saying a word challenged her to be authentic?

The lift was easy for him. He was strong. A slight smirk on his face as the bar came to rest in the holders at the top of the uprights indicated he knew what he’d done. He’d reeled her closer. She acknowledged his ploy with a scolding smile as she backed away to return to her spot across the room.

She felt off-balance. She’d never known someone that candid and with such command over his life. More than that, being in his company had walked her down a road she’d been resistant to travel. Her marriage was coming apart on several fronts, none of which she any idea how to remedy. But this moment pushed her face-first into the mess that was now her life. Worse yet, what she did consider significant to this point in her twenty-four years, the price she’d paid to protest the war and the work she’d been doing with draft dodgers fleeing to Canada, seemed piddling compared to what men like this one had gone through; more important still, where it had taken him.

When she finished with the free weights, she went to work on the cable machine. He had finished his workout and was leaning against the wall watching her once again.

“If your marriage is such a lie, why don’t you go AWOL?

“It’s a hard thing when you make a vow to someone. I don’t take that lightly."

He tucked his chin and eyed her sideways. “Who are you kidding? I’m disturbing you in a way that has you interested, am I not?”

She remained silent. She sank deeper into self-loathing. She’d just lied again.

His voice softened. He felt no need to condemn her. “I admit I have an advantage you don’t. My choice forced me to take responsibility for my life. From that point forward, what I saw, what I had to do, who I saw myself as, that was a wake-up call. If you ever want to free yourself from the life you inherited, you have to quit lying. Now I have to find out which parts were the lies. But when you lead a life like yours, it is possible to kid yourself to the bitter end.” The roughness of his prior tone had softened.

She could feel herself squirming inside like a trapped animal. She had never intended to recreate the marriage of her parents and life she knew as a girl growing up. Yet she had done just that. She had been the child with vision, with a sense of destiny, the one to spout off grandiose possibilities, which were now reduced to gut-wrenching doubts. Yet here she was. He was right. Without your life, or something else of value on the line, you could endlessly pretend you were changing. But what did life with the power to alter you look like if it wasn’t bombs going off or direct assaults on your values and beliefs?

Her voice on the edge of desperation, she blurted out, as if he were privy to her thoughts, “What is it that drives us to pretend? What has such power over us?”

He sat back down on the bench, hunched over, hands clasped and hanging loosely between his knees. At her question, he dropped his head and swung it slightly, side-to-side. A sigh escaped him she could hear across the room.

In a voice she could almost not hear, he said, “That’s what I want to know.” And quieter still, “…have to know.”

The room felt like a sanctuary, stillness being the only experience it offered.

She felt unhinged, ragged.

Finally he said, “I’m going to Greece. That’s my plan. I was there years ago. I knew acceptance and love and honesty. The people I met took me in as family. Maybe they will again. But I have got to figure this life of mine out or there’s no point. If there is one opportunity war offers, it is its power to make you question everything. Whether you have the guts to acknowledge your findings…” he smirked as his voice trailed off. He stood up again, restless, perhaps engaging this far with another person the first real risk he’d taken since he’d come back.

He continued, “You attract me like I attract you. You are lovely to look at and you have a spark. So - you want to come with me?”

Oh… God, she thought as that invitation beckoned her to a table laden with so much of what she longed to taste. She stared straight at him, her face intense but her eyes revealing her as somewhere between desperation and despair. He waited. He folded his arms across his chest and bent one leg back to place his foot on the wall. His stillness amazed her. She wanted a life free and clear like he wanted, she was sure of it. She just didn’t know free and clear from what, not yet anyway. She held his stare for as long as she could, then dropped her eyes to the floor.

He knew it was not going to happen, and he was almost out of time. He picked up his towel, shook his head quickly as if to clear it and walked out soundlessly.

In another time, he would have reached out to her, given her some room, but he was too muddled now. How could she live where he did? She hadn’t done the things he’d done. Nor had she yet left a world she’d known and come back to one where she could no longer find her place.

When he was gone, she sat back down on a bench. The space felt vacuous, flat, as if the energy of that moment followed him Pied Piper-like out of the room. He was going to right himself or die trying, she knew that. But what had she garnered from the choices she’d made as a protestor? She’d started honestly, willing to give up her family, her country and her most promising career. But when her marriage began to crumble, she got scared and backed off. She’d been merely coasting ever since, even while knowing something was wrong, just not what it was, afraid to look.

It took several more years, plus marital abuse, before she left her husband. She didn't have Greece to head toward, only a small room in an old boarding house and the spark that fierce young man had seen in her years earlier. He had never said his name. He was too cautious, and that clutch of people who commit to moving beyond their lies seemed to be outliers. She knew that now. So rather than regret her loss, it was gratitude she felt toward that nameless young man. She opened her window letting sub-arctic winter flood the room with a piercing stab. She whispered to him through the thin, frigid air not as the misguided girl of years past, but as a woman with it all on the line. “Would that we had met now. I think I too would have loved Greece.”