Chapter Ten: The Proposal I Refused and the Shape

Chapter Ten: The Proposal I Refused and the Shape

of That Refusal I want to spend some time with the girl who proposed directly. She does not get enough space in the easy telling of this story, and the easy telling is not the one I am trying to write. I will call her Rida. She told me what she felt in a message that was three paragraphs long and had clearly been written and rewritten before being sent. I could feel the rewrites in it — the places where a more cautious sentence had been replaced by the honest one, the places where she had decided to stop editing and just say the thing. She said she had been feeling it for a long time. She said she thought I might feel something similar, or might be capable of it, and if she was wrong she was sorry but she needed to know. I read it three times. I thought about it carefully, which is more than I can say for some of the decisions I made in those years. I said no. The reason I gave — and I gave a reason, I didn't simply refuse without explanation, I had the decency of explanation if not the courage of honesty — the reason I gave was that the feeling wasn't there on my side, that I valued what we had, that I hoped we could keep it. The standard language. The language that is technically accurate and entirely evasive simultaneously. The technically accurate part: the feeling was not there in the form she was describing. The evasive part: the feeling was not there in the form she was

describing in part because I had other feelings occupying the space where it might have grown, feelings I did not mention, an architecture I was not disclosing. She responded with grace that she did not owe me. She said she understood. She said she appreciated my honesty. I was not, in fact, entirely honest, but I absorbed her grace without correcting the record, which is its own form of taking something that wasn't offered. *** The regret arrived within days. Not because I had fallen in love with her in the interval — love does not work on that schedule. The regret arrived because I recognized, in her proposal, something I had not seen clearly while I was refusing it: the extraordinary courage of the direct statement. The willingness to lay the interior completely open, without pretext, without the gradual maneuvering that everyone else in my life including myself used as a way of approaching feeling while maintaining deniability. She had no deniability. She had said the thing. And I had said no to the thing. And then I had gone back to my complicated architecture of pretense and gradualism and things that were not stated directly and I had looked at it and thought: why. Why is this the preferred mode. Why is the indirect approach safer when what it is safe from is precisely the thing that makes Rida's message the most honest communication you have received in months. I did not answer these questions. I filed them. The filing system was getting full.