Too Serious

Rob had never been into zodiacs, but like most people he had learned to listen patiently when a partner, a friend, or a girlfriend decided to read him a horoscope.

He knew the ritual. The small clearing of the throat. The phone held out as if it contained a weather report. The first line delivered with an expression of comic seriousness, followed by the brief hope that he would confirm the universe had seen him correctly.

It was all bullshit.

But it was sweet bullshit, and sweetness was difficult to reject when someone you loved was offering it with both hands.

“Gemini,” Klara said, looking down at her screen. “You are well known for positive energy. You are talkative. A social butterfly. You don’t let other people influence your way of life.”

Rob looked at her. Her face was lit by the phone. She was smiling already, before he had said anything, as though the reading had caught him in a small, flattering lie.

Do I believe this shit? he thought.

“No,” he said.

The smile stayed on his face because he had made it stay. “I really don’t believe in horoscopes.”

Klara lowered the phone. “You don’t have to sound angry about it.”

“I’m not angry.”

“You are always angry when something is simple.”

He arranged his face into what he imagined interest looked like. He widened his eyes slightly. He tilted his head. It was a performance he had been practicing for most of his life, though he still had no confidence that anyone was fooled.

It’s just another suit, he thought. Another thing to wear so people do not have to look directly at whatever is underneath.

“I am interested,” he said.

“No, you’re not.”

“I am.”

“Rob.”

His eyes had gone somewhere else. He knew this because Klara had seen it happen. He could feel the moment after a person noticed your attention leave them. It was like hearing a pebble drop into a cup.

Rob. Rob? Rob.

He came back.

“Why do you always have to be so serious?” she said.

The room was warm. Their apartment had one of those yellow lamps that made everything look forgiving, even the dishes in the sink. Outside, the city was wet from an afternoon storm. Cars passed below with the dull sound of tires on water.

“I’m sorry,” he said.

“I don’t want you to be sorry for existing.”

This was worse. He felt another pebble arrive.

He had never told anyone about the cups. Not because it was a secret exactly, but because some things became more ridiculous the moment they were spoken aloud.

Every important relationship in his life had a cup.

In the beginning, it was an actual cup: a small white espresso cup with a chipped handle, sitting on the shelf above his desk. Later he bought more. They were not fancy. One was blue. One had a faded logo from a café in Gothenburg. One had a tiny cactus growing from a smooth oval of dirt, a miniature thing that seemed to survive on almost nothing.

Each cup belonged to someone.

He did not add a physical pebble every time they were disappointed in him. That would have been too obvious, even to him. The pebbles were mental. A look. A pause before a text message came back. The slight change in someone’s voice after he had said something too sharply, too honestly, or not honestly enough. The cup filled in his head.

Klara’s cup was still mostly empty. That was why he was so careful with it.

But carefulness had a way of becoming its own kind of damage. He knew this. The more he tried to prevent a pebble from falling, the more he watched for it. The more he watched for it, the more he mistook ordinary human weather for evidence. An impatient sigh became a verdict. A forgotten invitation became a withdrawal of love. A tired face became the beginning of the end.

People eventually learned what they could and could not say around him. He hated that they had to learn it.

“Can we rewind?” he asked.

Klara put the phone down on the couch between them. “Can we?”

He reached toward her and pouted his lips in an exaggerated way. It was stupid. He knew it was stupid. But stupidity, used at the right moment, could be a small bridge.

“Would you mind reading it again?” he said. “Please?”

She tried not to smile. He could see her trying. That made him love her more.

“Here we go again,” she said.

“Again.”

She picked up the phone. “Gemini are well known for positive energy.”

“Clearly.”

“They are talkative and social butterflies.”

“I have been called many things.”

“And they don’t let other people influence their way of life.”

“That is completely untrue.”

“I know.”

This time he laughed. It did not solve anything, but it moved the pebble. Not out of the cup. Nothing came out of the cup. But perhaps it settled lower among the others, where it would not be heard every time he moved.

Klara looked at him for a moment.

“You know,” she said, “you don’t have to be interested in everything I am interested in.”

“I know.”

“You just have to not make me feel stupid for liking it.”

He nodded. It was simple. This was what people meant when they said simple. Not easy. Simple.

“I don’t think you’re stupid,” he said.

“I know you don’t.”

“I just—”

“Think too much.”

He looked at her.

“I know it,” Klara said.

He had always thought of thinking as a private activity. Something the mind did alone, like a machine left on overnight in an empty office. But of course other people lived beside it. They heard its ventilation. They felt its heat. They waited for him to come back from rooms they had not entered.

His first time in an American supermarket, a cashier had asked him how he was doing. It was the kind of question everyone asked, the kind nobody expected answered. He did not know this yet. He had prepared a serious reply because he believed a serious question required one.

“I’m doing OK I guess. I have been thinking about how people live here. The size of everything. The food. The way—”

The cashier had turned her head toward the next customer while he was still speaking. Not cruelly. Not even impatiently. She had simply moved on with her work.

He had carried that moment for years.

How are you? was not a request for the grand total of existence. It was a sound people made to keep a door open between themselves and someone else. The answer was supposed to be a sound back.

Fine. Good. Not bad.

He disliked those words because they seemed too small for the work they were asked to do. Good. Bad. Fine. They were labels placed on the surface of a life that might be enormous and complicated underneath.

But perhaps that was their mercy. Perhaps nobody could survive if every greeting required the truth. So at home they didn't even greet this way—the cashiers were just silent and that's all anyone ever expected.

The rain had stopped. Klara stood and pulled on her coat.

“Come on,” she said. “Let’s get out of here. We can walk downtown.”

His first instinct was to say no. His second instinct was to say yes too quickly, which was another kind of no. He looked at the couch, the yellow lamp, the place where the phone had been, the quiet cups in his head.

“Yes,” he said. “That sounds good.”

They walked without deciding where they were going. The streets were still shining. Water collected in the cracks of the pavement and reflected the old buildings, upside down and trembling. Klara talked about nothing for a while: a woman at work, a podcast she had heard, a dog she had seen wearing a yellow raincoat. Rob listened. Not perfectly. Perfectly was not available. But he listened enough to ask a question in the right place and laugh when it was real.

At a corner, Klara took his arm.

“You’re full of shit sometimes,” she said.

“I know.”

“But thank you for walking with me.”

He wanted to explain that he had almost not come. That he had nearly stayed inside and turned the whole evening into one more proof that he was difficult to love. He wanted to explain the cup, the pebbles, the terror of overfilling it. Instead, he said nothing.

He squeezed her hand.

For that moment, the tension was gone.

Not erased. Nothing important is erased so easily. But gone enough.

Above them, in the wet black glass of an office building, their reflection moved with them: two people walking beneath the streetlights, both smaller than the stories they were carrying, both trying not to drop anything else.

The cup remained.

But perhaps it did not have to be the only thing holding the relationship.