Value

Tristan looked at me over his shoulder, sheet of photographs scattered in front of him glaring tones of bright orange and red. The color was living. The parts of the lava that had cool down lost the viscosity of heat and dimmed to a bluish silver of pumice. “I was just thinking about when we used to dance in the kitchen together. Isn’t that stupid?”

I pretended to be possessed by my work and ducked my head further behind the laptop monitor. “Dana?” His voice sounded like a hollow cave and I was afraid to look at him. His face would be something like wax melting off a candle whose wick was too long and, as a consequence, had a flame that devastating the candle by burning holes into the sides and causing the wax to spill out onto the wall and carpet.

If I wasn’t so invested in the wall that had, some how, been built between us I would have told him, yes, of course I remember. I would have told him how much I loved to rest my head against his chest and feel his chin sit on the top of my head and feel his chest raise and fall while the onions in the skillet turned from golden to black and we didn’t care.

Sometimes we hummed some tuned together, other times the stereo filtered jazzy tunes in from the living room and washed us innocent, wiped away all the arguments and disagreements that were no more than us misunderstanding our own interiors.

Other times silence reigned, except for the rushing sound of gas on the stove and the sizzle of dinner. The dance was more of a sway, our bodies tuning into the distance ocean waxing and waning.

But instead of saying anything, I waited until the crisis passed, until I heard Tristan sigh and grind the palms of his hands into his eye sockets and start scratching research notes onto a pad of paper.

I waited until the crook in the road turned itself straight and then I asked him in a dull distracted tone, “Did you say something, Tristan?”

“Huh?”

“I said,” I overemphasized for no special reason, “did you say something?” Enunciating every word so I sounded like an obnoxious ESL teacher with an aversion to immigrants.

“About ten minutes ago,” he shook his head and tried to turn back to his books. I’d offered to buy him his own computer, for one of our anniversaries. He just shook his head and said he preferred the computer at school and books at home. He had a strict practice of not becoming overly reliant on any one thing.

He alternately drives and rides his bike to school. He made a modest garden in the back yard to supplement the things we bought from the grocery store and the farmers’ markets. Long ago, I thought it sweet, thoughtful, somewhat maniacal but the kind of habit that built character. Tristan was singularly identifiable in his need to diversify.

It was the kind of thing that scared me at first, enough to not call him back for several days after our first date.

He applied his theory of diversification to me, too. He called, wrote letters and sent them in the mail, wrote notes and sent them with friends. He was odd, my friends agreed, but there was something sincere and transparent about him.

“With Tristan, there’s no question. All you have to do is look at his face and you know exactly was he’s thinking and feeling,” Tracy said. My mother said, if I could have found one like that, I might actually have tried the marriage thing.

When we were first dating, watching movies while he half laid and I sat upright, he would stroke my cheek, look up at me and whisper, “It’s dangerous.”

“What is?” hating to move away from the movie to consider him, but once I looked into his eyes, I realized he was talking about us.

“Pyroclastic surges,” he said while his eyes became fluid and ready to spill over the soft tissue of his eyelids. I realized he was talking about us, but I asked him to tell me about pyroclastic surges instead.