A House Together

 

By CC Reverie

She was in her early twenties and carried herself tall and proud. She was a beauty, a steal; blue eyes, soft and happy, and a mane of black hair flowing down her round shoulders to her waist, walking with a laziness that made her hips roll as in a dance.

She came to me with a large smile on her face.

“Hi, I’m Feya, short for Frederica. André couldn’t make it today. She gave me these papers for you,” she said, handing me a big envelope.

She was waiting for me to say something, still smiling, with the papers in her hand.

“Hmm…wait a minute, are you….?”

“Yes, I am,” I said at last. “Nice to meet you, Feya. Look, I’m sorry,” I said, taking the papers out of her hand, “but I need to be downtown in twenty minutes, and the bus is coming. I have to run…”

“No worries. I can give you a ride,” she said.

And that was the start of our friendship.

Over the next year, Feya, André, and I became close friends. We went shopping together, drank together, and took classes together. The only thing we kept to ourselves was our romantic life because we were afraid we wouldn’t like each other’s boyfriends or they wouldn’t like us. I was in a very relaxed relationship with a guy who traveled a lot.

André was with this guy from Spain, and Feya was, as she put it, “still a single cell.”

One day, André told us she was getting married.

“With that dude?” we asked incredulously. “Why?”

“He loves me,” she answered.

And that was the end of it. Feya and I agreed she’d be sorry, but we said nothing to spoil André’s happiness.

“We should stop her!” Feya once said, almost crying.

“You know we cannot,” I replied.

“But it’s wrong. He doesn’t love her. He is just confused. She helps him with his job, that’s all. He’s being grateful, is all. She’ll miss out on real love. I’m gonna tell him!”

Despite my efforts, Feya made a few attempts to speak with the future groom, but he gave her the cold shoulder and threatened to wreck our friendship. In the end, André married her guy and left to live with him in Spain, where he opened a small general practitioner’s office. She was to be his nurse assistant.

“How lucky is everybody,” André said, with irony, before leaving.

“I’ll write you,” she added, and off she was.

And she wrote to us for a while. We missed her greatly. Soon, she became a mother, and her emails stopped. We missed her even more. In the meantime, Feya found a boyfriend.

“He has a good smell,” she told me once.

“No kidding, like a cologne?” I asked.

“Not like that, silly,” she replied. “His pheromones… I can smell them.”

I must’ve made a face because she burst into laughter. It never occurred to me that I could smell someone’s pheromones, but I wasn’t surprised; she and André were internist doctors.

“Can’t you smell your boyfriend?” she asked.

“Yeah, his sweat, the alcohol on his breath, or the weed. But we broke up a month ago, remember?”

Her guy was an accountant she had met on a weekend while visiting her cousin. “He is a good guy,” she had said.

“But do you love him?” I asked, reminding her of the fit she had with André.

She tilted her head. Heavy locks of black hair flew to one side.

“Maybe.”

They stayed together precisely three months, in which time Feya changed little by little as the day turns into night. Eventually, she lost her smile, stopped wearing makeup, and took to hiding her long legs inside baggy pants.

I was making fun of her.

“You know,” she said, “I don’t need a boyfriend to be happy.”

“I believe you,” I said. “Me neither, though I think it would be a different kind of happiness if I met the right one.”

“I know what you mean,” Feya said. “I met mine. A long time ago.”

The words hung in the air like ripe grapes on a vine, ready to be picked.

“You never said anything…,” I started.

“I’m telling you now.” We were in a grocery store picking cauliflower. She had a basket full of vegetables and fruits; I had bread and a chunk of bacon. She put the cauliflower back.

“I am done here,” she said.

I walked home thinking that I, too, had met the right one once, but I let him go. No, in fact, I dumped him. I wondered what happened to Feya’s.

The next time we met, she had tears in her eyes. She cried on my shoulder until her eyes dried out.

“It’s gonna be ok,” I said, quite believing it. But I was wrong, as I found out later.

“He was a good guy, and he cared about me. I just couldn’t go on…” she sobbed. “It was like I betrayed him…I felt like I wasn’t faithful…”

“To whom?” I puzzled.

“Oh, you don’t know, I never told you. But my last three months have been a nightmare.”

“Wait a minute,” I said, pushing her aside just a smidgen so I could look her in the eyes. “Did he treat you badly? Because, you know, guys are very good at being passive/aggressive and disguising it behind a façade of care and love.”

“No, no…not him, he was sweet…”

“Then what are you saying? Feya…, what’s with the nightmares?”

A long time passed before she answered. I kept looking her in the eyes.

“I mean, literally… “she finally said, sighing.

She calmed down, pretending everything was all right. Her next boyfriend was an artist, a painter. They met at a party; he told her she was beautiful and would make a perfect model. He brought her to his studio that night. A month passed, and Feya was happy again.

“He calls me Frederica,” she’d say, giggling. “He says my name sounds majestic.”

In my opinion, he was a megalomaniac. His name ended with “the third,” which he would say proudly every time, and he wore heels to look imposing. Feya didn’t seem to care. But she was more interested in my relationship with an older man who was recently divorced and still wealthy.

“He’s just courting me; nothing serious,” I said.

“But what about that dinner he threw for you at the Palace.”

“Just to win me over,” I laughed.

One night, I was coming home from a late appointment with a difficult customer. Tired and pissed because I let myself be fooled by an idiot, I just wanted to take a shower and play one of my shooting games. But Feya was sitting on the steps to my apartment, a cigarette in her hand.

“It happened again,” she said. “I must tell you now. Can we go in?”

“Sure,” I said, hesitating, struggling to unlock the door.

“You should have a lock with a code,” she said. “They are more secure and, of course, easier to unlock.”

She was making fun of me, and I took it as a good sign but wasn’t in the mood.

“So…,” I began, “what’s happened again?”

“I’ll tell you. But can you make me a coffee, please?”

She started speaking, looking out of the open kitchen window into the blue night.

“I was a freshman in college when I met him. He was studying photography. He had an eye for art. I didn’t. Ha-ha,” she laughed, “…and this guy I’m with right now calls himself an artist. How come I get these weirdos?”

Feya shook her head in disbelief.

“However, we fell for each other pretty fast. A few months into it, we were inseparable. One day, he got an offer to work on a film project in Italy. He said it wasn’t the project; it was Italy he wanted. So, I said, ‘Look, that’s great,’ and asked how long he’d be gone and what would happen with his studies. So, he said nothing. But he asked me to come with him.”

She turned to me for the first time. She was upset, still upset.

“I said, ‘No, I won’t.’ I said I wanted to finish college. I said I had just started it, I couldn’t just drop it and leave. And what about my parents? They had given me all their savings so I could go to college. I cried and begged him to reconsider. To have patience because better things would come for him.”

The sigh Feya let out told me she hadn’t yet made peace with that episode.

“I lied, of course, about the future. I had no idea what would come; I didn’t want him gone because I knew it would be over if he left. But he was so unfair in asking me to go with him. I still can’t get over it.”

“Because he loved you,” I dared to say.

“Yes, he did, but there was no way of knowing if it would’ve lasted. And if it didn’t, then what? No money, no college, no love, but shame and blame.”

“Love is a risk we take; love is not a loaf of bread to be put in the freezer to make it last a lifetime,” I said softly, trying to downplay the stupidity of my comparison. “Love needs faith.”

“Oh, well, I didn’t have it,” she replied harshly.

“Then what?”

“Nothing. He left.”

As she didn’t say anything, I started cleaning up the kitchen. She stood to leave.

“Well…,”

“Well,” I said, “just get over it, Feya.”

“I have these dreams…I cannot… I am thinking, actually hoping…” she was muttering.

“Hoping what?”

“That he’ll come back.”

I stopped cleaning.

“Is he calling you? Writing you? Texting you or contacting you in any other way?”

“Yes, she said softly. I dream of him.”

I stopped myself short of laughing. She went on.

“When we were together, we often fantasized about a house in a clearing in the middle of an enchanted forest. A little cottage with enough room to expand for possible ‘guests.’ I dared to believe that we were speaking about kids. The cottage would have sat in a meadow between rolling hills of green grass and old trees, with wildflowers and a myriad of birds and butterflies, under a perpetual blue sky.”

Feya stopped to wipe away an invisible tear.

“When he left, he told me he would come back. He didn’t ask me to wait for him, he just said ‘One day I’ll be back, you’ll see”.

She turned her head away, avoiding my stare like always when sharing personal thoughts.

“He said he’d be back to build that house together with me. Now, I dream about it. That’s all. I have nightmares. It starts out of the blue, and I just see a cottage on a hill among trees for a fraction of a second. Then it goes away. Then, the dream stops for days, sometimes for weeks. Then I dream again, a little longer this time, and more often. It is a happy dream up to a point. But I wake up crying, literally; my pillow is soaking wet, and I sob.”

“What do you dream?” I ask when the silence lengthens.

“Oh, man, …” she said, turning and looking me in the eyes for the first time that night. After a big sigh, she continued, “It is like I’m on this meadow with a house up the hill. And I know he is inside the cottage. And I run and run, and run and, almost out of breath, reach the house. And I open the door and the house is empty. Then I wake up and cry,” she said with another big sigh.

I couldn’t find words to comfort my friend, so I just said I was sorry.

“That’s ok, I had to tell someone. André knew. I’m sorry, I should go home.”

After she left, I noticed she hadn’t touched her coffee.

The relationship with the painter died a few short days afterward. She said he made her anxious and bored her.

Time passed—too much time. We buried ourselves in our work, ignoring everything else. Sometimes, we ignored each other because we were alike, a mirror of emptiness. One day, she called me and said she’d planned to travel to Europe for a month. She planned to stop in Spain to see André and asked if I wanted to send her anything. I said no and continued with my life. The next day I got myself a dog to keep me company. I called him Toto.

No longer than a week into her month-long trip, Feya sent me an email with just one picture. There she was, on a beach, with this gorgeous tall and muscular Spaniard, tanned and toned. “He’s Pedro, André’s friend,” she told me later.

But when she came back from her trip, she was sad and depressed.

“We had such a good time, Pedro and I…I could’ve stayed.”

“Why didn’t you?”

“I had the nightmare again,” she said. “I dreamt that I was on the meadow looking towards our house. But this time, it wasn’t a cottage anymore; it was a bigger house with a front porch and a small attic. There was a little garden on the left and a paved walkway around. It seemed normal to me. I ran to the house and opened the front door, but it was empty. I saw an old clock inside - its pendulum ticking, tick-tock, tick-tock, but I couldn’t hear it. It scared me.”

I thought of Feya and her nightmares and how they’d show up just when she was dating another guy. I said, “Maybe you need a dog, just like mine. Maybe the dreams will stop.”

“But I don’t want them to stop,” she said timidly. “I know when they come, and I know why, and I want them. See, now that I’m not with Pedro anymore, the dreams have stopped,” she said with a smile I had never seen before.

A few months later, she found another man, a half-bald middle-aged engineer, with a mission to fix everything in her apartment.

“I kind of like him,” she insisted, even though I knew she was lying.

During their time together, we grew apart. She was afraid I would judge her harshly. And I would have, as she had judged André years earlier. So, she kept her distance. More than a year passed when I finally saw her again. Although I was prepared for the worst, I hadn’t imagined it would be that bad. When I ran into her at a local market, I saw a haggard, unkempt, and angry old woman who didn’t even turn to look at me when I called her name.

“Feya,” I said, startled. I reached for her, but she slipped away into the crowd.

I, too, was going through a tough time. I had no job at that moment. I had also lost my apartment and moved in with my mother, who was allergic to dogs, so I had to give my Toto away. I was trying to hold on to hope, but seeing her made me think that hope alone wasn’t enough.

I went after her. At the hospital where she used to work, I was told she had left, and no one knew why or where she had gone. I went to her home, but there was nobody there. I called her parents, who begged me to find and help her. Then I remembered where her engineer worked. I found him quickly, and he screamed at me. “Don’t say her name in my presence!”. But, at last, he gave me a phone number, and by the end of our meeting, he asked me to say hello from him.

It took me a week to get her to speak to me. We met in a bar late at night as per her wish. She had put on some makeup, but her eyes were restless, and her smile was fake.

“I’m just a little tired,” she said.

“Have you been dreaming a lot”?

“I have. The last one was on Thursday. Do you want to hear?”

Then she started telling me without waiting for my answer:

“There is this mansion on a hill surrounded by patches of trees and mazes of flowery shrubs, just like at Versailles, if you’ve seen those pictures of that French palace. In the middle of a rose garden is a water fountain, and the water falls from the mouths of some cherubs. And I am sitting there, doing nothing, being happy, I guess. Then I look towards the house, and I know he’s there. I run and run and run and get to the front door. It is a heavy door made of steel and glass, and I push hard to open it. Almost out of breath, I manage to crack it open, and I sneak inside, and I hear the house going tick-tock, tick-tock, but the clock with the pendulum is gone, now the whole house is like a bomb and is just about to blow up; and I try to reach the office where I know he’s working. I want to save him, but I cannot move… and then I wake up.”

“Now you know it.” She continued finishing her drink and looking insistently to her right, where a man sat alone at a table.

I didn’t even try to tell her about my problems. I felt that if I helped her, I may also have  the courage to regain my faith.

“I am trying to save him; please don’t stop me,” she said, leaving while I stayed behind to pay for the drinks.

I ran outside after her; I saw her leaving with the man from the nearby table.

I kept calling her number every day. Some days, she’d answer and tell me that she’d gotten into the house, but the office was on the second floor, and she couldn’t find the stairs. Other days, I’d get her voicemail, which invariably would tell me it was full, with no room for new messages.

One day, while I was cooking dinner for my mother, she called me. I was shocked and scared when I saw her number on the screen.

“Feya… what’s up,” I said, almost forgetting to breathe.

“I found him,” she said.

I waited for her to continue. Through the silence that followed, I could hear her crying and imagined the streams of tears rushing down her cheeks.

“And?” I ventured.

“He’s dead,” she said. “In the office. Dead and happy. Happy without me.”

In the following days, I picked her up piece by piece and stitched her back together. I brought her to my mother’s house, gave her my bedroom, and watched her like a hawk. I took a part-time job at a local bookstore to give her a sense of normality. Her parents finally pitched in, and we sent her to therapy. It took years for her to recover, but it was worth it. Ultimately, she and my mother became friends. I was happy for them, my kind of happiness. Feya refused to return to practicing medicine because she didn’t want to see “people dying. “So she trained in medical insurance instead and immediately found a job, while I left the bookstore and became the PR officer for a small TV station. Life was getting better while we were wilting away.

One night, over dinner, she told me that she missed the old dreams, the tension and anticipation, the adrenaline rush in her brain.

“It was like dope,” she said, laughing. It was the first time she had mentioned the subject in years.

“But you know he’s not actually dead,” I said.

“Of course, I know, silly. But he’s dead for me. You see,” she continued, “I had to learn to die so I could live; I had to learn to let go so I could love. He said he’d come back, and we would build that house together, but it wasn’t about him; it was always about me.

All this time, I dated so many men, thinking that I was cheating on him and that I should wait for him. I thought if I could just be faithful, then maybe he’d come back. But then the dreams would stop. And all I had left from him were the dreams in which we had a house together. You see … that’s what I wanted. A house together, not a life knowing him.”

“It’s complicated,” I managed after a short break.

“Yes, it is. But now I can truly say that I love him. And I am not upset that he left to live his life and didn’t come back for me. I’m not upset anymore. I love him for the man he was, the man he is. And if he comes back to me one day, that’s our house, the house from my dreams. Together, we are one. Apart we are alone. So it must be.”

One day, Feya gathered her stuff from my mother’s home and moved out. We were both in our early forties. I had just acquired a boyfriend, and I was happily dating while Feya was advancing her career in the absence of better things to do.

“I may have to build that house after all,” she smiled, shaking her now short but still black curls.

I suddenly understood that we don’t have to give up our dreams even if their unfulfillment or continued pursuit hurts us. But our dreams are personal; they are nobody else’s business; they are ours. We must find them within ourselves. And we must survive them. Only then will they come true.

They came true for Feya. Shortly after she had finished building a small house in the countryside, my phone rang.

“Guess what,” she said.

“What?” I asked.

“He’s back,” she said.

But I wasn’t surprised to hear it.

“What do you say?” she insisted.

“Well,” I replied, “how does he like your house?”

There was a second of silence before she replied, annoyed:

“Oh…” she sighed, “he wants to put a porch on the front…Then he said we could…” She kept speaking to me, but I spaced out. The person at the other end was someone I hadn’t heard in a long, long time.

 

 

The End!