intense, how serious things once were between them.
And maybe there is some truth to what Eric said about secrets being a form of lying by omission, or at least there's truth in the idea that keeping a secret can feel like a lie. Maybe this has something to do with why she never could tell him about her and Max. The intensity of her and Max's love has always felt too close, too alive for her to express it without surrendering its truth to Eric.
When Max arrived in Boston, the cab ride to see Annie—for the first time in more than three years—was excruciatingly long. She stood in front of her apartment building waiting for him, and, as he approached, something woke up inside him. Though they had been talking regularly for three years, seeing her was a shocking experience. There was something new and immeasurable about his emotions when he saw her again. It became immediately apparent to him then that they had built something truly substantial in the past three years.
Annie still remembers how much of that youthfulness had disappeared in his face. His face was thinner, but stronger and sharper than she remembered. His eyes, always clear and focused—always moving from here to there relentlessly absorbing the world—were as clear and full of his emotional tells as ever.
For Max, she was more beautiful than he remembered. There was something different about the way she carried herself. She moved with a special kind of self-assurance. She was obviously more comfortable with herself, and more at ease with her body than he remembered. Her face had grown softer somehow, the youth of the flesh giving way to something more adult, more feminine. Her hair was shorter, but framed her face better than her long hair once did. When he last saw her, he suddenly realized, he had left behind a girl, and now he was standing in front of a beautiful, confident woman—a thoroughly different woman.
It wasn't as if they were strangers though. They had obviously been talking constantly on the phone. There weren't going to be any surprises in their conversation. So, it's not as if there was any catching up to do. They didn't have new stories to tell. But, seeing each other, realizing how foreign the other's face, the other's body had become, threw them both for a wonderful loop. And as she greeted him on the sidewalk in front of her building—his new home—they stopped and stared at each other for a long time. But when they finally embraced and kissed, it was a long, slow kiss, a dizzying kiss—three years long.
When he saw the apartment, he was shocked at the size of the place. She'd said it was small, but he hadn't been prepared for it to be as small as it was, or to see the poor shape it was in. She had furnished the place warmly, and it was clearly nicer for her care and attention, but it was a dump. It was an efficiency studio, and only slightly larger than Max's childhood bedroom. The hide-a-bed they would sleep on hid a small portion of a badly water stained wall, and it faced a poor approximation of a kitchen. The bathroom was essentially a closet—a curtain in place of a door—with a toilet and a tiny standing shower. There was only one window, a large one that displayed a pretty nice view of the city. It was the one thing that saved the apartment from feeling like a dank tomb.
But, even with all the apartment's faults, it was difficult to complain. It was true that they were new to co-habitation and didn't have a lot of money, but they were young, in love, and excited for the opportunity to be together again. And, besides, his thinking was that this arrangement was all very temporary. They would remain in Boston through what remained of her spring semester—a little less than three months—and then everything would change after her graduation. But, in the meantime, there was a great sense of newness and adventure in the prospects of learning each other so intimately again.
And it didn't take long for them to find a rhythm in this shared life. They didn't get in each other's way, and they just genuinely enjoyed the experience of playing house, reacquainting themselves with the other's body. Three years is a long time to desire someone only to have those desires go unfulfilled. So, for the first month, they spent almost all their time in bed. And, when they weren't together, she was busy with school, and he was going to the movies, or exploring Boston, thinking about their future.
One thing that he learned quickly was that Boston was a wonderful place to spend a few months, but it wasn't a place he wanted to live longterm. He felt very much like a west coast man now. He could hardly imagine living through a northeastern winter ever again. And there was noise. It wasn't just something he could hear, but it was something he could feel. The perpetual sense that business was being done, a general feeling of hurriedness in the air, was almost too much for him to bear some days. He missed the relative calmness of Stanford, and, if not Stanford, than he had aspirations toward the upper northwestern states.
Once Annie graduated, he just assumed they would leave Boston. Of course, he knew to tread lightly on the subject with her. And when they did talk about the future, they spoke about it in cautious, vague tones, as if they both knew that speaking specifically about the future meant having to define it. And he wasn't so sure that defining the future was such a good idea yet. They had, after all, only gotten back together. Still, he knew that Annie loved Boston, but he had heard hints that she didn't see herself staying a Bostonian.
Mostly, when they would talk about the future it was about how they intended to spend their futures together. They had spent all that time apart, and spent so much time and energy thinking about ways that they could get together, that when they were together they realized they had to synchronize what it was going to mean to stay together.
The love was there, but that was never the question. It just took time for other questions to arise above the noise of love.
Eventually, though, simplicity gives way to complication. Joy gives way to reality.
Max was the first to seriously contemplate where they were heading. He spent a good deal of his free time considering their future. He was alone for long stretches during the days while Annie was busy going to school. Her studies kept her from fixating and planning the way Max was starting to fixate and plan.
But Max was fixating, making plans, letting the future unfold in a million different shapes in front of him. He created scenarios where he and Annie would go west. He would attend graduate school. Annie would play her music. In some ways, to him, this would be an ideal existence. Of course, he didn't take into account Annie's future expectations. He just assumed he understood what would make her happy. There was a part of Max, an overwhelming part, that entertained no other possibilities. He believed that Annie would be happy just being with him and having the freedom to play the piano all day. Never mind the fact that he hadn't bothered to talk to her about her career plans. And, even when they did talk about what they would do in the future, he was careful to speak in assertions rather than questions, always trying to feel her out without having to ask her directly what it was she was planning. If he asked for specifics then he was inviting the possibility of an answer that didn't match the stories he had been telling himself.
Besides, they'd been through this once before.
So, in order to avoid all this uncertainty, he began to think of ways that he could show a deeper commitment to their future. He wanted to let Annie know that he intended to make this relationship last, even as they struggled to maneuver the tenuous crossroads of starting and merging their adult lives. He concluded that if he were to, at least, make the symbolic gesture of asking her to marry him, there would be no doubt that he was serious about their future.
There was no question that they wanted to be together. They had expressly established that they wanted to be together for the long haul. But a question was always lingering: What might get in the way? Max reasoned that a promise of commitment would keep the things that did get in the way from becoming a crisis, or at least might make them feel more obliged to work out a solution together. This was almost as crucial for him as it was for her, since he had a tendency to overreact when things didn't happen as he'd planned. Essentially, he wanted to take out an insurance policy against any potential bad new
s.
So, he withdrew a large chunk from his ever-shrinking savings and bought a ring. He didn't want to go too far overboard on a proposal. Neither of them were the type to make a spectacle of themselves, and he thought the theatrics of the moment were entirely self-contained and needed no added social element. And his paltry financial situation, further complicated by the excessive cost of the ring, also helped determine how he would ask her to marry him. With his options dwindled, but his intentions clearly of an intimate nature, he decided to ask her that night in bed, in the light of their afterglow.
Annie remembers that he seemed nervous and preoccupied that night at dinner. She had been planning on talking to him that night about his plans after she graduated. She had recently found several application packs from universities—all from the west coast—tucked in the drawer of his nightstand, and it alarmed her. She was starting to panic about what was unfolding in front of her. Not only was she about to graduate from college, but she was about to be thrust into the real world without any real clue about what she was going to do. It was going to be the first time in her life where