Your Heart Belongs to Me

sea. Thermal strata that descend forever, schooling sunfish in this one, and under the sunfish are clouds of luminescent plankton, under the plankton krill, and on and on, light playing down through the layers but shadows rising. And down there somewhere there’s something of you, a mysterious other you. I mean…another side of you, a quality I never recognized.”
    She did not at once respond, and he thought that somehow he had offended her or had sounded so jejune that she was embarrassed for him, but then she said, “What quality?”
    “I don’t know. I can’t get my mind around it yet. But I have this feeling that when I do, when I understand that part of you…I’ll know why you couldn’t accept my proposal.”
    She regarded him with such tenderness that he could hardly bear the weight of it.
    “Sam,” he pressed, “is what I feel possible? Is there something in this book that will tell me what it was I didn’t have that you needed most?”
    “I suppose there could be. There is. Though I didn’t write it to enlighten you.”
    “I understand.”
    “But inevitably, I’m in it. All of me, down there under the luminescent plankton.”
    The melancholy of her smile was a deeper sorrow than before.
    He glanced around, wondering if passersby were alert to the small drama on this bench. Sam was already something of a literary celebrity, and he did not want to discomfit her by making any kind of scene.
    The shoppers hurried past unaware, self-amused children giggled, young couples hand-in-hand drifted by in mutual infatuation, and only an Irish setter on a leash looked alertly at Ryan and Sam as though catching the scent of distress, but it was pulled along by a man in khaki shorts and Birkenstocks.
    “Sam, you know, I wish you’d just tell me what it was I didn’t have.”
    “During all the time we were together, I tried to tell you.”
    He frowned. “Was I that dense?”
    With the gentlest regret, she said, “It’s not a thing you discuss like halitosis or table manners, Ryan. It’s not a thing you can acquire overnight just because you know I need it. And the worst would be to fake it because you think it’s wanted.”
    “So how was I supposed to know what it was, what you needed—by subtext?”
    “Yes. By subtext. The implicit meaning of how I lived my life, what I felt, what mattered to me.”
    “Sam, I’m lost.”
    Revealing a pain at which her melancholy had only hinted, she said, “Sweetie, I know. I know you are, I know, and it breaks my heart.”
    He risked reaching out to her, and she took his hand, for which his gratitude was too great to be expressed.
    “Sam, if I read the book enough to get it, to understand what you needed that I didn’t have, and if I can be that for you, whatever it is, can we try again?”
    She gripped his hand tightly, as though she wanted to hold fast to him forever. Nevertheless, she said, “It’s too late, Ryan. I wish it weren’t, but it is.”
    “Is there…someone else?”
    “No. There hasn’t been, not a single date this whole year, and I’ve been fine alone, I didn’t want anything else. Maybe one day there will be someone. I don’t know.”
    “But you loved me. I know you did. You can’t just stop loving someone from one day to the next.”
    “I never stopped,” she said.
    Those three words, with such potential to exhilarate him, instead disheartened because her voice conveyed with them a quiet yet intense grief, an anguish, with which wives spoke of their recently deceased husbands, for whom their love would henceforth be unrequited.
    “I love you,” she said. “But I can’t be in love with you.”
    Frustrated, he said, “You’re parsing words.”
    “I’m not. There’s a difference.”
    “Not enough to matter.”
    “Everything matters, Ryan. Everything.”
    “Please tell me what I’ve done.”
    She looked stricken. “No. Oh, God, no.”
    Her reaction seemed out of proportion to his question, which after all was just another way of asking what she needed that he had not recognized.
    The sharp emotion of her response implied that they were at the hard point on which the lever of their relationship was balanced, the point on which it had turned from light to dark, from hope to hopelessness.
    Designing software, running a business, you learned to recognize lever-point moments, to bear down on them and by bearing down to lift the whole enterprise over an impediment and swing it toward success.
    “Please tell me,” Ryan