Amantine's Song

Chapter 12

CHAPTER 8

I had to compose and return to myself on the way to Geoff’s apartment. Maybe my concern was the sign of something changing inside me. Maybe I should have seriously considered the idea of straightening out, moving in with Geoff and dealing with all that would follow from it.

Finding Rachel and Trevor there as well that Sunday comforted me. I wouldn’t have known how to behave alone with Geoff. I felt guilty and uncomfortable. I felt as if I had betrayed him, even if only in my thoughts.

While Geoff was arguing with Trevor on a dissertation about Hegel and the phenomenology of spirit, I took the chance to get out on the balcony. Rachel promptly joined me.

‘Soon they will get from Hegel to the sport.’ Rachel sighed, shaking her head and letting her bobbed blonde hair swing. Trevor was doing a PhD in philosophy and in his subject he was even more motivated and stubborn than me, if that’s possible.

‘We’re a nice bunch of failed intellectuals, in short.’ I stretched my neck in a vain attempt to relax.

‘Don’t look at me, I don’t care about an academic career at all!’ Rachel, graduated in medieval history, was very good at teaching at high school. She didn’t ask for anything better.

I nodded without excessive participation. Maybe I should have stopped being so reluctant and selfish. Rachel and Trevor had been living together for two years. They were fine. Perhaps it was time for me to give in and please Geoff. At this point I understood that it would only be a matter of time. The alternative was to split up, once and for all.

‘Do you think I should move and live with Geoff?’ Saying it aloud, I felt suffocating with anxiety.

‘I know he would like you to, Amy.’ Rachel turned her back to the view, turning to me and resting her hands on the railing. ‘But it must be your choice, you shouldn’t feel forced.’

‘He will leave me if I keep refusing.’ I ran my hands over my face and held them to the sides of my neck. I didn’t want to move in with him. But I didn’t want him to leave me. What would I do then, alone? I would force my friends to make a choice between me and Geoff. And most likely they wouldn’t choose me, the one responsible for the break up.

‘I don’t think so. After all, if you’re not ready yet...’ Rachel left the sentence deliberately pending, maybe believing that I would continue it. But the truth was that I didn’t know how to finish it.

I decided to speak. The real question was not whether and when I was ready or not. ‘What if I never am? If I never want to be ready?’

‘It would mean Geoff is not the right man for you, Amantine.’ Rachel was always very logical. She went straight to the point.

But how could I admit that Geoff was not the right man for me when he had been part of my life all along? When he was part of my world, of the world I had chosen from the first years of my life? That straight and unequivocal line, that fate I couldn’t ever change now. It would be too risky. I feared the unknown more than anything else. How could I land in a world that was not mine? What would I do? What would happen to me?

‘I’ve made my choices, now. And Geoff is somehow part of these choices. It’s my world, Rachel. What can I do if I lose my world?’

My life and Geoffrey Carter’s were somehow inextricably intertwined. We came from the same environment, we had the same studies behind us, the same knowledge, the same ambitions. Nobody could understand me as much as he did. With nobody else could I confide and confront myself in the same way. All the rest was of secondary importance. No, I wouldn’t give up my world. The cost was moving in with Geoff, even if I wasn’t feeling ready. I would never allow my world to crumble to the point of collapsing and destroying everything I had worked for all my life.