"Boy Crazy" by Elodie A. Roy

Boy Crazy 

          I’m not waiting for Josef. I force myself to leave the flat on the days he’s promised to call. I walk through the streets of Vienna, imagining the phone ringing in vain at the end of the corridor. I wrap heavy shawls around my shoulders to keep the cold away, take streetcars to the farthest extremity of the city, and defiantly vanish for hours. Disappearing comes so naturally. Yet even outdoors — where his voice can’t reach me — I almost hear its soft, dreamy tones. I could live in Josef’s voice as one lives in one of those vague, shapeless dreams. Leaving the flat is no use. My love follows me everywhere — it follows me into teashops as I half-heartedly order slices of Linzer torte, as I write postcards to my acrimonious grandmother, as I exchange vacant pleasantries with my fellow council workers.
Thank God, Josef is a very decent man: he knows full well what is happening and gives no encouragement. It would never cross his mind to exploit my attachment. He consistently looks the other way. It seems to me he is faintly dismayed by the situation. I am unsettled, too. We’re both waiting for it to pass. It’s been six or seven months already. It started in the summer; now it is January, and the entire city seems to be unnervingly drifting, its contours erased, its harmonies muffled by the snow. It is another city altogether — an altered, less definite version of Vienna — a shaky composition. Yet, my love has remained. Am I imagining it? The other day I’d swear I saw a faint glint of alarm — or was it pity? — in his kind, brown eyes. Josef has begun to fear for my sanity.
The irony is that I’ve led such a serious life before. He’s always known me to be so independent and cool-headed. To my grandmother’s relief, I was never boy crazy — an expression she applied to any girl she’d see speaking or laughing with a man. (No good, she predicted, would ever come out of fraternizing with the enemy. The girl would be abjectly seduced, abandoned, left alone to raise an infant — all of which had happened to her before the war. My grandma thought all men were pigs. They were pigs in 1988, the way they’d been pigs in 1938 — it was perfectly clear to her, a case of eternal return). As a teenager, I gravely professed that a woman’s salvation came from within — from gentle, persistent soul-searching. I simply knew — I thought I knew. I used to roll my eyes when less-enlightened comrades complained of broken hearts. I could understand their sorrow, yet felt no real sympathy. I grew up watching the men and women around me fight and make up. This was love: a tortuous cycle of separations and superficial reconciliations. Peace was never achieved: it was unachievable. So, I lived alone, away from the fights. It felt safe. I was never lonely before.      
Josef came to visit. I noted with weary amusement (for I see the humor in the situation) that he kept his winter coat firmly buttoned up and his hat on for his whole visit. It wasn’t even that cold — he was simply careful not to unveil any section of his anatomy. He came fully protected, invulnerable, a man with a mission, wearing his coat as warriors don armors. We’ve known each other for so long. He comes because we’re such good friends — or we were such good friends before this disastrous case of infatuation began. It started like an illness — I wasn’t feeling myself, and for days couldn’t quite figure out what it was. And then it suddenly dawned on me, with shocking clarity: I had fallen in love. It hadn’t happened before. I almost burst into laughter. Immediately after, I felt like crying. Somebody had to know.
After concealing the mystifying discovery for a few weeks, I brought myself to tell him. I believe in frankness. The look on his face was unforgettable — it expressed such complete incredulity. He removed his glasses and ran a hand across his eyes, looking so touchingly baffled that I had to smile. There was silence. He fumbled for some time in his pocket and laboriously produced a crumpled cigarette from its depths. When he spoke again, it was in an injured, slightly plaintive tone: “Me? Are you saying you’re in love with me?” I was a little vexed he didn’t take it more seriously at the beginning, dismissing my revelation as one might tell someone affected with the flu, “Don’t worry, it is just a cold, you’ll feel better soon.” Of course, it only got worse. He finally rose to the gravity of the situation. He understood. We never spoke about it again.
Josef is exceedingly kind. His greatest kindness is to not give me up — he treats me with a gentle distance, professionally, like a doctor treats a patient, never mentioning the wretched illness afflicting them. My affection embarrasses him. He’s always tactfully changing the topic, forever avoiding my gaze. He comes round, and we play long, absorbing games of chess. When one of us gets tired, I prepare strong coffee on the little stove. He waits for it to cool before drinking it, mentions some little amusing trivia he’s seen in the paper, or tells me about his work at the museum.
Sometimes — though these occasions are getting rarer — we decide we want to watch a movie. In the cinema, as we sit side-by-side in the dark, we make sure our arms don’t brush against each other. I hold my breath and will my tall, awkward body into complete stillness. I disappear. The screen mercifully absorbs us. We stare fixedly ahead, pretending nothing has happened, nothing is happening, nothing will ever happen. And by the end of the film, numbed, I find it difficult to rise from my seat, to form words again. There is suddenly so much sadness. We leave the cinema in silence, with our enthusiasm dampened, obscurely dissatisfied with one another. Our friendship suffers.
Still, Josef is kind to me. His perpetual kindness makes me uneasy. It has become rather intolerable. I wish he would speak freely. I often suspect he acts out of panic and cowardice rather than out of true wisdom. Does it make a difference? These days I sit in the office whiling the hours away. Even today, when my boss is expecting my report on the shortage of nurseries in Vienna, I am doing nothing. I don’t even feel ashamed, delighting in my idleness. I have a real talent for daydreaming. I do not have such a talent for being in love — unless the two are the same thing. It drives me mad. Some illnesses, when contracted in childhood, are perfectly harmless — but the same ailment can destroy a grown person. As with everything else in life, it is a matter of timing. This unseemly passion came absurdly late, and it is violent and fierce. I can hear my grandma’s voice in my head: “Mark my word, it will not end well.”
Boy craziness never does. I must remind myself that it is nobody’s fault — that lightning strikes blindly, haphazardly. For a few minutes, I think indifferently of all the nurseries this city needs. More nurseries, I fear, than could ever be built. In the distance, the bells of Stephanson are ringing with pointless insistence. All over the city, thousands of office workers are perfunctorily tidying their desks and preparing to go home. I must go too — go and efface myself in the crowd, lose my name, and suffer like everybody else. 

Elodie A. Roy

Elodie A. Roy is a French-born writer living in Newcastle upon Tyne, England. Her short stories and essays have appeared in many journals, including The Stinging Fly, The Oxonian Review, The Drouth, and Scrawl Place. As a cultural theorist, she's the author of two nonfiction books, as well as of many essays for academic publications.

Headshot: Sophie Robinson

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