The Circle Line

“I just don’t get it,” said Ellie as she frowned and brushed her long brown hair from her gray eyes. She focused again on the notebook, flipped some pages, and looked at Martin across the metal table, puzzled. “I just don’t.”
+++++“You don’t get it.” Martin dropped his gaze from Ellie’s and looked at the Polaroid snapshot he had taken of her minutes earlier while she read his most recent writing. In the photograph, whose edges were held down against the wind by books Martin had brought with him, Ellie looked as beautiful as in real life, if cold. She had closed her windbreaker against the late September chill, but the gusts on the Hudson had been stronger than they had anticipated when they embarked on the Circle Line tour around Manhattan and climbed the stairway to sit on the top level of the boat. Ellie was so concentrated in her reading that she did not notice Martin remove the camera from his backpack, aim it at her for a full minute expecting her to look up and smile, and ultimately take the portrait of her reading, eyes cast downward trying to decipher his penmanship.
+++++“Right. Do you want criticism or not?”
+++++Martin had often heard that tone, as Ellie presided over meetings of the Summit High literary magazine, Mirrors. It said, “You don’t really want me to tell you why this piece stinks, do you?” But, often enough, their classmates asked for just such criticism, and Ellie’s brand could be withering.
+++++“Sure, we have plenty of time before we dock.” In the distance, he could see the looming towers of the George Washington Bridge grow slowly closer as the “SS Manhattan View” turned downstream at the tip of the island; to their right, the wooded embankment of the Palisades watched over them. He guessed it might be 20 minutes before they made it to Hoboken.
+++++“OK, you asked for it. What you have obviously done is to collect up vignettes from your life, and it’s all about girls you’ve had crushes on: Heather, whom I don’t really know because she’s not in college prep, Kathy, who never went to our school anyway and I’ve never met, and Lisa, who of course is our classmate, and then you start to talk about me, and I have no idea why you’ve dragged all of us into your story.”
+++++“Well, look, obviously the story is about me and how I felt about them and how I …”
+++++“Hold it, stop right there!” Ellie yelled and jumped up from her bench to emphasize whatever point she was about to make, startling the small girl sitting behind her. “The story is not about you! You are confusing the narrator with the point of the story. The story has to be about the three other girls and me, and it can’t be about you!” Having made her point, she sat down.
+++++Martin sat with a stupid look on his face. He had not expected that kind of outburst or to be told that his own story was not about him. Then, Ellie started to laugh and for an instant he wanted to strangle her.
+++++“Just joking,” she sang sweetly, pleased as punch with her brand of sadistic humor. “Of course the story is about you. And it’s about me, too, or you wouldn’t have given it to me to read. You know I love to tease you, right?” Without waiting for an answer, she continued, “Well, to be more serious, I do have some problems with the things you said you did, or didn’t do, to these other girls.”
+++++“Such as?”
+++++“Well, let’s start with Heather. You say you loved her, or thought you did. You actually had a date with her in the sixth grade. And, yet, you didn’t try to kiss her goodnight. I find that cruel.”
+++++“Cruel?”
+++++“Very. She was probably crushed. She certainly wanted to be kissed on her first date, or at least have you try, so she could push you away. You not only disappointed her, you killed any ego she might have had. You damaged her forever by that thoughtlessness.”
+++++“Why am I sorry I asked for this?”
+++++“Then, the next one is even worse. You were in love with Kathy for years, but you never did anything about it!”
+++++“Except …”
+++++“Except that you wrote her an anonymous love letter! And mailed it!”
+++++“And the issue is …?”
+++++“She never knew who sent it, and she must have had tremendous anxiety in wondering if the author would ever step forward. Didn’t you have any feeling for how that must have hurt her, when no one did?”
+++++“Ellie, I’m sure I never worried about that. I was in love, I was miserable, I had to do something, and …”
+++++“And that’s the only dumb thing you could think of, I see that. Some love. If I were writing about my past escapades and giving it you, I’d make myself look a lot better than you’re doing in this thing, surely. OK, then the clincher of bad conduct is with Lisa, and why you’d treat her like that, a really sweet kid, I’ll never know.”
+++++“I think I know where this is going.”
+++++“With Lisa, you go a step further than you did with Kathy. You write her a letter and you sign it!”
+++++“But … you said I should have signed the letter to Kathy!”
+++++“No, that was good, but then Lisa approaches you in the hallway at school, she smiles at you and says that she got the letter, that she would like to talk to you about it and … and ….” At this point, Ellie started shaking her head as if Martin’s stupidity had grown to monstrous proportions in front of her nose. “And … you said nothing but ‘Oh!’ and walked away and never tried to talk to Lisa again about it. I mean, I have to tell you that that is more than cruel. It’s sick.”
+++++“I truly never thought about it from the girls’ perspectives. I admit that I’ve been callous at times, but it doesn’t come from meanness, it comes from awkwardness. You know, girls were always … somewhere out there, hardly human beings. But I was a lot younger.” They passed through broken shadows as their boat glided beneath the bridge.
+++++“The thing with Lisa was in our sophomore year and we just turned seniors. It’s not very long ago at all.”
+++++“Well, the whole point of stories — which I’ve never told anyone before — is that, with you, things have changed. Have I treated you poorly?”
+++++“Of course not.”
+++++Martin and Ellie sat quietly for a minute. They both were thinking, unbeknownst to the other, about the intimate pleasure they had enjoyed with each other the evening before. Martin had had a crush on Ellie the previous year, but, instead of writing notes, he had grabbed onto Ellie’s hand at the school picnic in June and never let go. To his amazement and happiness, she had never asked him to let go.
+++++“So, the story comes down to our relationship, doesn’t it?”
+++++“Yes, I guess it does.” After a pause of a few seconds, Martin said the words he had dreaded to say, but felt compelled to say, “Ellie, I love you.” She smiled, having anticipated where everything was leading, but said nothing. Silently, they passed the next 10 minutes holding hands across the table.
+++++Finally, as their boat headed into the dock, Ellie spoke. “Are you expecting me to say something, Martin?”
+++++“I don’t know. Maybe.”
+++++With a jar, the boat hit its mooring, and people began to get up and walk towards the exit stairways.
+++++“You want me to say that I love you too. I know you do. Well, the truth is not so clear. Maybe sometimes I do, maybe sometimes I don’t. C’mon, let’s get off before they take us around again.” She stood and handed the notebook to Martin, who stuck it, his camera, his books, and the photograph of a beautiful and very independent girl into his backpack.

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Bruce J Berger is a graduate of the University of Connecticut and Harvard Law School and a former Executive Editor of the Harvard Law Review.  He is a senior partner at the Washington, DC law firm Hollingsworth LLP.  When not practicing law, he plays senior baseball and writes fiction, participating in a workshop at the Writers’ Center in Bethesda, MD.  His story The Circle Line was inspired by a self-portrait painted by his daughter, Jean.  Bruce lives in Silver Spring, MD, with his wife, Laurie (an equestrian), and two dogs.