Learning from Swans

After the funeral, we decide to go to the pond and watch the swans.

It’s a lovely day, cloudless and bright, accompanied by a cheerful breeze. The only other people at the park are mothers pushing strollers and office people taking their lunch breaks in the sunlight. Loose snatches of conversations mingle with the rush of traffic on the street just beyond.

We walk around the edge of the pond until we find an empty bench. We sit down. The swans make their slow rounds through the murky water, their snowy feathers brushing up against discarded straw covers and candy wrappers. They pause in front of us, inky eyes considering our morose figures seated among the afternoon joggers and light midday chatter.

Once, in a warmly lit bookstore, I’d flipped through a book about them. It was no doubt made for children, glossy pages crowded with pictures accompanied by simple, short sentences. I liked their long, curved necks and unblemished bodies. I liked what they represented and lingered on the photos of them with their heads pressed together, the arcs of their necks forming hearts. Swans mate for life, did you know?

You take off your suit jacket, loosen your tie, and let a long sigh out through your nostrils. Digging around in your pants pocket, you draw out a pack of cigarettes and a plastic lighter.

“I thought you’d stopped smoking?”

You place one in your mouth and mumble around it, “Started again.”

Four times your thumb presses down on the ignitor, four times until an unsteady flame appears. You exhale a narrow plume of smoke that fills my nostrils with the familiar sweet, acrid smell.

“They’re not good for you,” I start, the words forming from rote memory. “You know—”

“‘Those things will kill you.’ Yeah, I know.”

*****

After our first year of dating, I asked you to stop smoking. The first time I mentioned it, I tried to be casual. Back then, our relationship was still a series of elaborate performances: we ate at nice restaurants where the food portions were too small and I would have to secretly go back to my apartment and have another meal with my roommate while I talked about you; you spontaneously baked me cookies and decorated them with cheesy messages in shaky icing letters; I brought you a bright bouquet of flowers from a vendor on the street on a whim, just because I was thinking about you.

I was at your place. It was after dinner and we were out on the cramped balcony that looked onto the beige stucco backside of another building. A cigarette was already hanging from your lips and your hands were buried in your pockets, looking for a lighter. I was afraid you’d use it against me, so I never admitted it to you, but I loved the way you looked when you smoked. I watched the brittle flame (you always bought shitty lighters that barely worked) illuminate the hollows of your face, rest deep in the caverns of your eye sockets, perch on your cheekbones. It was one of the few things romance films got right.

“If I asked you to stop smoking, would you do it?”

You turned to face me. “But are you asking me?”

“Maybe.” I placed my hands flat against your chest, wanting desperately to be the cool girlfriend at this moment, not the woman who asked that you didn’t inhale chemicals and toxins into your body every day. Everyone avoids being the person in a relationship who asks for things because no one wants to admit that romantic love is work, when the movies show us that it’s effortless, that it’s easy as breathing. It was one of the many things those films got wrong. But I just wanted to kiss you without tasting stale smoke.

*****

You finish the first cigarette, leaving the smoldering butt out on the cracked green paint of the bench. As quickly as the first one is discarded, you take out another one, lighting it this time on the first try.

“We’re too young to know people who are dead,” you say to me. “And from a fucking heart attack? It makes me feel old…but I am old, I guess.”

“I have a Roth IRA,” I start to point out, “—but I don’t exactly know how it works.” You grace my comment with a laugh and I can imagine falling for it all again, the worst kind of trick because you come into it with your eyes wide open, thinking you’re doing it of your own volition.

There are these small details that feed into the lie, make me think I still know you, even after all these years apart. Your shirtsleeves, rolled up exactly twice; the spot along your jaw you always miss when you shave; two spritzes of the same cologne so that it’s just a remnant lingering around your neck and wrists.

I focus on the swans and try not to think about these things. Two of them have moved out of the pond, and now stand under the shade of the trees planted along the edge of the water. They groom themselves, long necks bobbing elegantly to pick at the bugs and trash that cling to their snowy feathers. Swans mate for life, but if a swan’s partner dies, they’ll find someone else. After all, swans form lifelong monogamous bonds not for romance, but for a desire for stability.

“I honestly don’t remember learning how to file my taxes. Or setting up my retirement account. Or any adult stuff. It all just—” you made a helpless gesture with your hands, “happened.”

Like I said, the worst trick of all.

*****

It was our third anniversary. We’d at least dropped the pretense of caring about fancy dinners and expensive gifts. Instead, after work, we had dinner at our favorite Vietnamese restaurant.

The smell of boiled beef bones had been cooked into every surface: the slightly tacky Formica tables, the plastic leaves of the fake plants that I suppose were meant to lend the place a sense of liveliness, the menus with their covers that were so faded that the words were hardly legible. Not that it mattered, because our order had remained the same for the last three years. The familiarity was like a sedative; I could have cruised through dinner with my eyes shut. I hummed in acknowledgement without really hearing your story, tasted my food before it reached my mouth, anticipated the turn of the wheels and drag of the brakes on the drive back to our apartment.

When we got home, you pulled out a bottle of wine and poured each of us a glass. You had to stop me from immediately drinking mine: “Hold on, baby, I want to make a toast.” I scrunched my nose and laughed, but did as you said, tucking my feet under me and waiting for you with a teasing smile and a wine glass that was already stained with lipstick.

At least you didn’t stand to give it, like a fool. You scooted one of the dining chairs to be next to mine and cleared your throat, just the tiniest bit.

You put so much care and thought into finding the words that by the time they got to me there was little for me to do with them. I smiled and kissed you, thanked you, told you that I loved you too. I tried to remember the last three years we spent together so that I could feel grateful for them—one thousand and ninety-five days that I didn’t remember in distinct detail, some that passed so easily they simply slipped out of my head.

We decided our relationship was going to be like the ones in the movies, where things just constantly fall into place and we don’t have to try at anything because our love just is.

But I think we made the mistake of conflating comfort with love. I think I almost succumbed to that complacency. I think I almost settled for pretending I didn’t crave something more.

*****

The swans move away from the shade, searching for food.  Some return to the water, while others venture back towards where we sit. Their long necks flash in the sun as they nose through the grass at our feet. Your fingers are deft and sure as they reach into the carton for your next cigarette, and I think about how the smoke will settle into the fibers of your shirt and pants, and how the smell of it will never leave because you won’t remember to take any of it to the dry cleaners until you need to wear it again. By then it will be too late.

“Aren’t funerals usually on the weekend?”

I reach into my purse, looking for a granola bar I know I threw in there weeks ago. My hand closes around it with a loud crinkle, and I pull it out, triumphant.

“Yeah, but I think it had something to do with his sister. Like, she could only fly in for a certain amount of days so it had to be today.”

When I toss the crumbs towards the birds they’re startled, flapping their wings before realizing what’s happening. Out here in all this concrete and trash, they take what they can get.

“I almost didn’t come because the timing was so weird. But I guess I’m glad I did.”

*****

You came to stand at my shoulder while we watched the casket being lowered into the ground.

I’d seen you momentarily at the service when I arrived late, standing a couple of rows ahead of me. Of course it made sense you were here; he had been friends with both of us while we were together and had remained so, even after the breakup. I gazed at the back of your head the entire time, deciding that it was enough, that it was already a strain on the clumsy stitches I’d given myself to get over you just to be standing this close.

When we filed outside to watch the burial, I had been so focused on not letting the heels of my shoes sink into the damp dirt that I hadn’t noticed you come up behind me. You briefly touched your fingers to my forearm and whispered, Do you wanna go talk somewhere? I looked over my shoulder and there you were, achingly familiar. (I couldn’t help it: I allowed the briefest glance to look for a ring. When there wasn’t one, I pretended not to feel the rush of relief and girlish giddiness. You take what you can get.) Standing at the back of the crowd, no one noticed us leave.

*****

This is your fourth cigarette, and you notice me eyeing the carton.

“Don’t worry, I’ll eventually start dating someone else who will convince me to give them up again.”

You’re joking, for the most part, but that truth fills me with a melancholy relief.

It hadn’t been that I was unhappy, or that you were ever cruel to me, or that I’d found somebody else. But I thought about those one thousand and ninety-five days a lot and I imagined thousands more, with only two options to choose from: we would either break up or get married, and the prospect of either filled me with the dizzying, untethered feeling of dread.

I think you knew this too, and it was why you hardly put up a fight at the end. Familiarity was one thing, love was another. I look at the swans that wander around the bench, the flat taste of stale granola in their mouths, but who nonetheless are waiting for more.

Given that they live a fraction of the time humans do and must take into account the amount of time they will spend courting, migrating, establishing territories, incubating, and raising their young, and then doing it all again, maintaining a relationship with a single partner is the easiest option for them. They aren’t the graceful romantics we paint them as. Humans looked at them and saw romance and true love. They know none of this. They’re practical.

But I suppose we’re not swans, so when you offer the carton to me, I don’t think too hard before taking a cigarette.

Julianne Vu is a junior at USC studying English Literature. She is passionate about reading and writing, although she seems to do very little of either these days. When she does find the time, she writes short stories, flash fiction, creative nonfiction, and poetry.