by Siel Ju
We got under the covers. We started kissing again, more gently this time, but pressed hard against each other. With his thumb he caressed my eyebrow, then my ear. “I really like you,” he said. “I want you to know, the other women I’d been seeing, I’ve told them I met someone, I’m not going to see them anymore.” As he said this he was looking away slightly, like a child that had told a tall tale he’d almost convinced himself was true. I felt an uncomfortable mixture of empathy and derisive mirth. I suppose it wasn’t out of the realm of possibility that he’d been dating a few other women, he was attractive enough, but something about the way he’d made this declaration made me disbelieve him. It seemed too spot-on a detail of the way he wanted to be seen—as someone unconventional and daring and profligate—and it felt desperate, beseeching in its effort to convince me that he was a catch and I the lucky one. In a way I did feel lucky. But I also wanted to call him on it. I like you too, I wanted to say. But you’re not fooling anyone.
We dozed next to each other fitfully, the room humid with our body heat. I had a hard time falling asleep, and when I did, kept waking up. In this way, I didn’t dream.
The next morning I drove Erin to the airport. She was going home for the holidays; her parents lived in New Jersey. During the drive, Erin discussed the relationship seminars. They didn’t start until the New Year, but she had signed on to the website and watched some of the free mini videos, including one about online dating.
“Basically, we need to look at it as a numbers game, and just go out with a lot of people. And right away, too, so you’re not all invested in someone before you even meet. None of this emailing and talking on the phone for weeks.” She leaned toward me. “The magic number is thirty-seven.” She sat back, then wagged her hand. “Or around there. You have to go out a lot.”
Her expression was anticipatory, but with a disgruntled undercurrent, like she was aggravated about all the time she’d wasted before discovering these truths. Still, she seemed happier, more alert. She was wearing a crisp, blue crewneck and a high ponytail, which gave her the look of an unusually enthusiastic student, the kind that sat in the front row and raised her hand a lot.
“After the trip, I’m starting fresh,” she said. “So while I’m at home I want to do like a cleanse. Vegan, no gluten. Mostly raw food. I need to reset my system. I’m not going to drink at all. Or if I do, only organic wine, no sulfites. Although I might go out with my friend Vanessa in New York for New Year’s …” She ran mental calculations, negotiating with herself.
“Vanessa the alcoholic?” I asked.
“Well, yeah. Though I probably shouldn’t have called her that, when you don’t even know her. I don’t know that she’s really an alcoholic. It’s just that whenever I go out with her I end up drinking way too much. Last time …” She came to an uneasy pause. “The thing is, I’ve been taking Xanax.” At this I turned toward her and she continued hurriedly. “For that breathing issue I told you about. It’s been helping, really it has. But then when I drink after I’ve taken one, it’ll be all great for a while, and then suddenly I’ll black out and not remember anything. That’s what happened with that guy. You know, that short guy I told you about, with curly hair. At the Italian restaurant.”
I remembered the guy, though I’d never met him, just heard about him as I’d stood in line with Erin at the pharmacy for Plan B. She said she’d found him unattractive, but that she was drunk and took him home anyway. The last thing she remembered was padding into her bathroom to get a condom. In the morning she’d looked at the used thing and panicked; it didn’t look right. “I don’t want to have this guy’s baby,” she’d told me. “In the future, everyone I sleep with, the guy has to be good looking, someone I can at least look at and say, okay, I could have his baby.” She said she’d never get an abortion; she’d been raised Catholic. She’d looked somewhat excited when she said this, like a part of her wanted an accidental pregnancy to happen, which alarmed me. But as she swiped her credit card I supposed there was no reason Erin shouldn’t have a kid if she wanted. She certainly made enough money to raise one by herself.
When I got home I felt unexpectedly exhausted, and lonely. I lay on my couch with my arm over my eyes and let my mouth turn down dejectedly. I thought about the guy I’d dated the summer before, how one afternoon he’d gotten barefoot and climbed the fig tree on my street, laughing as he dropped the fruit down to me. The weekend after that, apropos of nothing, he’d told me that he liked hanging out but didn’t want anything serious, as if the intimacy of sharing fruit had suddenly made it all too much. There’d been a slight smile of satisfaction on his lips as he’d told me this, like he was enjoying exercising his upper hand. I’d told him goodbye and good luck. This shocked him; he said effetely that he hadn’t meant he wanted to stop seeing me. I guess he’d really thought I was a pushover.
I wondered if maybe I was. In a vague sense, I knew why Erin was unhappy. But I felt powerless to help her. I did the same things.
Maybe I could change, with Christian. I thought about his saying he wouldn’t see the other girls again, and this time felt kindlier toward his posturing. In a way we had a lot in common, shielding our insecurities with false bravado and toughness. He was arrogant, yes, but only because he was too terrified to look at himself more closely, to face the fact of his insignificance in the world. Weren’t we all? I thought it was possible that we could protect each other, preserve each other’s fantasies of self-importance.
I got up and went to my desk. The teenager next door was playing basketball on the driveway again. I typed to the beat of his dribbling and ended up working for hours, into the evening, dropping into bed early with a twangy headache that felt almost virtuous, like a sharp proof of productivity.
An hour later, I woke up when Christian called. There was a coddling solicitousness to his tone that assumed I would be feeling tender and vulnerable toward him, and in my groggy, curled-up state, I did. He asked me what my plans were for Christmas day. When I said I didn’t really celebrate Christmas though I had nothing against it, he invited me to a potluck Christmas dinner he was having with a few of his friends. “You don’t have to bring anything,” he said. “Just show up.”
“I can make something,” I said. I wondered if Matt had warned him about my cooking for some reason. I thought I was passable in the kitchen.
“We could make something together,” he said. “What do you like?”
At this I started making haphazard suggestions, but it became clear he’d already created a menu and bought the ingredients, which was just as well. We were to make turkey and sweet potato pie. He said there’d be six of us, and that he thought his friends would like me. He said this like a compliment without bringing up whether or not I might like them. This grated on me. I pictured myself as a demure and obedient child, being kept up after bedtime and trotted out to play an amateurish piano concerto for the dinner guests. At the same time I felt that child inside me grow eager and plaintive, looking forward to that impromptu concert, yearning to perform well. In my mind I petted the girl’s head, trying to calm her anxieties. But I couldn’t. She was hungry for attention, and strong-willed.
In the end I didn’t end up helping much in the kitchen; Christian had almost everything done by the time I got there. He had me run the beater over the sweet potato mixture, then as soon as the pie was in, we started making out, somewhat theatrically, like we were acting out a scene in which we knew we’d be interrupted by the comedic sidekick. Still, we went at it for a while. He had my shirt wrenched up and me pinned hard against the fridge when the doorbell rang. We straightened up with an artificial sheepishness. His friend Jason arrived first via taxi with his law school girlfriend, Jenna. Then Amy, a girl Christian had met in an improv class a long time ago, came in with her acting class buddy, Jeff.
I disliked Amy instantly. A pretty, slightly bony brunette, she introduced herself to me in an ostentatious, overly-familiar way that somehow seemed to announce she’d met plen
ty of Christian’s girlfriends before and had acted this way with each one. She and I sat flanking Christian, who took the head of the table, and she flirted with him occasionally, leaning over with her elbow on the table, her hand dangling over his thigh. Then she’d look over at me and wink, as if the flirting was some inside joke we shared.
She mostly focused on Jeff though, a dark, scruffy guy with nice arms. She had an obvious crush on him that got bolder with each glass of Pinot Noir. All of Christian’s friends drank a lot, in fact, the empty bottles collecting on the table like spent exclamation marks. They apparently took the Christmas holiday seriously. By dessert they were lax and garrulous, playing with the food, spilling bits and drops, interrupting each other excitedly with banal platitudes about life. Christian was enjoying it. He’d let himself get quite drunk. His self-aware, self-revisionist tendencies were completely gone. Now he was shamelessly cheeky, wearing a loose, semi-permanent grin. This transformation gave me pause, though I was glad to see him looking free, liberated from the insecurities he worked so hard to mask. He started making silly double entendres and laughing hard at them. At dessert, he interrupted Amy and made an abrupt segway in the conversation to start discussing deadbeat dads.
“I’m not saying they shouldn’t be held responsible, necessarily,” he said, mirthful and loud. “But the thing is, they have no choice if you think about it, if a woman gets pregnant accidentally and she just decides to have the kid.”
His eyes had a giddy, hooded look, like a mischievous boy trying hard to stay awake to see the results of a prank he’d set up.
“I totally support a woman’s right to choose,” he continued impishly. “Which is why, if she’s made that choice herself, never mind what the guy wanted, shouldn’t she kind of take on the consequences?”
The guests kept on their tipsy smiles but their brows tensed slightly, inclined to be agreeable but unsure how they’d suddenly ended up in this position. “I don’t know if I’d go there, Christian,” Jason said in a tone of mock caution, and the table laughed a little, good-natured and uneasy. I looked around with a nebulous discomfort. I was bothered that by virtue of being his date, I may appear to be agreeing with him if I stayed silent. Yet I didn’t care to join in, not when Christian was so obviously fishing for attention, holding up his ridiculous bait with a desperate glee. And I didn’t really want him to feel bad either. These were his friends, after all, and he’d invited me to meet them. It was Christmas. He was drunk enough to be oblivious to the tenor of the room. He grinned stupidly over his glass. I felt embarrassed watching him, but also wanted to be tolerant of his transparency, its needy innocence.
Jenna suddenly spoke up. “You know, my mom didn’t ask for anything,” she said, sounding petulant and defensive, but slurring girlishly too, “raising me and my brother alone. But she struggled. I don’t know if she would have taken it, but it would have really helped if our dad had helped out, ever.”
There was a short silence. Then Christian said, “Wow! I wasn’t expecting that!” Everyone laughed. “Wow!” he said again, more chastened this time, but still laughing. “I take it back. Down with deadbeat dads. I can take it back, right?”
“Yes, yes, take it back,” Amy said, waving her hand as if to dismiss him. She got up and clomped around the table in her heels, passing around the chocolate raspberry crumb bars she’d brought. She said they’d been a hit with her acting class. Then she inhaled dramatically, like she’d just remembered something. “Jeff’s an ah-mazing actor!” Amy said. “We should do that scene from last week!” She tried to pull him up from his seat.
“Hey—It’s relaxing time now,” Jeff said, pointing at his wine and gently extricating his arm. He was on his second glass, like me; he was the designated driver.
“Oh, fine.” Amy stalled for a moment, uncertain, then by herself started in doggedly on a short solo scene—an Ibsen monologue animated with big arm movements. I smiled at Jeff, rolling my eyes at Amy. He smiled too, shrugging. Then we clapped—Amy was taking her bows.
The night slowly devolved. Christian opened yet another bottle of wine despite protests, a Bordeaux he insisted everyone had to try. This finally started putting his friends over the edge. Amy drank a half glass, then got up to do another scene, pulling Jeff by the arm again and begging “Please? Pretty please?” in a cringingly desperate way. Christian for his part started opinionating about Mel Gibson’s latest DUI. By this time I’d learned to just quietly smile along, obliging him without responding to him, like his friends knew to do. When he realized no one was really listening, Christian gestured wider, until inevitably, he hit his wineglass. We watched it fall slow motion into the turkey carcass. “Well, there goes that,” Jason said, then glanced over at Jenna, who had been sitting silent for a while. She looked like she was going to throw up. Jason took her out on the balcony for air, then popped his head back in. “I’m calling a cab,” he said.
Jeff immediately suggested going too, but Amy was drunk and bratty, saying she was staying until Jason and Jenna left. The cab was going to be an hour. We waited in the dimly lit living room, Christian fiddling with iTunes and Amy yelling out requests then dancing jerkily by herself. Jason and Jenna came back in and clung to each other, swaying in a vague waltz. Christian took me by the waist and we twirled around a bit too. He’d lost his logorrhea; the dancing took all his concentration, and he was pretty good at it, better than I was. Seeing Amy watch us, I felt a small, peevish pleasure. Christian dipped me. I was afraid he was going to drop me, but he didn’t, and this made me relax for the first time that night. His eyes looked darker now, hinting at a complexity that almost made his former drunken pontificating seem like a put-on.
When the song ended Amy had a change in attitude. She turned to Jeff and said, “Do you want to go?” She said this smiling with bedroom eyes, as if he’d just propositioned her. When he said yes, she took his arm. I heard her heels clatter out through the apartment complex’s courtyard.
The taxi came soon after that. As soon Jason and Jenna were out the door, Christian turned and grabbed me. I lost my balance and we fell on the floor. We rolled around, giggly at first, kicking our shoes off, then more sensually, then giggly again. We cycled back and forth; we couldn’t stay serious enough to actually progress to a real sexual encounter, but it felt good all the same, playful and intimate. Then he propped himself up on an elbow and said, “I got you a Christmas present.”
We went to the bedroom, where he fished a gift bag out of the closet. In it was a Malcolm Gladwell book from my Amazon wish list, and a silk eye mask. I’d told him I wore one when I slept at home. “For when you stay here,” he said.
I thanked him sincerely. It was the most thoughtful gift I’d ever received from a guy, the most accepting. I leaned into him and we kissed deeply, and while we did, I remembered what he’d said about his tendency to jump into things too quickly. I didn’t care. Maybe it would be different this time. It was happening fast, but without illusions. I already knew I could be embarrassed by him, and I was okay with it. It felt candid and clear-eyed, free from games.
“I got you a gift too,” I said suddenly. I took his hand and led him outside in a half-run, the concrete icy against our bare feet. The night winds whipped around us powerfully. I opened the trunk and lifted out the scarf, the blue one I’d gotten for my sister. “It’s like mine, but different,” I said.
He turned it over in his hands, then wrapped it loosely around his neck and looked at me, as if for approval. “Thank you,” he said. I shrugged happily. I felt resolute and proud, like I’d flouted some rule. “Thank you,” he said again, then leaned over for a long press of his lips against mine. When he pulled away his face was in shadow and I couldn’t read his expression, then he moved a little and I saw the glint of light on his teeth. I realized then he was still drunk, swaying, grinning blithely under the moon, content. I was disappointed realizing this, that he wasn’t experiencing this moment as viscerally as I was. But I also felt a slight pull. He was
happy, and he was with me, and I wanted to feel what he was feeling.
After the New Year, I went to Natalie’s boutique again. I explained to Natalie why I needed another scarf and told her about Christian, which seemed to make her happy, like she’d been somehow instrumental in the romance. Then Natalie told me about her experience detaching from her mom.
“It was just a first step,” she said. “But when she said we should go on a hike, and my brother said no, he just wanted to relax and watch TV, I agreed with him. In the past I would have just gone with my mom without question. I would have helped her try and guilt him too.”
She sounded exultant.
“Then the next day, when I was packing up to leave, she asked me to stay until after dinner, and I said no, I wanted to beat the traffic. She didn’t make a scene because my brother was there both times. I planned it that way to make it easier.”
“Have you talked to her since?” I said.
“No. That’s how I know she’s mad.” Natalie marched me over to the scarf section and presented the top one to me in a defiant gesture. Then she brightened. “So let me know how it works out with him,” she said. “Maybe I’ll start calling these the holiday love scarf.”
That night I met Erin for drinks at Bodega Wine Bar. When I got there she was surrounded by a group of coworkers, most of who seemed to be her underlings. They looked at her with a glittery respect mixed with a certain impetuousness, like they were testing out being on equal footing with her, fellow drinkers at a bar. When I arrived they bought Erin a last drink and said their goodbyes. Afterwards Erin glowed, basking in the aftermath of their attention. She had the look of a valedictorian who’d finally received from school the attention she’d never gotten from her parents. I felt a swell of tenderness. We moved from the bar to a table that had opened up in a corner, then sat close to each other and made small talk in low tones, as if conspiring. I leaned my head on her shoulder for a moment in a show of feeling.
