Burning My Hundred
It’s astonishing the way we arrive without knowing it, the history we make by accident.
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I see her in the blue light of dancing water. She is standing by the fountain at the university in a dress and low-top Converse. Her hair is tied up loosely and she is shorter than I figured.
We had been playing the Bumbl game for a few safe weeks, matching and asking questions about the interests we had edited for publication, the things we saw in the six or so pictures uploaded to our profiles.
Do you live near a lake?
No, but I own a kayak.
Is that China? The one with the bronze-green lion.
It’s Chicago. The Art Institute.
We graduated to books. Me all Ford and Bausch and Powers, a study of Richards—my affinity for Dicks, her joke—and she, Cline for fun and Google Scholar for her dissertation, the neurology of Asian children from abusive, middle-class homes. The Life of Milarepa. We left the app for texting, made small, meaningless promises to delete our profiles. We demanded pictures from high school. Blurry, drunken snapshots from undergrad with digital camera timestamps. Spring breaks and summers abroad. A mai tai in Ensenada. A beer in Hanoi. I’m grabbing at a plaster pirate’s cod piece at the Shedd Aquarium. She’s in a dorm room filled with laughing, red-faced twenty somethings. Chianti bottles and candlesticks, CD wallets and fixed-gear bicycles. The life lived before iPhones.
Then we gave away our traumas. Once, during a seance, she heard a voice say daddy loves you—which only hardened her belief in observable facts. I told her I had been mugged leaving a parking garage at 10AM on a Sunday; they stole my wallet but refused to take my Zune. She forwarded me an article she had written called “Pity Sex and the Spectrum of Rape.” I suspected my mother was having an affair with a woman.
“You’re here,” she says, as if our tenuous online experience hardly proved that someone might do in real life what they say on the Internet.
“I love it here,” I say.
Students glide past us on hoverboards and Razor scooters, off to cram for some test, that last great barrier to their nobler cause. I have been out of college for over a decade and so miss the sense of feeling like the things I was told to learn would lend me the power to enact my will on the world at large. But so far, not a single person ever asked what my GPA was or what I thought of Countee Cullen’s “Yet Do I Marvel.” We learn, far too late or sometimes never, that no matter how much we want for it, there is no greater life out there waiting for us. Or maybe there is, but the risk and ruination we wage in our seeking terrifies us to a standstill.
“Don’t you want to see my office?” she says.
“Does it have a view?”
“Does it ever.”
She has a chummy, cartoonish way of speaking that, for someone with her credentials, sort of frightens me. It isn’t that it’s off-putting. I suppose I just expected to have my vocabulary tested, the humble (if existent at all) understanding I have of the big three. On the phone a few nights ago she listed everyone in her closest circle, attaching their profession to their name, and it was a deep, impressive order. There was Julie, who was an onsite psychiatrist at the Google campus. Assam, startup acquisitions, whose dad had been shot in the leg by the IDF before his family left Ramallah for San Jose in the nineties, and to whom she was engaged for three years! Robert and Sean, both attorneys and both flaming gay, but not with each other, as a rule. Laney, the language arts and sociology teacher/girls’ basketball coach at an exclusive, coastal preparatory school. Lastly, as if she knew it would be something of a finale for both the exoticness of name and preposterousness of title: Soudi, the no-shit rocket scientist. They meet for dinner twice a week. My best friend went to Stanford, I tell her, as if his resume gives me some sort of currency.
She leads me around the quadrangle and through a set of locked double-doors, up two flights of stairs and down a hallway where lights flick on automatically as we move. The office itself is small, the bulk of all the university’s real estate belonging to the hard sciences and mathematics more complicated than the ones she taught—college algebra and statistics. These are the classes everyone has to take, she tells me. An obstacle for nurses and budding criminologists. She puts this in her syllabi.
She has an expensive chair parked in front of a desk that has TA hand-me-down written all over it, literally. It all sits before a large, floor-to-ceiling window, the view from which, I notice, is blocked by various postcards and signs. Feminist affirmations, math jokes, Black Lives Matter, and a poster of a smug looking mouse in a suit feet propped on a desk with a word bubble that says, I press the button, they give me cheese. It’s a pretty sweet deal if you ask me.
“Nice digs.”
“Have you ever dated an Asian girl?” She’s leaning against the doorframe.
“My college roommate’s sister. They were from Iran. I bet you’d say that doesn’t count.”
“I suppose you’ve caught me on a technicality.”
“Trying to expose my Asian girl fantasy.”
“I wonder if I’d feel the same if I was missing a limb.”
“I dated a one-armed girl once.”
“Shut up.”
“She wasn’t Asian, though.”
If I knew the things to say to make women want to kiss you, I would sell it as an e-book and maybe move into a nicer house. But I don’t. All I know is that it’s hardly ever the thing I think I should have said. She has a sheepish way of kissing, pausing often and drawing her head back to be chased. I wonder where it was she learned that.
“Do you want to get a drink?” I say.
“An appeal to the most probable inference?”
“I guess.”
“I’d rather spare the carbs. French fries?”
“French fries?”
“Best to keep my mental faculty—around you. You are a stranger, after all.”
“Good thinking.”
“It’s what they pay me for.”
We leave the university and walk through SoFA holding hands and scrutinizing window menus. It is a good feeling anyone should be so lucky to know, an evening stroll in late spring with a beautiful woman, everything sheathed in newness. Burgers in a window booth, the purpling night, and people simply everywhere. It is the charge I suppose I had been searching for, the doubled-down corporeality of first encounters.
“You pick onions off,” she says. “Like a child.”
“There’s no rule that says you have to eat onions if you want to be an adult.”
“I am currently drafting the legislation.”
“You’ll let me know when it’s on the ballot.”
It carries on like this until we hit a loll in the conversation and I notice her face go a little cold. She stares out the window, sensing something. I don’t want to ask if anything is the matter. It could be she’s gotten a bad onion or really is perturbed by my distaste for them.
“Are you close with your mom?” she finally asks.
“My mom?”
“Yeah.”
“Not really,” I say. “We used to be, but not anymore. Is that indicative?”
“Remains to be seen. What happened?”
“I realized she was a narcissist. Incapable of viewing the world from any other aperture. My dad makes it worse.”
“How’s that?”
“He infantilizes her. He’s also terrified of telling her she’s wrong. I’m not sure where that comes from. How does someone feel contempt and fear at the same time?”
“Did you mean for that to sound rhetorical?”
“I don’t know. I don’t mean to go on about it.”
“I brought it up. It’s refreshing.”
“What is?”
“I don’t know,” she says. “You’re unguarded.”
“Wait, are you therapizing me?”
“Please. It’s funny though isn’t it?”
“What?”
“The way first date conversations mimic psychoanalysis. Like we’re feeling for traps the future has set for us.”
“I suppose you’re right.”
“So Mom’s a narcissist, huh?”
“The reigning world champion.”
She laughs.
“It’s too bad.”
“Why’s that?”
“Psychology says you’ll probably be one, too.”
“Really?”
“Uh-huh.” She eats two french fries and smiles. “Oh, but it’s not your fault.”
“That’s a relief.”
Just then my phone vibrates, which also makes my watch vibrate.
Why are you doing this?
“What about you?” I ask.
“Me?”
“What’s your mom like?”
“Stereotypical.”
“Tiger? Helicopter? What?”
“Disappointed with girls. Some stories don’t need to be told. Ready?”
We leave the restaurant and walk back onto campus. This feels deliberate on her part. I am a stranger, after all, and the bustle of a state school never seems to cease. She leads me to a bench beside the fountain and we sit.
“So you were engaged. What happened with that?”
“His parents hated me.”
“I don’t believe that.”
“They thought I was too candid.”
“I see that as a positive.”
“Talk to me in three years.”
“So they didn’t like you,” I say. “What about him? He just kowtows to whatever his parents say?”
“He’s Muslim. And I,” she pulls a strand of hair away from her face and laughs, “am terrified of dying.”
“Because you think there’s nothing after.”
“You do?”
“I probably don’t.”
A few groups of students walk by and hose us down with their conversations. They all look so much younger than us and I think, maybe, it’s the first time I’ve felt old. Or older. The talk about death and accounting for the mistakes of our parents, the blissfully oblivious, pure-hearted children walking by, their voices on some continuum spanning the inanities of the cute jumper Jess wore to O-Chem to the highest vibrations of social injustice, it makes me feel very weird and inconsequential. It makes me miss being in college, the hours spent rapt in dead serious conversations over books and which of our favorite authors had bedded our favorite poets. Once, I suddenly recall, at the end of a seminar wherein my cohort and I spent four hours painstakingly explicating Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! only to conclude that we all truly didn’t know what the book was about, we had a bonfire at one of the second year’s houses. I remember us sitting in silence around the fire, not in frustration because we had failed some task, but perhaps in wonder that a work written in our native language could unanimously confound us. A world of worlds, some open and others not. After a few beers, one of the first years, a really smart, bighearted guy from Alaska, pulled the book out of his backback and tossed it into the fire pit. He dropped out after that semester and moved back home without telling anyone. A few years after, he died in a plane crash somewhere in the middle of that unknowable wilderness.
“Plus he was afraid of my sex drive.”
“Afraid?”
“You could say there was a correlation between my desire and his performance anxiety.”
“You could say that.”
“What would you say?”
“I would say that he is probably off somewhere kicking himself.”
“Oh we’re still good friends. His wife is simply stunning.”
“What does she do?”
“Him, now.”
“Intermittently.”
She laughs.
“Can I see your apartment?”
“Do you think that’s a good idea?”
“Worried about your sex drive?”
“It’s not as if I am incapable of restraint. I’m a big girl.”
“Prove it.”
She gapes in that learned way pretty girls do so often, feigned shock, a tactic deployed to stun us.
“Okay,” she says. “I will. But only to reward the cunning involved in saying something so cringe.”
Her place is a short drive from campus, one of those mid-tier luxury jobs of glass and optical illusion floating balconies, first floor juice bars and Korean pastry places, popping up all over Silicon Valley. She holds my hand the entire drive, letting go only briefly to evaluate the contents of my glove compartment. We park in a structure and she reaches into her purse and pulls out a parking placard and affixes it to the rearview mirror.
I laugh.
“Shut up,” she says.
She lives in a studio on the eighth floor, every wall a window peering out at the light and sway of the city. A desk unusable for its books, a tidy kitchen, a bed with a frame I had seen advertised on Instagram. There’s an e-bike parked by the door, a plastic cubby for shoes. We land on the modular couch, another relent to our adventure’s most likely outcome. She reaches into my shirt and places small, icy hands on my stomach.
“Much better,” she says.
My phone and watch go off in buffered tandem.
Don’t ignore me.
I dig into my pocket and hold the power button down.
“What is it you think you like most about me?” she asks. It’s a loaded question, one of those moments where opportunity or dissolution ride on the back of your voice as you answer. I decide to just be honest.
“Talking with you feels like there is something at stake.”
She laughs out loud. “You’re full of them tonight, aren’t you?”
“What?” I say. “What do most guys say?”
“I don’t know,” she says. “My blowjobs.”
“I wouldn’t know.”
“Well, mostly they say that.”
“You’ve had a lot of practice?”
“That sounds like a mean way of saying I’m good at them.”
“So you’re good at them?”
“Internationally ranked.”
It’s astonishing the way we arrive without knowing it, the history we make by accident. We play dumb and risk the outcome as foreplay, but all signs point to something. I’m pained for it because, I now understand, that all I really wanted was to know there was still a lifetime of chances for me. And in knowing that there is and that I have taken one, all the lightness and consequence I built up of an evening is gone.
“I should go,” I tell her. “I have an early morning.”
“Me too.”
She gets up and walks to her bathroom and closes the door. I stand on the other side stupidly and listen to the whir of her electric toothbrush. She comes out in pajamas and gets back into her bed and pulls the duvet up to her chin and smiles at me.
“Night,” she says.
I say it back and then leave.
When I get to my car, I unhook the parking placard and walk back inside her building. The elevator takes me to the eighth floor and I wedge the thing in her doorframe like a takeout menu. Then I drive home.