You Exist Too Much

by Zaina Arafat

  Who knows if I invented her—the things I remember, no one believes. “You can’t possibly remember telling your father that your mother was in labor!” people say. “Your brother is only two and a half years younger than you.” They tell me I can’t remember my mother hemorrhaging and returning to the hospital right after I was born.

  But I remember. Perhaps because I want to. I can just as easily forget when I want.

  14

  MATÍAS IS A VISITING FELLOW AT MY MFA PROGRAM. He’s in town from Argentina for the fall semester to work on his fourth novel. We meet the day he arrives, during the welcome barbecue at the fellowship director’s house. He approaches me from across the backyard, as though in a movie. “Hi,” he says. “Can I offer you a university-subsidized beer?”

  We make our way to the drinks table, where he pulls two dripping IPAs out of a cooler. We wander to a swing on the front porch. “So do you know anyone here yet?” I ask.

  “Nope,” he says. “Just you so far.” The conversation quickly moves from pleasantries to relationships to breakups. He’s recently separated from his wife; they stayed together too long, he tells me. He seems surprisingly eager to talk about her, and he describes the boredom that crept in, her growing disinterest in sex, leaving him constantly wanting more love. I feel an immediately closeness. I tell him that my relationship with Anna ended in May, intentionally avoiding any details about my summer.

  That’s how we begin.

  The next afternoon I run into him outside the local bookstore. Apparently it’s the kind of town where this happens often enough. “What’ve you been up to?” he asks. I tell him I wrote a short story, did some reading. “A story about what?”

  I wasn’t expecting him to ask. “Sex, actually.”

  He smiles. “Is it possible to write something short on that topic?”

  I laugh. The conversation feels scripted, like we are two leads in a screwball comedy. “Well, it’s more about women having sex ‘like men’ and vice versa.”

  “Interesting,” he says, taking a step closer to me. “I’m always the one who needs to be held afterward, and who needs to feel loved.”

  The thought of holding him makes me feel warm, and I start picturing the two of us in bed together before my mind wanders to Anna, to a condom wrapper that materialized from inside my purse one night. I managed to throw out the incriminating object before she could see it. I think about intimacy as I’d learned about it over the summer: “Into-me-you-see.”

  “Right,” I say. “And I’m out the door before the sheets have cooled.”

  Before we part ways he asks me to have dinner with him the following night, and I accept. When I arrive at the restaurant he is sitting at an outdoor table in a sports coat, smoking a cigarette, his bangs resting just above his green eyes. He reminds me of the lead in a nineties rom-com. “Do you mind if I smoke one more before we go inside?” he asks.

  We end up spending the evening on the balcony, smoking and drinking. He talks about his five years in Paris, meeting his wife during his first week there—they had each been at a surrealism exhibit at the Centre Pompidou, alone—the birth of his son two years later, who he describes as the true love of his life in a way that makes me feel both awed and prematurely disappointed, the plot of his novel, his open marriage and subsequent separation. I safely tuck away the Things to Be Wary Of. I ask follow-up questions, engaging in his stories. He doesn’t ask much about me, he seems happy to keep talking, and I am content to just listen. When we finally decide to order, the kitchen has already closed. “It’s so comfortable with you,” he says. “It feels like we’re talking in bed.”

  The presumption of his comment is both off-putting and impressive. Later, as we say goodbye, I give him my cheek but he kisses my lips. He invites me to his hotel room, and though I am tempted, I automatically decline. For one thing, I know better; you don’t sleep with a seductive Latin writer on the first date, even if—especially if—you find yourself charmed by him. Plus I’m not supposed to be doing this so soon after my twenty-eight days. “Not for a year,” the counselors instructed. “You’ll be too vulnerable anytime before that.”

  Though a year seems excessive, I know that less than a month out is too early, and I don’t want to be derailed just yet. Besides, if this is going to be anything at all, then there’s no need to rush. He seems impressed with my decision. “Fair enough,” he says. “I’d ask for your number but I don’t have a U.S. cell phone.” He kisses my cheek once more before walking toward his hotel.

  By the time I arrive back at my apartment, I already have an email from him. “Before tonight I was attracted to you,” he writes, “but in a speculative, abstract way. After we kissed, though, I walked home with my muscles in tension, imagining the unpublishable things I want to do to you.”

  I write back, “While in a way this excites me, it also makes me nervous.”

  He answers, “It’s the same for me. We may never do anything but talk, and so what: some friendships are driven by attraction. The only certainty is that there’s too much complicity between us to hurt each other, no?”

  It’s a line I might’ve used myself. I don’t respond.

  The following Saturday I’m walking through town and it starts to pour. I run into the nearest building, which happens to be the bookstore. He is standing near the register, paging through Borges. He’s wearing the same outfit he wore the day I met him, a black T-shirt and faded jeans. His hair’s a bit messy, cheeks dark and unshaven, and he’s carrying a brown leather messenger bag. He seems to possess just the right amount of concern for his appearance—style-conscious but not overly focused on it. I am both excited and nervous to see him, and I consider leaving before he notices me. Instead I say hello. He tells me he enjoyed the other night, and asks if I’d like to go out again this weekend.

  I tell him I can’t, I’m not ready to get involved with anyone. No need to go into details, Richard advised, when we talked about how I would handle such a situation. Say what needs to be said, reveal nothing beyond what’s necessary. “Then let’s be friends,” he answers.

  For a minute I feel thwarted before deciding I can do it, I can be friends with someone I’m attracted to. Soon after we leave I write to him and ask if he wants to come over in the evening. “Just friends,” I add.

  He arrives with a movie, Notes on a Scandal. We talk throughout. “Do you think Cate Blanchett is hot?” I ask.

  “Nah,” he says, “but Judi Dench I’d totally fuck.” I let him smoke on the couch since it’s still raining.

  “Can I have a drag?” I ask, and he holds the cigarette to my lips. When the movie ends he faces me. He inches forward, slow enough that I can stop him if I want to. But I don’t.

  Afterward, after he’s pulled me onto his lap, carried me to bed, and made love to me, sweat drips off his nose and onto my chest. “Is it all right if I stay?” he asks.

  I wince. The thought of spending the entire night together nauseates me. Then waking up and seeing each other’s body in slivers of light through Venetian blinds, the smell of stale sex and sleep breath. “No,” I say. “It’s not all right.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because I like incrementalism.”

  He smiles and gets up. “Just promise me you won’t disappear.”

  We spend the next few evenings together. One night he makes me dinner, fried steak. He cuts up Gouda and feeds me pieces while he cooks. “Who are your favorite twentieth-century poets?” he asks, and I’m so nervous that I answer Keats. “That’s eighteenth,” he says, smiling, “but yes, he’s all right.” We eat in the living room, and I barely make a dent in my plate, my appetite overshadowed by my libido. We put on a movie and five minutes into it we’re undressing each other on the couch. We try to watch the movie again the next night; this time we make it halfway through before I am straddling him as he clenches my shoulder blades, the flicker of the screen casting our shadows on the wall.

  Some nights he wants to talk about our pa
sts. He tells me about his mother, how she used to sing to him before bed. “It’s amazing,” he says as I run my fingers through his hair, “the pull of a mother. I guess that’s why everyone relates to Proust so much.” He then asks if I’m close to my own mother.

  “I am,” I say. “We were closer before, though.” He wants to see a picture of her, and I pull a photo album out from a desk drawer, one that I put together several years ago and carry with me from city to city. There are pictures of her on almost every spread in the album, and I feel pride when he tells me she’s beautiful. “She is, isn’t she,” I say, running my fingers across the cellophaned ridges of the page.

  He tells me about his wife, which she still is. They’re only separated, I keep forgetting this, that he’s married to a woman I’ve never met. He tells me that part of the reason they broke up was because she wanted to explore her sexuality. “She was very matter-of-fact about it,” he tells me, “as though she was telling me she wanted to go back to school or something!” On the fourth consecutive night together, I let him sleep over. The next morning I turn within his arms to face him. “Hi,” he says as he smiles and stretches. “Shall I make coffee?”

  He goes to the kitchen, and as he carries two mugs back to bed he asks me why I never talk about my last relationship.

  Until now I’ve managed to sidestep the subject of Anna whenever he brings it up, always turning the conversation back on him. “Because,” I say. “I was pretty terrible.”

  “Did you cheat?”

  I nod. “With men, and sometimes other women.” I take a sip of coffee. “Worse than that, though, I lied to her.” Matías gives me a confused look, so I continue, “I don’t know that lying and cheating always go together.”

  “So have you dated women other than Anna?”

  “Is that okay?” I ask, worried that I’ve revealed too much. Surprisingly, it often isn’t, at least not for men. At first it’s a turn-on; they ask many questions, have you ever done this, would you ever try that, would I be allowed to watch sometime, and could we ever do a threesome? Then it becomes a problem, as everyone starts to seem like a threat to him, both men and women. Soon insecurity consumes the relationship and it crumbles around me.

  “You know,” he says, “sometimes I wish I were bisexual. But unfortunately I just like women.”

  I smile. It’s exactly the right thing to say.

  •

  He tells me stories. Tells me about Guy de Maupassant’s insatiable sexual appetite, his mentor Flaubert’s fear that his protégé’s lust would deplete his creative energy. Joyce’s urine fetish, Dalí being bedridden for seven years after the death of Gala, the competitive friendship between Picasso and Matisse. He reads me Neruda, Calvino, the prostitute scenes from Tropic of Cancer. Tells me tales of his own sexual conquests: the neighbor’s wife in Paris, a forty-two-year-old German woman in Berlin when he was twenty-one, a Vanessa Paradis look-alike in Rio whose dress fell to the floor with a gentle lift of the straps. I tell him my stories, too, and they excite him, as his excite me. He knows more than I know, has done more than I have, and I like it.

  Once, he asks, “Is it weird that I fantasize about you pregnant?”

  His question sends a chill of unease through me, and makes me wonder if he’s toying with me. He must sense that I’m thinking this. “I’m not saying right now, of course,” he continues. “But someday, I’d love to make you pregnant. Can I say that?”

  “It depends. Do you mean it in a macho, spread-your-seed sort of way?”

  “Of course not!” He laughs. “In an ‘I would love to have a baby with you’ way. I keep imaging you with Simoné.” His three-year-old son. “Seeing the way you are with me, I think you’d be such a great mother.”

  Part of the reason for treatment was fear that I was becoming like mine. It had already started happening, me using Anna’s faults as ammunition. My mother had taught me that trick. Once, Anna dropped a wineglass on my kitchen floor and I lost control. I screamed at her, insulted her, and stopped myself just before calling her absentminded and unfocused, her weaknesses, and using them against her for extra impact. Afterward, I stood in front of her breathing heavily as she stared back at me, stunned and afraid of what I’d just done. I’ve always wanted kids, but the risk of becoming my mother was too high to ignore.

  “It would be great to have a daughter,” Matías says. “I’d want her to be just like you.”

  In bed that night, he places his hands on my cheeks, looks me in the eye, and tells me he loves me. I immediately push his hands away and turn my head. “Don’t say that,” I tell him.

  “Why not?” he asks. “Don’t you feel the same?”

  “I mean, don’t say it that way, right now.” I know that I need this from him—love—but I also need it to be real this time, and not an outcome of passion, or jealousy, or control. I need it to just be.

  •

  A week later, Matías and I are asleep when the phone in his hotel room rings. We both jump up immediately. I look to the clock on the nightstand and see that it’s three a.m.

  He picks up the phone and hunches over it. I can hear the faint murmur of a voice on the other end. I caress his back, but he doesn’t seem to notice. I draw my hand away, feeling strangely afraid.

  “What?” he says, cupping the receiver. “Of course, I do.”

  He mutters a few more innocuous words before hanging up. He then lies back down and tosses his arm over me like nothing happened. I scoot out from underneath it and turn to face him. “Who the hell was that?” I ask.

  “Oh,” he says, as though he’d already forgotten about the call, “it was just Claire.”

  His translator. She and I met a week earlier; Matías invited me to her birthday party, told me he thought we would really get along. “So glad you could make it,” she’d said when we arrived, offering a tight smile, then looking to him. The look she’d given him suggested that she didn’t know he was bringing me, and was surprised that he had. When he excused himself to chat with another visiting writer, he pressed his hand to her shoulder, which wasn’t particularly troubling—he was rather indiscriminately effusive. But still. I noticed it. When it was just the two of us left standing there, I asked her where she’d learned Spanish. “Oh, everywhere,” she said. “I just got back from two years in Argentina, before that I was in Madrid.” I felt slight envy at this, given that I was living in Iowa.

  “Claire’s traveling early tomorrow to Mexico City,” he says to me now. “She needed to ask me a few questions about a translation.”

  “At three in the morning?”

  “I know, it’s weird,” he says. “She works nonstop. She’s very American in that way.” He laughs a little, then pets the top of my head. “I’m so sorry it woke you, mi amor.” He kisses my cheek and I lie back down. I still can’t shake a feeling of fear. He touches his lips to my neck. He places his hand beneath my nightgown, and I pretend that I’m already asleep.

  Several days later, we are on our way to catch a flight for an impromptu trip to New York that Matías suggested and bought tickets for, and that I’ve been hesitant about. It seems hasty and extreme, and the impulsivity of it makes me worry. “Why the sudden need to travel?” I ask.

  “Because,” he says, “why not? It’ll be great to explore the city with you.” I am not so sure I need spontaneity right now, and I certainly am not ready to visit New York yet—I only just left a month ago. But against my better judgment, I agree to go, not wanting to seem boring or uptight.

  “I did something silly last night,” he tells me in the car on the way to the airport. “I kissed someone.”

  “You what?” I press the break unintentionally and the car jolts to a stop on the empty highway. He throws his arm out across my chest. I look in the rearview mirror, then at him. “Who?”

  “Claire,” he says as the odometer creeps back up to seventy. “Does that bother you?”

  I feel my chest heaving, like I’ve been punched in the stomach and can’t b
reathe. “Of course it bothers me!”

  “I just thought I was moving too fast for you,” he says, peering down at his shoes, then dramatically back at me. “And that you didn’t care about me as much as I care about you.”

  My entire body is about to revolt. I’ve already grown tired of his need for constant reassurance. He’s always complaining that I’m distant, asking if his emotions scare me. Asking if I faked it, to which I always respond, “Why must you ruin the moment by asking that?”

  “I panicked,” he says. “I told you I love you, and you didn’t say it back.”

  “Yes, and like I told you then, during sex doesn’t count. Plus last I checked, feeling insecure doesn’t justify kissing someone else.”

  “I never know with you,” he says, looking down at his lap. “Trying to detect how you feel is nearly impossible. I just—”

  “Damn it, Matías,” I interrupt, and by now I am yelling, “I’m going to New York with you! I’m not an escort, I don’t just let men I don’t care about take me to random cities.” My heart is throbbing. “I told you I was afraid you would hurt me, right? That I wasn’t ready for this?” My voice cracks and my eyes begin to burn.

  “In a way,” he says, placing his hand on my thigh and squeezing gently, “it makes me happy that you’re upset.”

  I squint at him. “You’re happy that I’m crying?”

  “It shows me that you actually care.”

  I’m tempted to turn the car around, but instead I reassure him. “Yes, I do care. And maybe it’s not very postmodern of me,” I say, thinking of his open marriage, “but I get jealous. I know we have no claim on each other—”

  “We do, though,” he says. “I want us to.”

  At this, I begin to soften. By the time we’re on the plane he’s calling me his girlfriend. We’re kissing and drinking tomato juice and even the flight attendant indulges us with sugary smiles. Periodically an image of him kissing Claire flashes in my mind, and I wince. “I just pictured it,” I tell him.

  He scrunches his brow, gives me sad eyes. “Don’t,” he says. “It was stupid. It lasted for two seconds and never would’ve happened if I wasn’t drunk.”