You Exist Too Much

Home > Other > You Exist Too Much > Page 19
You Exist Too Much Page 19

by Zaina Arafat


  In high school I would skid down the driveway to get laundry detergent—her discovery that the bottle was empty would trigger a rageful episode—only to wish to casually drive into incoming traffic on the way there. I couldn’t always distract myself with sex or a drink, or any other usual means of distraction. In the meantime nonexistence often seemed like a viable alternative.

  By the time I would return from the store she’d have calmed down. “Yalla, let’s go for breakfast,” she might suggest. I was expected to have brushed off the rebukes and be ready for eggs Benedict.

  “I’m leaving,” I would say, a halfhearted effort to stand up for myself, swearing to sear the memory of the incident onto my consciousness. I knew better than to leave myself no out. But inevitably, the hurt would fade too quickly, and two hours later we’d be having lunch.

  Other times her rage surfaced if I tried to set a boundary and assert some control. Suggesting we set a time to run errands or help with her résumé inevitably led to an explosion—how dare I not give in to whatever she wanted, the moment she wanted it, and have a life of my own that didn’t directly involve serving her?

  “Better safe than sorry,” everyone says. But for a while I’ve been afraid I could never truly be either.

  15

  “YOU FUCK WELL,” I SAY TO THE ARAB ENTHUSIAST AS he lies heavy on top of me, still inside me. He pulls out slowly and rolls the condom off, tying it in a knot and tossing it onto the nightstand. He then lies back against the pillow, his chest still heaving as I rest my head on it.

  The Arab Enthusiast is a twenty-two-year-old Oriental Studies major—they still call it that out here. He’s a native Midwesterner, a double black belt in jiujitsu, and the linchpin in my attempts to distract myself until Matías returns. So far it’s working, despite the fact that I’ve almost called out Matías’s name several times during sex.

  I met the Enthusiast through a friend. He had just come back from the West Bank, so we had plenty to talk about on our first date. He’d been once before—with Birthright Unplugged in high school, the alternative to Birthright Israel, which involves touring the occupied West Bank.

  “So you’re Jewish, but Pro-Palestinian?” I asked as he chalked the tip of a pool cue. “Do you get a lot of heat for that?”

  “Sure.” He shot his stick and sank two balls. “But I’m not changing my beliefs because of it.”

  Over dinner a few nights later we discussed Egypt. There was unreported talk of protests brewing against unemployment and government corruption inspired by events in Tunisia, where a street vendor had lit himself on fire in frustration, spurring demonstrations that toppled their own fifty-year military dictatorship. The Enthusiast knew everything about what was going on in Cairo.

  “Apparently more than ninety thousand people have signed up on Facebook for a ‘Day of Revolution,’” he told me. “And it’s supposed to happen in the next few days, in Tahrir Square.”

  Over dessert I noticed a thin scar just underneath his left eye. “I got knifed,” he said when I asked about it, running my finger along the puffy skin. “By an Israeli soldier while I was protesting the wall.”

  The idea of him resisting on Palestine’s behalf left me both thrilled and certain that I should invite him home with me. “So should we pay and get out of here?”

  By the time we made it inside my apartment I was already halfway undressed. As he groped me against the wall before leading me to the bedroom, I felt an eerie familiarity, as though he were channeling Matías. For a moment I genuinely believed he was there in the room with us. I fought to the push the flashes of him from my mind.

  I’ve seen the Enthusiast almost every evening since. Tonight he’s over at my apartment. We watched a documentary about the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement before making our way to my bedroom. “I better get going,” he says afterward. “I’ve got an early class tomorrow.”

  “No problem,” I tell him. Perfect, in fact.

  At eleven the next morning, I’m still in bed when my phone rings. It’s an international number—Matías. I haven’t thought about him in almost three days.

  “Mi amor!” he says when I answer, a frantic urgency attached to his voice. “I need to ask you something.”

  “What is it?”

  “Do you still love me?”

  I look at my nightstand and notice that the Enthusiast forgot to throw out his used condoms before leaving. “Yes, I do love you,” I respond. “Why are you asking?”

  “Because I just booked my plane ticket,” he tells me, the urgency replaced by smug satisfaction. “I’m coming to see you, baby.”

  •

  I know that I need to move on, I need to forget him. But in between nights with the Enthusiast, Matías becomes a character in every novel I read and reread. He is Swann. He is Heathcliff, Valmont, Rodolphe. He is Henry Miller, the one I know through Anaïs Nin’s diaries. We Skype almost every day, him regularly appearing in boxer briefs if it’s the end of the evening, or in a leather jacket and tight-fitting Diesel jeans if he is on his way out. We describe our airport reunion to each other dozens of times—twenty-first-century TSA security never factors in to our fantasies. All the while, I’m hoping that I’ll wake up the next day and no longer want him.

  “You’re not sleeping with anyone there, are you?” he asks periodically. “Because I just think it will be so much better when we finally do see each other, if we both hold out. I know I’m planning to.”

  Renata and Thomas each remind me that Matías wasn’t able to “hold out” from sleeping with someone else while he was sleeping with me, when we lived in the same zip code, let alone thousands of miles apart. “He loves himself too much to go without sex,” Thomas tells me over FaceTime, Renata visible in the background, shaking her head while studying for her board exams. “He needs the constant validation that comes with boning a variety of random women.”

  I nod in fake agreement. I can’t help but feel that Matías is sincere this time, that he wouldn’t risk losing me twice. The reward for both parties is just too great: four weeks together in a freezing Midwest winter, the perfect measure of his determination and commitment, at the end of which I’ll leave school and accompany him back to Buenos Aires, just in time for spring. Once there I’ll write and teach at the American university.

  “Chances are you’ll be working the register at the neighborhood supermarket,” Renata chimes in without looking up from her textbook. “Do not quit school, trust me, you’ll regret it.”

  “I end up regretting most of my decisions,” I respond. “So I guess I’m doomed either way.”

  Matías and I discuss the possibility that it might not work out, that our relationship might always be haunted by “the hell,” as he’s come to term the cheating months, as if he’d been assigned to his infidelity and had no control over it. He might never succeed in fully restoring my faith in him, and my resentment and mistrust might be too great to overcome. He assures me that doubt is an inevitable, even necessary, component of any relationship, and that any love worth pursuing entails risk—some more than others. Though we bicker over the specifics, we both agree that the wager is worth making. And so I spend my time counting down until his visit, running diagonal lines through the squares on my calendar as the months turn to weeks, and, eventually, days.

  But as his arrival approaches, something unexpected takes hold. A phenomenon in which he begins to appear smaller. Less exciting. A little pathetic, even. Just like with others who came before, I’ve crystallized an illusion of Matías that’s composed of an initial fantasy and the filter of distance. Yet this time, the illusion doesn’t hold up. Ever so slowly, it begins to disintegrate.

  As it does so, practical concerns began to seep in. I make an appointment at the local clinic to get tested for everything he might’ve given me, which in a turn of luck is nothing. I sit on the edge of the examination table, feet crossed at the ankles, feeling I might shatter if even the nurse touches me. I tell her about him. “
Could you be pregnant?” she asks.

  I shake my head and feel an ache in my chest. “I don’t think so.”

  “Did he use protection?”

  “Not always,” I tell the nurse.

  Finally, just two days before Matías is supposed to fly here, I muster up the strength to tell him that I’ve changed my mind about us, that I don’t want him to return.

  “I don’t get it,” he says. “You’re saying you feel differently than you did just last week?”

  “Yes. That’s exactly what I’m saying.”

  But he refuses to accept this, he keeps insisting. “I’m coming there, even if it’s just so you can break up with me in person. Then I’ll leave the next day. That night, even.”

  “Matías—”

  “If I don’t come,” he raises his voice, “then we’ll both always wonder what seeing each other might’ve done for us.”

  As promised, he comes. In truth I’m happy to let him, rather than risk regret. And during his visit, I manage to resist him. Sex with the Enthusiast seems a harmless distraction compared to the potential destruction of Matías. We sleep together only once, on his first day, and I realize before we even make it to my bed that the spell is broken, the appeal of him no longer exists. I am amazed by how quickly and completely it’s diminished when faced with his reality.

  I see him only a few times after that, once for dinner, then again for coffee. We spend an afternoon writing together in his hotel room, with no sex, just feedback and a few laughs. Pavarotti sings on low volume in the background as we work. I ask Matías if he thinks we could transition into a friendship, supporting each other in our creative lives and in our future relationships. I could see him being an excellent confidant, which is ironic, I tell him, given that he broke the trust by conducting a parallel relationship the entire time we were dating. He seems hurt by the question. “I think it’s a bit soon to think of us as just friends,” he says, “but maybe one day we can braid each other’s hair.”

  After ten days, he surrenders. He changes his flight to leave two and a half weeks earlier than planned. I drive him to the airport and drop him off outside the airport, underneath the departure sign, with no extended farewell. By the time he leaves he can no longer save me, even if either of us had still wanted him to.

  16

  TARA GREW UP IN SOME SORT OF COMMUNE THAT I CAN never quite visualize when she mentions it. Her dad is a drummer and a bit of a player, she tells me, her mother needy and dependent—both drug addicts. A poetry MFA student, Tara moved into the apartment next door to mine a few days ago. Her divorce was finalized over the summer. “He stopped effing me years ago,” she tells me when I stop by to give her the Wi-Fi password. She’s just finished baking banana bread and offers me a piece, along with a glass of lemonade. “I once mentioned that we didn’t have enough sex, and as punishment, he stopped sleeping with me entirely.”

  It’s been a year since things ended for good with Matías. I quickly lost interest in the Enthusiast, mostly because I wasn’t yet over Matías. Even though I felt relieved when he flew home two weeks early, I still find myself wondering what my life would’ve been like had I gone to Buenos Aires. To quell these counterfactuals I started dating someone new, a visual art professor at another university in-state. It’s quasi-long-distance; he lives and teaches an hour and half away. We see each other on weekends. It’s cozy between us, our relationship lukewarm, and for now that’s okay.

  Tara and I become fast friends based on shared daytime boredom and light evening alcoholism. Wanna meet on the front porch? she texts me a few nights after she moves in to the building. I could use a glass of vino.

  I find her outside, sitting on the top stair in a pink chiffon dress, her legs stretched out across the next few steps. She wears rubber sandals and her toes are unpainted. She pours me a glass of red wine. Tara only drinks red, I quickly learn, no matter the season. We get intimate fast, exchanging stories of family trauma. She tells me she’s of Syrian descent, that her grandmother was from Damascus. I tell her about Matías and Claire. I talk a little about Kate, and about Anna. I wouldn’t have guessed you were bi, Tara tells me. I shrug. “Isn’t everyone, these days?”

  I run into her sober the next day. It’s a little awkward, we maybe said too much last night. “Just so you know,” she says, “anything you told me stays between us.”

  It’s a nice assurance, but unnecessary—by now I’ve grown more comfortable telling these stories. Still, I feel shy, and I blush a little. Thanks, I say. Same for you.

  Our drinking sessions become more frequent, and I look forward to them throughout the day. As the nights grow colder, we switch to drinking in my living room. She takes off her ankle boots and socks and lies barefoot across my green couch. She is small against it, like a child in a swimming pool. I sit in a blue armchair facing her, as though I’m a psychiatrist, though she asks most of the questions. She asks about my current relationship. “He’s done teaching for the week by Wednesday but he never comes down until Saturday,” I tell her. “I guess he’s pretty clear about his priorities.”

  “He seems subdued,” she says after meeting him, tapping her finger against her chin. “Not nearly as dynamic as you.”

  I’ve been feeling increasingly slighted by his work and self-absorption. The infrequency with which he throws me down to fuck me and how quickly he is up and out of bed on our Sunday mornings.

  I admit to some mild dissatisfaction.

  Her observations become increasingly suggestive, her questions more leading. Most of our conversations feel intentionally weighted, though maybe I’m imbuing them with intention. One night we arrive at the end of a bottle around midnight, at which point it’s time for her to go back to her apartment. I walk her to my front door. She smiles and reaches forward to hug me. When she pulls away we make eye contact before saying good night. Her eyes are icy gray, almost blue. They seem to hold both intensity and surprising vulnerability. They seem to say what she doesn’t want to.

  •

  Tara is a runner. She does it to relieve anxiety, she says, for peace of mind, and I assume to stay thin, as well. She stretches on the front porch, sweaty after her long runs. One afternoon, I step outside with a New Yorker and I sit down on the steps. I watch her stretch; her legs are tan and long and tight. She presses her heel into the cement and bends over to hold the toe of her sneaker at a forty-five-degree angle. I suddenly feel self-conscious. She asks if I’ll wait for her to shower so we can walk to the reading together. Yes, I say, I’ll wait for her.

  She steps back out an hour later, freshly showered and wearing fishnet tights and a dress—always a skirt or a dress. She somehow looks even tanner now, glowing.

  At the reading, we end up sitting a few seats apart. My eyes keep catching her legs, bound up in netting. Afterward we go to an imitation speakeasy with a few others poets in her cohort. We talk about dating other writers, about “MFA goggles,” a phenomenon in which men who would be considered unattractive in any other setting became appealing here, due to the lack of options. “I slept with Jimmy again,” Tara tells the group. Jimmy is our across-the-street neighbor and her intermittent hookup. “Case in point.”

  I feel slightly disappointed, momentarily forgetting that I sleep with my boyfriend every weekend. I’m also a little relieved. Tara and I can go back to just being friends, with no possibility of more, none of the efforts that come with attraction. I drink several cocktails, and at last call we order a martini to split. It’s sufficient, we’re drunk. We walk home together, and once we arrive at our building she invites me to her apartment for one more drink, though we both know we don’t need any more.

  She lies on her couch, which is a futon that the last tenant, a fellow poet, left behind. I sit on the edge of it. We make small talk. I start to shiver. “You’re freezing,” she says. “Let me get you a blanket.”

  She returns with a colorful knitted quilt and proceeds to drape it over me. We keep talking. I start touching her leg
, cautiously at first, and then with increasing confidence. I move my hand up her thigh. I’m still shivering as I press my fingers against the holes in her fishnets. We keep talking as if nothing is happening. I inch my hand higher; her body feels warmer. I ask inane, mindless questions. She smiles and laughs a little, and asks, “Do you really care?”

  I shake my head. “I don’t.”

  I kiss her. At first it just feels like mouth on mouth, lips against lips. But I keep kissing her, and it starts to feel good. I run my fingers through her hair, I move my body on top of hers. She bends her knees and I am between her legs. I cup her hips with my palms as I kiss her. Her kisses are full, she flicks her tongue against mine, her body beneath me feels tiny and I like it. She says we should probably go to her room. I let her lead me through the dark and to her bed. She tells me this is new for her. I tell her I already know this.

  I pull back the waistband of her fishnets and place my hand beneath them. I ask her if it’s too much. No, she says, it’s not. I slip my fingers inside her. After a few moments her body shudders. I roll off her and we lie beside each other. She takes my hand and kisses the top of it. Then she says she’d like to make something to eat. “You hungry?” she asks.

  “I’m okay,” I say, sensing I should leave. “I’m gonna go.”

  “Don’t feel like I’m pushing you out,” she says, which of course means “I’m pushing you out.”

  I return to the living room and get dressed. My clothes are embarrassingly strewn about, much less sexy in the aftermath. I call out good night and close the door behind me.

  The next morning I leave the building through the back door, afraid of running into Tara in the hallway. I’m shaky and hungover and my heart is beating fast. I’m not yet sure how I feel about what happened, but I know she is now different to me. She’s imbued with an electric charge. Around three in the afternoon I get a text from her: No shame, friend. How’s your hangover?

 

‹ Prev