You Exist Too Much

by Zaina Arafat

  Shame isn’t what I feel. I tell her this, and I wait for a response, but she doesn’t answer.

  •

  Tara and I continue, with inconsistency, despite some hesitation on her part, following a profession of desire on mine. “No feelings,” I promise her before the second time. It’s her only condition. That and drunkenness. So we drink a lot. Some nights nothing happens and I get in bed alone, drunk and disappointed.

  I begin to dread my boyfriend’s visits. One night the three of us go to a bar, and when he gets up from the table to buy us a round, she admits to feeling possessive of me whenever he’s in town. She links her leg with mine under the table. She tells me she’s going to head out soon, and when I ask about her plans for the rest of the evening, she smiles but doesn’t answer. I can’t tell if she’s jealous or trying to make me jealous. After she leaves, he and I sit there with not much to say, or maybe he is saying something, but I am definitely not listening. We leave soon after she does. It’s snowing out, and when we finally get in his car to leave, we search for her on the sidewalk. I twistedly accuse him of having feelings for her. “I just don’t get why you care so much about how she gets home,” I say as we peer through the windshield into powdery whiteness. “She probably went to see that guy across the street.” I begin to burn inside.

  “I don’t care how she gets home,” he says. “You’re the one who wanted to look for her.” I lower my head and close my eyes. Am I really doing this again?

  More than occasionally, I sit on the floor and press my ear to our shared wall. She is in her kitchen, cooking for someone—I can never identify the other voice. I hear her laugh; hers is a laugh that I would like to bottle and drink. I hate whomever she is with. I panic, I pace. I call Renata, who’s on her way back from meeting with the wedding caterers. Earlier in the day she’d sent me screenshots of different cakes she’d found online, as if any of this mattered to me right then. I didn’t bother to pretend like it did, and I launched right into things. “I can’t tell who she’s with,” I say. “All I hear is muffled sounds.”

  “Stop listening,” Renata says. “Just stop.”

  •

  By a weird and unexpected coincidence, Tara and I are both offered positions to teach at the same satellite campus of an American university in the UAE. At first I’m elated. I imagine us spending weekends together in Dubai, camping in Oman, hopping over to Turkey during school holidays, and of course, her eventually falling in love with me.

  By now I know better, though a part of me wishes I didn’t. A part of me would like to keep living inside this fantasy, and for a while I cling to it. I write a letter accepting the teaching offer, which I save in my drafts folder. When I can no longer put off responding I delete the draft and write a new letter to decline the position.

  The faculty members who offered it to me are stunned. How could I not want to do this? “Are you sure?” they ask, giving me one last chance to reconsider this huge mistake. Who in their right mind would pass this up?

  “It would be a ten-year setback,” says Renata. “It would be completely insane.”

  A week after I turn down the teaching offer, I rent a car to drive us to a writers’ conference, where Tara meets someone new. He’s a tenure-track poet with the air of a player who’s ready to settle down for the right woman, and immediately I know that woman is her. She and I had planned to share a hotel room, but he stays over instead, and I sleep on the floor outside one of the conference center’s ballrooms. A security guard wakes me up at around five a.m. and tells me to use my purse as a pillow.

  When the conference ends we drive home together in silence. A few nights later, we sleep together for the last time. “I’m going to go down on you until you come,” I tell her. I want nothing in return. Besides, she has nothing to give me, not even acknowledgment that any of this is happening. In fairness I can’t give her that either, since I’m technically still attached elsewhere. After she comes I scoot up to face her. She kisses me on the cheek, and as she turns away I catch her mouth with mine, so that together we taste her. She presses her foot against my shin and lets me kiss her for what seems like a very long time. It feels like a goodbye and I treat it as one.

  The next morning, I decide to move back to New York once the semester ends. It’s a decision propelled by a barely audible survival instinct, a whisper—Insanity is doing the same thing over and over, and expecting different results.

  During our last month as neighbors, Tara and I engage in innocuous, friend-type activities. We get pedicures. We take our unwanted clothes to thrift stores. We organize a yard sale. We host a dinner for our neighbors. We caution the ones who plan to renew their leases against sleeping with the incoming tenants, never admitting to anyone what we’ve been doing. We avoid eye contact during these conversations; only once do we look at each other and wink. She wishes I were coming with her to the UAE. As our travel dates approach—hers to the Persian Gulf, and mine back to the East Coast—I find myself wishing the same. There is still a lingering hope, the possibility of something good, maybe even great. But I can no longer afford the cost of finding out.

  I’M NOT SURE WHAT I’M EXPECTING TO HAPPEN AT THE LGBTQ center reading on Sunday night. That I’ll meet someone who is neither straight nor married, that I’ll find some sort of community, that I’ll hear writing I can relate to. I arrive at the front desk and try to peer into the room behind it.

  “Do you want a ticket?” the woman sitting at the desk says. But I hear, “Are you still a closeted dyke?”

  I am certain she knows what I really want, that her eyes have seared through me, leaving me exposed. Appetite is embarrassing enough; visibly trying to satiate it, utterly mortifying.

  “Yes,” I say. “One, please.”

  17

  I AM RUNNING LATE TO OUR FIRST DATE. I’M COMING from a friend’s apartment in Sunset Park. I’ve been back in New York for six days, working an entry-level office job and crashing on the couches of various friends until I can find my own place. It’s not exactly ideal, but at least I’m back in the city. The decision to come back to New York put a circumstantial and friendly ending on my quasi-long-distance relationship with the visual artist. He didn’t appear to be terribly upset, and we agreed to stay in touch. For once, friendship after a breakup seemed possible.

  Until I can find a teaching gig, harder to come by in New York than in the Midwest, an office job means regular hours and potential for a more “normal” life. I’m still readjusting to the crammed subway ride, hovering beneath someone’s armpit both to and from work, arriving everywhere disheveled and sweaty. In this environment there isn’t much to live for post-lunch, not until the stirrings of pre-dinner hunger. But for now that isn’t so bad, and I’ve discovered that having a job I dislike makes writing seem more appealing, an act of resisting against what I’m supposed be doing.

  A, as I knew her through OKCupid, suggested two possible meeting spots. “One is quieter,” she wrote, “the other louder and more lively.” A quieter bar seemed like a more adult choice and therefore the right answer.

  I push through the door and the heavy curtain and see her sitting at a small round table near the front. “Hey,” I say, breezy, as though we know each other, as if this isn’t our first encounter.

  She plays along with the instant familiarity. “I almost just said hi to someone else,” she tells me, smiling to break the awkwardness, “thinking it was you.” I quickly glance from side to side, searching for someone who looks like me. She already has a drink in front of her. “There’s no waiter,” she says.

  “Cool,” I say. “Be right back then.” I go to the bar to order. I’m a little hungry and afraid of getting too drunk, so I ask for a vodka cranberry, thinking it has more sustenance. When I return to the table with my drink she teases me playfully for the collegiate choice. She asks many questions in rapid succession; she seems simultaneously inquisitive and nervous. Where am I originally from? Nablus, I say. Her best friend spent a few years livi
ng there, she worked at the cultural affairs center. It’s an uncanny coincidence, one that creates community.

  Soon it’s my turn to ask questions, and I find that I am genuinely curious to know everything about her. Her name is Anouk—I realize I didn’t know this until now. She’s half French, half American, and she grew up in Paris. She dropped out of her comparative lit PhD program to become a filmmaker. Her first feature premiered at the IFC.

  She feels warm to me, as though we’ve always known each other, but the familiarity makes her exciting. There is a lull in conversation between drinks two and three, one that momentarily makes me panic and worry that we shouldn’t have ordered a third round. I say something to fill the space. “You’re fun to talk to.” She half smiles and says nothing. It’s an underwhelming compliment.

  We talk about suffering from morning melancholy. I ask her if she thinks there’s a solution. “I don’t know,” she says. “Probably a relationship?” I don’t mention that I just ended one. That in each of my relationships I’ve woken up to despair. I do bring up Tara, though—I can’t resist mentioning her. I still think of her more than I should, more than she likely thinks of me, but distance is helping. Quitting social media helps. And the possibility of someone else helps, too.

  When we leave, Anouk walks me to the train. We continue talking but I’m already thinking about the goodbye. Will we kiss? Too soon. Hug? Too friendly. We arrive at the subway’s entrance, and I am standing in front of her. “It was nice hanging out with you,” I say. “We should hang out again.” The words echo through my mind. Hang out, hang out, hang out.

  “Yeah,” she says. “We should.”

  No kiss, no hug, and I feel good as I descend underground.

  The next morning she texts me: I woke up today feeling less sad than usual.

  •

  For our second date I suggest a Mexican restaurant in Crown Heights, one that I noticed while staying at a friend’s place in the neighborhood. I arrive early and wait for Anouk on a bench outside.

  “Hey,” she says, stepping out from inside the restaurant. She is wearing a denim skirt and a loosely fitting pink-and-white striped top. “I just put our names on the wait list.”

  She sits down beside me, her side flush against mine, and I feel a surge of attraction run through me, the first time I’ve felt it with her. She scoots away a little, which makes me wonder if she felt it too. I ask about her day. I’m too close to face her, so I look straight ahead. She tells me she’s coming from her building’s co-op meeting. “So you own,” I ask.

  “Yeah,” she answers quickly. “Well, my parents do. It’s kind of a double-edged sword.”

  “How so?”

  “I guess it ties me here. Or at least it feels that way.” She seems uncomfortable. “I know. It’s a bratty thing to complain about.”

  Before I can respond, the hostess steps outside and calls her name, a relief, because I’m not sure how to calibrate the depth of our conversation for the bench outside. “Should we sit at a table or the bar?” Anouk asks me. Since it’s our first dinner date, a table seems right. We order margaritas, and when our drinks arrive I remember that I am still a little hungover after a night of doing shots with coworkers. I would’ve slept it off, but I had to move out of my friend’s apartment in Sunset Park by noon, and spent the morning transferring between trains and buses to Bed-Stuy. I choose not to mention any of this to Anouk. I don’t want her to know about my transient life. Usually, people arrive in a new city and get settled first. They sort out their jobs, find an apartment, and then start dating. For me, the latter took precedence. A relationship was the whole point.

  We order nachos and combination chicken-and-steak fajitas, a decision we come to easily. “Good to know we like the same foods,” she says. “That bodes well for us.” She laughs, and I laugh too. I like that she’s assessing this openly, as though we are two members of a committee evaluating the potential for our relationship from a detached vantage point. I nod in agreement. When we finish, the waitress asks if we want a box for the leftovers. Yes, but Anouk says no. The waitress clears away the food and brings us the bill, which we split.

  Even though we are the last ones to leave the restaurant, it feels early enough that I don’t want our night to end. “I’m not ready to leave you yet,” she says as we walk to the subway.

  “Do you want to come over?” I ask, then remember my current living situation: a pot-reeking, barely furnished studio on the border of Bushwick and Bed-Stuy. “Or maybe I could come over?”

  We take the 4 train to Atlantic. I comment on there being more stairs from the train to the street than I remember, and she laughs, presumably at the filler-like quality of my comment. On the walk to her apartment, we talk about productivity. Sometimes she’s like a squirrel with a nut, she tells me, other times she watches porn and masturbates all day. I blush at the word masturbate, our first overt reference to anything sexual. “I’m like that too,” I tell her. “Always at the extremes.”

  She leads me to her building and up two flights of stairs. She unlocks the door and flips on the lights to reveal a beautiful apartment: spacious, wood-floored, huge windows, and minimally decorated with elegant furniture and equally tasteful, professionally framed art. I cringe thinking about my apartment in grad school, the walls bare aside from a few postcards and photographs. “Do you want something to drink?” she asks. “I have whiskey.”

  “Sure.” I never drink whiskey—I’m not sure I’ve ever had a glass of it—and find it sexy that she does. She goes to the kitchen and returns with two tumblers, each filled a finger deep. We sit beside each other on the modern elegant couch. We make awkward, self-conscious conversation while sipping our whiskies. I am not mentally present, my teeth chattering a little. Finally we stop talking and I ask if I can kiss her. She says yes.

  Our kiss is long but chaste. Closed-mouthed. When I pull away I look into her eyes.

  “What?” she says.

  “What what?”

  “Why are you looking at me so dramatically?”

  “I don’t know,” I say. “Isn’t that what you do when you kiss someone?”

  She smiles. “It’s a little intense.” We continue making out on the couch until she invites me to her room. I lead her to the bed, feeling oddly comfortable in her space. “You’re pretty,” she tells me, and I feel myself blush. I kiss her lips, her cheeks, her neck. Periodically she opens her mouth wide and breathes heavily into my ear, which I love. We keep our clothes on.

  After a while we stop and lie beside each other. I look at my watch. “It’s late,” I say. “I should go.”

  “You’re gonna leave now?”

  She seems disappointed. I shrug. “Is that weird?”

  She shrugs. “Has anyone ever left you in the middle of the night?”

  Often, around four a.m., Anouk is up and anxious. I’m usually roused by her wakefulness, and she asks me to run my fingers through her hair. I pet her head softly, falling back asleep mid-stroke.

  Anouk and I joke that my heart is a fleshy, blubbery, trembling whale of a heart, one that lies bleeding on an unidentified beach somewhere. Hers is guarded, hidden inside a cage, at the bottom of a well, tucked away. “This doesn’t bode well for us,” she tells me. And at times, she’s proven right. She rejects my sentimentality—when I buy her an iPod Shuffle and fill it with two hundred songs, she expunges the love ballads, keeping only the Cure. She’s demanding and particular and forthright, and I love her for these things but I can’t always live up to them. I’ve told her about my past relationships, and she’s afraid that once my infatuation with her wears off, I’ll lose interest. She keeps a distance to protect herself.

  There is a constant fear inside me that any misstep could ruin everything. In my worst moments, I quell the anxiety of her leaving by preempting it. I threaten to end things. I hate myself for my immaturity, but old habits rarely go away entirely, and I can never fully escape myself. I relapse. I beg for her forgiveness, for her to be
patient with me. Somehow, she is. She doesn’t excuse the push-pull, but at the very least, she gets it.

  Eventually she begins to open up and allow herself to trust me. And as she does, I find that I love this version of her, with all of its circumstance, even as the initial excitement gives way to cozy routine, with its own kind of intimacy. I find that I enjoy the stability even more than the highs, certainly more than the lows. And whenever she catches me projecting idealized versions of herself onto her, she calls me out for doing so. Throughout our relationship, she insists on remaining real.

  I nod in response to Anouk’s question. “People have left me,” I say. “Though I guess it’s usually me who leaves.”

  But this time, I don’t want to. I want nothing more than to stay.

  18

  AT THE ALLENBY BRIDGE CROSSING, SUNLIGHT RICOCHETS off a white-painted archway and onto the mountains looming in the distance. I have already been in transit for eight hours by the time I arrive there at noon. I left Paris at four that morning, after a weekend stopover to meet Anouk’s family. “They’re like poodles,” she told me on the flight over. “Uptight and yippy.” Though I immediately saw the poodle reference—her father big and Flemish, his hair abundant like fur, her mother curly haired and put together—they seemed neither yippy nor uptight; on the contrary, they seemed incredibly laid-back, which didn’t surprise me, since they’re retired and wealthy. Their apartment is a modest one-bedroom, tasteful in its décor with big molten-glass windows that open onto a leafy boulevard in Montparnasse, and that they shutter each night before bed. Mornings were spent reading, her mother painting in her studio loft just above the apartment. We had lunch both days at one, fresh fish and salad from the marché, followed by museums in the afternoon, and a light dinner out on the promenade. Their routine, the calmness, was something I had never known in my own family. Such structure! And they guarded it, they protected it from any outside disruption.