Going Dutch

by James Gregor

  He sent Anne a text:

  YOU LEFT WITHOUT ME.

  There was a croissant on the table, dry and armadillo-like. He drank two glasses of water, and then got back into bed with the croissant, but he couldn’t fall asleep. In the adjacent backyard, a man watered the garden and sang to himself. Richard got up and left the room again and sat on the sofa in his underwear, surveying the grimy apartment with a sense of dissipated consternation.

  An hour later, Anne texted back.

  YOU WERE ASLEEP.

  HOW ARE YOU? he responded immediately.

  She sent an emoticon indicating a headache.

  ME TOO, he wrote back. HOW DID YOU SLEEP?

  NOT WELL.

  ME NEITHER.

  When nothing further came, he wrote again:

  CAN I TAKE YOU OUT TO LUNCH?

  He suggested Chinatown, because Chinatown would be cheap.

  OKAY. WHEN?

  They met at the edge of the neighborhood an hour later. The sun was driving and acute. Wearing dark glasses, they walked in a ponderous silence.

  “I’m disappointed you didn’t come today,” she said finally.

  “You could have woken me up.”

  “I thought you were invested in all of this.”

  “I’m hungover, that’s all. I drank a lot last night.”

  “But you know how important this is to me,” she said.

  When something was important to her, did that mean everyone else’s life had to flatten out and disappear? Did everyone have to be good? Was he not allowed to get drunk and sleep in if something was important to Anne?

  They chose a restaurant at random. When they sat down, she sighed heavily.

  “We’re both in fantastic moods, aren’t we?”

  Richard scanned the menu. The curtain over the window jerked limply.

  “We’ll feel better when we eat something,” he said, not looking up.

  “You didn’t miss much this morning,” she said. “Anyway.”

  “I’m sure you asked some devastating questions.”

  “Maybe,” she said.

  She described an example of the mediocre command of the literature she’d detected in one of the conference participants.

  “Mostly I couldn’t be bothered though.”

  “Probably better for them.”

  Soon they were plopping greasy pieces of duck into their mouths. For dessert they had bubble tea. Richard paid the bill. With the exchange rate significantly in favor of the American dollar, it was negligible. They strolled through the neighborhood, going from store to store. Anne spotted a pair of satin slippers. Richard bought them for her. Then he bought himself a key chain attached to a small pagoda. She saw an embroidered fan she liked and he bought that for her too.

  At the Old Port they bought iced coffees and walked down to the river.

  “I feel like I could drink an endless cup of coffee right now,” he said. “I feel like I have a hole in my stomach.”

  “Me too. Thank God we don’t have to make small talk.”

  “Thank God.”

  He laughed and looked at her, and wanted to squeeze her.

  They linked arms, walking in a zigzag pattern out of the Old Port and through a neighborhood of seedy commercial strips. They were dazed to be somewhere uncharted, anonymous claimants to the block along with the actual residents of the city.

  They passed into a gay area of the city, indicated by a series of pillars in rainbow colors above the entrance to the subway station and signs for “Le Village.” Richard noted to himself the same hoary retail that he had seen elsewhere: a store that specialized in crochet; a shawarma place; a French bookstore; a travel agency whose door was plastered with rhapsodic descriptions of the Danube. Men in singlets and shorts made prolonged eye contact with him as they passed. It was a silent pleasure—a pleasure he did not voice—to have his attractiveness endorsed and acknowledged on the streets of a new city.

  Anne pointed to a store window.

  “You would look good in that sailor shirt.”

  “Too many middle-aged women wear them.”

  “You think?”

  “I’m always afraid I’m going to run into a rich seventy-two-year-old woman on her way to the golf course who is dressed exactly like me.”

  “Unlikely.”

  “You never know. When I’m a middle-aged woman, I’ll dress like a middle-aged woman,” he joked.

  She squeezed his arm. Another man went past, gawking boldly. She pulled at the hem of her shirt, fanning herself.

  “I didn’t realize it would be so hot here.”

  “It’s not the Arctic,” he said.

  “I didn’t think it was.”

  “Do you want to go back to the apartment?”

  “Not yet.”

  “What should we do?”

  Anne thought for a moment.

  “Let’s go swimming,” she said.

  “Where are we going to do that?”

  Richard thought of the lazy-Saturday proposal, an offer he had never taken her up on.

  “I was reading about a pool in one of the guidebooks. It looked beautiful. It’s not far,” she said, already heading toward the subway.

  “What do we do about swimsuits?”

  “I’ll buy us some there.”

  They went for several stops, found their way to the pool and an adjoining shop that sold athletic gear. Richard picked out a pair of boxy shorts.

  “We’re in another country,” Anne said, lifting a red Speedo off the rack.

  Richard shook his head.

  “But it’s my treat.”

  “I don’t know,” he said, taking the swimsuit in hand.

  “Abandon your past.”

  It was a ludicrous proposal, but oddly enough he liked the idea of being voluptuous and exposed in the suit while Anne watched.

  Without waiting for an answer, Anne took the swimsuit and went to the cashier.

  At the pool, Richard emerged from the changing room feeling like the protagonist of a public-service self-esteem campaign.

  He held a towel over his crotch and kept his eyes on the ground. Anne was in an athletic black one-piece. They went to a corner of the pool deck and spread out their belongings.

  “We have to put sunscreen on. I’ll put some on you first.”

  Richard lay down on his stomach. Casting his head into shadow, she knelt beside him. He felt a cold squirt on his back, her hands moving in concentric circles, ranging up and down his back, the length of his legs. She worked the lotion between his toes and over the soles of his feet, her touch supple but direct. For a moment Richard thought—what luck it was, to be one of the organisms that is taken care of and not devoured.

  He got up and she lay down on her front. He smoothed the sunscreen into her shoulders, then around into the scoop of her back, gliding down her legs, greasy and bright, to her feet. Her body trembled.

  What am I doing? he thought, and almost stopped himself. All the people splayed around the pool, with their glistening skins and dark sunglasses, were sure to think that he and Anne were a couple, if they cared to think anything about them, or maybe some of them noted his swimsuit and thought differently. Why did that matter? He could get a raging sense of claustrophobia when a woman, one of his female friends, was affectionate with him in public, when he felt he was being blocked off from some more authentic kind of attention. It was almost a political sense of indignation and entrapment, like someone deprived of an education. They were shutting him off from his potential. But why was it more authentic? Was it more authentic?

  “I think that’s good,” she said.

  Their arms brushing together, he lay down again, eyes closed. At the edge of his perception a baffling conversation, accented French spoken too quickly, spun in place like a whirlpool, alluring and incomprehensible. The sun anointed his back and he felt dazed. They lay there for some time. Finally Anne got up and stepped into the pool. Richard watched her go and then stood up himself, starkly verti
cal. From the water she watched him, her attention indiscreet, the water heaving leniently around her waist.

  He stepped into the water and submerged himself. The cool of it mitigated a headache that was beginning to knot at the back of his head. He went forward under the water, surfaced, and floated away from her. The swimsuit breaking the surface, he drifted on his back. Their movements felt free and arbitrary, but also immaculate, as if choreographed from above. She breast-stroked in a curve around him.

  When their eyes met, she splashed him with water.

  A line of athletic young men, in a mirage-like procession, their rippling silhouettes crammed into swimsuits even smaller than Richard’s, passed by en route to the competition pool. Richard turned onto his stomach and watched. Anne looked over, and they both gawked.

  * * *

  RICHARD CONTINUED TO FLOAT in his odd mood. After returning to the apartment in a taxi, a shower, and another taxi to the restaurant, he felt vacant and serene, rinsed of worry and initiative by the long day in the sun. The menu at the restaurant Anne chose for dinner was like the preamble of a serial killer experimenting with animals before making the leap to humans. One dish consisted of a pig with a fork driven through its skull. Richard opted for a pig’s foot stuffed with foie gras. Anne ordered the magret de canard.

  Anne’s dish arrived in a can. The waiter turned it upside down and the glistening food slid out and fell in a wobbly tower onto her plate. It made Richard think of dog food.

  “Do you think we got sunstroke?” he said, cutting into the foot. “I feel out of it.”

  “I’m okay.”

  “I should drink more water.”

  He took another sip of wine.

  “Want to try this?” Anne said.

  “Sure.”

  He leaned forward and bit the tendered meat from her fork. Outside, the occasional car rolled past on the cobblestoned pedestrian street, like a tank in the warfare of the evening.

  “You looked great today,” she said, smiling. “I hope you don’t mind me saying so?”

  “That’s delicious. No, it’s fine,” he said. “I mean, whatever.”

  There was something intolerable about her saying so—unbearable in its candor and exposure. For a moment they ate with concentration, the artfully displayed food steadily decimated.

  “You looked great too,” he said. “Is that okay to say?”

  She did look great—it was that end-of-the-summer-day disheveled blooming sheen, her hair extra springy and curly, the tanned scoop of her exposed chest.

  “I haven’t reached a definitive conclusion.”

  “Well, let me know when you figure it out.”

  Richard looked for his water glass, but it was still empty.

  “I bet you killed it at the conference today,” he said, feeling himself slip into a new gear of intimacy. “I bet you annihilated everyone.”

  “Do you have to put it that way?”

  “You like a more peaceful rhetoric?”

  He felt as though they were on a stage somewhere.

  “Maybe I don’t. I bet I did kill it, with my questions. I guess I’m the . . . annihilator.”

  She snorted.

  “That’s your new nickname.”

  “I know I’m strong,” she said, more seriously now. “I’m stronger than my family. I’m stronger than my father. I’ve always had to be.”

  “You’re stronger than me.”

  “I don’t know. We’re strong in different ways.”

  She poured more wine into his glass, and then into her own.

  “I’m not strong,” he said.

  “Why should strength be the measure of anything?” she said.

  It wasn’t exactly the response he was looking for.

  “Right,” he said.

  She laughed—her normally serious, erudite face curled under a childish steam of emotion. With the napkin she wiped her eyes. He wasn’t exactly sure what she was laughing about.

  “There’s some enormous basilica here that looks like an Italian futurist temple,” she said. “I want to see it.”

  “Let’s go.”

  “Did you grow up with religion?” she asked.

  “Not really.”

  “You didn’t go to church?”

  “Once in a while,” Richard said. “My parents are like, orbiting Unitarians. They’re out there . . . I don’t even know if they believe in God. I think they believe in St. Anselm’s proof for the existence of God.”

  “It’s abstract.”

  “No, the opposite. It’s more, like, clambakes and picnics, that kind of thing. The best part is, the church has this yellow Jeep Cherokee with ‘Love’ painted on the door with a rainbow underneath it. Whenever I visit they want me to ride in it but I always say no. I think they drive it as penance for any awkwardness when I came out.”

  His whole body shrank. For a moment, he couldn’t raise his head from the plate. It was the first time he had stated this outright in her presence, shifted the information from the liquid realm of unvoiced context to hard syllabic life. He looked up slowly. Anne was gazing into her wine with a mild but inscrutable expression.

  “And my father likes the singing,” he said, by way of conclusion, choosing to leap, almost coughing out the words.

  Anne nodded, though it might have been in agreement with one of her own thoughts.

  “I envy religious people,” she said, her previous tone unchanged. She was still looking into her glass. She took another sip.

  “When they’re not killing each other,” Richard said, deciding to move along in the conversation with her.

  “Even when they are killing each other,” she said quickly and brightly, now looking up at him with a smile.

  He smiled back.

  “You’re enjoying that wine,” he said, his voice excitable. He felt quite drunk now.

  “Yes I am,” she said, cheerfully. “And so are you.”

  She seemed not to want to pursue the topic. He would follow her lead. He decided to keep drinking the wine, and to encourage her to drink too.

  The sliced-up ruins and smears of their plates were taken away. For dessert Anne had lemon meringue pie, and Richard something called milkshake XXX. Then the waiter brought digestifs, followed by espresso. Anne paid and they left the restaurant.

  “Let’s get another drink,” Richard said when they were standing on the street.

  “Good idea,” Anne said. They started walking. “We’re going to feel terrible tomorrow,” she said breezily.

  “I brought aspirin,” Richard said, extending his arm and taking her hand, and then winding them down the street toward a bar that was attractively disgorging people onto the sidewalk.

  Along the block of iron staircases that plunged gently from stone facades, the innards of the restaurants were exposed. They went into a wine bar and huddled together on a banquette, squished in with others.

  “That shirt,” Richard said, nodding with endorsement as he brought the glass to his wine-stained lips. “It looks great on you. You should wear it more often.”

  “You like it?”

  She looked down at the shirt.

  “It’s a nice cut.”

  “A low cut,” he said.

  “It is.”

  Anne laughed. They had to scream into each other’s ears to be heard, and they kept brushing their lips against each other’s cheeks and ears.

  When they left the wine bar, they made their way to the curb in search of a cab. Richard steadied himself against a tree.

  “Can you flag down cabs here?”

  “I can,” Anne said, theatrically stepping out onto the street. She stuck an arm into the air and, like magic, a taxi stopped.

  Air poured in through the open windows of the speeding cab. Anne nuzzled against him, her nose in the crook of his neck, while the radio blared in French. They giggled and whispered to each other.

  “I love the accent here,” she said.

  “I can’t make it out.”

 
; When they arrived and climbed up the stairs, their drunk legs heavy on the wooden slats, Anne pushed Richard from behind, her hand cupping one of his butt cheeks.

  “Be careful,” she said.

  “You be careful,” he said, laughing. “I might fall on you.”

  “You’re not that heavy.”

  “I’m heavy.”

  Suddenly, they were unpeeling their clothes, toppling into the bedroom. They got into bed and Anne struggled up onto Richard’s chest, her groin like a frame above his torso. She kissed him on the mouth, a kiss that was more expert and adroit than he’d expected. A bolt of current surged through his lower body. They were both sweating and the room was stifling. Then his hand was sliding inside her pants, and she reached to unbutton his fly, once again with a confidence and competence that surprised him, and took out his cock. Like a group of dancers clumped in a hot, loud room, searching for space, his thoughts lurched from stasis to glee and back again. He thought of an article he’d read about cows getting squeezed before they are slaughtered, that it calms them and preserves the meat. Increasingly unskillful and enthusiastic, they burrowed toward each other. As her mouth moved down his body, each thought seemed shadowed by a barometer that measured its strangeness, importance, and intensity. But the barometer kept offering up disparate readings, flares of frenzied energy and inertial dips.

  He seemed to be moving and then he was still; he was floating and he was falling; he was trapped and he was free.

  NINE

  Back in New York, several days passed and Richard heard nothing from Anne. He was surprised by the feeling of bitter neglect, the swollen rejection that finally shrank to a sore lump of regret. He didn’t know if he should write to her first. A restless confusion came over him. Was she embarrassed? Did she feel differently about him now? There had been no awkwardness or regret afterward. She had even complimented him on his sexual skill. Despite their awful hangovers, the train ride back had felt light and oddly uncomplicated, as if now that the important matter had been settled with no catastrophe in its wake, the world still functioned, and there was a new, straightforward momentum to things.