by Anne Wagener
“Whoa, there. You want a drink or anything?”
I make a noise that, while being totally indistinguishable as a real word, somehow indicates Nope, I’m ready, take me now. We start kissing again and slowly move together down the hallway. He has to hunch down to kiss me, and I feel as if I’m pulling down a high branch for a succulent piece of fruit. Plucking temptation right off the tree—mine, all mine. Maybe I’m descending into Dante’s second circle, but I don’t care. He guides me into his room and we stumble across the debris on his floor, dancing over shoes and discarded clothes until we tip backward onto his bed.
The wine massages my nerves, which otherwise would be sending off fireworks of anxiety. One little worry spark persists: I haven’t been with anyone since Scott. But Kalil snuffs out the worry spark with his fingers and lips; the former are unbuttoning my shirt, the latter kissing each new piece of flesh that’s revealed.
Button-down shirt, you came through for me after all. Soon I’ll be a naked zebra.
I reach for the bottom of his shirt and yank it over his head, admiring the tousled look of his hair, then letting my eyes take in his bare chest. He grins down at me, and I rest my hands on his waist, grinning back at him. We pause, admiring the plating of a delicious dish before diving in.
At that exact moment, the front door to the apartment opens. The sound of two distinct voices—one male, one female—floats down the hallway. Kalil tenses immediately, his smile gone. The male voice sounds like a deeper modulation of Kalil’s; the female voice is raspy with age.
“Shit!” he whispers. “You have to go.”
“What?” I clutch the halves of my shirt together. “You drove me here!”
He closes his eyes, opens them again. “Okay, well—get in the closet, then.” He looks exasperated.
“Not until you tell me what the hell is going on!” I try to keep my voice low, but my blood is boiling, and not in the good way anymore.
“That’s my mom out there,” he says in a rush. “I had no idea she was coming over. She’ll kill me if she knows I have a girl over.”
I grope around on the floor and grab my purse strap with one hand, still clutching my shirt together with the other. “Seriously?”
He drops his head a little. “Yeah.”
I tiptoe toward the closet, and he gives me an apologetic look before closing the doors in my face.
Eighteen
My life has officially reached a new low.
Surrounded by darkness, I strain to hear what’s going on outside the closet doors. Kalil joined his mother and brother in the living room—after putting his shirt back on, I’m sure—but all I can make out is the muffled rise and fall of their voices, the words indiscriminate. The rain picks up outside, accompanied by a driving wind. I try not to think about how long I might be stuck in his closet. Thank God I peed at the restaurant. I consider urinating anyway. A revenge piss.
My Stoicism has officially cracked. The desires are piling up now. 1) Learn kung fu. 2) Become a lesbian. 3) Write and subsequently publish stories that mock and shame certain people in a thinly veiled way.
As quietly as I can, I settle into a cross-legged position on the floor. It’s a small closet, so I have to keep pushing the wrists of his shirts away from my face. Like I’m being slapped again and again. I fumble around inside my purse and sigh with relief when my hands close over the rectangular shape of my phone.
I text Lin: Help! I’m trapped in Kalil’s closet!
He texts right back. OMG. Should I come get you?
Closing my eyes, I draw up a visual map of his apartment, or what I could see of it when we stumbled in. Was there a back door? A fire escape? Can I open the closet doors without being heard? And why do I even care if his mom hears me? Serves him right.
Okay, focus. On the way to his room, I do remember seeing a glass-paneled sliding balcony door at the back of the apartment. I glimpsed it between kisses and imagined us sitting out there circa two a.m., sipping wine and watching the rain drip off the balcony in a cloud of postcoital bliss. How could I have been so wrong?
Focus! It’s only the second floor, so a balcony escape might actually work. The hallway to his room is out of the den sight line, so I could get to the balcony door without being seen. Being heard could be a different matter.
I text Lin back: Not sure yet. Hiding from his mom. I decide that if I’m still in here in half an hour, that’s where I draw the line. Part of me thinks Kalil might yet emerge and invite me out to meet her. That he just needed to set the scene and mentally prep her. In which case the closet bit was unnecessary, but I’d like to give him and his beautiful, beautiful body the benefit of the doubt. He’s still in the possibility-of-redemption zone. T minus 30.
At one point someone walks down the hallway, but it turns out to be one of them going to the bathroom. A flush, and then the voices resume talking. I close my eyes and the thoughts rush in on me. Man, was I suckered. I knew it was too good to be true, a sexy philosopher interested in me, showing up just in time to distract me from Charlie’s disappearance.
Kalil has disappeared now, too, out of my reach. It turns out that all his lovely theories were just a philosophy of avoidance: Don’t get another job, don’t share your writing with the world, don’t introduce the girl you like to your mother. It’s an immaculately wrapped philosophy, sheer paper topped with a silver bow. But there’s a puppy inside the box, and it’s trapped. It’s going to die in there if no one lets it out. Thing is, if you let the puppy out, you have to potty-train it, clean up after it, feed it so it grows. The philosophy of avoidance doesn’t allow for life’s messiness.
And that’s when I realize: I want it to grow, my puppy in a box. Sure, it doesn’t know anything about the big wide world. And sure, maybe I can’t afford dog food. But I have to let it out. And I have to get out of this closet.
I open my eyes and grab my phone. It’s time to notify my getaway driver. The apartment is at the intersection of two main roads in Fairfax, so he should be able to find it. I didn’t catch the building number, but it’s close to a patch of woods, so there’s at least a landmark. I text Lin the relevant info.
Once enough time has passed, I stand up, looping my purse over my head and one arm. Pushing the shirts out of my way, I stand in front of the vertical line of light between the closet doors. I can hear better from here. His mother is talking in what sounds like a stern tone, saying something about alcohol in the apartment. That’s the part I can understand, anyway. The rest is in Urdu.
While I’m buttoning up my shirt, I allow myself the luxury of inhaling the nuanced scent of his closet. It smells like dryer sheets and cologne with a hint of sweat. I inhale and let out a silent sigh, my body tense. Inside the anger shell, there’s a soft center of me that’s still melting from his kisses.
I don’t have too much time to dwell on all that, and it’s probably for the best. I open my eyes. By now, Lin is waiting for me outside in his Audi. It’s time for action. I can do this. I am one of Charlie’s Angels. I am a ninja.
With a swell of confidence and fury mixed together, I give the closet door a gentle but firm push, and it opens without a sound. Tiptoeing to the door, I peek out. A quick glance confirms the back door is indeed where I remembered. The hallway light is off, and I’m sure I won’t be seen as long as no one gets up from the couch. I make my way to the back door, getting more confident with each step, putting one foot in front of the other as if on a balance beam. I can hear Mr. Smiley saying, “Walk on your high toe!” I am a jungle cat! I am stealth embodied!
I take hold of the balcony door handle, turn it, and slide it open. It squeaks softly, and my breath catches. Shit!
The conversation stops in the other room. I’m frozen.
“What was that?” his mom asks.
Shit! Shit! Shit!
There’s no option now but to move ahead with my plan. Witho
ut opening the balcony door any farther, I slide outside and close it as softly as I can. It squeaks again.
The rain is coming down hard now. I dash to the railing to find I’m quite a bit higher up than I was hoping, but there’s an ample bush below. Remembering my third-grade fire plan, I swing one leg and then the other over the railing. I grasp it firmly and let my feet drop so I’m dangling by my hands. Rain begins to soak my backside.
Before I can release my hands, the balcony door flies open and an older version of Kalil appears. He slips out and dashes to the edge, looking down at me. His eyes widen, and I realize that the top couple of buttons on my shirt have come undone and are flapping in the wind. So maybe I have a bit of work to do on the stealthiness thing.
Our eyes stay locked. His seem to say, Get out while you can! Over the sound of the rain, I can barely hear more footsteps coming down the hallway, along with Kalil’s anxious voice.
His brother raises his eyebrows at me, and I nod. It’s time. I release my hands from the railing and let myself fall. For one or two seconds, my stomach lurches as I drop. It’s only two stories, but it feels like a small eternity before I land with a thud in the bush, sprawled out hammock-style. It takes me a second to regain my senses. I throw my leg over one side of the bush. It lands in a giant mud puddle, but I have to keep moving. I hoist my other leg out of the bush.
Holding the top of my shirt together with one hand, I make a break for the parking lot. I allow myself one glance backward and see that Kalil’s brother is the only one on the balcony. I made it!
I turn to find Lin, mouth hanging open, waiting for me in his Audi. I climb inside. “Oh, dear Lord,” he says when I’ve closed the door. I look down at myself: Leaves are plastered all over my new jeans; my left leg is covered in mud up to my midcalf. I’m generally soaked; wet strands of hair cling in limp clumps to the sides of my face. I follow Lin’s eyes to my chest, where a few more leaves lurk in my cleavage.
I lean my head against the seat. “Worst. Date. Ever.”
Half an hour later I pull on my pajama pants and a T-shirt and walk into the den, relieved to be warm and dry. I toss my cell phone on the coffee table. Lin is reclining on the sofa, flipping through channels.
“Anyway, how was your night?” I sit down next to him, pulling an afghan over both of us.
Lin stops on the Food Network—a Julia Child rerun—and we watch transfixed as she dumps two sticks of butter into a pan.
“Oh, sorry. It was fine.”
“Steve’s good?”
Lin gets a melty-butter smile. “Yup.”
I shake my head. “Good for you, sweetie. But could you toss me a lifebuoy from cloud nine? Here I am dangling off of men’s balconies in the rain.”
Lin looks away from the screen to meet my eyes. “That has nothing to do with you and everything to do with him being a spineless asshole.”
Right on cue, my phone starts buzzing. Lin snatches it off the coffee table, frowns, then turns it toward me so I can see Kalil’s name flashing across the front. “No way are you answering this. No way in hell.”
“No argument here.” I watch the name flash and then disappear. I tilt my head onto Lin’s shoulder. “Seriously, I can’t even have a decent date.” Outside the radius of Kalil’s blinding hotness, my mind clears enough to reveal the real disappointment: I’d been hoping this date could take my mind off Charlie.
Lin seems to sense this—he finds my hand under the afghan.
“I want him on this coast,” I say, and Lin nods.
On that train of thought, Scott rides in, wearing his stupid boat shoes and alligator polo. The night after our first date, I came home to the dorm gushing, “He’s a musician!” as Lin smiled up at me from the couch. Scott had taken me back to his room and played his guitar for me. Oh, so painfully cliché, but like a jackass, I’d melted into a girl puddle on his beige carpet. Looking up at him was like being underwater at the pool on a summer day, the sun’s light spreading out in rippling waves across the surface of my life, everything intense but also in slow motion.
My memory fast-forwards to that horrible breakup at Calamity Brew. The hurt from Kalil’s rejection opens up a portal of echoing pain. Thinking of how close Kalil and I were to doing the deed, I can’t help thinking of my first time with Scott. He put on some mood music: the Gaussian Pyramids’ EP. There might as well have been a blimp flying overhead bearing the message: “Danger, Will Robinson, danger! You are about to bed a narcissist.”
I revisit my flash-card mantras: Scott was a scum bastard. Scott never loved me as much as I deserved. And Lin’s favorite: Scott had an alarming amount of earwax. “How can he tell he’s even singing in the right key?” Thing is, Scott was my first love. No amount of woolgathering about his imperfections can change that. Not even the travesty that is indie-disco fusion.
The sliding tile puzzle inside me was always in disarray with Scott, but I frowned at the pieces and thought, Well, maybe that’s what love’s supposed to look like. Maybe love is like modern art. It’s colorful but doesn’t make much sense.
Charlie made so much damn sense.
When I met Charlie, it was like a revelation: This—this is what I’ve been looking for. Someone sexy, confident, and creative, but also vulnerable. Someone with an open heart who wanted connection, not just abject adoration.
A tear rolls down my cheek, and then, because my face is tilted, it rolls across my nose and onto Lin’s shoulder. He hears me sniffle and wraps me in a big hug. “Honey,” he says softly.
“I feel like other people are moving ahead with their lives—getting married, getting real jobs—and I’m stuck. Stuck in a dead-end job. Stuck on a guy who’s out of my reach.”
“You’ve got me, Pipes. You’ve always got me.”
I smile through my sniffles. “I don’t know what I’d do without you.”
“Oh, hush. You’re an ironclad woman, you know that? You just got a few layers of mush to work through.”
My phone begins buzzing again, and Lin grabs it. “Arsehole,” he mutters under his breath, and shoves the phone under the couch cushion. The rain keeps pouring down the windows. Lin flips through the channels one more time before settling back on Julia, but I can’t focus. Instead, I retrieve Stacey’s cheat sheet from my room and bring it back to Lin.
“Quiz me?” I ask, repeating a refrain from our college days. Back then, we were the king and queen of mnemonic devices. Thanks to Lin, there are certain German verbs I’ll never dislodge from my hippocampus. “Verstehen,” he’d intone from the bunk lofted over my study nook. Then his face would appear, upside down, over the edge of the bed as he awaited my translation.
“To understand,” I’d reply. “Because verstanden on solid ground.”
“Ya. Sehr gut.”
Now, muting the TV, he takes the study sheet from me and examines it. “ ‘Hindu Wedding Guide for Dummies LOL,’ ” he reads from the top. He holds it up to his face, squinting. “Does this paper actually have glitter embedded in it?”
“Yup.”
“When’s this gig again?”
“Two weeks. Aren’t you jealous of how I’ll be spending my Fourth of July weekend? I better rock the shit out of it, too, because I need the money before my next credit card billing cycle hits. Turns out, transmissions aren’t cheap.”
He pats my head. “Well, now. Maybe it’s good you won’t be too distracted by a certain shifty sexpot.”
“Nothing like work to take your mind off things.”
“Right, then. Define swaagatam. Did I pronounce that right?”
“Beats me. I’ve been saying ‘swah-got-him.’ That’s when the groom’s family arrives and the bride’s family welcomes him.”
“Good. Use it in a sentence.”
“He almost got cold feet, but swaa-gat-am to come after all.”
My response is met with a swift
thwack of a couch pillow to my head. The second our laughter dies down, I get a flash of the closet doors closing in my face.
But Lin has a word at the ready. “Aarti. Go.”
Nineteen
The morning of Stacey’s Hindu wedding, I stumble into the kitchen in a caffeine-starved haze to find a strange man at the breakfast bar. At first I think I’m hallucinating—I stayed up until two a.m. chanting, “No shoes in the mandap.”
I blink, but he’s still there, surrounded by the detritus of a debaucherous night: half-burned dragonfruit candles, wineglasses, and empty bottles labeled “Cheap Red Wine.”
In a pleasant, subtle Southern accent, he says, “Well, hello there.”
I break into a smile. “You must be Steve.”
He beams back at me and extends a hand, which I promptly shake. “Guilty.”
“The famous Steve,” I say in wonderment.
“And you must be Piper.”
“We meet at last,” I say, trying not to squeal. Way to go, Lin. He’s an absolute fox. “Coffee?”
“Sure. And maybe some for Lin, too, though he’s taking his sweet time getting up.”
I observe him in my peripheral vision while I brew the coffee and get Lin’s favorite mug, a chipped black one he found at the thrift store and loves for no particular reason. I pull down a couple of George Mason University mugs for me and Steve, who sits on a bar stool with one of his bare feet grazing the black-and-white-checked floor.
He’s drop-dead gorgeous but seems oblivious to it. Wearing a pair of worn jeans and a white undershirt, he looks stunning. Straight off the cover of The Comely Culinarian. Soft blond hair curls around his ears, flanking warm brown eyes. He is one stunning specimen of manness.
“So what are you up to today?” he asks.
“Oh, you know, just being a bridesmaid in a Hindu wedding. Well, not really a bridesmaid, I guess. Long story.”
Steve’s eyes light up. “Oh yeah, Lin told me about that. A clever way to make money, if you ask me.”