The Year Of Uh

by Jud Widing

  The logic of the Prisoner’s Dilemma dictated that each of them ought to have rushed home before the other had the opportunity to. Instead, they exchanged messages, met up, and went home together, thus obviating any trouble for either of them.

  There passed a moment when they could have shot each other in the metaphorical dingii, but didn’t…and gosh and darnit if this didn’t instill a certain degree of good faith in one another.

  A trial period of sustained circumspection might well be what was called for then, but Nur was growing impatient. Deirdre had already amply demonstrated that she was capable of facilitating progress in Nur’s romantic liaison, and there was so much progress yet to be made. Nur considered the issue and decided that, despite its intimately personal nature, Deirdre could help, and she ought to strike while the links of the sororal irons were hot.

  Alright, no sense dressing it up: Nur wanted Deirdre to help her get laid.

  “You what?”

  “Please don’t make me ask again.”

  Deirdre rose her palms to her temples and very pointedly failed to conceal a smile. “I’ve…I…I’m-“

  “This isn’t about you!”

  The smile widened. “No, I know, of course not.” Deirdre lowered her hands to her lap. “I, er, it’s just surprising, is all.”

  Nur couldn’t quite bring herself to look at her sister’s beaming mug, so she let her gaze settle on Deirdre’s right ear. “If I could handle it myself, I would.”

  “That big, huh?”

  “What?”

  Deirdre’s grin split open, revealing her brace-straightened teeth.

  Nur would have done a spit-take, if only she’d been drinking something. “No! The it is the, the circumstances, not-“

  “I know, I know. I’m messing with you.”

  “Well, don’t!”

  Mercifully, Deirdre picked up on this and adopted a dignified pose more becoming of the situation’s sensitivity. “Right. Sorry. What do you expect me to be able to do though? I can’t imagine having your little sister play pimp is going to get him in the mood.”

  “You wouldn’t be ‘playing pimp’. You’d be…” she tried to lock down a phrasing of Deirdre’s putative role that didn’t sound like a florid euphemism for pimp. She failed. “Well, anyway, I just need you to help with the translation for a bit, then peel off. We’ll arrange a meet-up ahead of time, and-“

  “Where am I going to sleep though?” The concern was genuine.

  Nur scratched her chin. “Huh?”

  “I can’t come back here, so where am I go-“

  “Oh. Oh. I wasn’t planning on spending the night with him.”

  “…then what are we talking about?”

  Nur walked over to her bed and sat down across from her sister. “No, I mean, I’m planning on ‘spending the night with him’ in the colloquial sense. But I wasn’t going to literally stay the whole night. That’d never fly with Uncle Bernard.”

  A wretched little smirk alighted on the corners of Deirdre’s mouth.

  Nur sighed. “What?”

  “Nothing.”

  “That’s something. What.”

  “Just that I’m definitely playing pimp here.”

  Despite her frustration with Deirdre’s lack of gravity, Nur gave a dramatic “ah!” gasping noise, like an old dowager fixing to faint. “Why, just because I’m not staying the night?”

  “You’re gonna do the deed and then scram, right?”

  “Well he’s not paying me!”

  “Of course not. But is he paying me?”

  “Ah!” Nur grabbed a pillow and hurled it at Deirdre’s head. It was a good-natured hurl. “You little shit!” That was a good-natured ‘you little shit’.

  The levee broke and Deirdre’s laughter came roaring forth. It was catching, and Nur was receptive.

  CHAPTER 18

  They had something approximating a plan, and Nur didn’t feel great about that. A scheme to get into a guy’s pants…that was a simplistic formulation of things, but it wasn’t inaccurate. She did love him. Probably. Most likely. And he was very timid, clearly not apt to make many first moves beyond hand-holding. Fold these in with the extenuating circumstances of their limited conversational opportunities, and a little pinch of calculation wasn’t so unreasonable after all. Was it? Of course it wasn’t.

  Probably. Most likely.

  And anyway, it’s not as though it was some masterpiece of Machiavellian manipulation. “Get Hyun-Woo to invite us back to his place”. That was it, in totality. From there, they had a little rigmarole put together, by which Deirdre would excuse herself and leave the lovebirds to their tender ministrations. If, on the walk up, the area looked like a halfway decent one, Deirdre would get the night to herself once again, wandering and exploring to her heart’s content, as long as her heart could find contentment by 11:30PM. The T closed relatively early, after all. This time limit also presupposed Nur could find contentment of a more glandular sort before the train carriage turned back into a pumpkin, but she’d never been the ‘go all night’ type anyway. Get in, get the job done, get out. Anything more was just loitering.

  The pumpkin was before the horse here, though. They had to get invited to Hyun-Woo’s, and as he hadn’t extended the invitation on his own, the issue would need to be forc…facilitated. That was where Deirdre came in. Deirdre and the calendar, which turned out to be a capable co-conspirator.

  Halloween wasn’t unknown in Seychelles and South Korea, but it was more acknowledged than celebrated. Nur speculated that she had an uncommon familiarity with the holiday, simply because it was observed by so many of the tourists who spend the ass end of October vacationing at the De Dernberg Towers.

  October 31st fell on a Monday this year, which meant much of the mischief went down on the 28th and 29th, so working stiffs could drink themselves silly without condemning themselves to jockeying a desk with ringing ears and splitting head. This unspoken preemption of the Big Night caught Nur unawares, but also served as a helpful reminder that she needed a costume. She herself had never dressed up for Halloween, or as the case seemed to be, dressed down for it.

  Some people dressed as characters from pop culture; some dressed as real people, historical and contemporary; some went as inanimate objects; some went as animals. The common thread running between all of these seemed to be a paucity of threads. America was still recovering from a recession, she knew this, but how striking it was to see that nobody seemed to have enough fabric to complete their costumes!

  Nur would never self-describe as a prude, but fits of sarcasm like that made her wonder if that was just because she lacked the self-awareness to do so. If people wanted to dress up as sexy versions of, say, a child murderer (Darth Vader) or a corporate CEO (Harold Westmore), that was their prerogative. And more power to them for doing so in such a frigid clime. Would that Nur could feel so committed to anything, as these people did their igloo eroticism.

  This naturally opened an avenue of seduction; parade in front of Hyun-Woo in something revealing. What that something was remained undetermined, as she’d had very few costume ideas, and even fewer that she hadn’t seen in the days leading up to Halloween executed far more, how to phrase this, successfully than she’d be able to. Nur had nothing to be ashamed about with her body, and nor was she (usually, anyway). But it also wasn’t the sort of body that got along with skin-tight leotards and crop tops. Seductive in the confines of a bedroom, sure, she could manage that. But stood next to some of the stunners Nur saw clomping around Copley in six-inch heels, she wouldn’t have been able to entirely blame Hyun-Woo for a wandering eye. She had self-awareness enough for that, at least.

  The costume was the hard part. The rest was fairly straightforward.

  Inviting oneself to someone else’s house was a no-no, Nur knew. And even if it wer
e more acceptable, she still wouldn’t do it; there were few things she hated more than people inviting themselves along with her. On anything. It baffled her why anybody would ever just assume their presence was wanted, despite not having been requested.

  How to get around this? Well, on one of their semi-regular threesome dates on the Friday before Halloween, Nur and Hyun-Woo and Deirdre as translator, Nur got up to go to the bathroom. As she passed her sister, she gave her a little tap on the shoulder. This served no purpose other than to say look at us, with the surreptitious gestures, except don’t actually look.

  Running out the clock on the porcelain throne, Nur tried to ensure Deirdre would have enough time by running a projection of how she imagined the conversation would go. She knew Deirdre’s opening salvo well enough; they’d rehearsed and refined it over a period of days.

  Deirdre: Hey, while Nur’s in the bathroom; we’re gonna be trick-or-treating on Halloween, and I thought it’d be a fun surprise if one of the doors we knocked on happened to be yours. Where do you live? I’ll sort of nudge her your way, and we can pretend it’s just a crazy coincidence.

  Inviting him into her confidence, making him feel as though he’s inviting them when he’s really not.

  And he really isn’t. They’re sort of inviting themselves, putting Hyun-Woo in that awkward position of either feeling obligated to accommodate or having to uncomfortably rescind an invitation he’d never extended.

  So, yeah, they were inviting themselves over to his house. But desperate times, and so on.

  At this point, the conversation would naturally go wildly off road. Nur and Deirdre had rehearsed that opening line, and settled on a variety of follow-ups based on the numerous possible responses they could imagine Hyun-Woo giving, but of course they couldn’t imagine all of the possible responses. He could well surprise them both by saying something utterly out of the blue, in which case Deirdre was on her own. Nur had to trust her sister’s extempore talents, and she was pleased to find that she did. She really did.

  Hyun-Woo: Yes, she imagined him saying, this is a wonderful idea, perhaps the most wonderful idea I have ever had the pleasure of hearing. Why not skip the pleasantries of trick or treat, and have Nur ascend to my penthouse where we will dine on the finest seafood fresh from the harbor, and smush our genitals together.

  (Nur expected that saucy talk would get jumbled and unsexified in the act of translation)

  Deirdre: I expect Nur will be exceedingly pleased to hear this.

  Hyun-Woo: I, in turn, am exceedingly pleased to hear that.

  Deirdre: This has been a conversation conducive to exceeding pleasure.

  Hyun-Woo: What an exceedingly pleasurable turn of events.

  Deirdre: I concur.

  Hyun-Woo: Terrific.

  Jealousy shot through Nur for a split second; the moments of exceeding pleasure should pass only between Hyun-Woo and herself! And then she remembered that that conversation hadn’t actually happened, or at least, hadn’t actually happened like that. That was all imagined.

  She got up to find out how the conversation actually did happen.

  She sat back down, wiped, and then got up to find out how the conversation actually did happen.

  Not right away. She had to sit through the rest of the date – not that the rest of the date wasn’t enjoyable. They chatted through Deirdre about ways in which they would not want to die, and the ways in which they would kill themselves, if they were so inclined. A morbid conversation to be sure, but oddly unifying. They had moved beyond the small-talk phase, and Nur was unutterably pleased with this development. Small talk was boring. Strange conversations about whether you would rather jump out of a plane with a faulty parachute, to watch the Earth go from a far-off hypothetical to a terminally tangible fact, or go scuba diving with a faulty tank, struggling to shake off the dead weight and kick up to the shimmering surface, as the dancing sunlight slowly collapsed into an endless tunnel…this was an Interesting Conversation, of the sort one doesn’t have with just anybody. And Hyun-Woo was having it with her, freely and easily. She wasn’t just anybody to him.

  On the walk back home (they’d had this get-together in a cute little faux-French eatery near Uncle Bernard’s place), Nur did something she hadn’t done in years: she put Deirdre in a headlock and gave her a noogie.

  “Gah, stop it!” Deirdre sputtered.

  Nur released her sister and laughed. “You’re amazing, Deirdre. It was like I was talking directly to him. I forgot you were even there.”

  “Gee, thanks.”

  “I mean that as a compliment! You’re a natural interpreter!”

  “Oh, of course,” Deirdre replied with an ostentatious, hand-spinning bow. “I knew that.”

  “So what did he say?”

  Deirdre regained the vertical with a fiendish glimmer in her eye. “About what?”

  “You know what!”

  “He liked the idea.”

  Did he find it exceedingly pleasurable? Deirdre having information that she didn’t was maddening. “And he gave you his address?”

  “Mhm. He did.”

  “What is it?”

  The fiendish glimmer bloomed into a spotlight. “It’s meant to be a surprise.”

  “…”

  “Don’t you want to be surprised?”

  “No!”

  “If I tell you where he lives, and which house, then you’re going to have to pretend extra-hard to be surprised when he opens the door. But if I don’t tell you, you’ll only have to work half as hard.”

  Deirdre had a point. If Deirdre wasn’t a great actress, she came by it honestly. Nur was no better. Retaining an element of the unexpected would keep her from having to feign shock, which would likely take the form of screwing her palms into her eyes and shouting “WWWHHHAAAA?!”

  But still…this meant Deirdre had information that Nur didn’t. Which was maddening.

  Also…

  “Also, if you’re gonna keep it a secret, now we have to actually go trick-or-treating!”

  Deirdre feigned shock, only just falling short of how Nur fancied she would have done it. “But that was always the plan, wasn’t it?”

  “No! We would have gone straight to his place!”

  “With empty bags?”

  “Empty bags of what?”

  “…empty?”

  “What would have been in them?”

  “Candy!”

  Nur lifted a finger, ready to make a great point, before realizing that Deirdre had beaten her to it. The illusion would be incomplete if they showed up to Hyun-Woo’s without candy. So now they had to actually go trick-or-treating.

  “…good point. But I’m too old to trick-or-treat,” Nur opined as she slowly lowered her finger.

  “I’m not. And neither are you.” As Nur’s finger fell, so too did her shoulders. Deirdre shook her head. “It’s free candy!”

  It was in moments like these when Nur remembered just how young her sister was.

  “Alright,” she allowed, hiking her shoulders back up to their normal position, “but promise me you won’t hold Hyun-Woo’s place out until the end of the night.”

  “I would have thought the night was over when we got to Hyun-Woo’s, no?”

  “…good point.”

  CHAPTER 19

  The two criteria by which Nur assessed potential Halloween costumes were sensuality and insulation. It was a notably cold October in Boston, getting down to the 30s, and there was no sense revealing skin if it would be mottled with goosebumps. Particularly with her having been born and raised in a tropical environment, Nur had little truck with the cold.

  Were a film to be made of her life, this would be the point at which a jaunty pop song would come tinkling in, obliterating the diegetic sound and signaling a montage d
uring which all manner of garments and household accessories were repurposed into a series of increasingly preposterous costumes which escalate, in comedic fashion, to the point at which the final costume is discovered.

  But were a film to be made of Nur’s life, it would have subtitles, and Deirdre would probably be more reliably amusing than she actually was, and both herself and Hyun-Woo would have abs (as would Deirdre, as would Uncle Bernard and Aunt Amy, as would Tuppence Crabshoe – everybody would have abs), and they (Nur and Hyun-Woo, not any of the other people just mentioned parenthetically) would have had sex within the first thirty minutes of their meeting, thus rendering this whole Halloween misadventure moot.

  Without the magic of montage, finding a suitable Halloween costume was more dirge than lark. Deirdre had asked around and discovered that the secret was to come up with a thing that you wanted to be, then just put the word “Sexy” in front of it, and yank away the fabric around the legs.

  Uncle Bernard took a hard pass on any fabric being yanked or torn, so Nur was left to cobble something together from the materials she found around the house, as they were.

  Lucky for her, her Aunt and Uncle had acquired the tackiest trappings of their respective cultures. Which is how, at the end of what would have been a rather prolonged and humorless montage set to something like The Rite of Spring, Nur wound up dressing as Sexy Bear from The Revenant (being “From The Revenant” was Deirdre’s suggestion, as she insisted that just plain ‘sexy bear’ meant something specific in America).

  The “costume” was really just a single item, a thick pelt that belonged to some poor bear or wolf or whatever, but now found new life as a throw blanket meant to represent the fur traders that dominated some distant portion of Aunt Amy’s family tree. The dimensions were modest enough to drape over Nur’s shoulders like a cape without dragging any surplus pelt behind her. Plus, it was warm! Granted, it would take some explaining for which Nur was hardly prepared, but there weren’t many alternatives.