The Year Of Uh

by Jud Widing

  With dread inexorability, the TAF and TAS circles threatened eclipse. So Nur replied to her sister with a suggestive, eyebrow smile, and rolled the dice: “The one you told me about?”

  The lurid liberality of that expression got through to Deirdre, alright. The creases in her brow smoothed themselves out. “Yeah,” she finally admitted.

  Not so deep down, they both knew Nur was bluffing. She hadn’t heard a word Deirdre had said about this guy. But going by the look on her younger sister’s face, Nur had an impression so strong as to be something close to certainty that, by the very act of bluffing, she had conveyed the amount of thought she’d put in to Deirdre’s situation, without explicitly saying as much. Because why bother pretending to have heard something she hadn’t, unless she had become cognizant of said something’s importance to the person who said it?

  Maybe that was projection, or pure fancy. Either way, it didn’t much matter to Nur. Because Deirdre seemed gratified by the exchange, and the two sisters once again found common cause in trying to get one of them laid.

  It was a point of no small frustration that the circles TAF and TAS seemed so drawn to one another, but perhaps a little bit of overlap would help stabilize them both. Just a little bit. Not too much. Nur just hoped that one day, she would learn to live with that little bit of overlap without wanting to sick up her lungs.

  CHAPTER 28

  The kid’s name (and he was a kid, Nur acknowledged only in passing, as she zipped that thought straight into the mental garbage can) was Kamal, and that was really all Nur needed to know about him. She couldn’t keep calling him ‘the guy’ or ‘the boy’, certainly not ‘the kid’. But hot on the heels of “his name is Kamal” came a biography of such exhaustive triviality, Nur began to once again despair of whatever connection she felt she had with Hyun-Woo. At bottom, they really didn’t know anything about each other. Not if the things Deirdre and Kamal knew about each other was the benchmark, at least. Granted, the youngins had more of the common language down, but Nur had never let a well-reasoned point stand in the way of self-doubt.

  Kamal was Pakistani, and Deirdre seethed with genuine outrage as she recounted the flaming hoops through which he was forced to jump upon immigration. Kamal was in Boston on a $20,000 scholarship to Boston University, where he took night classes towards a degree in archaeology, and Deirdre swelled with proxy pride as she expounded upon the ancient Soanian leftovers near Islamabad, which was to be Kamal’s specialty. Kamal always seemed to smell great, even on days when he claimed he hadn’t showered, and Deirdre flushed with timid recollection of the furtive whiffs she’d stolen.

  Had Nur been asked early last August to describe what love looked like, from a purely behavioral standpoint, she would have outlined the Deirdre before her accurately enough to help a police sketch artist capture her visage and bring her to justice. Did it cheapen the things she felt – or thought she felt – for Hyun-Woo? She was ashamed to admit that she thought it might. Looking at him had filled – and still did fill – her heart with a bewildering stew of emotions. She looked at him and wondered what he had been doing one year ago today, when the two of them hadn’t the slightest inkling that the other existed. She looked at him and wondered if he felt the same way as she did when he looked back. She looked at him and wondered where they would be one year from now, if they would continue along the paths they had set out for themselves, or if they might prove so drawn to one another that their paths converged and took an entirely unexpected but breathtakingly picturesque detour…

  She looked at him and thought all of these things, but it was a purely internal combustion. Unless there were some fugue states for which she couldn’t account, and about which nobody had told her, Nur had never jabbered and babbled about Hyun-Woo the way Deirdre was doing now for Kamal. What did that mean?

  Deirdre was younger, of course. Was it just youthful enthusiasm? Maybe…but she seemed so sure of her feelings for Kamal. Nur was constantly waffling, scrutinizing her motives and second-guessing her emotions. Was Deirdre doing the same thing, and simply finding more reliable conclusions than Nur was? Or had she neglected to engage in the same critical examinations?

  And who, in that case, had the right approach to being in love? Were either of them actually in love? Was there anything to gain from asking these sorts of questions?

  Was Deirdre still talking?

  “...time out of Pakistan, which made me think, like, we’ve got so…”

  Yes, she was.

  One thing was for certain, at least: Nur understood why Deirdre had gotten so angry at the flat dismissal of her carnal ambitions. Her baby sister was all grown up, and she was, as the Americans say, thirsty.

  Nur let Deirdre run out the charge of giddy affection, not knowing that this would take several days. When that reservoir finally ran dry, they began to talk logistics, which once again seemed like a dirty word where love was concerned, but some things just couldn’t be avoided.

  To wit: unlike Hyun-Woo, Kamal was not possessed of mysterious riches. The only reason he could come to America was because of the scholarship, and the only reason he could stay in America was because his mother lived here now. His parents were divorced, that was another thing Nur found out from Deirdre, and Pakistan wasn’t exactly the best place for a divorced woman with a child to be setting up shop. So she moved to America, remarried, and was finally enjoying the company of her son for the first time since her expatriation. They lived in a small, one-bedroom apartment, just a ten-minute walk or so from the language school.

  A small, one-bedroom apartment. Kamal slept on the fold-out couch in the living room.

  So Kamal’s place was out.

  Despite the gentle leverage Nur now held against her Uncle Bernard, him being equally afeared of her parents and all, she wasn’t about to try to turn his house into a fuckpad. They were his guests, and even if she could somehow convince him to keep mum about the whole thing, and not tell her mum (which she doubted very much), she wasn’t about to lean on him for something like this. He would be helping his niece, a legal minor, get her cherry popped under his roof. Bernard seemed like the kind of guy who wanted not a football stadium between his TAF and TAS circles, but a continent, or perhaps a solar system.

  So Uncle Bernard’s was out. What did that leave? Get a hotel? And how would they explain that charge to their parents? They certainly didn’t have the money to cover it in cash, and besides, if the hotels in America were anything like theirs in Seychelles, it was nearly impossible to get a room without a card now. They could try to call it a night of research, which in a sense it would have been. But again, Nur felt slightly gross about making her family even unwitting accomplices to this. She felt more than slightly gross about her own involvement, but she loved her sister and that’s what people who love each other do. They help each other have sex. But also there are a lot of different kinds of love, Nur added for her own mental well-being.

  So what did that leave?

  Nur could only think of one possibility, and it was arguably the grossest one.

  CHAPTER 29

  `Hyun-Woo didn’t say anything for several seconds, and that was to be expected. Nur had been silently hoping that he would have as much trouble with the age for sex as he had with the age for drinking, but his ruminative stillness dispelled that hope. Two minors having sex was all well and good, but what did the law have to say about helping said minors have said sex? Was that what he was wondering? Or was it just the strangeness of having to provide a pad for your lover’s younger sister to do the deed with a boy he’d never met? Or was it the added absurdity of having the person translating the plea be the interested party herself?

  Deirdre had equipped her sister with a few English prompts, hoping she wouldn’t have to be present for the pitch. It’d save everybody a lot of discomfort, they agreed. But ultimately, even if Nur was reasonably confident she would have bee
n able to understand Hyun-Woo’s responses (he was getting pretty good at anticipating Nur’s problem areas and avoiding them, which made it a pleasant surprise when the areas stopped being problems), she couldn’t remember the entire spiel Deirdre prepared, and the prospect of starting the hard sell and not being able to finish it was mortifying to both of them. So Deirdre went along, and allowed Nur to make the pitch in Seychellois Creole, translating for them for the first time in weeks. It was awkward not only for the subject matter, but for the fact that Nur and Hyun-Woo had grown accustomed to communicating without a middlewoman. Reintroducing her was a bit like slapping training wheels on a motocross bike. Even if the driver still had a tendency to fall down a lot, two little extra baby wheels aren’t gonna help on a hairpin turn.

  He looked from Nur to Deirdre, back to Nur, held her gaze for a little while, darted his eyes to Deirdre and then straight back to Nur, then at his feet. He made an extended study of his shoes.

  Just as she was losing heart, Hyun-Woo lifted his head as though he’d found the lost heart down on the floor and needed desperately to let her know. “It’s important to you?” he asked Nur directly. The question came in English, but the language of its delivery didn’t even register with her. Nor, really, did the content of the question. What she latched on to was the aching finality with which the question was asked; she knew in that instant that however she replied, Hyun-Woo would proceed accordingly.

  All of the risks, all of the personal reservations, all of the variables of which she couldn’t possibly be aware, were sublimated into a single question aimed not at Deirdre but at Nur. He cared what she thought, and her word would be law.

  She still had a million questions, about what Hyun-Woo wanted and needed and expected and thought and felt…but that one extra question from him turned out to be a satisfactory answer to hers, at least for a few beautiful seconds there.

  Nodding, she suddenly developed a great interest in her own shoes. “Yes,” she replied in effortless English. “It is.” Her eyes rose to meet his again, and there they remained, and there they would have continued to remain, and Deirdre not cut in.

  “It’s also important to me,” she pointed out quite reasonably.

  Hyun-Woo once again favored Nur with that unrivaled smile of his. “Well alright then.”

  “Ahem,” said Deirdre, because for once she thought she could forward a strong moral argument that she should be the center of attention in this conversation. And eventually, she was. Eventually.

  There was a perverse (in the sense of ‘odd’, as opposed to ‘lecherous’, though one could be forgiven for making that mistake) fascination to be found in watching Hyun-Woo orchestrate a sexual liaison. For one, he was trying to orchestrate it, as though there were dozens of moving parts that needed to be wrangled and synchronized. Quite the opposite: unlike Nur and Hyun-Woo, Deirdre and Kamal had had conversations about sex, and the gist of those conversations had always been theory with an eye towards practice. There were only two moving parts, and given the opportunity they would lock into complimentary, repetitive motion all by themselves.

  For two, Hyun-Woo was still slightly reticent with regard to sex. Nur suspected this would be a lifelong affliction, not that there was anything wrong with it. Not having the vocabulary necessary for such a sensitive conversation, she wasn’t entirely certain why Hyun-Woo had retained his virginity into his second decade of life. Choice, circumstance, or something else, all she could say for certain was that Hyun-Woo as he was now had some difficulty staring down sexuality. And yet here he was, taking something like charge of the situation. A sexual situation. The Hyun-Woo of last August would never have gotten involved in such a predicament, Nur was certain, and merely implying the sorts of particulars now being bandied about freely would have caused him to blush until his face burst into flames.

  Then again, the Nur of this January-almost-February (Christ, where was the time going?) felt nearly face-flushed into the danger zone as they discussed all the surfaces in the apartment upon which Nur and Hyun-Woo had come to know one another biblically. Deirdre didn’t want sloppy locational seconds, but was quickly discovering that this left her the choice to making her own scriptural introductions inside the fridge (as opposed to up against it, check), in the narrow gap between the back of the couch and the wall (the couch itself and the floor around the couch having been well-utilized, check and check) and under the glass-top coffee table (the delicate and frankly reckless task of christening the top having been accomplished, check, though you’d never guess it but for the traitorous redolence of Windex). Deirdre didn’t bother asking about the memory-foam bed, because she suspected its memory wouldn’t be short enough for her.

  Wishing she could take the last fifteen-odd minutes of her life back, Deirdre resigned herself to letting things with Kamal happen naturally, and trying to purge her mind of the knowing, variable-intensity smiles that accompanied her pointing to each object in the apartment.

  And really…that was it. Hyun-Woo didn’t have to do much more than make his place available and himself scarce. Perhaps he was just an attentive host unable to shake old habits, or perhaps his discomfort surrounding the entire topic at hand manifested in a sudden fit of anxious micro-management, but either way he seemed highly disinclined to get out of Deirdre’s damn business.

  Not that anybody phrased it so harshly. Paragons of tact and discretion, were the De Dernberg sisters. Deirdre gave Nur a look, and Nur nodded in acknowledgment. She gave Hyun-Woo a wry, tolerant but nonetheless impatient ‘time to go’ pat on the shoulder with an effortless technique that more commonly develops around the silver anniversary.

  It was, all of a sudden, The Night In Question. Nur had a curiously maternal they grow up so fast sensation, while Hyun-Woo did his best to show Deirdre where he kept the condoms without swallowing his own tongue and exploding. Her all-growed-up sister had arranged a lovely little dinner at a lovely little Mexican restaurant around the corner (how hard it was to shake the slightly dismissive ‘little’ qualifier; Deirdre was past the age where she had little dinners at little restaurants), after which she would ask Kamal if he wanted to watch TV. This absolutely baffled Nur, because she and Kamal had already discussed sex (she being Deirdre - key distinction, that). There was no need to be coy anymore. Deirdre was very firm on this, though. The offer would be for television, even if the subtext of the offer was readily apparent to the both of them. She might even extend the invitation with a suggestive wiggle of the eyebrows. A long night of American television, perhaps with reruns. Wink wiggle blink wink.

  As Nur shuffled Hyun-Woo out the door, he once again pointed out where the condoms were, stretched his hand out like a mother shouting wait let me take my baby as she’s being dragged by bad people away from a baby she wants the bad people to wait and let her take. It was a really weird moment for everybody and thankfully it passed quickly.

  Out in the bracing twilight, the dying day fled westward with a swoosh of its crimson cape, making an overdramatic exit that served as the perfect foil for the rising moon’s deadpan straight-to-camera shrug.

  And then Nur was all like, “well now what?”

  And Hyun-Woo was all like, “that’s a good question.”

  And they both understood what the other was all like with a precision they could never achieve when they thought hard about it.

  So monomaniacally fixated on Deirdre had they been, they’d not stopped to ask themselves what they would do to pass the time while Deirdre was passing the time with Kamal.

  This was the part, in a movie, where Nur would say something flirty to Hyun-Woo, like “oh, I can think of a few things.” Cut to: them flopping down next to each other in a bed, or if this was a classy picture, maybe one of them hugging the other from behind, except they’re both in bath towels because they had to take a shower to wash off the sweat they had accumulated from flopping around on top of each other in a
bed.

  What a wonderful transition that would have been, largely because it cuts out the moments after “oh, I can think of a few things,” when Hyun-Woo replies “like what,” because he seemed pretty slow on the uptake with these things, and then Nur would have to respond with “like sex things,” and Hyun-Woo would say “oh,” and then they would have to find somewhere to have sex, which they didn’t have, so they’d have to go find a motel that charged by the hour, which they probably didn’t have to have in Cambridge, so they’d have to get on the T and go to one of the sketchier neighborhoods and ask somebody excuse me where can we find the nearest hotel that charges by the hour, and then the somebody would give them a look and Hyun-Woo would swallow his tongue and explode.

  Unless they wanted to have sex in an alley. Which they didn’t.

  So they took a walk, and they held hands, and if Nur knew enough about English to use the word ‘swell’ unironically, she’d have said the night was just that.

  CHAPTER 30

  Apparently, nobody had told Deirdre that there would be blood. And apparently, that same nobody hadn’t told Hyun-Woo. Nur felt a measure of responsibility, then, for her sister’s embarrassment and her lover’s sheet set. But how was she supposed to know what these two did or didn’t know?

  This was the question she put to Deirdre, who was trying to crinkle her nose up to her forehead as she balled up the 600 thread count nightmare. “It couldn’t have hurt to mention it in passing, just to be safe,” she mumbled through pursed lips. Nur couldn’t recall being so disgusted at the sight of her own blood when she’d been in this position, but then again, she’d been prepared for it. “Like, ‘hey, it’s gonna sting a bit, and maybe lay out some newspaper’.”