by Teddy Wayne
“Barron wants her to take saxophone,” Cynthia said. “He used to play it. Horribly.”
“And you’d rather have her learn the flute?” Barron said.
“I didn’t say it had to be the flute,” she said. “I said a woodwind.”
“The saxophone is a woodwind!” Barron said. Michelle was creating scalene triangles by lining up pieces of gnocchi on her plate. “I don’t want my daughter playing the flute. The flute is…” He shook his head and cleaned his mouth with his napkin.
“What?” she said. “Say it.”
He removed the napkin. “It’s bougie,” he said. “It’s a bougie instrument for bougie music that bougie people listen to.”
“I listen to classical music,” Cynthia said.
“I’m not attacking you. But we do enough bougie shit already. And I never complain. You want to spend a grand on a couch, I don’t complain. You want to fly to Paris for Christmas, I don’t complain. This is the one thing I’m asking for.”
“Daddy’s asking for,” Michelle said, which was illogical, but children often repeat statements they hear without consideration, even if they are illogical and lacking context. Frequently I had to correct Zahira.
Cynthia was quiet. Then she said, “Let’s talk about this later.”
“No, let’s talk about this now,” Barron said. “Let’s ask Karim what he thinks.”
“Don’t bring him into this,” Cynthia said, and I mutely agreed with her, but Barron was looking at me and I felt I had to provide some input because I was asking them for help as well.
Michelle was resuming her triangles. “Possibly it is best to present her both options, and see which she is interested in and excels at,” I said.
“And she’ll be interested in the sax, like any intelligent person,” Barron said. “Good advice, Karim.” Cynthia looked upset. “Fine, we’ll discuss it later,” he added. “Okay?” Cynthia quietly said okay. It wasn’t the ideal parenting technique, but in some ways it is preferable for both parties to state their opinions, even if it produces arguments.
I said loudly, “I hope the gnocchi has enough earthiness.” No one responded for a few seconds until Cynthia said it was very tasty.
After the cupcakes, I made tea and Cynthia read my contract and I discussed politics with Barron, who knew much about American history and taught me about the 1960s political movements, which was another area I wanted to broaden my knowledge of.
Finally Cynthia said, “The language is complicated, but it looks to me like if you sign this, you’re transferring ownership of the intellectual property to the company.”
She explained the details, but I didn’t 100% listen to them. I was mute for several seconds before I remembered to thank her. I didn’t want them to ask more questions about what the intellectual property was, and fortunately Michelle yawned and Barron said they should get going. I walked them to the door and closed it behind them and sat down on my floor for several minutes.
Mr. Schrub had lied to me, or he had not told me the complete truth. And possibly he had only invited me to spend time with him not because he liked me, but because he wanted me to trust him enough to sign the contract.
I thought of what Barron said about confrontation. I emailed Mr. Ray again:
Please tell Mr. Schrub I would like to proceed with my own proposal and meet with him again to discuss it.
Then I understood that although Barron’s advice wasn’t about Rebecca, and although she wasn’t a phony like Mr. Schrub was, it was applicable to her to boot. It was cowardly of me to not contact her. You have to confront obstacles and not hope they will be resolved without hard work.
I was going to shoot her an email, but even that was cowardly, so I called her. She answered in a flat voice.
“Rebecca, this is Karim,” I said. I hadn’t strategized, which was possibly foolish, but sometimes it results in saying truer things. “It is my bad for the other night. I have some issues that are independent of you.”
She said, “Uh-huh.”
“Let us see if we can’t resolve this problem,” I said.
“What exactly is your problem?” Rebecca asked.
I hoped she would already understand, but I said, “It is difficult to explain.”
“I can handle it,” she said. “You don’t want to see me anymore.”
“No,” I said. “I mean, ‘No, that is false,’ not ‘No, I don’t want to see you.’” I find the usage of “no” as a prefix confusing because it’s not always clear what the negative applies to. Then I told her my recent thoughts about Ramadan.
“Uh-huh,” she said again, and I could tell she was uncomfortable, but she asked me more about Ramadan and how I felt about it, and how I felt about being with her during it and in general.
I said I didn’t feel good about it but I enjoyed being with her. It was difficult both to decipher my feelings and to state them initially, but the more I did it, the easier it was. “Possibly I should learn not to view my values as a series of binaries and instead find a compromise,” I said.
“That’s what relationships are about, right?” she said. “According to my last issue of Cosmo.”
“Do you classify this as a relationship?” I asked.
“I don’t really know,” she said. “It’s just been a couple of weeks.”
“We are not in Kansas anymore,” I said.
“What?”
“I have not been in a relationship previously,” I said, “so I do not know the appropriate amount of time before it is technically considered one.” When I said it, I realized it was the class of statement that someone like Angela from Cathedral would reject me for, but I hoped Rebecca would be careless.
“I’m no expert, either. But this is pretty quick,” she said, and my heart slightly plummeted, but then she added, “Though we could keep seeing how it works. And I’m joking. I don’t read Cosmo.”
“I do not even know what Cosmo is,” I said.
We made plans to see each other after work on Wednesday night, and for a little while I forgot about Mr. Schrub and Kapitoil, but only a little while.
big for one’s britches = lacking humility with a higher-up
bougie = bourgeois; middle-class or materialistic
chef = used without an article, the term for a chef at a classy restaurant
Cosmo = Cosmopolitan, a magazine for females that frequently analyzes romantic relationships
exploiter = someone who leverages; this is a word
lady friend = either female friend or romantic partner
philistine = someone ignorant of quality culture
phonies = false people
stab someone’s back = practice deception
steel-trap mind = a brain that does not forget many things
JOURNAL DATE RECORDED: DECEMBER 16
Mr. Ray replied and told me that Mr. Schrub would be very busy over the next week but he would contact me when he was free.
I should have said I was ready to sign the contract but that I wanted to meet with Mr. Schrub directly first. Now they knew I had reservations about the contract, and they were forcing me to wait so that I might reconsider. My father frequently negotiated with suppliers who used similar tactics, and I have read several business manuals on negotiating, although this was the first time I had ever had a real-world negotiating opportunity, which was why I made an error.
Of course I could simply write my proposal and try to publish it in an academic paper without telling Mr. Schrub, but he would fire me instantly for being too big for my britches and I would never have a chance to work for him again. Possibly if I waited and got him to see the idea from my POV, we could compromise.
I was relieved that Rebecca planned our date for Wednesday, which was to see her friend’s rock-and-roll band’s concert on the Lower East Side. The friend was the man from her party with long hair named James. He sang and played guitar, and although the crowd was not very bottlenecked in the dark room, several females stood in the front
and watched him nonstop. People danced merely by rotating back and forth on an axis over their feet and not truly moving, so I didn’t have to worry about dancing poorly and looking foolish. I asked if Rebecca wanted a beer. She said, “Sure, but you don’t need to buy it for me,” and I said I would purchase this first set and she could purchase the second set. “It’s called ‘buying a round,’” she said.
By the time we were on Rebecca’s round, James’s band was done. After they put away their equipment, he located us at the bar and hugged Rebecca. “Thanks for coming, Becks,” he said. “Looks like you’re the only one who made it.”
She nodded at the females. “You’ve got plenty of groupies.”
“They’re a pale mimesis of you,” he said as he compressed her around the shoulders with his arm.
Rebecca retracted very slightly, just a few inches. “You remember Karim from my party, right?”
“No, nice to meet you,” James said, and shook my hand with great force. It was very loud in the bar, and I heard him say, “You a fan of Indian rock?”
“I am not Indian,” I said. “I am from Qatar.”
James’s upper lip rotated to the left when he laughed via his nose, but Rebecca didn’t and she said, “No, ‘indie rock’—it’s short for independent. Music not released on big record labels.”
“In that case, yours is the first band I have heard that is in that class, and I did enjoy your music,” I said, even though I didn’t truly enjoy his music and thought his voice was impure, unlike that of Leonard Cohen or John Lennon or even Bob Dylan, whose voice is impure but intriguing.
James said he could obtain free alcohol for us, and soon he had three small glasses of whiskey and three cans of a beer that tasted mostly like water, and we drank the whiskey and then the beer to reduce the burning, and after we finished the beers he produced a second round and we repeated our actions.
I was slightly dizzy, but Rebecca was very unstable, and when she almost became imbalanced James held her and her body became fragile in his arms, and he said, “Your hair always smells so fucking good, like strawberries,” which doubly angered me because it smells in fact like watermelons, and then he slowly danced with her even though the band was playing a fast song.
I wanted to leave so I wouldn’t have to see what was happening, but I was afraid that if I left James would attempt even more. So I stood by the bar and watched them dance in the middle of the room and felt my body heat up like a microwave at James every time he whispered something in her ear and also at Rebecca for frequently laughing at what he said and for acting like this directly in front of me while we were on a romantic date.
When James lighted a cigarette for himself and let Rebecca inhale from it as well, I decided that if this was what she wanted to do, then it was her choice, and I left.
Outside the wind burned my ears as I determined the location of the subway. Before I walked away, Rebecca exited the bar and almost fell. “Wait,” she said.
I rotated but didn’t speak. “Why are you leaving?” she asked. Some of her words blended together.
“You do not seem to require my presence,” I said.
She leaned against the wall of the bar. “I don’t normally act this way,” she said.
“Then why are you doing it now?” I asked.
“I don’t know. For attention,” she said. “Sometimes. When I drink. Even from sleazeballs like James.”
“But why do you want attention from James when I am already paying it to you?” I asked.
“Because,” she said, and she decelerated her words. “I really like you.”
I leaned against the wall next to her. “Then those are not logical actions,” I said.
She collapsed but I hugged her before she fell. She pocketed her hands inside my coat to keep them warm and got close to me and our breath was the only non-cold thing near our faces, and she kissed me and it made my entire body feel hotter, but not like the temperature spike of a digital microwave as before, as it was more like an analog toaster with gradual heat. “You want to come home with me?” she asked.
“Of course I want to,” I said. First we went into a store and I bought her a large bottle of water. She nearly crashed into a stand that stored snacks. When I helped her outside she almost fell again, and I said, “Maybe we should go home independently tonight.” She nodded. I retrieved a taxi and gave the driver $30 and wrote down his car’s ID number and said if he made her pay I would contact his employer.
After I linked Rebecca’s seat belt, I told her I would call later to certify her safety. She pulled my tie and body close to her and said, “You can hate me if you want.”
“I do not hate you,” I said. “Obviously, I also really like you.” She asked, “Yeah?” and I said yes again, and then kissed her on her hand. She smiled when I did that and touched the spot with her other hand, and I closed the door and watched her drive away.
When I returned home I had an email waiting for me from Mr. Schrub’s secretary. My heart became stimulated because I thought it would be about a meeting with Mr. Schrub, but she was forwarding me a message from Mrs. Schrub that read:
Dear Karim,
Would you care to attend a holiday fund-raising event next Wednesday the 22nd that I’m organizing?
The event was to raise money for refugees from Kosovo. I knew she hadn’t told Mr. Schrub she was inviting me, because if he was there he would not have wanted me to also be there after my last email to Mr. Ray. And this would be my best opportunity to confront him again about my proposal.
buying a round = purchasing alcoholic drinks in bulk for several people
groupies = females who desire musicians
indie = independent
mimesis = imitation
sleazeball = James
JOURNAL DATE RECORDED: DECEMBER 19
On Friday afternoon a few small white objects fell from the sky, and for a moment I thought someone was ejecting shredded paper from a window above me. I opened a window and put my hand out to touch the snowflakes, but they deleted almost instantly on my hands. I wanted Zahira to be able to see them.
I called home. My father picked up. I disconnected.
Rebecca had invited me to go out to a bar with some of her friends and Jessica that night in Brooklyn, because she was leaving for Wisconsin on Tuesday for almost a week to work remotely on the Y2K preparations. We had to go to her apartment first to drop off some of her possessions, and we decided to eat something there first. When she looked out the window after we finished, she said, “You mind if we ditch the bar and stay in with this weather?”
“I am not dying to go to the bar,” I said. I didn’t feel like talking to new people, even though I liked Rebecca’s friends, minus James, and I also understood why Rebecca once said she liked Jessica but didn’t 100% connect with her.
She had a selection of board games, and I chose one that I thought would enhance my English: Scrabble. I would lose but I didn’t mind playing poorly in front of Rebecca.
She explained the rules to me and we started as we sat on the carpet next to her coffee table. “We can listen to some indie rock that’s better than James’s band,” she said, which made me smile to myself, “or this CD of ’50s songs.” I said I was unfamiliar with music from the 1950s so I would prefer that, and she said, “Me, too. There’s only so many scratchy-voiced tales of postgraduate alienation a girl can take.” I didn’t always understand Rebecca’s ideas, but I valued the way she stated them.
I was robust at understanding the structure of the game, although my limited English restricted me, and Rebecca won the first game easily.
We replayed, and when Rebecca created the word “C-A-NC-E-R-S” she clapped her hands and said, “Bingo plus triple-word score!” She laughed as she counted her points. I didn’t say anything, and she looked up and said, “What’s wrong? Afraid of getting blown out a second time?” It reminded me of what Mr. Schrub said after he won a point in racquetball. Americans enjoy boasting when they are
winning competitions.
“I do not mind losing the game,” I said. “Your word made me think of my mother.”
She stopped scoring her move. “What about her?”
Before she could say something such as how she was sorry, I explained the basic facts of my mother’s death. I didn’t discuss the night of my birthday.
She didn’t say anything the entire time, just as Mr. Schrub didn’t. When it was over, she said, “I think you’re the first decent guy I’ve actually liked.”
“Decent means ‘average,’ correct?” I asked, because it did not seem like a compliment.
“No, not average,” she said. “Unusual.”
Suddenly I wanted to feel close to her in a way I hadn’t yet. I took her hand and we walked to her bedroom. It felt simultaneously familiar and new, which was an intriguing combination, and I thought that is how all experiences should feel, or how you should make them feel to you, but often they feel too familiar or we desire something exclusively because it is new. After a few minutes she said, “Do you want me to get a condom?” and I said yes, and she retrieved one from the bottom shelf of her clothing drawer.
My performance was slightly better than the time with Melissa. I paid attention to which actions produced no effect and which yielded a net gain, as in a boosting algorithm, and I utilized the strong ones in variable patterns so they wouldn’t become predictable, but after a period of time I merely let myself enjoy our actions, even if I wasn’t the cream of the cream partner. At one point we stopped moving and looked at each other at highly magnified range and she removed the perspiration from my forehead with her hand and I did the same for her and we both smiled, and I knew what it was like to know that your happiness was making someone else happy and have reciprocity for it, which was a true example of something that wasn’t a zero-sum game.