1997 [excerpt]

The following is a draft of portions of my essay “1997” where I address the movies Titanic and In the Company of Men and break down their influence on my artistic development.

Titanic

People might forget—if they are old enough to remember—that in the months leading up to its release, all signs pointed to Titanic being an unprecedented commercial and artistic failure. The exceedingly negative pre-release buzz was so relentless that the movie’s status as an imminent catastrophe became common knowledge in the culture, which was especially impressive considering that household internet was still in its infancy and the bulk of entertainment news was gleaned from weekly updates in newsstand periodicals. (It didn’t hurt that the attention-grabbing headlines practically wrote themselves: endless variations on “Disaster Movie Is, itself, A Disaster!”) The dollar figures attached to the production were beyond comprehension: the director’s quixotic attempts to recreate the historic event with maximal fidelity—culminating in the construction of a nearly full-scale replica of the doomed vessel, accurate down to its very rivets, as well as the biggest pool in the world to store it—had pushed the production way past its already massive budget, with more money being hemorrhaged every day on CGI effects. It got to the point where the fabulously wealthy studio that had funded the movie had to enlist the help of another studio to relieve some of its financial exposure. The final cost of Titanic—north of 200 million dollars, a record for a single movie at the time—is high even by today’s standards. All this for a three-hour movie that everyone knew the ending of, with no real stars in its cast. By the time December rolled around there was the feeling that no one who had anything to do with the movie would emerge from it with their reputation intact, and there was absolutely no hope of the movie simply breaking even at the box office.

Despite the bad press, it was definitely a movie I was going to see. By that time, the writer/director James Cameron had already proven his credentials as an entertainer: Aliens, Terminator, and True Lies were all great fun. Seeing Terminator 2 at the arguably too-young age of eleven with my uncle and two cousins is still one of the great memories I have of going to the theater. Moreover, Cameron excelled at the big screen spectacle. He brought purpose to action sequences that other directors didn’t. Every gunshot, every explosion, every stunt felt consequential. You sensed real calculation behind the special effects, a brain at work, which made other effects-laden movies seem careless and haphazard by comparison. Titanic seemed like perfect material for him. There was no better person than Cameron to recreate one of the most famous disasters in history. And the production’s runaway budget was not a red flag to me; on the contrary, I was excited by the prospect of seeing a Cameron production on which no compromises or financial concessions were made. There was real anticipation on my part—bordering on expectation—that the sinking of the ship was going to be one of the most impressive displays of Hollywood magic I’d ever seen. And if it bankrupted a studio (or two) in the process, well, it might even be worth it.

There was a whole other aspect to the movie that no one—including me—paid much attention to leading up to its release, and that was its story. Everyone assumed the narrative would be purely functional, everything geared toward conveying the audience toward the obvious, anticlimactic climax. Maybe we’d get introduced to roughly a dozen characters so that their peril would add dramatic weight to what would otherwise be a fairly mechanical affair. But how much surprise or tension could be layered into a story whose ending was known by all? And why would we care about the characters when all the movie’s resources seemed to be allocated to the fight between an iceberg and the biggest boat in the world? The secondary nature of the human beings in this tale was all but confirmed when one looked at the cast, which was full of unknown names, devoid of A-list actors. By the end of 1997, I was watching more movies than the average person and rapidly filling in the gaps in my knowledge. I’d recognized the names of the two leads, but I’m not sure I’d seen Kate Winslet act in anything at that time, though she did have a reputation (which Titanic seemingly cemented) of doing period movies that required her to be elaborately costumed. Leonardo DiCaprio’s most memorable performance, to me, had theretofore been his small role in the ‘80s sitcom Growing Pains. Besides Kathy Bates and Bill Paxton—hardly big names—I recognized none of the other cast, and figured this was a calculated move to ensure most of the budget went into the visuals, where it belonged.

It was under these circumstances and with these general sentiments that I settled into my seat to watch Titanic for the first time, a week before Christmas in 1997. I was excited, though cautiously so. Open to seeing something amazing, but still skeptical. Expecting thrills and never once considering the possibility of being emotionally engaged. From this relatively neutral, unengaged state, things changed very rapidly. The first shot of what looked like real newsreel footage—with a somber score playing over it, embellished by a lone singer’s plaintive coloratura—had a sensitivity that stunned me, and by the time Rose started telling her story in earnest twenty minutes later, I was completely enthralled. The present world’s wreckage dissolving into an intact ship of unprecedented majesty remains one of the best transitions I’ve ever seen in movies. Seeing it for the first time was breathtaking and utterly transporting. The illusion of being brought into the past and that past being brought to life in vivifying detail was complete and impeccably executed. The fruits of Cameron’s commitment were immediately evident. The ship was as impressive on the big screen as one would imagine it to be in life. The other particulars of 1912 were just as lovingly recreated, the clothing and cars and hats and watches. All the detail and craft on display made it easy to give yourself over to the illusion. There was no suspension of disbelief in the traditional sense; one simply had to believe one’s own eyes and ears.

Our introductions to the characters are no less memorable than our introduction to the world they inhabit. In perhaps the most iconic shot of Cameron’s career, the camera cranes down to reveal Rose’s face beyond the brim of her ostentatious hat. Her beauty is striking—you’re halfway in love with her before she even boards the ship. Jack’s introduction is similarly kinetic, the camera swirling around the table during a pivotal poker hand. He is confident, smoking, ridiculously good-looking, and full of charisma. We know who they are almost immediately—her, trapped in a loveless engagement of convenience; him, a spirited young man eager to see what the rest of his life will bring—and we can’t wait for them to collide. There are other characters (as we had suspected before buying our ticket) but they are purely utilitarian in nature, background figures subordinate to our fated couple. Most of them are defined by their position or job and exist primarily to fill certain narrative roles when the ship starts sinking, but the only ones we are even tangentially interested in are those who have some proximal relationship to the two main characters, those who orbit of the story’s two red hot stars.

The movie very quickly becomes about Jack and Rose, with everything else becoming secondary—even the eponymous ship and its disastrous meeting with an iceberg. Had people known beforehand that the majority of the movie’s runtime would be devoted to charting their story, it would’ve seemed even more audacious than what most assumed the movie’s narrative would be, which was a more straight, almost documentary-like reenactment of Titanic’s last day. (Before its release, many jokes were made about the movie being longer than it took the actual ship to sink.) Fortunately Leo and Kate’s chemistry is off-the-charts good: their banter is natural, unforced, and their affection for each other is evident. It also doesn’t hurt that they look great as a couple. There was something irresistibly compelling about the two of them together, and it was this obvious spark between the two actors that audiences responded to, powering a lengthy box office run.

But all that was largely post-game stuff. During that initial viewing, I was just thoroughly enjoying characters being brought to life in a way that can only happen when there is sufficient unfamiliarity with the actors, when you haven’t seen them in dozens of roles and even their best work starts to seem like a performance instead of true transformation. I got caught up in the sweep of Jack and Rose’s story as they became the kind of characters I referred to by name—their names, instead of the names of the actors playing them. I became invested in their pursuit of their desires, and I was rooting for them all the way. Every moment they shared worked for me: every joke they made, the knowing looks they exchanged in the midst of her social set at dinner, their revelry and dancing at the party in steerage, their first kiss at the ship’s bow, Rose taking Jack’s implied virginity in the backseat of a car in the cargo hold. They all struck me as carefully observed moments, even more carefully captured by the filmmakers, in a slowly unfurling story of a fated couple, each unrushed beat giving the characters yet another small reason to fall in love. It was like watching (if I may) a flower blooming, shown in time-lapse still slow enough to convey a delicious languor. That Cameron devoted almost a feature-length film’s worth of time to developing a convincing love story in what was supposed to be a disaster movie was as unexpected as it was skillful. By the time the iceberg showed up, its appearance was surprising, nerve-racking, and truly undesirable. I really wanted to see what would happen when Jack and Rose reached American soil, and it was a shame we wouldn’t be able to see that story.

The movie, in some ways, becomes predictable as the ship starts to sink. At the very least it starts to deliver on the promise of disaster movies in general. Scenes of destruction, both practical and computer generated, started to compile. The musical score, which had been delicate and even pretty, introduced loud brass instruments and percussive elements designed to ratchet up the tension. The editing became fast-paced and choppy, adopting the familiar rhythms of typical summer movies. It is all very impressive, and one gets caught up in the sheer movie-going thrill of it, especially when seeing it for the first time. In a lot of ways, the second half of the movie is Cameron at his best: a master technician with an aesthetic eye. He is perhaps the best in the world at creating moving images of perfectly orchestrated chaos that keep the audience oriented (and therefore invested), and he knows enough about the technical side of things to integrate special effects without sacrificing a sense of verisimilitude, avoiding garishness, and making it all look beautiful. After Titanic, elements of his previous movies seem like mere practice for his magnum opus: the calamity of everyone being trapped in the breeding den in Aliens replicated and multiplied by the passengers of the ship; the digital effects and modeling work of living steel in his Terminator movies repurposed to create an ocean liner that will break in half; the water-based life forms in The Abyss paving the way for realistic effects in a movie that takes place almost entirely on the ocean. No one doubted Cameron’s ability to pull off these aspects of the movie. Even people who don’t wholly like Titanic respect—if not thoroughly enjoy—its second half.

After the ship starts to tragically take on water, the tale becomes one of survival and there are, perforce, fewer extended scenes of Jack and Rose just hanging out and getting to know each other. But there are still moments that honor the love story we’ve become invested in, many of them eye-watering for even the hardest cynic. My favorite moment, which still has the power to move me, is when Rose is seated in a lifeboat, secure and being lowered to safety, as Jack watches her from above, his loving gaze framed by emergency flares exploding behind him. While the score playing underneath reaches new depths of sadness, Rose looks around her with increasing desperation as she realizes that this will likely be her last glimpse of Jack. Her inner turmoil reaches some sort of breaking point, and with heartrending determination she throws herself back onto the sinking ship, knowing full well that to do so was to effectively consign herself to death. It was the kind of sacrifice—overdramatic, but absolute—that I, for whatever reason, found admirable, especially when it was done out of love for another person. These fictional tales that deal with matters of the heart invite us to hold our own lives up to the contours of what seems so unattainably perfect and it’s in that wistful space in-between the two where our dreams are defined. Some may wish to one day meet someone who is just like a character that represents an ideal mate, or to have occasion to say a perfectly crafted line at exactly the right time, or just to live happily ever after. Somewhere, in that scene of Rose deciding to stay on the ship with Jack, it was cemented for me the notion of sacrifice being an ultimate expression of love, and it prompted me to wonder whether I’d ever be a worthy recipient of another’s sacrifice.

The broad strokes treatment of romantic love really connected with me in a way that a more nuanced portrayal might not have. I was eighteen years old, a young eighteen-year-old still defining for himself what love meant or even was. The things Titanic gets criticized for—its sappiness, its unremarkable and borderline trite dialogue, its cartoonish villain—did not faze me. Cameron’s technical side, which extended into his role as a storyteller, appealed to my appreciation of perfect geometry. Every moment and scene of Titanic seemed perfectly of a piece with one another, a part of a fully realized world, as lovingly crafted and integral to the overall structure as a rivet in the reconstructed ship. I was nowhere near savvy enough to be too cynical for the movie. I was even too inexperienced to realize that giving your credulity to a storyteller is one of the best things you can do with it. It was enough that the story regarded love as something the world conspires to complicate and sometimes obstruct, but that love’s true form remains, for the two people who share it, simple and pure and unlike anything those outside its influence perceive it to be. It was not an overly layered concept, but at the time it was about as complex an idea about love as I was able to receive.

By the time the movie ended, I was ready to call it the best movie I’d ever seen. It was also the most impressive work of art I’d ever encountered. The full magnitude of the production was on open display; there was no attempt to disguise the insane amount of work it took to produce this masterpiece. It was something to behold, too big to take in all at once during a single viewing. It demanded multiple viewings, and I gladly obliged. I ended up seeing this relatively fleet 3-hour movie two more times in the theater—the first rewatch happening quickly, within a couple weeks of the initial viewing, and my final theatrical experience occurring many months later. That was another highly unusual thing about Titanic: there were ample opportunities to see it throughout 1998. Movies back then didn’t have as short a theatrical window as they do now, but it was still almost unheard of for a movie to still be in theaters a month after its release. Titanic’s unprecedented run of being the number one movie every weekend for almost three months will never be topped in this age of incessant entertainment options, when everyone’s attention is constantly fragmented by daily candidates for the Next Big Thing. Titanic was the only Big Thing for a long time. Marshaling the resources to make something as big as Titanic took time, and it would be a while before something came along that was momentous enough to take people’s attention away from this particular, monumental pop culture phenomenon.

It quickly became apparent that my assessment of the movie was shared by many others, members of the audience as well as the critical establishment. All the critics who had spent months predicting a disaster changed their tune after they saw the film. The reviews were glowing when they weren’t gushing, and most of them had a palpable sense of awe—awe at the production, but also that the supposedly chaotic conditions on the set resulted in something that was not only very watchable but actually good. No longer unified by their prognostications of doom and gloom, the cultural commentators pivoted to proclaiming the movie to be the last of its kind, the final word on the old-fashioned Hollywood epic made with mostly practical effects, a spectacle of the sort that we might never see again. (Whichever way they swing, hyperbole is how these commentators pay the bills.) The paying audience’s reaction was less conflicted: they just loved it with a constant—building, even—fervor, which proved to be key to redeeming its financial prospects. Titanic was number one at the box office on its first weekend, though just barely, beating out the latest Bond film by the slimmest of margins. The final tally of about $25 million wasn’t great, especially for a movie with so much ground to make up. While the swell of critical plaudits ensured that Titanic wouldn’t go down in history as a bad film, its status as a money-loser seemed all but certain. But Titanic had more things to show us that we had never seen before—off the screen this time. In its second weekend, it made more money than it had the first weekend. This was in total defiance of the traditional weekly revenue half-life, most movies’ ticket sales decaying rapidly each week, usually by 50% or more. Anything less than a 40% drop off week to week was regarded as phenomenal for a movie in wide release. Titanic’s numbers going up was like seeing things fall up into the sky instead of toward the ground…it was a complete reversal of natural law. After a few weeks, Titanic’s upward trajectory couldn’t be explained by much else than the simple fact that people liked the movie and were seeing it multiple times. There was evidence to suggest that the romance at its core provided a major impetus to its repeat business (its highest grossing weekend just happened to coincide with Valentine’s Day) and a lot was made of teenage girls’ fascination with Jack Dawson and the actor who played him. (While DiCaprio indisputably became Hollywood’s most desirable actor in the wake of the movie, not enough was made at the time of Winslet’s becoming, for young men everywhere, one of the hottest actresses around, a judgment I can personally ratify, then and now.) The longer it stayed in theaters, the more it became mandatory viewing, if one had any desire to keep up with cultural touchstones. The protracted run forced staunch holdouts to finally break. After months of earning $25-$35 million every weekend, it started climbing up the all-time box office list and was soon supplanting a different iconic film every week. After Spielberg’s most memorable films—the Indiana Joneses, Jurassic Park, E.T.—were outgrossed, the only things left were the untouchable golden idols: the Star Wars movies. The numbers for the three movies in original trilogy seemed unbeatable, and each one had even been given a significant boast earlier in the year due to a high-profile theatrical re-release. Titanic took them down one by one, and it was hard to believe as it was happening. Star Wars was an institution, the basis on which so many had developed their imaginative playgrounds in childhood. That its records were being smashed by a contemporary film was simultaneously disconcerting and thrilling.

Titanic reached peak cultural significance in March of 1998, at the Academy Awards. It was nominated for fourteen Oscars and would end up winning eleven—a record for a single film. It all had the feel of inevitability, as if Titanic’s succession of wins were a foregone conclusion. The evening was a well-deserved coronation of a film that had been unfairly maligned in the press, only then to be celebrated for reminding everyone of the power of movie magic. The ceremony was fun to watch for someone who was both a fan of Titanic and not yet jaded about Award shows. A year earlier, a sixty-second clip of a nominee inflamed my interest in films, and now the best film I had every seen was garnering nearly every award available. It was a stunning ratification of my own taste, a cosmic alignment of my inner life with the collective consciousness of popular culture. My thoughts and feelings were imbued with a powerful relevancy they never had before: they were not confined to my own personal sphere; in this particular instance, at least, they were shared—and thereby amplified—by millions of others, and this shared admiration and love was seemingly powerful enough to have real-world impact and possible practical application. It was the equivalent of supporting a presidential candidate who wins in a landslide, the feeling that enough people agreed with you that your very opinion could move the needle and have a bigger effect than even gravity in shifting the world on its axis.

I was a loner who, like most introverts, took a certain amount of pride in my iconoclasm. I didn’t need my admiration for something corroborated by public opinion in order to validate it. But whenever one of my independently arrived at opinions was subsequently adopted by the culture at large and my thoughts became indistinguishable from general sentiment, there was, in those rare instances, a not unwelcome “clubhouse” feeling associated with my having a now-popular position on something popular. I was not so independently-minded that it meant nothing when the things I loved were loved by others. I was not immune to that feeling of relief when others saw things the same way I did. And the public outpouring for Titanic in particular ended up having great significance for me personally. You see, I grew up in a household that all but denied the existence of artists. There were no artists in my family, we never even knew of one, not even an amateur dabbler, let alone someone getting paid to create art. It was a rather foreign idea to me that someone could possibly make a living as an artist. I was, however, brought up to respect achievement. And only the most intractable person would argue that Titanic represented anything but a total, all-encompassing success. On the financial front, it was hard to do better than to become the highest grossing movie of all time. In terms of cultural significance, people discussed it to the exclusion of everything else, as if no other movie, album, or book were being released; it dominated the entertainment news cycle for a whole year. And for proof of its artistic merit, one needed to look no further than Oscar night, when they gave out gold trophy after gold trophy to honor nearly every aspect of the production. This pageantry was extensively witnessed, by an auditorium full of applauding spectators, with many more at home watching on tv, millions and millions of people tuning into what would be the highest-rated telecast for an award show in years. This display of mass approbation changed how I viewed artists and their endeavors. Before, based on ingrained prejudices, I would’ve characterized all art as little more than diversionary entertainment, and the making of art seemed to me frivolous and unserious work—borderline childish, in a way. But seeing all these adults exalt something I saw as a work of art elevated it in my mind, made it seem significant and worthwhile, and the process of making art no longer seemed like a childish waste of time a part of me suspected it was. Art could participate in society, in the economy, and be taken as seriously as anything else in the adult world. When James Cameron shouted from the stage that he was king of the world, it was hard to argue with. At that moment, he was as decorated and revered as any popular artist had ever been. And it took something like this, an over-the-top demonstration of art’s importance, to pierce the barriers I had constructed that prevented me from even considering the possibility of trying to become an artist. I may have considered myself independent in thought, but to attempt something that had real stakes and real world consequences, I needed precedent. The timing was exactly right to have the biggest effect on me. Not six months before seeing Titanic, I was being asked to really think about what I wanted to do with my life, and it was my first time ever doing so. And I had no idea what I wanted to do. One area of study seemed as valid—and ludicrous—as the other. It was no use asking what I was good at…I felt I wasn’t good at anything. It was also no good asking what I was interested in…my hobbies revolves around all the time-wasting activities of youth. Going into college, I was looking, unconsciously, for role models. Someone I could point to and say that’s who I wanted to be. Cameron became that person on Oscar night. He was arguably the single most important person in the culture at the moment, lifting his gold trophy up and proclaiming himself king of the world…how could that not have an effect on an impressionable young man starting to discover his own artistic sensibilities? It was the right moment in time. And I feel it could’ve been anyone, in a way. I had no idea what I wanted to do, who I wanted to be. I was led to believe I had some aptitude in math or science, and my mother made no secret of her hope that I would become an electrical engineer. I was not eliminating any possibility. In my first semester of college, I chose biochemistry as a major. Halfway through the year, I tried switching to computer science. I might as well have been throwing darts at a dartboard. The idea that I could be whatever I wanted was paralyzing instead of liberating. When anything was a possibility, nothing stood out as a clear calling. Each profession was within my capability to become a vocation, which just meant that each was as unlikely as the next. I was the first in my immediate family to go to college, and I found this new territory to be extremely destabilizing. I was a pioneer without a pioneer’s enterprising spirit. Following someone’s lead is what felt most comfortable to me. I needed to see precedent, an antecedent, a model to emulate, an example of success which I could aspire to attain. I was a blank slate in need of inspiration. I didn’t know any electrical engineers and I had no idea what the job entailed, so the peak was just as mysterious as the path, should I have decided to point myself in that direction. Art was something I was beginning to understand, and it was something I was interested in, and it was something that now seemed important. If the culture put electrical engineers on tv accepting gold trophies, maybe I would’ve gone in different direction.

It’d be easy to attribute my fascination with Titanic and its success to the seductive power of Hollywood and its stars, but I think something more was at play. I don’t think it was coincidence that it was a love story that captured my attention, that the two movies that showed me that narrative storytelling could be important adult art were love stories. Love was another thing I was working out the definition for, during a time when it was starting to present itself in myriad forms for really the first time in my life. Then consideration of the romantic aspect of love had its own obvious appeal, but ultimately it was the discovery of a love for art itself that opened up my world and that showed me a way into my own future. Love of romantic partners, love of love stories, and a love of art—all these loves became somewhat entwined and some of their effects became indistinguishable as they developed in parallel in my own headspace. But there was one particularly salient aspect they all shared: a willingness to allow another individual to not only change your life, but to rewire your insides and change who you are as a person. It’s a principle that people don’t always arrive at intuitively—It’s sometimes deemed to be more practical—more mature, even—to take that power out of a single person’s hands. Better to be transfigured by systems or events or jobs or oneself…or, best yet, not at all. People can be messy, and some need to maintain a sense of control. But can’t works of art be that impersonal object, detached from human association? Maybe ideally they should be, but one thing I’ve retained from childhood inculcation is that people are inseparable from their accomplishments, that both are one and the same. And once I esteemed movies—and, by eventual extension, all stories, regardless of medium—as something worthy enough to take credit for, their authors loomed as large in my mind as the art they produced, and there was always a person to assign responsibility for the effect their creation had on me. There’s an irony that movies were what motivated me to view artists in this way, being as they are the most collaborative of all art forms. (That was another thing all those Oscar wins hammered home: how many individual artists it takes to make a movie.) But before I had even heard of auteur theory, I was inclined to think of the director as the film’s author, especially if he also wrote the screenplay. In the case of Titanic, it was clear that the film wouldn’t exist without its brainchild, James Cameron. He conceived of the entire thing and everyone on the production was working to reify his vision. He made the work of art that changed everything for me. He was the artist who made me start thinking of becoming an artist myself.

In the Company of Men

The first stirrings of a desire to become an artist did not confer to me such audacity to expect that I’d settle into the director’s chair of a $200 million production overnight. My fantasies needed to be flavored with a touch of realism in order to reach optimum piquancy. If you’re a prohibitively young person with an interest in film but who has absolutely zero contacts in an industry whose machinery seems opaque to say the least, the tales of independent, no-budget filmmaking have obvious and irresistible appeal. The ‘90s were a golden age for independent films. Every few months a new low-budget film from a debut director seemed to spring out of nowhere and become yet another inspiring story. The takeaway was always the same: everyone was a good script and a few maxed-out credit cards away from being a legitimate filmmaker. (What was at least partially lost on me at the time was that the culture’s newfound interest in DIY filmmaking was largely motivated by well-endowed corporations recognizing that money could be made from this movement, from the studios distributing the films or buying them outright to the press writing widely-read feel-good stories of an indigent artist making good.) It didn’t matter that a lot of these films’ budgets still totaled more money than I had ever seen in my life, by far. (I was also curiously unbothered by the fact that I didn’t knew any actors, either.) Every success story in this arena allowed me to think that making art was possible, which was the message I most needed to internalize at the time.

To this day I still enjoy a good no-budget film, or at least the story behind its getting made. The films themselves can be spotty and usually have to be enjoyed conditionally, making certain allowances for the oftentimes obvious deficiencies in various areas of its production. But looking back on all of them, it’s clear to me that one film in particular had a lingering effect on me as an artist, due almost entirely to its content. I forget exactly when I saw In the Company of Men, but it was certainly on video, probably sometime in 1998. Following its debut at the Sundance Film Festival, it had steadily attracted more and more buzz, attaining a certain notoriety even, until one felt the need to see what all the fuss was about. My reaction upon seeing it was extremely positive. I thought it was incredibly sharp, keenly observed, deliciously scabrous, funny and horrifying—basically it lived up to its billing. That the director, Neil LaBute, had also written it was also appealing, and its $25k budget was inspiring. (Though, again, it was more money than I could ever dream of procuring at the time.) One of the best things about it is that the images they captured seemed exactly right, with nothing you could point to that would’ve clearly benefited from more money being thrown at it. With great actors, a great visual aesthetic, and a finely tuned script, one was free to judge the movie as one would any other movie, on its own merits, and see if something valuable could be taken from the experience.

I was thinking about girls a lot, as any eighteen-year-old boy does. My perspective was necessarily male, so a lot of these thoughts on females were framed in relation to males, and vice versa when I would try to picture what men looked like from a women’s perspective. It wouldn’t be much of an exaggeration to say that my concerns at the time revolved exclusively on the dynamic between girls and guys. So naturally I was most interested in stories that concentrated on that dynamic, or that made that subject its focal point. It just so happened that the two movies that opened up my eyes to higher tiers of art—Jerry Maguire and Titanic—are sweeping love stories in which love conquers all. I was certainly sympathetic to that notion and felt I had it within me to tell stories in that vein. It’s also true that movies, particularly Hollywood movies, provided no shortage of movies with a foregrounded love story that would more or less end the same way. Love sells, even more than sex. The ‘90s were also a notable era for a certain type of romantic comedy, memories of which make one either groan or smile, depending on whether they hit for you or not. I confess to enjoying a fair number of them. But even though romantic love was a big potential component of guy/girl interactions (and it was definitely where my own personal, vested interest lay, the result I most hoped for myself), I knew there were other components and textures to it. In the Company of Men showed an extreme case of what could happen when you brought men and women together. I confess to having no firsthand knowledge nor ever witnessing anything like what this clearly satirical film depicts, but elements of the characters’ attitudes and snippets of their dialogue rang true. The film itself had a very different perspective from that of Titanic, whose depiction of enduring love was honestly, in many ways, as foreign to me as the outrageous behavior in In the Company of Men. How the two movies handled the interplay of men and women represented opposite ends of a wide spectrum, and I saw an infinity of possibility between those two poles. (That one movie cost about 1% of what the other had cost just accentuated their differences.) That was thing that excited me about both movies. They showed that one could write almost any kind of story, simply by putting a guy and girl in a room together. I would not be locked into one kind of story, and it could be a lifelong fascination which could absorb any amount of interest and be the springboard for writing about anything in the known universe. Stories of men and women, boys and girls, guys and gals are still all I’m really interested in as both a spectator and creator of art, and Titanic and In the Company of Men were, to me, early indicators of the breadth of what still seems to me like an ever-renewing source of material.

Liquid Almond Eyes

This month marks the third anniversary of the publication of my story collection The Funeral Girl, a book that left National Book Award Finalist Brandon Hobson "envious and inspired." Reprinted below is one of my favorite stories from that collection. Enjoy.

"Liquid Almond Eyes"

WALKING DOWN MAIN STREET ON HIS LUNCH BREAK, Gabe runs into the coffee kiosk girl for the first time since word got out that he’s hit the jackpot. Her greeting is customary: a big, generous, two-armed hug. What’s new is the shriek of excitement and enthusiastic squeeze of his upper arm afterward. She’s “Coffee Girl” for short; this antonomasia is well-established: say to anyone (especially a guy) “I saw Coffee Girl at the video store today” and he will know whom you’re talking about. She’s a mainstay, a cornerstone of Main Street, dispensing java and good cheer in equal measure for close to a decade now. Gabe does not know a downtown without her. She’s been a fixture ever since he established his daily routine, dutifully manning her enclosed post between City Hall and the pharmacy. Rain or shine, snow or sun, she’s there, usually with a smile and a disposition no less affable than cheerful bonhomie.

For a one-girl operation, business is booming. Wait times almost require reading material. There’s little doubt that her pleasing temperament attracts more business than it turns away, but it’s hard to pinpoint that as the only reason her sales are brisk because her coffee is actually good. Some go as far as deeming it superlative and refuse to drink anything but her unique, personally-concocted blend. Gabe considers that judgment a bit hyperbolic, though her brew definitely falls within his acceptable limits for coffee. She’s also located within walking distance of several businesses, a distance easily traversed during a lunch- or cigarette-break, if one were inclined. And you can always count on her being there. She’s one of those people who seem to consider their presence at what they consider to be their job mandatory, another of her puzzling affects along with what appears to be unforced happiness.

Plus she’s hot. The fact that a significant percentage of her customer base consists of men with dilated eyes cannot be passed off as coincidence. Some women do frequent the kiosk (another indicator of above-average coffee) but it’s obvious what the main attraction is for the males, which annoys a lot of the females. Even though there isn’t any appreciable difference in her treatments of men and women, she is confronted by a far greater number of irate women customers, termagants who cavil in shrill, unhinged voices about the most venial things ranging from coffee temperature to cup size with an indignation that couldn’t possibly be rooted in the vast insignificance of their complaint. At times, there is the unmistakable whiff of jealousy in the tones of some of these belligerent women (most of whom could be equitably described as “less hot”) and their attacks swing wildly on the verge of being ad hominem. Yet even when excoriated in front of other patrons, Coffee Girl never loses her cool or lashes out with reciprocal vitriol. She turns the other cheek in the face of raving customers, evincing almost inhuman forbearance and equanimity, helpful and willing to correct any perceived wrong, but with also a firmness to her voice that indicates a line where crossing is prohibited. The pugnacious women who push her that far understand then that they are not dealing with a pushover or emotional weakling who will burst into tears at the slightest reprimand, and, upon this realization, they invariably slink off to private embarrassment. Gabe has been witness to a few dust-ups and can testify that the crowd’s sympathies always lie with the girl in the kiosk and that the aggressors had generally been regarded as unpleasant and unattractive bitches before proving it publicly. In the face of Coffee Girl’s understated dignity these catty women seem to exemplify the worst in petty American righteousness, the kind of people who honestly buy into that oft-repeated sophistry: The Customer Is Always Right. Though no one intervenes on Coffee Girl’s behalf while she’s being upbraided (since it’s a situation in which she’s clearly in control), the next customer almost always feels compelled to apologize: for the departing shrew, for himself, for the national identity. She always laughs, dismissive, already over the incident, truly water off the duck’s back.

Her inability to brood or be perpetually slightly pissed off would mark her as Not From Around Here if her dark-complected features didn’t already give the game away. Her birth country is the subject of light speculation. No one really has any clue. A blind throw of a dart at the world map from twenty feet is better than anyone’s best guess. People can’t agree on a hemisphere, let alone a continent. Baseless conjecture covers every possibility from Central to South America, through Europe to the ends of Asia. To be sure, she’s from some place on Earth, miraculously. Beyond that, no one feels a pressing need to know any more than they already do: all the foreign, rarely-seen things about her have combined in a way that is extremely pleasing to the eye.

What she is not is conventionally beautiful. Tête-à-têtes have included the observation that she would never be in a Victoria’s Secret catalogue or even a K-Mart flyer for that matter. She lacks the Amazonian quality, the hourglass figure, the plastic sameness of American sylphs. She is short, with an overall shape more like a bowling pin or a pear. She is cursed with a foreign-born nose, hers flat and a little wide, covering a bit more real estate on her face than most people in town are used to seeing. Her crooked teeth bespeak parents who, during her adolescence, lacked the dental fastidiousness (or the funds) that most parents in the good ole U.S. of A. seem to possess. None of this detracts from the final judgment. All her putative flaws are barely motes in her eye when compared to the defects of truly homely women. Her peculiarities add charm when they don’t outright stun. Her imbricate teeth are otherwise perfect—clean, upkept, and an integral part of a searingly disarming smile. Her physicality suggests an over-sized stuffed animal that you want to snuggle, squeeze, and mount like a dog. Her facial features are unbearably adorable; they seem to have sprung from the end of a children’s film’s animator’s pen—from the lovably wide nose to the chipmunk-like cheeks and buttony dimples to the liquid almond eyes of an Arabian princess: everything designed and arranged for maximal winsomeness. This borderline-zaftig woman’s semi-rounded figure is not a turn-off. On the contrary, her shape gives the impression that her body is all curves, full of the kind of precipitous slopes any man would kill to traverse with hand, tongue, or congruently writhing body. The air around her is thick with the suggestion that underneath her swathe of clothes lies the true meaning of the word “voluptuousness.” Her jet-black hair, in itself a wondrous oddity, purls down her back in wavy tendrils, that is when it’s not clipped up and falling across her face in perfect cute strands. There’s hardly a man alive who has seen her from the back and has not wondered what her luscious ass would look like stripped bare and, after she turns around, what her equally tantalizing breasts would feel like if cupped and caressed. It’s hard to imagine someone not taking her “as is.”

And then there’s her voice. Hearing her talk is an aural joy. Her enunciation is delightfully unique, full of languorous vowels and consonants devoid of sharp edges. Her syllables swirl into each other, creating a pleasing hum. Through her lips, unremarkable digraphs become sensual diphthongs, and you don’t even mind the cacoepy. Her syncopated rhythms quickly turn from novelty into something beautiful that you want to hear again. She’s like a composer, placing each phoneme on a staff, forming delightful movements of words, words the rest of us can think of only as prose. Her sound is unencumbered, soothing to anyone who hears it. The noises she makes meld into a 19th-century impressionist masterpiece; by contrast, white Americans’ voices have all the nuance of a Sunday comic strip. She, a foreigner, has managed to tease the delitescent musicality out of the English language.

Plus there’s her refreshingly direct way of speaking. Her phraseology is stripped of the conversational tics, pop culture references, and eu-/dysphemisms that litter your typical U.S. citizen’s chatter. The thrust of what she’s saying is not muddled by colloquialisms, opaque metaphors, regional idioms, pleonastic phrases, or sesquipedalians. All this probably goes hand-in-hand with learning a second language, but still. Her diction is almost disconcertingly but actually really pleasingly simple. Not that she’s unintelligent, just really to the point. Like, for example, when you ask her how she’s doing, she’ll say something like “I’m trying to be good” and this will be said without any coyness, irony, sarcasm, jocosity, disingenuous-ness, or the like because what she truly means is just what she has said: she is going through her day literally trying to be good. And in one pithy statement she has gotten to the heart of the sentiment we all probably mean to convey when we respond to the question of how we’re doing with things like “Not bad” or “Can’t complain” or that weird parroted non-response “What’s up?” or any number of other listless stock answers, and one quickly sees that her response is a superior one if for no other reason than it actually means something and actual communication has taken place, which—not to put too fine a point on it—makes everyone involved in the exchange feel more human. Any speaker of English can attest that achieving clarity is no mean feat—too often the words get in the way—which makes her facility with the language nothing short of astonishing, especially considering that her lexicon is probably no larger than an average elementary school student’s. It might be strange to cite a person like her for precision, but the undeniable truth remains: she picks the exact right words to say, which, again, most likely stems from her learning the language as an adult. As a corollary, her limited vocabulary and verbal punctiliousness virtually eliminates pretense and dissimulation. There’s no B.S. with her, no prevarication. She doesn’t resort to logorrhea when confronted with silence. With her, what you see is what you get, pretty much. Not totally because everyone, no matter how much integrity they have, puts on some sort of act with everyone they encounter—saying things to men they would never say to women, treating the old differently from the young, things like that. But with Coffee Girl, you get the sense that all the play-acting is kept to a minimum. And this realization might take a while because when you see a nice, generous, cheery girl with adorable phrasing, you naturally assume it’s an act. But she like inculcates you to the inescapable veracity of her innate traits and after never seeing her any other way, you have to admit that that’s probably the kind of person she really is. Which is a pleasant surprise. Compared to her, most people seem to be spouting the kind of manipulative periphrastic jargon practiced by used car salesmen.

To the delight of men everywhere, she is also an openly tactile girl. She has no compunction or squeamishness about venturing into someone’s so-called “personal space.” Hence: the hugs. They’re not deployed totally indiscriminately of course, but it’s not too hard to become one of the huggables. If you’re a regular at her kiosk and see her out and about in a store, chances are you’ll get a salutatory hug. She is also not averse to reaching out to gently guide one’s arm as she points out directions, or grasping one’s forearm to convey emphasis or excitement, or playfully swatting one’s shoulder after they tell a ribald joke, or rubbing someone’s upper arm (or even back, if she’s in a position to do so) while the person relates some lamentable misfortune. In an age when physical reservedness between non-blood relations is the norm, her barrage of hugs, touches, and rubs initially comes across as somewhat outré, but through repetition becomes accepted, then appreciated and even looked forward to, since being hugged by an attractive woman turns out to be an instant mood-booster.

She separates herself from the herd of cookie-cutter girls that populates every small town in the U.S. by just being herself. She’s an exotic flower sprouting up from the cracks on Main Street. She’s different, a change of pace, new, exciting. More than a few octogenarians have referred to her as the knees and pajamas of bees and cats, respectively. She’s a breath of fresh air from who knows where. All this and a wonderfully vaginal name: Favia. It’s no surprise that she has inadvertently fostered a number of secret crushes. Full-blown, adolescent-era crushes that turn men into gabbling bad joke generators. The kind of debilitating infatuation that renders a man near useless in the presence of his object of affection. Who knows how many harbor carnal fantasies; their number could be legion. This is despite her semi-advanced age (her years are in as much question as her provenance) and her kids in high school (a daughter and son) and, not to mention, her husband and the at least ten years of matrimony under her belt. These things are common knowledge, even though they sound like convenient discouragements fabricated by jealous female rivals. No one’s really seen her dependents or the guy she shares her bed with, making their existences easily pretermitted, which is necessary to facilitate any one-on-one fantasies. The hard facts are attenuated by dulcet rumors: her husband is an overweight American shlub; she’s unhappily married, has been for years; her daughter is almost legal and even hotter. Truths and untruths swirl around her, calumnies mix with wishful thinking, surrounding her in an aura of unreality, making her seem more exalted, truly sui generis. No wonder everyone acts as if they’re in their cups around her. What’s great is that she seems oblivious to all the tumult she causes.

Gabe had been impervious to falling in with the like-minded, googly-eyed crowd at her feet. He has thought her cute in the past and has far from minded her generous hugs, but he had somehow resisted falling in something between love and lust. He had not succumbed to her unintentional charms and she’d been largely off his radar . . . until now. All it takes (he reflects later, somewhat perturbedly) is an arm-squeeze—a shorthand for intimacy, a representational gesture devoid of sexual meaning since no lover has ever squeezed another’s arm in this way, with quick collegial applications of pressure, like checking a plum for ripeness. It’s an ersatz statement of affection, an autotelic touching that lacks the desire for further exploration. A hand that stays decorously above the waist. It’s an illusion, invisible to all but the most credulous. But it does the trick. Gabe’s heart starts beating out a corybantic rhythm, beyond his understanding. Sweat films his clothed crevices. He feels faint; God help him, even his knees feel weak. He steals a look toward her lustrous eyes, whose emanating warmth rules out a returned steady gaze. He feels her hand on his arm; each squeeze inspissates his friable attention, vectors his awareness to the locus of her touch and the excruciating proximity of her fingers, their skin denied access to each other by the thin fabric of his exasperating shirt. It feels as if she’s testing the girth of his biceps; some unctuous part of his brain tells him he should flex, but his nervous system is on the fritz. (The designation never seemed more apt—“nervous” system indeed!) All he can do is stand there frozen while his insides go haywire. She starts talking and he finds himself entranced by the poetry issuing from her mouth. His side of the conversation feels stilted, disjunctive even, and he quickly errs on the side of purposeful laconicism—every one of his words and gestures calculated to elicit a response from her. All he wants is to keep the music playing.

She mentions the money, of course, but only in the abstract, as a triviality subordinate to the more pressing concern: his happiness. “You must be so happy,” she gushes. He sees that she is happy for his good fortune, specifically for how it has (presumably) made him happy. This unadulterated, unqualified happiness she’s exuding causes his heart to be filled with something like happiness, if not the genuine article—something that produces the same elation, at least. “I am,” he assents and, for a minute, her joy is the whole point of his windfall. He gets caught in the full candent blast of her smile and it feels like a benediction. He does not want to be anywhere else, doing anything other than talking to this exquisite woman.

After too short a while, the conversation winds down despite his best efforts to perpetuate it. Even though her amicable expression never changes, he feels a twinge of sadness as they start tossing contentless, conversation-enervating monosyllabic interjections back and forth. But she summarily extirpates his disappointment with a farewell that mirrors her greeting. He dares to hold her for a half-second longer than the first hug, because he hardly dares not to. She reaches out and latches onto his arm, thrilling him with one last squeeze—made more exciting and important simply by being next in the series—before turning to the line of disgruntled interlopers that has formed behind him.

He walks away, dazed, discombobulated. Every step feels like coming up for air. Sights and sounds fail to register for the better part of an hour. When he finally gets his equilibrium back midway through his shift, the first thing he notices is that he can still smell her. Discreetly crooking his neck downward, he verifies that it’s not just his imagination—his shirt has absorbed the fragrances of all her perfumes and cosmetics. It’s a sweet smell, a piquant medley of flowery scents that immediately conjures up pleasing memories of that afternoon’s embrace. His shirt becomes a kind of olfactory time machine, granting him access to an event he is eager to relive, if only in his mind. He finds himself stealing whiffs by pretending to inspect his shirt’s collar. Roy walks in on him in the bathroom when he’s holding his shirt up to his face with both hands, looking as if he’s trying to inhale it. After an awkward pause, Roy heads toward one of the stalls. Neither of them says anything. Gabe slinks out, trailing his tattered dignity. For the rest of the workday, he manages not to draw any further attention to what appears to be either a new shirt-sniffing fetish or an OCD-level compulsion to check for what can only be rank B.O. This does not stop his co-workers from casting furtive glances in his direction and surrounding him in susurrous indictment.

By the time he gets home, only a faint trace of her evocative scent remains. Before he can properly lament the evanescence of a redolence that has kept him stimulated all the live-long day, Jessica brings him back down to earth, re-acclimating him to the comforts of home by using the most effective decompression method at her disposal: a blowjob. He is barely through the door when he finds himself thrust in a situation that reifies the inchoate whimsy floating in his head—there is no need to fantasize anymore since his member sliding in and out of Jessica’s mouth is a physical truth. All errant thoughts exit his mind, for the spectacle before him is an avaricious one and attention must be paid. The BJ proves to be a prolegomenon to a long treatise on sexual pleasure that takes all night to explore the ins and outs of. Somewhere along the way, he completely forgets about anything to do with Coffee Girl.

His oblivescence persists until five minutes before his lunch break the next day, when the possibility of another encounter with a girl he is finding it easier with each remembrance to think of as some sort of goddess fills him with excruciating anticipation. Walking down the street, he feels his palpitant heart straining against its suddenly inadequate confines. When she comes into view, emerging renascent as he rounds the corner, he feels the inexorable curling of the corners of his mouth. He gets into the line already five-men-deep and just stands there, grinning, unable to avoid looking like the simpleton he knows he must appear to be. Better that, however, than the bashful schoolboy he feels like deep down inside. Oblivious to everything else, he watches her with an uncritical eye, reveling in every graceful movement. His countenance is a gift to her, whether he intends it or not. Does a smile exist if no one sees it? In the brief interstice between orders, she espies him waiting and his heart skips a beat when her expression kicks it up a few notches. The pleasant, amicable affect she was formerly going with doesn’t really change by an order of magnitude so much as it simply becomes an entirely different thing altogether. She’s truly smiling now, a smile that exposes what she was previously doing as a factitious contortion of her lips into a congenial but perfunctory breve, short and unstressed, denoting nothing more than telemarketer-level politeness. Her newly widened smile narrows the aperture of her eyes, allowing her to focus on the source of her newfound joy. They’re both smiling at each other now, blurring the distinction between cause and effect. Gabe senses the glower and annoyed vibe directed toward him by the man who just got his coffee. This guy has probably waited months and made scores of witty remarks and observations to see this gorgeous woman do what Gabe is making her do just by standing there. He has managed to extract the immanent sugar from the cane under everyone’s noses. Gabe feels like lifting his hands obligingly to the others and swiveling them around. Look, no hands. And, with a leer: Imagine what I could make her do with them.

When he gets to the front of the line, she seems to become even more delighted, as if she’s been storing her excitement for when it could be shared with the right person. After an ejaculatory greeting, she moves around the counter and peremptorily spreads her arms. There is no way to refuse her. Not that he had been thinking of abnegating the pleasure of her embrace—in fact, he’d been looking forward to it. He takes a chance and presses his whole body flush against hers, engaging her in a more intimate clasping than the prim, slightly kyphotic politeness they’ve deployed in the past. He also resolves to hold her until she makes a motion to move away and thrills when a suitably decorous duration (considering the line of spectators) comes and goes. They hold each other, her face level with and buried in his chest. He rubs her back a little. Feeling their bodies conform to each other, he can’t help the titillating thought: we fit. After a few eternities, lasting many seconds each, she pulls away with a sigh so content he feels his face start to flush. She looks up at him and, proving their symmetry extends beyond the somatic, voices one of the foremost thoughts in his head: “Mm, you smell good.” He nearly starts at her eerie entry into his psychic space, then recovers enough to say the obvious: “Thanks. You do too.” With consummate aplomb, she leans in for another smell while he involuntarily holds his breath. She looks up at him, smiling. “I like, I like.” The unconventional construction of her affirmation sets off waves of pleasure through his body. Even an awkward phrase, through her lips, becomes an aphrodisiac. The elided object of her compliment could be any number of auspicious possibilities: she likes his scent, she likes that she likes his scent, she likes him. For now, it’s enough that “she likes” in his presence. They stand there, taking each other in, seeing their happy expressions mirrored on the other’s face. Would a third party see a lopsided vase between them or possibly a different type of optical—sparks maybe? Perhaps between them lies a fireworks display of a magnificence not seen since Kelly and Grant hit the south of France. Gabe is too rapturous to say for sure.

Upon returning to work, he holes up in the employee room, which is little more than a small cramped storage area with last year’s calendar on the wall and a single metal folding chair for anyone needing seclusion at the expense of comfort. He spends the last ten minutes of his lunch break absorbed in his shirt. With both hands he lifts it to his face and takes deep, nourishing breaths, as if he were recovering from a traumatic event. The smell of her perfume prevails. He tries to nail down the constituent elements of the fragrance, but finds his aromal discernment frustratingly lacking. Every time he thinks he has a handle on it, the next inhalation wipes him out anew. The scent never changes, yet he can’t get enough. There’d be no reason to get all analytical about it if he could just smell her all day, every day. But not having this option, and with only a few more minutes of intensive panting left before he has to return to a social setting where excessive huffing and puffing is stigmatized, he desperately tries to activate the latent olfactometer that surely must reside in him somewhere. No go. Every exhalation is a reawakening that causes him to completely forget the preceding sapid imagery in his head, if there was any at all. He just can’t seem to nail the scent down.

Intensity isn’t the problem. This is not a subtle perfume as delicate as a butterfly kiss. This one leaves no doubt you are smelling something meant to be noticed. It starts out strong, bracing, and sends you on an invigorating ride, seeming, like sex, to build to a climax that leaves you just as insensate as you are immediately after orgasm. It practically screams its ingredients at you but mental decoction is extremely difficult, like trying to take down all the notes of Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto No. 4 in real time while it’s blasting at 150 decibels. It’s starting to look like an insurmountable task. He’s in need of a serious cheat sheet, and only the perfume’s box will do.

Running out of time, he tries a different tack. Instead of letting the fragrance overwhelm him and then trying to parse in the confusion, he takes several short breaths, hoping to grasp some initial data point before the scent’s strength goes exponential. He imagines he smells something flowery, and he isn’t sure whether this being cliché discounts it from being possibly true. Flowers smell nice, why not perfume? There’s more than flowers in there, obviously, not to mention a botanist’s library worth of knowledge that would narrow down his broad generalization—but for now, “flowery” does its shorthand job at limning one of the textures for a scent-deficient layman.

There’s a vinous tinge in there too, he would almost swear. Something fruity, refined into something intoxicating—the formula strikes him in its simplicity. He absentmindedly finishes a long breath and, before the full wave crashes into him, he gets the revelatory impression that a large part of what he smells is her. She must be providing the extra kick herself, her natural musk, the ur-stimulant, wafting off her skin, transuding out her pores, her sweat mingling with the perfume to form an entirely new concoction. The perfume box wouldn’t help after all—nothing has ever smelled like the residue she’s left on his shirt and, after she’s gone, nothing will ever smell this way again.

This new insight stimulates him all over and, as he reverts back to long, deep, heaving breaths, he can feel stirrings beneath his waist. In his mind’s eye, he sees a luxurious and sensual scene, a tableau whose opulence fixes it in an ancient epoch, biblical, Greek. Marble statues abound in a palatial atrium, enclosed by Corinthian columns. Baroque fountains spray iridescence into a central wading pool. A tribute to the gods is taking place. Servant girls offer fruits and liniments to the revelers who are prescribed a dress code of loincloths and robes by divine mandate, which fosters a lubricious atmosphere. The proceedings tend quickly toward the orgiastic. Then the gods themselves arrive, manifest in corporeal forms upon which Man’s gaze can alight without fear of sensory overload. This is an homage to the gods attended by the gods. They’re all here: Aphrodite, Priapas, Eros, Hymen, Uranus. Peitho pushes the surprisingly taciturn Dionysus toward Antheia, who is doing such a good job of taking on the aspect of a wallflower one would think the plant really exists. Within minutes they have broken the ice and begun copulating. Everyone follows their lead. The stench of wine, flowers, and bodily secretions is overwhelming. The coition gets more frenzied; the orgy turns dithyrambic.

In the middle of all this, Coffee Girl emerges: numinous, inviolate, oneiric. And like in a dream, she inexplicably becomes the object of this unrestrained fete. Everyone, be they supplicant or idol, vouchsafes their attention to the newly arriving figure. There she is, a vision to be savored, looking no less compelling for being the only one wearing clothes and the short-billed cap she sometimes dons. They all genuflect and screw each other in her honor. Gabe approaches her. Never has her smile looked more encouraging. He kneels before her and she positions her crotch in front of his face and loosens her belt, a clear indication of where he should focus his worship.

He snaps out of the eidetic fantasy when he hears the door to the backroom open and a voice call out, requesting his presence for the start of the next show. Flustered, he manages to stammer out assurances of an imminent return and as he hears the door close he tries to envision images antipodal to the ones that so deliciously paraded through his mind ten seconds ago. He thinks of vivisected amphibians, excrement, friends in thongs—anything to ablate his massive and conspicuous hard-on.

After getting home, the first thing he does is sit in the easy chair in the living room, close his eyes, and drift back to the fantasy world he had started to create at work. Her scent has once again dissipated from his shirt but he no longer needs a material reminder of the evocative fragrance. Thanks to the intense wheezing he did at work, her smell is imprinted in his memory. All he has to do is close his eyes and he can “see” it, along with all the sumptuous pictures it creates. Later that evening, as he finishes his ablutions in the bathroom, he sees the nearly empty bottle of cologne in the cabinet. He uncaps it and positions the atomizer under his nostrils. This must have been what Favia smelled when she issued her encomium. He always squirts himself a couple times before going to work, more out of habit than a desire for favorable notice. He’s been using the same brand for years. Carol had always given him an exact copy (even down to the bottle size) every Christmas—again, more out of perennial tradition than actual preference. He can’t even remember if she had ever commented on it qua cologne—whether she liked the scent, enjoyed smelling it on him, etc. In all fairness, even he had ceased thinking about it and he was the one wearing it. He had vaguely registered that the bottle would soon be empty and had briefly wondered why Carol didn’t restock his supply this past Christmas until he’d realized that her thwarting of expectation was more portentous than it had seemed at the time. In any case, Coffee Girl has alerted him to a permanence all but forgotten. He smells the scent through her (somewhat large) nose and arrives at the same conclusion—it is quite nice. He’ll have to pick up another bottle sometime.

As soon as he sees Coffee Girl the next day, he can smell her, even though she’s still forty feet away. The two-way synesthetic reaction is complete—the sight of her evokes her scent and vice versa. She’s delighted to see him, of course, and today he is the lucky recipient of an embarrassment of riches. He gets not only a smile and new-and-improved hug, but also a few minutes of alone time with no other customers in sight, the world working in his favor by saddling everyone else with exigent matters requiring their full and immediate attention. He milks the opportunity to be in her presence (if not her person), to get to know her a little better (if not in the biblical sense). As he watches her lips move, he wonders what exactly is going through her head. He knows that behind his own phatic words lies a torrent of vulgarity separated from the open air and her delicate ears by the glacis of his vocal cords and breezy countenance. He can feel his true thoughts demanding a voice. The more he opens his mouth, the more he says, the closer he gets to revealing all, to referring to the unspoken. He considers the words he would die to say, words that would kill him if uttered, and then the words she could use to resurrect him, to deliver him to paradise. The thought immoderately thrills: that she—who has so far proved to be his exotic counterpart, an emotionally-aligned mirror image, she and he two birds of a feather—could be harboring thoughts and desires symmetrical to his own. Maybe not exactly the same but complementary; he has what she needs what he has. Perhaps they fit in multiple configurations, not only in body but mind, too. And there could lie the key to accessing these cravings that fester on one side of a dichotomy of the sundered entity that is a human being. These ineffable desires of the body seem to be known, expressed, and accessible only through the body. The willingness of the spirit to be unwilling: a sentiment that can only be penetrated by weak flesh, flesh that can get stronger, harder, that can swell, clench, indurate to the point of bursting. The idea excites Gabe—that he could share with Favia more than just what’s on the surface. But for now, even he can see that a meaningful exchange—spiritual or otherwise—would be impossible right then with this respecter of persons. There are still no customers but there is the prevailing sense that taking up any more of her time would be an impertinence. Still, he lingers, protracting his valediction as much as possible, a choice made easier by her unwavering smile.

Finally, after a final forced iteration of goodbyes, he starts to take his leave of her. Frustration wells up inside him as he turns away. Every departure is becoming a torment. His digestive system feels like it’s malfunctioning. His stomach feels both hollow and oedematous, as if swelling to accommodate the emptiness expanding within him. He already cannot wait until he sees her again. The hope that their next meeting will be very soon is the only thing that attenuates the fear that their interactions may have just concluded sine die.

Before taking two more steps, and before any tempering deliberation, he swivels around to face her again while at the same time extending his hand. When he thinks about it in an unvexed setting later that day, he will be certain, crazy as it sounds and ruinous as it would have been had his hand reached its intended target, that he had been reaching for her left breast. As his arm shoots forth, his mind is a blank. Repercussions are not a factor. The future becomes as inconsequential as the past, and all that matters is touching her in a way that matters. His eyes are practically closed as he makes his blind grasp. He doesn’t dare bear witness to what could prove to be a catastrophic transgression—the “look, don’t touch” caveat of gentleman’s clubs seems to obtain in the public arena—so he is surprised when he feels her hand slip into his. At first he’s ashamed that she very reasonably felt the need to intervene, to intercalate the closest thing at hand between him and his hunger for impropriety. He timorously looks up at her face, fully expecting an expression of reproof and disdain. Instead he glimpses a new sparkle in her eyes. She is pleased and for a second he has no idea why. Then the realization hits: she thinks he was going for her hand the whole time. And his gesture, the very same one that had had such crass intent, is being perceived as entirely appropriate. An apposite display of the connection they feel. Physical manifestation of their emotional propinquity. Further symmetry—they are like two paper dolls, cut from one design, joined like Siamese twins. They are now comme il faut. It nearly takes his breath away, especially when he beholds his consolation prize.

It’s not a breast, but it’s a lot more prehensile. Her hand continues to surprise beyond the wonder of its presence. He’s taken aback by the unexpected coarseness of her skin. Her calluses testify to a hidden lifestyle of hard work, either at home or her rumored second job at a cleaning service. Her unsoft hands endear her to him more, instilling in him protective urges alongside the previously existing amatory ones. This initial grasp is tentative, the movements of his hand rigid. His phalanges are fused together as his jammed brain frantically tries to revive basic motor skills. His extremities degrade against his will, regress into incipient ur-versions of hands, transform into basically what amounts to flippers. Still, desperate, he enfolds what’s there over her offering. He gently squeezes and feels her apply pressure of her own. Her complicity makes him deliriously happy. She is his partner, willing to follow his lead in a dance he is improvising by the seat of his pants. By something in his pants, at least. After a few gravid moments, they separate, having to extricate themselves physically now, and he finally departs only after they silently agree to incorporate what they’ve just done into their method of communication. It’s an exciting addition to their idioglossia, which comprises significant looks, meaningful smiles, and now actual dermal contact.

He begins to wonder if she’s on any sort of birth control.

Subsequent latchings-on to her hand prove to be less awkward than the initial (accidental) foray. Hugs easily transition into hand-holding, his hands seeking hers and clasping even before they pull away and face each other. He always goes for both hands, discovering that his contentment is directly proportional to the total surface area of his skin in contact with her. She is always accommodating—it sometimes seems as if she’s racing him to initiate contact—and she continues to hold his hands for the duration of his visits. The only thing that can prematurely sever the link is the appearance of a stranger. The reasons for this are unspoken and obvious.

This new plateau in their interactions does not make him as anxious as he would’ve thought. Holding the hand of someone you haven’t slept with but want to proves to have an assuasive effect. What should be a sudorific nerve-racker instead turns out to be a calmative. His arm is a cable, his hand an anchor that moors him to the safe haven of her grasp, sheltering him from the turbulent storm of his emotions. After regaining control of his fingers, he finds it useful to channel the nervous fidgety energy that builds during their encounters through his touch so that their hand-holding is never staid. Together, they create myriad variations on an eternal theme. He palpates the back of her hand. He plaits his fingers with hers in various reticulate formations. They play cat’s cradle without string. His thumb effleurages hers. Swinging the skein of digits between them, he gets an intimation of what it would feel like if they were giddy childhood sweathearts. He tries to convey meaning with every movement, express what he feels about her with the heat from the friction of their skin. He hopes the apothegm holds true, that his body won’t lie. Maybe physical contact can become for them a kind of lingua franca wherein he can achieve the clarity and directness she accomplishes verbally. We’re doing exactly what I want, he would say. Now if only we could go a bit further. . . .

Ironically, if not cruelly, what he desires from Favia he is getting no shortage of at home in his bed with Jessica. It had never been this way with Carol, or perhaps ever. Sex with Jessica is constant, spontaneous, so much so that he often finds himself embedded in lubricity within a half-hour of his last glance of Coffee Girl. Unceasing copulation is not unusual for him but what is new is the recurring impulse to mentally transpose the grunting, sweating, naked bundle of sexuality beneath him with a girl he hasn’t even seen discalced yet and whose foremost quality is platonic altruism and yet who nevertheless arouses in him a frenzied lust. It is an act of pure invention to imagine what Coffee Girl would be like in bed, and, in this respect, Gabe is only too glad to play fabulist. But his attempts to proceed from a foundation of verity are continually thwarted: Jessica frustrates his efforts to recreate the only sensation approaching a sexual nature he knows with any certainty with Favia—the feeling of her hand in his—by keeping her hands constantly roving. At any given time during intercourse she is running her nails down his back, or pulling on his thighs to add force to his thrusts, or stimulating herself to orgasm, but she never leaves her hands quiescent, which prevents him from attempting anything as prosaic as a hand-hold. No matter; if that action alone were enough to get him off, he’d have to bring in a change of underwear every day to work.

Jessica takes amazingly good care of his body’s needs, allowing his mind to filter the experience through his consciousness the way he sees fit. Her enthusiasms help when they don’t hinder. Every moan, every pelvic abrasion, every arch of her back is vetted for comparison with the fabricated idea of Favia’s sexual behavior—her reactions and sounds and involuntary movements—and are either rejected or deemed plausible and used as fuel for his indelible fantasies. There are enough similarities—real or imagined—between the girls for this fanciful substitution to hold water: Jessica has a similarly curvaceous body, comparable midnight hair, and largish breasts the mirror image of which Gabe has only a noumenal sense of.

The illusion is of course easier to maintain from the back. Not even necessarily doggy-style, where one is compelled to watch, to gaze upon, to analyze what is usually more unclothed flesh normally seen from a lover—especially a diffident one (not a problem with Jessica)—or at least those parts of the body (viz. her back, her buttocks) not easily appraised for a length of time without coming across as slightly deviant, and one can do all this staring without being observed oneself, making dorsal spectation during doggy-style humping practically irresistible, and but n.b. that all this pointed and focused staring severely hampers one’s ability to picture anyone but the person one is screwing, what with all the particular details of the topography of her body (e.g. moles, collops, spinal alignment, tattoos, etc.) accreting to form an incontrovertible image of what can possibly be only one person in the world, and that’s if one is inclined to want to think about making mental substitutions for sexual gratification in the first place because (A.) all this analysis can get dispassionate and a bit unerotic (the same way repeating a word over and over until it is pure sound strips it of any meaning, staring intently at discrete body parts drains them of sexual connotation and all that is seen is flesh covering musculature and bones) and (B.) the position itself is physically tiring to maintain, and one ends up either concentrating on keeping up the steady thrusting or adopting the grim blankness of thought that seems to help people get through repetitive physical exertion. For Gabe, the position maximally conducive to envisioning an alternate lover is side-by-side spooning. This position requires less effort and keeps her occiput front and center, the reminder of her face firmly out of view. Missionary also works but only when he buries his face in the pillow beside her head and even then it doesn’t work as well. Spooning allows him easy access to her breasts and affords him enough arousing visuals so he doesn’t have to completely imagine the sights that will get him to the point when he shuts his eyes and nothing else in the world matters.

The look of Jessica’s skin supports the illusion almost as much as the feel of it. The coloration is similar to Favia’s, although obviously darker. Chroma and hue are close enough, only the value has to be adjusted. Contrary to all laws of ocular perception, the only way to lighten Jessica’s skin is to remove the light sources in the room. Only in the semi-darkness can the value-correction take place, and then only in his mind. He convinces himself that he’s seeing Favia’s skin, closing his eyes sometimes to get over the hump of reality and maintain what he imagines to be there. He ignores the truth of darkness, counters the decreasing value of every color in the room by making the naked body before him more valuable for it, more useful to him for being something different. A bit lighter, coarse around the hands, smooth as silk everywhere else.

One day, a late season ice storm descends on the area. After a night of gelid conditions, every traversable spot outside is turned into a hockey rink. Gabe ventures out during his lunch break into light sleet and frigid desolation. The climate has sucked all the urgency out of outdoor activities and sent everyone to shelter. So it’s no surprise that Coffee Girl is where she always is, though her kiosk is icily corticated and she’s getting a respite from the scourge of long lines that usually harry her. They rejoice at the sight of each other, friendly faces gladdening their wearers’ spirits, united in solidarity against the inclement weather. He knows he’s been drawn out by the necessity of seeing her and she is only there, in a way, to see him, the only person in sight, a prospective customer, potentially more. She quickly expresses horror that he’s willingly submitted himself to the elements and, proving her tut-tutting is rooted more in genuine concern than feigned compassion, she unlatches the side panel of the kiosk and invites him in. He stoops down and enters as she pulls down the jointed slats that cover the counter opening, enclosing them in, shielding them from the rest of the world.

He’s excited to find himself truly alone with her for the first time, immured in an unobservable space away from the inquisitive glances of the overly solicitous. He momentarily has the impression, no doubt abetted by the feeling of isolation prevailing this day, that they are an old impecunious couple, nestled together in this hovel, relying on each other for need and want and no less happy for it. One of the first things he notices is a feeling of warmth—not the heat radiating through his insides but the warmth of his surroundings, enveloping him in a shroud of comfort. The emanating source of this comfort, he sees, is a space heater in the corner which has no doubt made the day easier to bear for Coffee Girl. It has also allowed her to be decked out in such incongruous raiment as hunter green capris with adorable ties on the bottom, affording him a provocative glimpse of crural skin, and glittery sandals, which show off the impressively upkept peach-colored polish on her toes. She looks breathtaking, as always. He grabs her hands and her expression positively shines. She directs him to a stool and pulls another one close so that their fingers can continue to play. His excitement is beyond measure at this opportunity to interact with her sans the intervening chaperone of a counter or someone looking over his shoulder, hanging on their words. The small talk turns from weather to the rigors of maintaining the kiosk, which include but are not limited to the ungodly hour she’s expected to be open for business and, of course, the unappeasable customers. She doesn’t whine her litany of grievances; instead she unfurls them in a slightly eager way, as if she lacked for confidantes, betraying her need for understanding, her gratefulness for a sympathetic ear. Gabe squeezes her hand and rubs her arm consolingly. Before the mood can become doleful, she smiles at him and they veer off onto more congenial topics. They discuss his job, mutual likes and dislikes, favorite music (his: anything, hers: slow romantic songs). He manages to pry out of her that she takes belly dancing lessons and makes her promise to show him her moves sometime, a promise that lacks the specificity to be taken seriously but is potent enough in its potential form. Their conversation takes on the easy unimpeded rhythm of two people enjoying each other’s company.

While she talks, Favia slips her feet out of her sandals and places them alternately on the rungs of the stool and on the seat, folded up against the inside of her thigh. It’s a familiar move copied by girls everywhere. Gabe wonders how deliberate it is, if they know how crazy men are driven by the gesture. Like all girls, Favia does not overtly draw attention to what she’s doing; her movements are easy, airy, as naturally executed as a smile. The foot apparently persists as the only body part that can be denuded without sexual import. Can girls really be oblivious to the suggestive power of this habit? Perhaps it is truly an unconscious movement for them, as unremarkable as placing their hands in their pockets, a custom made meaningless through countless reiteration, a reflexive motion the purpose of which has long been forgotten, like the covering of one’s mouth when yawning. Nevertheless, intentional or not, Gabe is stimulated by the sight. After a few seconds, he decides that something must be done lest he wonder for the rest of his life what could’ve been done. Attempting to match her nonchalance, he casually reaches out and takes hold of her foot. “Here,” he says, willing his voice not to crack, “you’ve been working hard lately. Let me give you a foot massage.” She gives him a short chuckle and looks momentarily taken aback, lending further credence to the possibility that she had no idea what she was doing. However, she quickly responds to the offer, out of either desire or an amenable spirit, stretching her feet onto his lap in gratifying acquiescence. She becomes for him suddenly effaced above the ankle, no longer even appurtenant to the newly discovered body part, though her feet more than adequately attest to her overall loveliness. His hands rove freely, claiming territory on her insteps. He discerns her metatarsals and ungual phalanges, a budding podiatrist alone with ten live little piggies. He grazes the underside of her toes. Her feet are as coarse as her hands and he rubs her calluses as if hoping to intenerate them. Upon reaching her arches, his fingers linger on the soft virginal flesh they find there, a cavernous and illicit place which sends suggestive thoughts racing pell-mell through his mind. He subtly shifts position and he honestly doesn’t know if it’s to get her feet closer or farther away from the newly formed protrusion in his pants.

During this ostensible massage, their conversation continues unabated. The talk turns to personal matters, as all conversations invariably do. In ten minutes, he learns more about her than he has in ten years as she opens like a book in front of him. It’s as if everything they had ever said to each other up to this point had been part of a pour parler before the big colloquy. For starters, she hails from Brazil. She arrived in country about fourteen years ago, rooming with four other Brazilian girls. A crazy, exciting time she relates, her eyes wistful at the memory. Gabe can only imagine, his mind filled with gamboling sex-starved beauties and their nights of tequila-fueled experimentation. She’s fluent in Portuguese, which is her home country’s official language, a fact that may throw for a loop those who were leaning toward Europe as the place of her birth. She claims she’s thirty-four years old and, in the face of his skepticism, insists on the accuracy of this number, though she stops short of pulling out her driver’s license to prove it. Not that Gabe really doubts her, he just finds it propitious to express shock, ingenuous or not, whenever a woman says a number over thirty. Although, when she reveals that her daughter is a junior in high school, she prompts more questions than she answers and her assertion barely manages to hang on a thin thread of plausibility. Still, Gabe can’t deny that the math leads down some intriguing roads—pretty hot ones actually.

Just as all talk tends to the personal, all personal talk eventually arrives at sex. The subject is eased into via a few words about Gabe’s recently terminated relationship. Coffee Girl, like everyone else, knows about the big split with Carol and, through inference or access to someone with inside information or just plain old gossip, she knows about the brusque and peremptory way he was informed of the break-up. Actually, there is no way for Coffee Girl to know the exact details, but she interpolates the anguish he must have felt, the unnecessary heartbreak that has befallen him, and the derogation he has undeservedly been subjected to. If there exists a mold of compassion, she conforms to it utterly, right before his eyes: brow scrunched up in concern; eyes free of judgment, completely unwavering and filled to the brim with caring. The empathetic slight downward curve of her mouth. Her whole body leaning forward, ready to be his fulcrum, both physically and emotionally. The comforting way she rubs his arm, her touch of solace. All of this forces him to adopt a downtrodden aspect so as not to waste her display of consolation. She reassures him of his favorable prospects for finding someone else, someone he deserves. She appears to know nothing about Jessica, and he sees no reason to apprise her of his current relationship status. Secretly, he exults in the fulsome attention she’s giving him.

An offering of seemingly invested solicitude confers on the recipient of the sympathy a responsibility to comfort the now-distressed comforter; it is incumbent on Gabe, as the cause of her worry, to smooth out the wrinkles of concern on her face. He assures her that his dignity had not been comminuted beyond reconstruction, that he has emerged from the evirating ordeal with his self-respect intact, and besides. . . . Here he breaks off. A slightly waggish grin plays on his lips. He knows that this aposiopesis is all but irresistibly compelling. Sure enough, she senses that he’s on the cusp of revealing some scabrous tidbit and urges him to continue. After a suitably dramatic pause, he confides that he’s really not sweating the break-up because it’s not like Carol was that great in the sack. This is false, a flight of fancy. He had been nothing but satisfied with Carol’s bedroom performance. Whether out of a desire to steer the discussion in a stimulating direction or to slyly hint at unfulfilled needs that can be met by a willing party, he has preempted the truth with a lie and must now run with it. Coffee Girl emits even more sympathetic mewls; she considers the revelation just one more piteous thing on top of the rest. A good, mutually nurturing sex life is important, she avers, and proceeds to elucidate the differences between Brazilian and American women with respect to sexual praxis while Gabe, to whom all this is news, listens avidly.

Apparently, Brazilian gals are a more halcyon bunch when it comes to sex. Not only are they free of the priggishness and hesitancies that seem to be part and parcel of the U.S.’s most truly desirable girls (which include the girl-next-door types, the southern belles, the three-sport goddesses—basically the non-skanks), but they’re this way from the moment they step onto the scene. During courtship in her hometown of Mariana, sex comes early and often. It’s a non-issue in the dating ritual, unremarkable in its occurrence, as intrinsic and expected as a first kiss. You like someone, you have sex, she shrugs. It’s ingrained in the culture—everyone is screwing without inhibition, even the “nice girls,” and they can do so without the specter of elders with stern faces fixed in expressions of disapproval or the puerile gossip from their peers. Without the need to feel coy or abashed, lovers in Brazil are free to make sex the sweaty, fulfilling enterprise it was always meant to be.

She relays all this to Gabe equably, as calm and matter-of-fact when talking about the act as she claims to be when engaging in it. In fact, Gabe has never seen her look more composed—this is her bailiwick, she’s in her comfort zone, she’s got a pitch in her wheelhouse and is knocking it out of the park. Her words have the confident flow of a teacher imparting brand-new knowledge to an eager student, the kind of knowledge the teacher knows is no less interesting once learned. Coffee Girl even manages to multitask while she talks (a real indicator of a stressless comfort level), getting up to make him a cup of coffee on the house. He comments on how wonderful international sex sounds, and muses that if Carol had been a Brazilian girl they would probably still be together. He tells her that Carol was too reserved, too austere in the sack: another made-up bit come up with on the fly, once again proving that truth is the quintessential liquid commodity, always exchangeable for a more interesting lie. He looks at her conspiratorially and says he was willing to do anything—anything—Carol wanted him to do, but she lacked the sexual wherewithal to capitalize on his submissiveness. “I still am,” he adds, “willing to do anything.” He grins at her. “With another woman, of course.” Suggestive, hopeful, lecherous.

He takes a sip of coffee, lets out a contented sigh, and once again beseeches her to divulge her secret ingredients. This is a familiar method of joshing her, and she submits to it gleefully, teasing him right back. “No, no,” she says. “I’ll never tell.” He lunges at her, wrapping his arms around her as she squeals and laughs. He is in the dark about his intent, but since his hands are on her, he squeezes and tickles and rubs. They giggle uncontrollably, like two youths—one Brazilian, one willing to learn to be. They disentangle from each other after a few minutes, out of breath and flushed. They look at each other adoringly. He reaches out and soberly takes her hand, no longer playful, and gives it an optative squeeze. “Out of all the coffee places in town,” he says, “you’re my fave.” He gives her a meaningful look and repeats it: “You’re my fave.” It’s more than a simple paronomasia on her name. It’s a perfect mimesis of the sort of affectionate diminutive used by long-time lovers, a personal cognomen indicating carnal familiarity. Coffee Girl seems to grasp the implications. Her cheeks bloom red. The effect is like a cherry cordial with its attendant juices showing through a veneer of dark chocolate. She is exquisitely esculent, the dessert one indulgently orders for the entrée. At this moment, she is the meal he would most like to order off a menu comprising roughly three billion choices, a meal, it would seem, he is also prohibited from having—a forbidden fruit.

As he watches her reconcile his affection with her perception of the truth, he considers, not for the first time, whether there’s a way to tell her that he thinks of her when he comes—both alone and with Jessica. That that’s what puts him over the edge: the image of her in his mind. He wonders whether she would take it how he intends it to be taken—as a supreme compliment; she is the angel who guides him to the only heaven he knows. He tries to conceive of circumstances—baring impending eschaton—in which such an expression could be voiced and received properly, with no equivocation by the speaker and no misunderstanding by the listener. Perhaps no such setting exists, or perhaps what’s missing is the courage to tell her the truth. Is he being untruthful to her, letting lies taint the relationship before it has a chance to take flight? By acting as if she’s not a part of his most intimate acts, is he nothing but an abhorrent whited sepulcher? Even if this is the case, he is mindful of the potential ruination that could result from such a proclamation and instead tells her something safe and almost trite, though no less true: “You look really beautiful today.”

For a moment, his comment seems to affect her adversely; she freezes and looks stunned—this despite what has been, by all indication, her endless capacity for praise. This time he has waylaid her with a judgment she never expected to hear from his lips, maybe from anyone’s. The idea that she isn’t told what she so clearly deserves to hear on a daily basis is piteous to Gabe. The way he has so simply induced a flabbergasted aphonia in her, the way her mouth lies open in a rictus of momentary incomprehension, it breaks his heart. He tries to savor her unguarded reaction, knowing that he’ll never see it in all its glory again, as she’s bound to become inured to this particular combination of words, which he intends to repeat to her ad nauseam. A strange pang of regret and nostalgia jabs him even as she reaches out and pulls him close. She blubbers her appreciation, her thanks, discomfiting Gabe in return, who isn’t sure how to respond. Her actions seem born of a need for momentum, for her to do something besides just stand there, to be a gracious recipient of his kindness and offer some reciprocity of commensurate value. After some hugs and clutches and grasps, with need still lying between them unfulfilled, she improvises and gives him a kiss on the cheek. Her lips on his skin feel unreal. He automatically goes to kiss her opposite cheek before she can pull away. She has regained enough presence of mind to expect it, turning her head to offer him a receptive target. The skin of her face is smooth; the surface of his lips feels calcified in comparison and he doesn’t press in too firmly for fear of leaving an indentation.

As she starts to pull away, he is not ready to give her up. He maintains contact as she brings herself back upright, his hands sliding across her back, around her sides, arriving at the long-sought destinations residing about chest high. Unable to help himself, he grazes the sides of her breasts, letting his hands drift across their bulbous mass. She’s wearing an unpadded bra, a wisp of fabric that does little to conceal the softness underneath. His fingers trace these globular twins along their equators, achieving liftoff just before reaching the nipple, the passing into another hemisphere for a return trip deemed too flagrant even in his mindlessly excited state. He takes his hands away reluctantly, slowly, as if resisting a strong gravitational pull. He looks to her face immediately, an apology sitting in the back of his throat ready to be deployed at the slightest trace of objurgation in her eyes. Instead, he sees her familiar pleasant expression containing no hint of acknowledgement of the liberties he has just taken, no castigating look, no wry smile or bemused pause, no nod to the event at all. Her continuing insouciance to all forms of physical contact strikes Gabe as auspicious.

A moment after straightening herself, she announces her need to use the powder room. Would he mind staying here and watching the kiosk while she goes to the gas station down the street for a few minutes? She asks as though there is any chance at all he would refuse. Her unassuming nature charms him and he wants to tell her of all the things he would be willing to do for her that would involve much more discomfort, pain, and hardship than he will incur by the bagatelle of simply watching her workstation. Not to mention the intensely pleasurable things he could do to her as well, given the chance. She puts on some socks and slips her feet into boots, then bends down to grab a coat lying in the corner. She’s facing away from him, putting her backside on display. The bottom of her camisole and the waistband of her capris slide away from each other, parting to reveal thong underwear. It’s black and appears to be made of a shiny spandex-like material, pulled taut across the top of her buttocks into a “T” that threatens to disappear if stretched any further. Standing up, she puts on her coat and conceals the sight, to his eternal disappointment. After switching her cap for a wool hat, she smiles at him in a slightly embarrassed way and says she’ll be right back and exits the kiosk, shutting the panel behind her.

He is alone. After a second of deliberation, he picks up the baker boy cap she’s left behind and holds it to his face. He smells what he usually smells when they hug, when her head is nestled right underneath his nose. Only now, smothering himself with her hat, the smell is more concentrated than ever. Her perfume mixes with shampoo, beauty product, and dried sebum. Handling an item of her personal effects—something that has touched her skin, pressed against her, something that retains the secrets it knows of her by being so close, something she has exposed herself to, and now that something enveloping his face as he drinks in the sensations—makes him tremble with gratitude. He wouldn’t be more aroused if it were her thong occluding his nostrils. In this cramped space, surrounded by the mundane everyday accoutrements of a dedicated coffee slinger, with nothing more inspiring than a still-warm hat to work with, all he can think of is release. He would tame the angry python, even in this constricting space, but his concerns are more temporal than spatial. What if she came back and found him in a compromised position: using her hat to burke himself but trying for all the world to come before biting the big one? Then again, so what if she did? He allows himself to imagine the unimaginable: that she would come upon him in a similarly frustrated state. She would mask her delight by pretending to be shocked, though there would be little question whether she took offense after she reaches out to take over his own hand’s task. The hand he was jerking off with would be free to slip underneath her shirt, though his other hand would still be clamping the hat to his face so as not to interrupt the fantasy. There would be time for conventional lovemaking later; now is the time for fetishistic indulgence. The hat would be incorporated in their future playing; he would come home to find her sprawled out on the bed wearing nothing but. With a carefree laugh and confident flick of her wrist, she would fling the hat across the room, toward his pelvis, trying to score a ringer. He would catch it, hold it to his face, and whatever problems he had faced that day—none involving her—would wash away in the remembrance of his initial furtive desire.

He hears the latch of the kiosk release and, without thinking—or perhaps with a stunning amount of compressed calculation—he stuffs the hat inside his jacket. As Coffee Girl reenters the kiosk, he greets her effusively, willing her attention not to wander, barely concealing his need for flight. After some energetic but vacuous conversational sallies which are all he is capable of in his current nervous state, he stutters that he must really be leaving now. She calms his anxiety by holding him close and he feels how at ease she is, how free from worry. She stands on her toes and, with a stillness, whispers in his ear, “You’re so good. I’m lucky to have you in my life right now.” He looks down at her, amazed by this thing in his arms, and presses against her, exerting pressure on her whole body with the willful intention of making her change her position, of making her step back against the counter for leverage so she can withstand what he irrationally plans for them both to engage in, right here, right now. She misreads his signals, holds him tighter, leans against him harder, an indomitable object as true and secure as the statements she has made to him. When she releases him, he brushes a stray strand of hair off her face and lightly kisses her fingers. Eventually he leaves, because he has to, all the while feeling the lump in his jacket he can’t wait to extract, something he knows he will find benign, delightful even. He will live, and in so doing will find his release, many, many times over.

Lying in bed that night, alone, Jessica away on a two-day conference, he goes over his options. There is no question that he wants Coffee Girl in the only meaningful way one can: as an inamorata, and there is no chicaning himself to believe otherwise. The possibility seems close at hand, so close that he has little trouble imagining the deed already done. The jump from woman to lover is so small, the actions needed to fulfill the requirements of the change in title so inconsequential, that it’s easy at times to bask in the gorgeous prolepsis of every girl he sees being his lover, just ones who haven’t taken the ten seconds or so and participated in the pro forma act of copulation with him. And after all the formalities are dispensed with, before you know it, a quondam lover becomes a partner, a metamorphosis that leaves her no less hungry for sex (Gabe has little doubt in Favia’s case) but affords a different, quotidian set of pleasures, and, since he has spent ample time thinking about the more immediate gratifications she could offer, Gabe speculates on long-term delights, the various things that could be in store for him years down the road. Coffee Girl’s sleep-encrusted eyes being the first thing he sees in the morning. Knowing all her stories, every opinion she has and ever will have. Taking the sight of her naked body for granted, as just the wallpaper of his life. Lust must be as blind as love, because it all sounds great to Gabe. He begins careful consideration of how these things can come to pass. He thinks of inviting her over, maybe not for a cup of coffee exactly, but in a sort of neighborly spirit. Then, through some contrivance most likely tied to the decorative scheme of his home, leading her through the apartment. The key is getting her in the bedroom; behind closed doors, anything’s possible. The decision to make the plunge isn’t decided by quorum and consent need not be given the next day or even the next minute for something to happen now. He needs to corner her into a situation where a “yes” would be so much more easily uttered than a “no” and then let biology take over. Position her in the exact time and space, align her carefully along four dimensions, and the decision is no longer hers; something implacable takes over, something the non-perspicacious are disposed to call “fate,” not knowing that doing so absolves those guilty of orchestrating the machinations that hide from the ignorant every path but one. How lucky she is, Gabe reflects, that the person behind the scenes is working toward her direct and unambiguous pleasure.

The major impediment would seem to be the ring of platinum cinctured around her finger. She never references the person it represents, yet the ring is always present, serving as a reminder to all in sight. Gabe has traced his finger around it a few times, pinched it between his forefinger and thumb as if testing its integrity. He ponders the unknowable: how often do they have sex? Did she have a strong religious upbringing, adequate to instill in her enough fear that she takes the vows of matrimony seriously? Most important, does he make her happy? Because if this unknown guy is uxorious, he has almost no chance with Coffee Wife. But what of her other suitors? He just cannot be the first to throw his hat into the ring; she sticks out like Everest, both prominent and irresistible, something people will inevitably try to climb and conquer. How did those other hapless glory(hole) seekers fare? Crashed and burned, no doubt, ending up with the rest who got no further with her than having their change handed back. But what if that’s not the case? Gabe has fancied himself as treading on uncharted territory—to a destination visited a few times, sure, but blazing a new trail, arriving there in a wholly new way. But now he considers the possibility that he is only following in the footsteps of many who have gone before him. He may even meet a few of these intrepid folk when he reaches the summit, on their way down after exhausting the pleasures of the peak. With one guy, a weary king of the hill, presumably overseeing all the comings and goings. This perspective casts the husband in a new light as a possible wittol, more of a help than a hindrance. Maybe he’s even encouraging his wife to find guys for troilism, which Gabe has no interest in at all. No, easier to think of the guy as an uninspiring shlub, married only in a legal sense to someone better than he deserves, to someone who is looking to abdicate whatever obligations she foolishly agreed to, the two of them living under one roof but hardly together in any sort of meaningful union, biding their time in a stultifying modus vivendi, locked into a regrettable mesalliance. Gabe has to show her that marriage vows are more honored in the breach than the observance—something he can personally attest to. Only then can they. . . . He thinks of her elliptical thighs and soft belly and inviting hips and reaches over for her hat sitting on the nightstand, fully intending on putting it to use one more time before turning in.

The next day, sloshing through the runnels on the sidewalk created by melting ice, he anxiously debates the best way to give the hat back to its rightful owner. It bears no trace of the use and abuse it was subjected to the previous night, but the actual handing it back could be awkward since there is no plausible reason for him to have it. He considers stealthy legerdemain—distracting her then throwing it into a corner of the kiosk. He thinks of keeping it and disavowing its existence, even if confronted with direct questioning. In the end he decides to claim a different sort of ignorance, handing the hat back sheepishly, apologizing for taking it inadvertently and finding it when he got home bundled in a coat he’s not even sure he took off—a literally incredible explanation. With no better option, that’s what he goes with, and what’s more incredible is her easy acceptance of it, her thanking him, assuring him that these things happen, putting the hat off to the side and moving on. As he stands there dumbfounded, she reaches out toward his neck and starts fiddling with his shirt. It takes him a second to realize that, in a swivet about the hat, he has rushed out of the house in a minor state of dishabille, with a half-tucked-in collar on open display. He submits to her sartorial ministrations and she takes her time making sedulous adjustments. The moment distends. Gabe feels as though he is taking part in a domestic scene: the big-hearted wife seeing her husband off, preparing him for a hard day’s work—they play the roles exactly, a preview of things to come, a dress rehearsal before they do it for real. Her movements have an underwater feel to them; she’s absorbed in fixing his shirt, as if she’s doing it by habit but is surprised at how much she’s enjoying it. He feels safe and comforted and contented. She sighs, indicating she may feel some of the same. Finished with straightening him out, she pats him on the chest and says, “You’re so good.” Her eyes turn sorrowful. “I wish I could do things for you. I wish I could.”

Before he can respond, maybe to let her know that what she wishes is possible, her head goes down and she noticeably slumps as she drops the big news on him. Her mother, living back in Brazil, is unwell. Favia is unable to articulate the specifics of the malady, but Gabe gets the impression that it has happened suddenly and is unexpected and more than a little worrisome. The grasping of her hand is automatic; he’s always looking for the flimsiest pretext to touch her, though this time it’s for honorable reasons, his caresses meant to be more soothing than stimulating. He wonders if she perceives the difference on her end or if his hands are even moving any differently at all. While his face is scrunched up in concern and sorrowful hums rumble from the back of his throat, there is only so much invested empathy on display until she says the thing that truly disturbs him: she’s leaving very soon to go be with her. His hands reflexively clamp on hers, as if she intends to bolt immediately. With his mouth suddenly desiccated, he mechanically gets the answers from her he knows he will want to know later, when he has regained the ability to think straight. Yes, of course she’s coming back; she’ll be gone for a month. Yes, she’s going alone; the husband and kids are remaining stateside. No, the illness does not appear to be life-threatening, for now. The overwhelming sadness of the situation is evident by her blank expression and even tone of voice; it’s the kind of serious news that drains the emotion from a person. Still, she tries to maintain the compassionate optimism that defines her. She clenches his hands just as hard in return, asking him to pray for her, and he promises he will, convincing even himself. She wills a wan smile, citing encouraging facts such as the fast detection and her mother’s relatively young age, which seems to substantiate her truism about the accelerated nature of sex in Brazil; Gabe’s attention is momentarily derailed as he thinks of three generations of dark-skinned beauties—from teenager to grandmother—separated from being contemporaries by the slimmest of margins. She misreads his silence and attempts to cheer him up by saying she’ll miss him. He emphatically returns the sentiment. He expresses mock concern that she’ll find a suave, good-looking guy over there, a lusophone chevalier who will win her heart and he’ll never see her again. He’s half joking, half feeling out her receptiveness to the idea. The hypothetical causes a genuine grin, and she assures him that it isn’t even a remote possibility, that she has no intention of repatriation. Despite her demurral, he has his doubts.

Their time together no longer feels like a refreshing break from the world, more like sand slipping through his fingers. He’s running out of time to do something, though he’s not sure what. He’s in a dream, ill-prepared for the mysterious task before him. When they say goodbye, she once again presses her lips to the side of his face, a movement he mimics, and somewhere he finds the determination to do something else, to push things forward while he still can. He goes in for another kiss, deluding himself that he’s going for the center of her lips, ending up exactly where he had really intended: the corner of her mouth. His lips touch pliable matter, something that moves, something labile, alive. He feels as if he’s touching something clean, pure, something rubbed smooth or missing the layer of protective integument that covers the rest of her body. He feels closer to her, closer to exposed nerve endings and hot humid cavernous enclosures—passageways to her soul. He pulls away, no longer overly concerned about her reaction, which appears to be favorable; there is laughter in her eyes. A customer comes up and he tells her he’ll see her later and walks away. He feels a coolness as the trace of her saliva evaporates off his skin. He runs his tongue over his lips, licking the rest of her away, hoping for a residual taste but getting nothing. He looks back and she’s still watching him with a child’s arch delight. He resolves right then to prepare a dramatic gesture for her, one that will show her every facet of his desire.

That night, he paces around his apartment, expending the pent-up nervous energy that has built up throughout the day. He visualizes what he wants to see happen the next day, all the best possibilities, a panoply of favorable scenarios that result in his sweeping Coffee Girl off her feet. An event they can both look back on fondly as a turning point, a daring escalation, the time he bravely consigned the consequences to hell. He says her name again and again. “Favia. Favia. Favia.” He paces back and forth, ranging all over the apartment. He repeats the dactyl over and over—“Fa-via, Fa-via, Fa-via”—as if introducing the concept of her to the apartment before she makes an appearance. He eventually exhausts himself, allowing the previously unthinkable notion of getting some shut-eye to creep into his bones, and wearily gets into bed. The gears of his mind grinds away at his anxiety, and slowly his nervous anticipation gets sublimated into a dispersing flock of gold-tipped, well-intentioned butterflies fluttering gently in his stomach. He closes his eyes and lets his mind and hands wander. “Oh, Favia.”

He isn’t completely sure he will go through with his plan until he rises the next morning to shut off the alarm, which starts blaring at 4:45—needlessly, since he has been lying awake in bed for the last twenty minutes. He gets up quickly, and stumbles into the bathroom. After relieving himself and brushing his teeth and washing his face and combing his hair, he turns off the bathroom light and wanders into the kitchen, glancing at the digital display of the time in the kitchen. He stands at the table, drumming his fingers on the tabletop, staring into a bouquet of flowers placed in a makeshift vase (a glass pitcher he found in the cupboard), twelve long-stemmed roses purchased yesterday at the florist on Dixon after getting out of work, the glass container filled about three-fourths of the way with water, the flowers wrapped in pellucid red-tinted cellophane and prettily arranged with baby’s breath, the water slightly murky, the pitcher positioned at almost the exact center of the table. He stands transfixed, going over a plan that is dangerously close to being enacted, the linchpin of the plan right there in front of him, in full bloom. He is so lost in thought that a few minutes pass before he realizes he should’ve already left, and only then does he register that he’s still in his nightclothes.

A few minutes later, he rushes out of the apartment, dressed, surrounded by an invisible cloud of (newly purchased) cologne, keys in one hand, flowers in the other, and strides to the parking lot with a sense of urgency. He gets in his car and carefully places the flowers in the passenger seat. He looks at them again, recalling the precise calculation with which they were chosen, the consideration taken to ensure an optimally perspicuous representation of his intent. Even the color choice was deliberate. Twelve red roses—the meaning is unmistakable in any language. It’s a semion of romantic love, which implies intimacy, which is synonymous with sexual intercourse, which is a euphemism for anal action. He wants her ass, and his message could not be more clear.

He drives into the enshrouding solvent of darkness. The morning light has yet to break and the sky is a deep indigo color Gabe is unused to seeing. It irrationally seems unnatural, the color of a painter’s failed experiment. Under flickering streetlights, Gabe slowly passes quiet houses as he drives down deserted streets. It is still a touch too early for widespread activity, which unnerves Gabe. Though it is as dark as the dead of night, there is the feeling that the day should be starting, that the darkness has lasted about as long as it can and is starting to ripen, that night is over and what he is seeing is a facade, an untruth—day dissembling as night. The sense that things are not as they appear gives everything a slightly sinister edge. He feels assaulted by waves of suspicion from unseen eyes in umbral alcoves. A still small voice within him says he should not be out here, and he would normally have no reason to be, but he feels the pull of a beacon heralding him from Main Street and the rapidly closing window he has to answer its call; Coffee Girl will be leaving soon and Jessica will be back from her trip later today and be next to him in bed at this time tomorrow and would surely have questions—which could not be answered plausibly—about his sneaking out with a bunch of roses at the crack of dawn. Thinking of Jessica dampens his spirits, and not because of the vehement objections he knows she would have to this morning’s activities. What saddens Gabe is that among the many reasons not to be doing what he is doing, Jessica’s a priori disapproval—and the very probable hurt she would feel if she could see him now—does not affect him more and is not reason enough to turn around.

Coming onto Main Street, he sees Favia opening the kiosk and he is simultaneously proud and thankful of his perfect timing. He pulls up to the curb and gets out, carefully hiding the flowers behind his back. She is still fiddling with the lock as he strolls up. He impulsively reaches out to rub her back. He fights the urge to drop the flowers and wrap his arms around her, stroke the belly he is owed sight of, hold her close with the overly familiar ease he feels they’ve already achieved. Before he throws caution to the wind and just does it, she turns around and starts, opens her mouth slightly, and makes a startled sound; she seems more surprised by the sight of him than she is by his touch. She quickly recovers though and beams at him, giving him her hand, which he raises to his mouth and kisses. She always bows her head and smiles too widely when he does this, a young schoolgirl’s smile, one that is both abashed and thrilled. She asks him what he is doing out so early and he casually says that he just happened to be up and thought he would swing by and say good morning. “So,” he says, “good morning.” She smiles warmly and says it’s good to see him. He asks how she’s doing and she says she’s doing O.K. and asks how he’s doing. In his nervousness, he responds with the rote geniality “Good, how are you?” absurdly volleying the question back to her. He immediately feels the heat of embarrassment on his face, but she mercifully overlooks his slip-up, though she does pull away. She turns to the kiosk and scowls, muttering something, half in another language, about forgetting her keys. He clicks his tongue and sympathetically groans, arranging his face into an expression of shared frustration, unnecessarily since her attention is squarely in the other direction. He is still holding the flowers behind his back. He has been waiting for her curiosity to kick in; there is no reason it shouldn’t since he obviously has something for her, posed as he is in the instantly recognizable semaphore denoting the possession of a concealed gift: standing straight, awkwardly balanced, arm bent out of view, a game of guess-which-hand with only one choice. Still, she doesn’t seem to notice. And suddenly he gets very nervous about the fact that she hasn’t noticed him standing there clearly wanting to give her something. It doesn’t seem to be a simple oversight, and she also doesn’t appear to be intentionally ignoring what can so plainly be seen. An aperçu flashes through him like a bolt from the sky, hollowing out his insides in the process. She neither craves nor dreads what he has behind his back because, for her, there is nothing there to feel one way or another about. It’s more than a lack of observation. It’s that what’s behind his back is a void, a big fat null set that precludes consideration. His mouth goes dry. She is literally devoid of anticipation. For her, there is nothing behind his back; she is not able to envision anything behind his back, and never will. Despite blood being pumped rapidly through his body, he feels cold. She does not expect what he has come to unleash, to spring on her. To surprise her with. Her obliviousness is symptomatic, more effect than cause. It’s not that she has missed the portents or failed to recognize that the consecution of their interactions would naturally lead to him standing where he is right now, with flowers in tow. It’s worse: she’s indifferent. Now she’s looking up but still away from him, down the street, and even though it is now bright enough for the day not to be mistaken for night, he does not need to follow her gaze to know she is looking at nothing. She has not thought enough about him to even begin to fear he would pull this stunt. He is beneath consideration, always has been. She has no interest in him. He himself might as well be behind his back. If presented with the option, she would not want to sleep with him and would not be able to say why; he is such a blank to her, she has not even registered his flaws. He feels his deodorant failing. He wants out, he wants home, he wants away. To thrust flowers at her now would be out of the question. She would be stricken, dazed, shocked. Forced to have excruciating reactions. Put in a bind. Faced with a catch-22. Caught between a rock and a hard place. Caught with her pants down, up. He looks at the sky and holds his breath. Even though it is getting brighter every minute, the light is still coming from an invisible source, as if God is incrementally turning the dimmer knob. He ruefully thinks that he should have made his move that storm-ridden day in the kiosk, after the foot massage. Now the appropriate time has passed, and now it is past the 11th hour . . . there is no turning back. More than his dignity is at stake, and mortification is not the sole consequence he faces. She does not know him. She thinks she does; she does not. Only he knows that he stands as a stranger in front of her. He is now forced to reveal himself to her, the real him, and in doing so destroy the person she thought she knew. Literally wipe out that persona—him, but not him. Something about the precarious nature of what exactly would be effaced if he were to present her with his gift makes him wobble a little on enervated legs. He feels a total annihilation waiting behind a fragile partition, a bomb about to explode. Even if he isn’t the target, he is fearful of being caught in a decimating blast. It’s that close and that nebulous. Both everything and nothing would change. He hears her sigh and looks up. She is still looking away, her lips drawn tight in a thin line. “So. How is your life?” she asks. He automatically tells her it’s good and asks how hers is. She responds, “O.K.” She wraps her arms around herself, tugging at the sleeves of her coat, and says “I have to tell you something.” He is locked into position. He manages to croak “What’s that?” She finally turns to him. “I’m getting a—” She freezes, staring at him. It’s obvious that, for the first time today, she sees him, really sees him standing there. Lines appear on her forehead, her eyes are blank. Her mouth stays open on her words. He tenses, ready to reveal everything at her slightest move. The sound of a car door shutting breaks the silence. She looks to the side, turning her head into profile. She closes her mouth. He sees a square of light in her right eye. He watches her. His hands clench. The cellophane crumples and forms sharp edges that cut into his hand. He feels seized up, glued to the spot. Immobile. The helpless feelings of childhood. He sucks on dry skin. The ground feels both there and not. Everything is impossibly close. She’s still looking away. He lolls his head to the side, sees two legs approaching, and is not able to lift his gaze above the man’s swinging hands and the ring of keys he’s holding, the keys jangling, making a slightly abrasive sound as they lightly hit against each other, a sound like crystal shards being ground up, and he can’t turn away and he stands there and he watches and all he can hear is wind hitting his ears and all he can feel is that his insides are reaching a point he doesn’t know if he can take and then that point passes and he is still there.