Ambivalence (New Story 01)

When a girl is skinny, and calls you late at night, and you glance at
the calendar, and it is four days before you are scheduled to get married,
and the girl you are marrying is not the skinny girl but another
girl, a girl who has already departed for the city where your wedding
is to be held, it is your job, most probably, to hang up the phone.
When you do not hang up the phone, you have not done your job.
When you invite that skinny girl to your apartment, and then you
jump into the shower so that you will be clean, taking special trouble
to wash the parts that matter, and then you mess up your hair so that
you will look as though you haven’t gone to any special trouble, then
you are doing another job entirely.
She was a painter. Panos met her through a mutual friend. She
had a boyfriend, who was twenty-two years older than she, and when
Panos first spoke to her, he said that he thought that the age difference
was an atrocity. “Like bombing Cambodia,” he said, convinced
that this was a joke that she would not understand. She surprised
him with a knowing laugh. They talked about his impending marriage,
and about the week of freedom he had but doubted he’d use.
She took out a Paper-Mate blue pen and used it to write his phone
number on her hand. She wrote it strangely: not with numerals, but
with letters “O” for 1, “T” for 2, “TH” for 3, “F,” “FI,” and so on.
“So that makes your number ‘Efstooth,’” she said.
“Hey,” Panos said. “That’s my street: Efstooth Avenue.”
“For that joke I award you this pen,” she said, handing it over
ceremonially. “I’ll get it later.”
When she arrived at Panos’s apartment, “Efstooth” was still inked
on her hand, but that was not the first thing he noticed. The first
thing he noticed was that she was carrying a suitcase. It was small
enough that she held it rather than setting it down, but large enough
that it seemed to have winded her slightly on the way up to the third
floor.
“Are you moving in?” he said. “I don’t know how my wife will feel
about this.” She set the suitcase down on the floor, unzipped it, and
flipped back the top. There were white packages there, white sheets,
and when she unwrapped them they were her paintings. She spread
them out on the floor of his apartment. There were ten of them, each
one a small landscape with a single bird flying over a marsh and a
single human figure in the foreground. They were slightly different
shades, one reddish, one greenish, one dunnish, and so on, across a
muted spectrum.
Panos looked at the paintings and asked polite questions about
them that she answered smoothly. “I like to tell people that he’s
trying to capture the bird,” she said. “I always feel hilarious saying
that. But the bird’s not an unwitting victim. He sees the man. You
can be sure about that.” When he asked if they were all pictures of the
same scene, she said that she saw how he’d think so but that no, three
of them were painted from actual photographs of her father hunting
and the other seven were created from imagination. “My father left
when I was a little girl,” she said. “I remember that he yelled a lot,
and that he was mean to my mother, and that she was happier without
him. But recently I have been looking for pictures of him. I found
three and made up seven more. No one should have fewer than ten
photographs of her father.”
They turned the TV on but turned the volume all the way down.
They ordered pizza. She sat in a chair across the room from him, and
announced that she hadn’t showered that morning, because the water
in her apartment was too cold. Panos told her she was welcome to
take a shower if she wanted. “We’ll see,” she said, and went around
the apartment ticking her finger across the spine of books. “Lots of
history books,” she said.
“Not mine,” Panos said.
“Oh,” she said. “Too bad. I love history books.” She was wearing
tight stretch pants and a tight white shirt. It was obvious to Panos
that she was the skinniest girl who had ever been in his apartment.
She was not wearing a bra, which put her in the company of at least
two other girls who had been in the apartment, neither of whom was
the girl who was, in four days’ time, going to be his wife. His wife
always wore a bra, and even three years into their relationship, she
gave a little involuntary gasp of pleasure whenever he unclasped it.
He figured that it was, at best, a reflex. The history books were hers.
The skinny girl came and stood right next to Panos. She planted
her feet to make it clear that she was ready to address the issue.
“Well,” Panos said. “Here we are.”
“We are here,” she said. “No doubt about that.”
“It’s all in the way you say it,” he said. “‘Here we are’ is more
loaded than ‘we are here.’”
“Is that what we are? Loaded?” she said. “Speaking of which, I’ll
have more wine.” She shook her glass and sloshed out a few drops
onto her shirt. “Shit,” she said.
“I have extra T-shirts,” Panos said.
“I’ll just take this off,” she said, and did.
“Come here,” Panos said.
She sat on the couch and pushed up alongside him. They watched
the TV, which was showing a strongman competition. A fat Swede
was jogging down a short track, the chassis of a car held on his shoulders.
“I really stink,” she said. Panos closed his eyes for research. She
was right, in a way: it was the smell of young sweat, of a black flower
blooming. She unbuttoned his shirt and laid her head on his chest.
“Now you’ve got me thinking about my father,” she said.
“I do?” Panos said. “How?”
“It’s not that hard to do.”
“I don’t think I like your tone,” he said.
“I’m sure you don’t,” she said. “No one ever does.” She squeezed
his arm. “You know what my father did? Other than leave, I mean.”
“And hunt.”
“And hunt. No, I mean what he did for work. He was trained as a
lawyer but about a year before I was born he quit to work on a biography
of his great-grandfather, who was a British intelligence agent who
specialized in code breaking. Do you know about the Zimmermann
Telegram?” Panos shook his head. She didn’t continue right away.
He put his hand on her stomach, and then slipped a few fingers just
inside the elastic band of her pants.
“Tell me,” Panos said.
“What?” she said after a while.
“Tell me about the telegram.”
“Oh,” she said. “Why? Are you really interested?” Panos nodded
and let one finger drift a little lower. “Of course you are,” she said.
“Really,” Panos said. “Keep telling me about it.”
“Fine,” she said. “This telegram was sent from the German foreign
secretary to the German ambassador in Mexico, and it announced
that the Germans were going to support a Mexican attack on the
southwestern United States. The British, including my great-greatgrandfather,
cracked the code. When the telegram was verified,
Wilson armed ships to defend against Germany, and a few days after
that, we were at war. World War One.”
“You know, even though the history books aren’t mine, I managed
to figure that out.”
“The code was a cryptogram. We cracked it partly because one of
the top German spies, Wilhelm Wassmuss, had lost his codebook in
Iran the year before. We picked that up and it helped with the Zimmermann
Telegram.”
“We?”
Now she didn’t like his tone. “We the British. We my great-greatgrandfather.”
The strongman competition had ended, and now the
TV was showing dirt bike racing. She got up to go to the bathroom,
and when she came back she started to pack her paintings back into
the suitcase. “What color would you say this is?” she said, holding
up a canvas.
“Blue.”
“And what about this one?”
“Also blue.”
“Right. But isn’t that ridiculous? Two colors that are so different,
but they’re considered the same. It’s almost reason enough to become
a painter, just to try to understand that. Colors are like a code, too.”
“Oh, yeah,” Panos said. “Finish the code story.”
“It was finished,” she said. “Finished enough. I was out of that and
on to color. Blame your bathroom. It’s blue.”
“I didn’t pick that color.”
“It doesn’t look like your thing,” she said. “When are you getting
married?”
“Sunday,” Panos said. “It’s strange. It seems like a million years
away, and also like it’s going to happen the first time I let myself
breathe.”
“You’re not breathing?”
“Not always well.”
“Is it because I stink?”
“It’s because I’m not sure what message I’ll be sending if I do.
Maybe my true feelings will come through.”
“What are those true feelings? I assume they have something to
do with the reason I’m here.” She had her chin tilted up now, and her
words were falling into the space between them.
“Ambivalence.”
“That’s not a feeling. It’s the presence of two feelings at once.
What are the two?”
“Joy and fear? Happiness and hatred? Rightness and wrongness?”
“Wrongness?”
“The most obvious kind of wrongness. Like maybe this isn’t the
right choice. Like there are a million people to love, and how can I
settle on one and be sure that I’m not a fool? I have met others. I
might meet others. What about Eskimos?”
“The Eskimos,” she said. “Of course.”
“Or the Finns or the Malays or all the other people I don’t even
know about. Maybe I could be with one of them without ambivalence.
Don’t you have these questions about your boyfriend?”
“He’s a quick story. He’s older, is big like you, has a beard, helps
pay the rent on my painting studio, treats me with what we’ll say is kind contempt. That often does the trick for me, as it turns out.” She
slipped a hand inside his shirt and hooked her leg over his. “Will you
kiss me?”
“Sure,” Panos said. “But I’m not sure about more. I want to, but
you know.”
“Now that’s ambivalence,” she said. After they kissed, she pulled
her pants down far enough to show him that she wasn’t wearing any
underwear. “Put your hands on my ass.”
“If you insist,” Panos said. “But I want you to know that I feel like
I could stop any time.”
“I’m flattered,” she said, her eyes narrowing.
“What I was going to say,” Panos said, “is that it’s like when a
drunk driver thinks that he’s in control of his car.”
“Oh,” she said. “Maybe I am flattered. Well, do what you want,
or don’t. Your hours are numbered anyway. I have told you so many
state secrets that I’m going to have to kill you. Anyway, it’s not too
long until morning. I’ll be gone soon.” They leaned into each other
and she pretended to concentrate on the dirt bikes on TV.
The sky outside was already starting to change color, from black
to a weaker shade of black. There wasn’t any blue in it yet. “There’s
a bird out there,” Panos said. “I rarely actually see them at night.”
“The man sees the bird,” she said. “You can be sure about that.”
She made birds with her hands and flew them up high so that her
arms were stretching as far as they would go. She was so skinny that
there was something painfully religious about that pose. It was a
pose of appeal to something far beyond him. “Put your head back
down on me,” she said, and he did. She stroked his neck, unbuttoned
his pants, made circles with her fingers on his stomach, exhibited
restraint. Taking off her clothes would have been as easy as asking.
How often are things as easy as asking?
At seven, it was time for her to go. Panos found her shirt and buttoned
up his own. “Okay,” he said. “What’s the way to do this?” He
hadn’t anticipated the need for any secrecy. He had planned to sneak
her out at three in the morning or so. But now his neighbors were
up, and many of them knew his wife, and he wasn’t sure what they
would make of a strange skinny girl leaving his apartment early in
the morning.
“I’ll go down and throw out the trash,” he said. “If I buzz on the
buzzer, that means the coast is clear, so come downstairs quick. The
door will lock behind you.”
“Okay,” she said. “Can you carry my suitcase along with a trash
bag? That way I can get there fast. I won’t have to bump around on
the stairs.”
“It’s like being a spy,” Panos said.
“It’s nothing like that,” she said. “I could tell you stories.”
Did Panos take her to breakfast? Not to take her would have been
rude. But he did not pay. That would have been too conspiratorial,
and too high-handed, both at once. Besides, he was not hungry, just
intensely thirsty, enough so that he bought a half-gallon of orange
juice from the corner store and drank it straight from the carton
while he stood out on the sidewalk. She stopped in a coffee shop and
ordered a toasted bagel; a bit of melted butter ran down her chin
when she ate it. Her chin was slick with the butter. The sky was a
brilliant shade of blue. At that moment, just at that precise moment,
he wanted to invite her back up to his apartment and make all the
mistakes he had avoided making. Instead he changed the subject, for
the last time. “You forgot to get your pen back,” he said.
“You can keep it,” she said. “Remember me by it. That’s kind of
nice, right, to remember someone by something totally anonymous?
When you write with it, it’ll be like there’s an invisible ink message
just under the real message.”
“What does it say?”
“You wouldn’t understand,” she said. “It’s in Inuktitut.”
“What is that?”
“Look it up,” she said. “You have books. I’ve seen them. Okay:
I’m leaving.”
“See you,” Panos said.
“Or not,” she said. “Probably not.”
“Well,” he said, “I hope you enjoyed your time on Efstooth
Avenue.”
“You’re an idiot,” she said. When she leaned in to kiss him goodbye
he smelled it again, the black flower blooming under her arm.
He went back to his apartment and pulled out history books until
he found a listing in the index for the Zimmermann Telegram. He read a few paragraphs that he didn’t understand. They might as well
have been in Inuktitut. In the front of the book, on a f lyleaf, his
wife had signed her name. His wife, almost. He shut the book hard,
like a trap. He was trying to capture his ambivalence or kill it. Three
days later, he watched his wife sign her name again, on a marriage
certificate, beneath a paragraph he understood completely. The ink
and sky were blue.