The Forgetting Time(2)

But was she? She looked at him and saw it all instantaneously: the interest in his eyes, the smooth, easy way he moved his left hand slightly behind the roti basket, temporarily obscuring the finger with the wedding ring.

He was in Port of Spain on business, a corporate man who had done something lucrative with a franchise, and he’d decided to give himself a little “vacay” to celebrate the deal. He said it like that, “Vacay,” and she had to stifle a wince—who said things like that? No one she knew. He was from Houston, where she’d never been and had never felt the need to go. He had a white gold Rolex watch on his tanned wrist, the first one she’d ever seen up close. When she told him, he took it off and put it on her own small moist one, and the thing dangled there, heavy and sparkling. She liked the feel of it, liked its strangeness on the same freckled hand she’d always had, liked watching it hover like a diamond helicopter over her goat curry. “It looks good on you,” he said, and he glanced up from her wrist to her face with such directness of intent that she blushed and handed him back the watch. What was she doing?

“I guess I should get going.” Her words sounded reluctant even to her own ears.

“Stay and talk with me some more.” His voice had a note of pleading in it, but his eyes remained bold. “Come on. I haven’t had a decent conversation in a week. And you’re so…”

“I’m so … what?”

“Unusual.” He flashed a smile at her then, the ingratiating grin of a man who knew how and when to use his charms, a tool in that arsenal that nevertheless flared, as he looked at her, like metal in the sun, shining with something genuine—real affection coming right at her in a blast of heat.

“Oh, I’m very usual.”

“No.” He considered her. “Where are you from?”

She took another sip of her drink; it fuzzed her edges a bit. “Oh, who cares about that?” Her lips were cool and burning.

“I do.” Another grin: quick, engaging. There and gone. But … effective.

“Okay, then I live in New York.”

“But you’re not a New Yorker originally.” He said it as a statement of fact.

She bristled. “Why? You think I’m not tough enough to be a New Yorker?”

She felt his eyes lingering on her face and tried to withhold any evidence of the rising warmth in her cheeks. “You’re tough, all right,” he drawled, “but your vulnerability is showing. That’s not a New York trait.”

Her vulnerability was showing? This was news to her. She wanted to ask where, so she could tuck it back where it belonged.

“So?” He leaned closer to her. He smelled like coconut sun lotion and curry and sweat. “Where are you really from?”

It was a tricky question. She usually demurred. The Midwest, she’d say. Or: Wisconsin, because she’d spent the longest time there, if you included college. She hadn’t been back, though, since.

She never told anyone the truth. Except, for some reason, now. “I’m not from anywhere.”

He shifted in his seat, frowning. “What do you mean? Where’d you grow up?”

“I don’t—” She shook her head. “You don’t want to hear about all this.”

“I’m listening.”

She glanced up at him. He was. He was listening.

But listening was not the word. Or maybe it was: a word usually used passively, suggesting a kind of muted receptiveness, the acceptance of the sound that comes from another person, I hear you, whereas what he was doing now with her felt shockingly muscular and intimate: listening with force, the way animals listen to survive in the woods.

“Well…” She took a breath. “My dad had one of those regional sales jobs where they kept moving us around. Four years here, two years there. Michigan, Massachusetts, Washington State, Wisconsin. It was just the three of us. Then he kind of … kept on moving—I don’t know where he went. Someplace without us. My mom and I lived in Wisconsin until I was out of college and then she moved to New Jersey until she died.” It still felt strange to say it; she tried to look away from his intent eyes, but it was impossible. “Anyway, then I moved to New York, because most people there don’t belong anywhere, either. So I have no particular allegiance to any place. I’m from nowhere. Isn’t that funny?”

She shrugged. The words had bubbled up from inside of her. She hadn’t really meant to say them.

“It sounds pretty fucking lonely,” he said, still frowning, and the word was like a tiny toothpick pricking that soft part of her she hadn’t meant to show. “Don’t you have family somewhere?”

“Well, there’s an aunt in Hawaii, but—” What was she doing? Why was she saying this to him? She stopped talking, appalled. She shook her head. “I don’t do this. I’m sorry.”

“But we haven’t done anything,” he said. There was no mistaking the wolfish shadow that crossed his face. A line from Shakespeare came to her, something her mother used to whisper to Janie when they passed teenage boys at the mall: “Yond Cassius has a lean and hungry look.” Her mother was always saying things like that.

“I mean,” Janie stammered, “I don’t talk like this. I don’t know why I’m telling you this now. It must be the rum.”