Our Country Friends(76)

Ed marveled at the privileged, Senderovsky-like way Dee drove past the dappled fields in her unexceptional car, as if death was not an option for her even when the lane markers were clearly being violated and all of the cockpit instrumentation beeped and buzzed in protest. “I hope you won’t flog me!” Dee joked after she had run a tractor off the road with her impudence. “I know how particular you Kims are about your chauffeurs.”

He laughed behind his aviator sunglasses and wondered if they were on a date. In his beloved (and now debunked) Japanese reality show, a nerd had asked a beauty on a date and she had suggested they go to Costco with the rest of their roommates as a way of turning him down. It had become known as the Costco Incident. He did not think of himself as a nerd, yet had studiously avoided that type of incident his entire life and had many empty Moleskine diaries to show for it.

    They waited for their food along a pathway lined with cute signs about mask wearing and distancing, which we don’t need to reproduce here, then collected their trays and sat down at a table in the middle of the restaurant’s buzzing big tent, where they were soon molested by a wasp. “He’s harmless,” Dee educated her date as he tried and failed to shoo away the large clumsy insect with his fluttering hands. “He’s a cicada killer. They don’t sting.”

“Huh,” Ed said. He rolled up the deadstock cotton sleeves of his banker-striped shirt and refastened its thick mother-of-pearl buttons around the biceps of his tanned arms. “You shouldn’t dress up so much,” Dee said, observing his ritual. “Just wear plainer things. You have such a nice body. Give us a peek.”

He did not know how to respond. “Oh,” he said inwardly while presenting her with a blush. He opened the cardboard containers of sweet potato curry, black pepper wings in Vietnamese fish sauce, and a “Romanesco” larb studded with little gem lettuces and pickled chilies, and began to distribute the food. She poured two cups from a refreshing bucket of mezcal and grapefruit liqueur. As they toasted silently, they looked deep into each other’s eyes for a long, bashful beat. He drank down to the bottom and wiped his mouth with his naked hand. He didn’t care anymore. If it didn’t work out and he had to go to Chania alone, he would simply lock himself in a hotel room and drain the life from his body in one way or another.

“Dee,” he said, “I love you.”

“I know,” she said, immediately.

And almost as immediately: “I think I love you, too.”

He nodded thoughtfully, picked at his larb with mass-produced chopsticks, knowing he could no longer eat any more of it, delicious as it was. Even though the tables were far apart, his senses were now heightened enough that he could hear every conversation around them (mostly they were about local real estate), and his poor bladder was now consumed by that sweet, lovely panic that accompanies reciprocated love.

“Any more thoughts about what we just said to each other,” Dee ventured. “Or should we just talk politics?”

A towheaded and poorly masked five-year-old boy wearing an I AM A FEMINIST T-shirt had wandered very close to their table and was soon accompanied by his likewise-dressed twin. “Kent! Lorimer!” a freckled mama yelled from a nearby table. “Don’t come close!”

    “That’s okay,” Dee shouted back, even as she put on her own surgical mask to protect herself from the invaders. The feminist children retreated, kicking up gravel behind them. Ed had spent so much of his capital on his declaration of love that he no longer knew which other words were still in his possession. He decided to gamble and say something stupid.

“You look beautiful in your mask.”

She laughed. “Are you saying my mouth and chin are ugly?”

“No, I just…The gauze matches the color of your eyes.”

“Oh, God. Make this year go away.”

There was so much brimming, and brewing, within Ed that he wondered how to keep it all within himself, how to stop it from coming out as a fountain of tears or a loud “Romanesco” belch or heavy black smoke steaming out of his ears. They were staring at each other again, hands mechanically reaching for the grapefruit mezcal, mouths anxiously swallowing. “Should I keep my mask on between sips?” she said. “Does that turn you on?”

“You know me better than that,” he said. “You know everything I’m thinking. Always.”

“I’m thinking right now you want to touch my knee with yours under the table.”

“See! That’s exactly right.”

“And now,” she said as he began to rub his knee against hers, “you’re kicking yourself for not wearing shorts so you can feel how smooth my skin is. Correction, you’re kicking yourself for not owning a pair of shorts. Which we will have to remedy right away.”

“You see right through me,” he said. “The writer’s mind gives you an advantage.”

“Fine, then what am I thinking?”

“I’d rather not say.”

“Oh, come on! Not fair!” Her voice was high and unusually girlish. She more than knew the rudiments of flirting, he thought.

“You’re thinking that you’ve never been kissed by an Asian man.”

    She brought her hand up to her mouth in shock, mimicking, inadvertently, all of the young women on the reality show. “Oh my God,” she said. “You just racialized this.”