The Other Language(83)

She quickly writes a text on her phone and he discreetly looks the other way.

grabbing a bite, back by 2



She then turns the phone off.



The restaurant has just a few tables, low lighting, wood-paneled walls saturated with a fishy aroma. There are no customers as it is still early. A rice paper sliding door is half opened onto a private room with a table and two simple benches. She points toward it and the waiter nods.

“Shoes, madam,” the waiter whispers.

Slipping in the small room in their socks feels sinful, as though they are entering a bedroom.

The table is long and thin, meant for at least eight, low and slightly sunk in, so they can eat cross-legged facing each other.

They are too nervous to be interested in the food, neither one feels like looking at the menu.

“I’ll take what you take,” he says.

She orders soup, black cod with miso and tea. For a moment she fears it might have been a mistake to drag him all the way inside this private room; he might be feeling uncomfortable, trapped. He could’ve been on his way to a meeting, or maybe his family is waiting to have lunch with him somewhere after all. Yes, she might have been moving too fast, again, without thinking.

“What have you been up to since I saw you last?” Sonia asks, deciding to sound casual, with the tone people use when bumping into each other at a party. They have to start somewhere, after all.

“Uh, let’s see …” He fiddles for a moment with the chopsticks. “I’ve been thinking of you,” he says, deadpan, “on and off since we crashed.”

Sonia gives a nervous, artificial laugh.

“Well, I guess that was a hard one to forget, since we nearly died,” Sonia says. It’s the wrong tone of voice, she knows—casual, ironic. Yet she doesn’t know how to change it.

He doesn’t answer and keeps his eyes on her, intent.

“Did you ever recover the car?” Sonia asks.

“No, I had to buy another one.”

“I’m so sorry.”

“It wasn’t your fault.”

There is a pause as the waiter walks in with tea and soup in lacquered bowls.

She just can’t bring herself to say what she has been waiting to say for all these years. Time keeps ticking away. Soon they’ll be done eating, they’ll find themselves out on the street and once again she will go home having said nothing. She knows she will not be granted another chance. On the edge of a bathtub; in the middle of the bush; now Perry Street in the snow. It’s not going to happen again.

“What is this thing?” she blurts out at last.

“Which thing?”

“This thing between us. It’s ridiculous.”

“It must be what people call falling in love.”

How shocking, that he should be the one to be so unfettered. Yet she’s thankful, he has dared to say it out loud.

“I didn’t say I love you,” he says, defiantly. “I said I might have fallen in love. In love is a different phase, it doesn’t involve all that love requires.”

“What does love require?”

“Things like trust, affection. Solidarity.”

“I like trust, affection, solidarity,” she says. “I prize them enormously.”

“So do I. But those need time, and a lot of work.”

Sonia holds her cup with two hands, hiding part of her face.

“Okay, so what exactly is this?”

“It’s the way we as a species came to be. Some billions of years ago, that’s how life started to happen on the planet. I don’t see anything wrong with that.”

Sonia smiles. His humor is gentle, unthreatening. He sips his tea.

“We didn’t just crash, you know,” he says. “We exploded. From the … from the tension. That’s an enormous amount of energy, what you and I conjured up that night.”

“We fell off the bridge because we had had too much to drink,” she says, and again regrets the way she’s still keeping herself at a distance, feigning to be blasé.

He shakes his head.

“No, that’s not it. I’m not making this up. It’s physics. Like, you know, quantum theory.”

Sonia knows that soon her husband will call her phone and find it turned off. He won’t think much of that, he has no reason to be suspicious. There is trust between them, there has always been. The babysitter will leave in an hour. She really needs to go soon.

She looks at him and suddenly their eyes meet in that brief, suspended space where there are no more funny lines, no irony, but a seriousness they hadn’t dared before. She knows that this is the only chance she has to cross that realm and say what she has been wanting to tell him; that, yes, she has, in some quiet way, loved him all these years. She just wants him to acknowledge the part he’s been playing unknowingly in her life, as if, after learning that, they will finally reach a place of rest. And yet, she can’t make herself say it. What would happen at this point, she thinks, once those words are spoken? Would they really be at peace? Wouldn’t they feel they ought to do something with them? Take a room in a hotel?

And that, of course, would be insane.

“My husband has cancer.” The words pour out fast, almost without her knowing. “We came here because they have the best doctors. I have no idea how long it’s going to take.”