You Think It, I'll Say It(59)
“I didn’t really have a meeting in Chicago,” she continues. “I came here to go on a date with you. You wouldn’t know it was a date, but I would. I’d dress up, and we’d go to the kind of restaurant that Nelson and I don’t go to anymore, this kind of restaurant.” She gestures with one arm. “I’d drink a little too much, not that I’m three sheets to the wind or anything. I’m maybe one sheet to the wind. But I’d Google-Imaged you, so I knew you were still cute, and I also knew you were divorced.”
Is she finished? He waits a few seconds to make sure before saying, “Just so you know, I’m seeing someone. A woman named Jane.”
“Oh, that doesn’t matter,” Sylvia says. “This is a pretend date, a fake date. I wasn’t hoping we’d end up in bed. For one thing, I don’t think I could live with the guilt, and for another, childbirth wrecked my body. I can hide it when my clothes are on, but having the twins ruined my vagina, and having my daughter ruined my butt. Have you ever heard of anal fissures?”
Is this a rhetorical question? After a pause, he says, “Yes, I’ve heard of them.”
“Have you ever had one?” She’s as blasé as if she’s asking if he’s ever tasted coconut water.
He shakes his head.
“The comparison people make is to a paper cut on your asshole,” she says. “As for the rest of my parts down there, I’ll spare you the details, but suffice it to say that other women sometimes tell me they didn’t know it’s possible to give birth to twins vaginally, and, having done it, I’m not sure it is.” She smirks, then holds her glass aloft. “Live and learn.”
This, to him, is her ugliest moment yet—the purity of her cynicism, the unapologeticness of her vulgarity. Did she change gradually, little by little, or all at once?
“I was in the room when my ex-wife gave birth to our daughter,” Clay says. “I’m not some nineteen-fifties man who’s totally ignorant about the mechanics of the female body.”
She’s still smiling as she says, “Should I congratulate you for that?”
He takes care to keep his voice calm, not to match her antipathy, when he says, “At the same time, here’s a friendly tip for you, if you’re trying to reenter the dating pool. I wouldn’t recommend bringing up the topic of anal fissures.”
She doesn’t seem at all embarrassed; if anything, she remains amused as she says, “I guess I haven’t done a good job of explaining myself. I’m not planning to cheat on Nelson. This—tonight—it was an experiment, but I knew very quickly that it was a failed experiment. You’re still good-looking, I’ll grant you that. But you’re so boring! You probably found me boring, and I was boring tonight, but I was feeding off your boringness. Isn’t it weird how I was tormented as a teenager by a person who grew up into a banker who talks incessantly about his Fitbit?”
Their waitress is nearby, and he catches her eye and makes the check-requesting gesture. Then he extracts a credit card from his wallet and, when the waitress brings over the small leather folder, passes her the card without looking at the bill.
“Did I offend you?” Sylvia asks. “I didn’t mean to. I was trying to be factual.”
He says nothing—what’s the point?—and after a few seconds, she adds, “For all his faults, Nelson does make me laugh. He’s very funny. And I think a sense of humor is the single most endearing quality a person can have. Do you agree?”
Apparently, this isn’t a rhetorical question, either. They look at each other, and he says, “Sure.”
“Sure? That’s it?”
“It seems like we’ve both said what we have to say to each other tonight.”
Another silence ensues, a long silence, while they await the return of the bill, and at last Sylvia says, “So your daughter’s, what, a high school freshman? Or a sophomore?”
“Abby’s a freshman,” he says.
“Is she athletic like you?”
This is how their last moments in the restaurant conclude, with a conversation that in tone and content is the one he’d anticipated having with her in the first place. It’s a reminder that, probably, nothing is wrong with Sylvia, nothing diagnosable. She just turned out weird and bitter.
On the street, under the dark city sky, before they walk in opposite directions, Sylvia says, “Thanks so much for dinner.”
Normally, he’d hug her again, or perhaps kiss her on the cheek. And it feels odd to do nothing—as odd as it would have to split the check, not to pay for her—so he extends his hand, and as they shake, she smirks again. She says, “Farewell to thee in the perilous storm,” which is a line from the Bishop hymn, a song that even now, maybe especially now, he finds deeply moving. Without question, his moral code was molded more by the ideals of Bishop than by those of his parents. This is why he doesn’t care how paternalistic, how sexist, how Republican he sounds to Sylvia when he says, as his parting words, “Is it really necessary for you to poison that, too?”
* * *
—
They’d exchanged phone numbers over email, and she’d texted him around noon, to confirm dinner. Therefore, her number but not her name are in the Contacts of his cellphone, and when his phone rings just after eleven, while he is lying in bed watching television, he has no idea at first who it might be. But, because he is a parent, he answers.