Really Good, Actually(43)

“Man? Okay, dude.”

“That’s exactly the deflective stuff I’m talking about,” he said. “Just let me be nice to you.”

I rolled my eyes. Over the past few weeks, Simon had been lecturing me with increasing frequency about my alleged “aversion to kindness.” He cocked his head with a pensive expression, and I could see that we were in danger of repeating the waterfall situation.

To sum up: Simon had a car. When he first told me this, I’d said, “Of course you do,” and he’d looked at me quizzically and I had not elaborated. It was an old, beat-up Volkswagen Golf in a subdued dark green, with scratchy carpeted seats and gummy cupholders. Occasionally he would pick me up and take me on a kind of drive-through buffet, hitting up Tim Hortons for a breakfast sandwich, McDonald’s for hash browns and coffee, and Wendy’s for a shake to dump our coffees into, something 6Bites had recently termed a “dirtbag affogato.”

Last week he had driven us to Elora, to look at a waterfall. It being winter, there was no swimming or anything, so we admired the partially frozen natural attraction for about thirty minutes, then climbed back in the car to drive home. On the way we scanned for local radio stations, listening to Moose FM and Canoe 100.9 as they pumped out easy listening songs I remembered from family road trips past. I hadn’t realized I was singing along until Simon chuckled quietly to himself. I stopped immediately, eyeing him with suspicion.

“What?”

“You’re always, like, four beats ahead of the lyrics,” Simon said, drumming his fingers against the steering wheel. “It’s cute. Like you’re rushing to get to the part you’re most excited to sing.”

He laughed and I felt sick to my stomach.

“I don’t do that,” I snapped. I turned off the radio and we drove without speaking for a few minutes, both of us focusing too hard on the passing landscape. I knew I was being an asshole and wished I wasn’t. I couldn’t help myself when he got like this, all observant and dopey. I didn’t want him looking at me. I barely wanted me looking at me.

Simon sighed. “Do you like this, what we’re doing?” he asked, sounding a bit annoyed. “Because I do, and I thought you did. You’re always texting me, and calling me, and asking me to hang out, and I don’t know how else to read that.”

I muttered that I was enjoying it—obviously I was—but it was complicated. Simon asked if I wanted to talk about it. I turned the radio back on and rushed weakly into the bridge of a song about loving the nightlife, needing to boogie, etc.

Now in his kitchen I felt the same creeping discomfort, an outbreak of hives on the inside of my body. I wanted to tell him he was being a loser. I wanted to yell NO! I wanted him to understand that it was very stressful to experience this kind of thoughtful attention, knowing as I did how it could gnarl and twist into something unrecognizable, or disappear altogether. I wanted to tell him I had once woken up in his bed and thought in the dark that he was someone else, someone who had noticed all kinds of lovely things about me, and who more recently had said that being with me felt like drowning in another person’s need. On further reflection, I did not really want to tell him about that.

I grabbed a tea towel and started drying dishes, badly. “Fine,” I said. “I smell amazing. I’m like laundry fucked a bakery and gave birth to a rose.” On the counter, my phone lit up with a new Tinder match. I flipped it over before Simon could see.

“That’s more like it, bro,” he said, taking a plate from my hand and pulling me toward him. “Next time we’ll see if you can manage some eye contact.”

I could see that Simon was no longer worried. The crisis, as he saw it, was over. Why give it another thought? Simon was a man who felt that things in life generally worked out, because, for him, they generally did. He was the kind of person for whom flights waited, to whom baristas gave free coffee and bartenders an extra shot. I had once seen him sweet-talk his way out of a speeding ticket when he also was not carrying his driver’s license. I wasn’t going to be the one to break it to him that this was not normal. He kissed me and I thought, this is so doomed.



The next morning I sat alone in my big turtleneck, wrapping the identical sweater I’d bought for Hannah and considering posting an Instagram Story of myself in the cat filter with the caption meowwy christmas . . . is that anything, which I knew was lame but didn’t mind, because in the photo my jawline looked sharp.

I decided against it, posting instead a blurry image of discarded wrapping paper scraps that I hoped exuded a harried popularity. My windows were foggy with condensation, and I could hear some neighborhood kids playing in the snow outside. I’d decided against a tree—what would I put on it?—but had propped up a few holiday cards on my dresser in a gesture toward festivity. A strand of tinsel dangled limply above my pile of dirty laundry.

I rewatched White Christmas, fast-forwarding through the musical number where all four leads expressed longing for the good old days of minstrelsy, then moved on to lesser (though no less enjoyable) holiday offerings, comedies about house swapping and mistaken identity and finding love with a festive twist. During these I graded exams and made a satisfyingly disjointed lunch of cinnamon oatmeal, miso soup from a packet, and a rice cake covered in mustard and deli meat. For dessert, I put cheese on a cookie.

Around four thirty, I felt loneliness threatening to creep in. I went upstairs to see if Lydia was around. The house was deserted, everyone off with their respective families or, in Inessa’s case, an exciting younger boyfriend (he was sixty-seven, but still). I went back downstairs and checked my to-do list, though everything was already ticked. Solitude makes a person too efficient. I attempted to nap, which only meant I had my eyes closed for the last of the winter sun. When I opened them again it was five p.m. and pitch-black outside. I lit a candle and opened a book, resting my phone between the pages.