Iain Reid - I'm Thinking of Ending Things

“He was a Soviet engineer, worked in metallics. Era of Stagnation. Had a couple of monster caterpillars for eyebrows.”

This is what I’m talking about. Jake’s team name. It was meant to be funny, but also obscure enough to demonstrate a knowledge of the Soviet Communist Party. I don’t know why, but this is the stuff that drives me nuts.

Team names are always like this. Or if not, then they’re blatant sexual innuendos. Another team was named My Couch Pulls Out and So Do I!

I told Jake I didn’t really like trivia, not at a place like this. He said, “It can be very nitpicky. It’s a strange blend of competitiveness veiled as apathy.”

Jake isn’t striking, not really. He’s handsome mostly in his irregularity. He wasn’t the first guy I noticed that night. But he was the most interesting. I’m rarely tempted by stainless beauty. He seemed a little less part of the group, as if he’d been dragged there, as if the team depended on his answers. I was immediately attracted to him.

Jake is long and sloping and unequal, with jagged cheekbones. A little bit gaunt. I liked those skeletal cheekbones when I first saw them. His dark, full lips make up for his underfed look. Fat and meaty and collagenic, especially the bottom one. His hair was short and unkempt and maybe longer on one side, or texturally different, like he had distinct hairstyles on each side of his head. His hair was neither dirty nor recently washed.

He was clean-shaven and wore thin-framed silver glasses, the right arm of which he would absentmindedly adjust. Sometimes he would push them back up with his index finger on the bridge. I noticed that he had this tick: when he was concentrating on something, he would smell the back of one hand, or at least hold it under his nose. It’s something he often still does. He wore a plain gray T-shirt, I think, maybe blue, and jeans. The shirt looked like it had been washed hundreds of times. He blinked a lot. I could tell he was shy. We could have sat there all night, beside each other, and he wouldn’t have said a word to me. He smiled at me once, but that was it. If I’d left it up to him, we never would have met.

I could tell he wasn’t going to say anything, so I talked first.

“You guys are doing pretty well.” That was the first thing I said to Jake.

He held up his beer glass. “We’re helpfully fortified.”

And that was it. Ice broken. We talked a bit more. Then, very casually, he said, “I’m a cruciverbalist.”

I said something noncommittal, like “huh” or “yeah.” I didn’t know that word.

Jake said he wanted his team’s name to be Ipseity. I didn’t know what that word meant, either. And initially I thought about faking it. I could already tell, despite his caution and reticence, that he was exotically smart. He wasn’t aggressive in any way. He wasn’t trying to pick me up. No cheesy lines. He was just enjoying chatting. I got the feeling he didn’t date all that much.

“I don’t think I know that word,” I said. “Or the other one.” I decided that, like most men, he would probably like to tell me about it. He would like it better than if he thought I already knew the words and had an equally varied vocabulary.

“Ipseity is essentially just another way to say selfhood or individuality. It’s from the Latin ipse , which means self.”

I know this part sounds pedantic and lecture-y and off-putting, but trust me, it wasn’t. Not at all. Not from Jake. He had a gentleness, an appealing, natural meekness.

“I thought it would be a good name for our team, considering there are many of us but we aren’t like any other team. And because we play under a single team name, it creates an identity of oneness. Sorry, I don’t know if this makes any sense, and it’s definitely boring.”

We both laughed, and it felt like we were alone together in there, in that pub. I drank some beer. Jake was funny. Or he at least had a sense of humor. I still didn’t think he was as funny as me. Most men I meet aren’t.

Later in the night, he said, “People just aren’t very funny. Not really. Funny is rare.” He said it as if he’d known exactly what I’d been thinking earlier.

“I don’t know if that’s true,” I said. I liked hearing such a definitive statement about “people.” There was deep confidence bubbling just under his veneer of restraint.

When I could tell he and his teammates were getting ready to leave, I thought about asking for his number or giving him mine. I desperately wanted to but just couldn’t. I didn’t want him to feel like he had to call. I wanted him to want to call, of course. I really did. But I settled on the likelihood that I would see him around. It was a university town, not a big city. I’d bump into him. As it turned out, I didn’t have to wait for chance.

He must have slipped the note into my purse when he said good night. I found it when I got home:

If I had your number, we could talk, and I’d tell you something funny.

He’d written his number at the bottom of the note.

Before going to bed I looked up cruciverbalist . I laughed and believed him.

— I still don’t understand. How could something like this happen?

— We’re all in shock.

— Nothing so horrible has ever happened around here.

— No, not like this.

— In all the years I’ve worked here.

— I would think not.

— I didn’t sleep last night. Not a wink.

— Me neither. Couldn’t get comfortable. I can barely eat. You should have seen my wife when I told her. I thought she was going to be sick.

— How could he actually do it, go through with it? You don’t do that on a whim. You couldn’t.

— It’s scary is what it is. Scary and disturbing.

— So did you know him? Were you close, or…?

— No, no. Not close. I don’t think anyone was close with him. He was a loner. That was his nature. Kept to himself. Standoffish. Some knew him better. But… you know.

— It’s crazy. It doesn’t seem real.

— It’s one of those terrible things, but unfortunately it’s very real.

“How are the roads?”

“Not bad,” he says. “A little slick.”

“Glad it’s not snowing.”

“Hopefully it won’t start.”

“It looks cold out there.”

Individually, we’re both unspectacular. It seems noteworthy. Combining our ingredients, Jake’s lean height with my overt shortness, makes no sense. Alone in a crowd, I feel condensed, overlook-able . Jake, despite his height, also blends into a crowd. When we’re together, though, I notice people looking at us. Not at him or at me: at us. Individually, I blend in. So does he. As a couple, we stand out.

Within six days of meeting at the pub, we’d had three proper meals together, gone for two walks, met for coffee, and watched a movie. We talked all the time. We’d been intimate. Jake has told me twice after seeing me naked that I remind him — in a good way, he stressed — of young Uma Thurman, a “compressed” Uma Thurman. He called me “compressed.” That was the word. His word.

He’s never called me sexy. Which is fine. He’s called me pretty and he said “beautiful” once or twice, the way guys do. Once he called me therapeutic. I’d never heard that from anyone before. It was right after we’d fooled around.

I thought it might happen — fooling around — but it wasn’t planned. We’d just started making out on my couch after dinner. I’d made soup. For dessert we were splitting a bottle of gin. We were passing it back and forth, taking swigs right from the bottle like high school kids getting drunk before a dance. This instance felt much more urgent than the other times we’d made out. When the bottle was half-finished, we moved to the bed. He took off my top, and I unzipped his pants. He let me do what I wanted.