Mat Johnson - Loving Day

“They let the dough ferment for days, then hand pound it,” Elijah says. “You really can taste the difference. If you’re like me, you’re going to love it too. And it looks like we have the same tastes, right?” and I look up, and he’s smiling at Sun. Whose response is, “You know what, I think I need to powder my nose.” Because Elijah totally knows we’re fucking.

Roslyn makes a motion with her arm like she’s going to get up and go with Sunita and I reach over and grab her hand and say, “Will you help me pick some appetizers?” with my mouth and Please don’t leave me alone with this white boy with every other part of my body. Roslyn gets up anyway, pulls her hand free. Before she leaves, though, I get a kiss, on my forehead, that lasts long enough that I have to be still to not hit her in the nose. And then it’s just me and the white guy who’s smiling at me.

“Let’s get out the weirdness. Let’s just get it out, set it free, send it on the road.” This is his toast, two glasses tink . He brought his own bottle of red wine. The label is boring and not at all hip and I’m sure that that means secretly it is.

“Hit me,” Elijah says. I look up from my glass. “Just hit me.” I put the glass down. “Not, like, in the face, bro. I mean, the ladies are only going to be gone for a minute. Let’s have mano to mano time.”

Mano means hand. I kind of want to punch him with mine. Not really. Just a little, but not really. I’m suddenly tired. I want to go home. I have a daughter. Tal doesn’t need this. Tal needs me to date a woman who can add something to both our lives. I don’t need this. I don’t even really need a penis anymore. It can go. I could use a tube to pee or something. It’d be awkward, but I could get over that.

“Sun said you used to be married?” Elijah asks when my silence becomes too much for him.

“Married. Divorced. The whole cycle.”

“That’s why you get it, then.” Elijah goes to clink my glass again. It’s already empty. He fills it up for me once more.

“Marriage for men, it makes sense in a world where the average life expectancy is thirty-seven. If you’re a guy in a village of like sixty, eighty people, with just a few women of childbearing age. But in our world? Never catch me getting married.” He twirls his ponytail as he talks. He twirls it faster and faster. I look at the hair; I can’t look at him. I hear the words, I even think about them, but I can’t look at Sun’s white boy as he deems to whitesplain the world.

“Maybe we should just kill ourselves at thirty-seven. Have you considered that?” I shoot back.

“I think her ex was, like, thirty-four? When he killed himself?” he says and it takes me a minute to even realize he’s talking about Sunita’s, and I blush at my error.

“Listen, no faux pas, really. It’s just, she’s still really sensitive about it. You should know. But like in marriage, you have to kill yourself a little, right? Inside. To make it work. A long-term relationship is sexually fulfilling for, what? Maybe three years? It’s great as it is — Sun and I have been together two — you got to get creative to make it last. So you have to make a choice.”

“You can break up.” I’m not being theoretical. I mean Sunita Habersham, and him. They can break up. The earth would continue to rotate. It would be lovely, even.

“Or you can get her to realize that our societal expectations just aren’t realistic. When you have something deep, a quickie in the shallow end never hurts anyone. We’re just apes, right?”

“Oh. Another bonobo fan.”

“That’s Sun talking. She reads all that pop geek bullshit.” Elijah points at my mouth with his long, ringed finger, poking. “Those aren’t the only apes. Did she tell you about the gorillas? What they do?”

“We didn’t get that far.” I don’t want to get any further, either. I just want the women to come back. I look in the direction of the bathroom, sure they will reappear to rescue me, but they don’t.

“In gorilla society, there’s just one guy: the silverback. And he takes all the women, and kicks the other males out. The females, they stray every once in a while, but it’s permitted because the alpha male gets what he wants.”

“Sun and I are fucking.” I say it. With little outward malice.

“I know! And thanks for your contribution to our union.”

When the women get back, we’re talking about football. The real kind that involves feet. He takes the subject there the second they enter into my peripheral vision, and I let him out of exhaustion. Elijah has some “fascinating theories” on the rise of “American futbol” and its statement on the post-isolationist attitudes in the age of the Internet. I have a theory too: that he’s an asshole.

Sun sits right next to me. Close, next to me. I think this means something. I think, we are not just splashing in the shallow. We are swimming in the deep sea of love! The language of that is so horrid it sends me into a depression that lasts through the main course and into a third bottle of Cabernet.

“They have horrible wine here, unfortunately,” Elijah says, comparing the last two house wines to his contribution and I don’t know, maybe he’s finally right about something, but it’s still the kind of drink that makes things not hurt so much.

“Just amazing body. I love Madagascan grapes. We were in Madagascar — when was it, last year? Eighteen months?”

“Maybe,” Sun says. She leans over, brushes against my shoulder. “Or a long time ago, or whenever.” Sun says the last part to me. It’s almost a whisper. It’s almost just for me. It’s almost intimate, except for the fact that it’s addressed to everyone and so it isn’t.

“It was a buddhavistic moment of clarity.”

“It was okay. I guess.” Sun sniffs, then she shoots back another glass of the cheap stuff.

“It was…one of those rare moments of connection that you get. The rhythm of the drums. The surf. The rustle of the wind through the leaves. And my little Sunny.”

The Sun of this moment goes, “Okay, does anyone have a cigarette?” She gets up and walks out the door. I can see her through the window, looking left, looking right, and then nothing. She’s gone.

“Isn’t Madagascar where you encountered Chlamydia?” Roslyn asks, and I want to go home now. There is a flutter on Elijah’s brow, the reaction to a faint breeze of an ill wind, but nothing more. I reach for my wineglass and it’s just a pool of drips at the bottom, the last bottle offering slightly more of the same.

“Charuprabha. Her name was Charuprabha. But yes. That was there. She was working with Tossing a Starfish.” To me Elijah says, “They do work with the poor in the Vohipeno region. Very powerful stuff.”

“Oh, she was wonderful. I remember her visit. So well. Also, who was the Swedish friend you made? Katnis. That was it. Katnis Lumner, the young thing with the long blond hair on her legs. You make so many friends in the world, Elijah! So many connections!” Roslyn finishes her glass as well.

There are still words coming out of Elijah’s mouth, but I have reached my limit of Elijah sentences, so feel absolved of having to listen.

“Go outside,” Roslyn says into my ear, while he’s still talking. And then Roslyn pats me on the head.

I feel myself trying to get up, and I feel drunk. Tal would be mad. For her, I refuse to stumble. I refuse to recognize the uncertainty of my horizontal stability.

Sun found cigarettes. She smokes one. I walk over, and Sun keeps staring straight off to the street, one arm around her stomach. She’s wearing the white outfit again, the one she wore when I first saw her at the comic convention. There’s a jacket now, a Russian hat with flapping fake-fur ears, and the draping of a hand-knit scarf to accommodate the cold, but it’s the same.