Rafael Yglesias - Fearless

“Jesus!” she exclaimed and almost blushed as she entered his arms for a hug. She kissed him fast on the lips and pushed away, saying, “You bastard. You look the same.”

“I do not!” Max said and gestured at his diminished curlicues of gray hair and his regretful lined face.

“That makes you look even handsomer,” she said, meaning his hair he supposed. She got out of his arms and backed into a chair, studying Max. Her beautiful skin still registered pleasure and surprise. “I can’t believe it, Max. Makes me want to cry.” And her eyes filled.

“Why?”

“I don’t know…” She shook her head, the way she used to, but now there was no curtain of shimmering hair to sway with the grace and self-possession of an animal. Instead, with a helmet the color of worn leather, her movement was insecure and sad. “I’m glad you look so good, Max. You must be happy.”

“Are you crazy? I’m not happy. Do you know anybody who’s happy?”

“Well, you look happy, you bastard.” She surveyed him again and shook her head. “Can’t believe it. You’re the same!”

“I’m the same because nothing’s happened to me. I’ve been hermetically sealed.”

They were the only customers of the restaurant. They ordered coffee and cheesecake. Max’s tasted grainy and his coffee was weak. The place wanted to be more than a coffee shop, covering its tables with white linen and putting its customers in ugly captain’s chairs whose hard seats and high circular armrests had plenty of room for large waists. In fact, slight Max was swimming in his. He felt as if he had fallen into a toilet bowl. He kept lifting up his behind to seek a higher perch. He listened patiently to her jumpy narrative of the past twenty-odd years.

“My kids are great,” she said. Except for the third, she added, a girl named Halley, who had a slight learning problem that for two years the doctors thought was behavioral. There were two years of psychotherapy. Then Halley was diagnosed as suffering from a chemical imbalance and there were two years of pharmacology. Finally they went to a nutritionist and there were two years of expensive vitamins. Now there was nothing except diminished expectations.

Halley’s dumb, Max decided. They couldn’t accept a daughter who was dumb so they decided she was ill.

“But my kids are great,” she said and added that the eldest, another daughter, was no longer a ballet prodigy, after breaking her ankle in a freakish accident stepping out of a car. “She’s adjusted really great,” Alison said. “She’s got a lot more time for boys so she’s happy.” She lowered her head mournfully and Max knew that again Alison had been disappointed.

Her husband was great, she said, but she added that he was a little bitter because he hadn’t been made head of the drama school, although it had been understood for years he would be and yet when the time came someone from outside had been brought in.

Her pain was tangible. She pushed it at him in a bumpy aggressive way, like a subway passenger elbowing to get past. “What about you?” he asked. “Are you still writing plays?”

“No!” She scorned the idea and then said, “I’m a mess. I am thinking of going back to school. Get my Ph.D. and teach.” She reached out and slapped Max’s knee. “Tell me about you! You have a boy, right?”

“A ten-year-old.”

“Bet he’s smart like you.”

“Smart…” Max thought about his son, who was certainly a good student, articulate and precocious. Does that mean he’s smart? “He’s like all the kids I know. He’s smart, but it’s copycat intelligence.”

“What do you mean?”

“He imitates grown-up attitudes and says what his teachers want to hear. He’s a mirror of them and so they say he’s smart.”

Behind her there was a fierce glow from the windows facing the street. The summer sun flashed on the cars parked outside and a beam pierced into the restaurant, striking Alison on the head. It seemed to come out of her mouth as speech: “That is being smart, Max,” she said. “What do you want him to imitate? A baboon?”

“I just can’t shake the feeling that a really smart, an authentically brilliant child, wouldn’t seem brilliant to us. He’s smart in the same way we all are: he knows what we know, he believes what we believe. He’s being educated to be as dumb as the rest of us.”

“Come off it, Max.” She was irritated. A truck drove into the restaurant’s windows without shattering them. But it covered the glowing light behind her, and her eclipsed face went dark with anger. “That’s crap. Believe me, I’ve seen plenty of dumb students. Students so dumb they couldn’t imitate what you know if you put a gun to their heads.” The sun bleached her face again and she was shooting him.

Max reached out and caught her hand, frozen in an imitation of a gun, index finger threatening his brain. He could see how angry he had made her: the pain glowed about her eyes. “Don’t hate me,” he pleaded.

“I don’t hate you. Don’t be ridiculous.”

Max pulled her hand to him and kissed the fingers. They were plump and soft. He had remembered them as long and elegant, their touch cool. These were the hot whitened hands of a baker. She ignored him and said, “Just don’t tell me your son is a genius and it doesn’t make you proud.”

He let go of her hand. “He’s not a genius. I didn’t say he was a genius.” He thought back and couldn’t remember what he had said, except that it was contemptuous of his son. “Did I? I mean if I did—”

“Max, I’m exaggerating. Remember me? I exaggerate.” She covered the space between them, her head bobbing like a doll with a spring for a neck. “You just said he was bright. But you know what I mean.”

“Let’s make love.” His belly was full and warm. He wanted to hibernate in a cave with her — dark and close and fucking slowly. She disappeared in the darkness again and he couldn’t see what she was feeling. She said something softly, but he didn’t hear and anyway he kept talking, right out of the center of his being, without censorship: “We’ll probably never see each other again and I’ve forgotten everything about myself. Haven’t you? I don’t remember who I was or what I am and that’s too sad. Makes me too sad to eat or sleep or argue. So let’s get a room now and make love.”

He couldn’t see her face clearly. The restaurant’s window had altered the sun and now it had no light of its own. He tried to focus and see her eyes but they were hollow. He got up and she did too so he supposed she was willing. He put a twenty down on the table and she said, “That’s a twenty.” He assumed it was her way of saying yes.

They walked. He put his arm around her shoulders and they felt comfortable, the right height, fitting easily within the shape of his reach. “Do you have a room?” she asked and laughed at what he answered, shaking her head as if he had been foolish. He didn’t know if she was right because he hadn’t heard his own voice. “I’ll wait here while you get it, okay?” She slipped away and sat down in a chair he hadn’t noticed. It seemed to appear under her just as she lowered herself. He looked down at her and had no idea who she was.

The clerk seemed overjoyed about Max checking in. “Certainly, sir! We have a room.” He was a boy. Max was fascinated by his partial beard, a skinny line trailing erratically under cheeks that looked permanently flushed.

Max didn’t talk while the clerk did the paperwork. His lips got stuck together and then he wasn’t sure he could talk. He nodded when the clerk asked if he was staying for one night and shook his head no when asked if he needed help with his bags.

The carpeted floor undulated beneath his feet. He was able to walk on it without any trouble, like a graceful surfer. Alison was in the chair waiting. Many other chairs had been bred in his absence. A whole row of them flanked her, their empty arms gleaming sullenly.