Dinaw Mengestu - How to Read the Air

Once we had settled into our room and begun to unpack I noticed Angela staring at me puzzled from behind the doors of the armoire where she was busy hanging our clothes.

“Is something wrong?” I asked her.

“Why are we here, Jonas?”

“For a vacation,” I told her. “I thought you wanted that.”

It was the first notable sign I’d had that Angela wasn’t completely convinced by my performance, but looking back, I can see that there were others. She had been staying up later and later at night, and for several days prior to then, had watched me as I pretended to work at our kitchen table. She had unexpectedly called from her office late in the afternoon on four separate occasions simply, she said, to say hello.

We had a small dinner delivered to our room. We pulled the bed up against the window so that we had a view of the snow drifting out over the ocean and onto the beach. I knew we had at least one night together where we could happily coast along, and I thought this was going to be it. We fell asleep in each other’s arms. In the morning Angela and I opened our eyes to a bright, cold sun blazing in through the windows, a sight unlike any we had seen in recent memory, our normal mornings being ones of muted shades and car horns blaring. For the first time in months we made love after waking up, and were content to later bask in the glare of the frigid sun, which offered no warmth but was lovely to look at.

Later that afternoon we took a taxi to the center of the village and walked slowly up the main street, staring idly through the windows of the handful of stores open on a winter Sunday morning. The town felt as if it had been abruptly abandoned in preparation for a natural disaster, which only the most committed were determined to see through. We had expected a street full of picturesque Christmas decorations and large cardboard turkeys taped to the windows. Instead we were at any given moment two of maybe four people walking down the road.

“It’s kind of depressing, isn’t it,” Angela noted. “I thought white people loved the cold. I thought I would see them walking around in flip-flops and shorts, but it’s just us. We’re probably the only two black people to ever come here in winter.”

“Maybe that’s why everyone left.”

“You think they heard we were coming?”

“Word travels fast in small towns.”

A few minutes later, while we were browsing through an antique store whose oldest items dated back to the late 1970s, Angela told me that I was a terrible liar. She said it jokingly but there was no humor in her voice, only a forced and slightly pained smile that did a poor job of masking her intentions.

“You think you can lie,” she said. “But really you can’t. You’re terrible at it.”

“That’s not true.”

“When was the last time you lied to me?”

“I can’t remember.”

“You’re lying to me now.”

“No, I’m not.”

“You lied to me yesterday when you said this was a vacation.”

“How was that a lie? Look at us. That’s what this is.”

Angela picked up a music box with the figure of a ballerina doing a pirouette on top.

“What do you think of this?” she asked me. She held the box close to my face so I could make out its poorly carved details and the flecks of paint missing from the nose.

“I think we should pay for it with your Discover card. Or it deserves to be right here in this shop where no one will ever see it.”

“I don’t believe you when you say that.”

“So you think I like it?”

“No. I think you know I don’t like it, and before you can even decide, you say you hate it because that’s what I would say. You do that because you want to make me happy. I know that’s true sometimes. But you also do it because you don’t want me, or I think anyone, to ever be angry at you, or to say something that will make you upset.”

“You’ve been angry at me for years.”

“That’s probably true. But I can say the same about you as well, Jonas.”

“I’ve managed to live with that.”

“No. You haven’t. You haven’t lived with me in a long time. You’ve slept in the same bed as me, you’ve had dinner with me, gone to the grocery store with me, but you haven’t really lived with me again until just a few weeks ago.”

“That’s not true.”

“Yes, it is, and you know that as well. You don’t want to say that though because you think it will hurt me, or you or the both of us. Do you remember when our fights started to get really bad?”

“Of course.”

“I was miserable.”

“I know. You hardly tried to hide it.”

“But do you know why?”

“It was a lot of things. We were under a lot of stress. We were short on money, my father died. You were working long hours.”

“That had very little to do with it, Jonas.”

“That had everything to do with it.”

“I was convinced that I could no longer love you, or us. I’m not really sure which. Every time I thought about us I had this picture of two damaged little kids trying to heal each other’s wounds and failing miserably at it. I began sleeping with someone else; I think you know who already, someone I hardly even cared about, just because I thought it might make me feel better. Less alone. Less frightened and nervous. You knew that even then, didn’t you, and yet you didn’t want to admit it. Even now you don’t want to admit it. We could fight about anything else so long as it was stupid and trivial but not that.”

“I never knew that,” I said, but neither of us was convinced I meant it.

“You’re lying again. I came home late from work. I left condoms in my purse for you to find. I deliberately showered before going to bed. I couldn’t have been more obvious unless I waited for you to come home before fucking someone else. What I want to know is why you didn’t say anything. I stayed away from you night after night to see if you would say something. When you didn’t I just assumed it was because you didn’t care and so I thought fine, fuck it. Let me sleep with Andrew. Let me rub his face in it. It killed me that you never even asked me why I was doing that.”

“How could I? After you left for the summer, that would have been impossible.”

“I was gone long before then, and so were you. Every time we had a fight or argument you disappeared.”

“I never left. I never even threatened to leave, even when you asked me to.”

“You didn’t have to. But I think it would have almost been better if you had. You’d shut down so completely that it was worse than if you weren’t even there. I felt like I was talking to myself; I’ve done enough of that in my life, Jonas. It’s the one thing I know I can’t do anymore. I can’t be ignored, especially not by someone who’s supposed to love me. That was why I was so happy when I found you. But then you would shut down like that on me and it was a thousand times worse than being completely alone. You could be so distant and polite that I was nearly convinced that you had never cared about me until the day you almost hit me. Do you remember that?”

“It was an accident.”

“It wasn’t an accident. You squeezed my wrist so tight that you left a bruise around it. You had your fist curled. It was only at the very last second that you released it. I could tell you wanted to hit me hard, and not on the hand.”

“That’s not true.”

“It is true. And do you remember why? I said I was going to be coming home from work very late.”

“You were always coming home from work late.”

“You knew what I meant. And honestly, Jonas. If you hadn’t done anything, I wouldn’t have stayed much longer. I would have never let you grab me like that again, but I also wouldn’t have been able to stand your indifference anymore.”