Emma Rathbone - Losing It

He burst out laughing. And then I saw him look at me in a new way, size me up as a possibility, and then immediately extinguish any thought that I might be coming on to him.

I liked the warmth in his eyes. He had such a completely different feeling about him than Bill Meeks did. Bill was filled with compacted, frantic resentment, and this person was all trust and light and belief and the sense that anything was worth a try.

“I want to design logos,” he said.

“Really?”

He nodded.

“That’s nice,” I said. “That’s nice and specific. Do you have anything in mind? Any logos you’ve got in the pipeline?”

“Well.” He got kind of serious. “I’ve been thinking about it. I have one idea — it would be for contact lenses?”

I nodded.

“Just for any brand. You always see people putting them in, in the commercials. And clear green fields and things like that. But I was thinking, there could be a little blue guy.”

“A little blue guy?” I said.

“Yeah,” he said. “As the logo.” He nodded to himself. “And he would be on the box and everything.”

“Sure, yeah,” I said. “What would he be doing?”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, on the box.”

“I don’t know,” said Gerald. “Maybe, sitting on a porch swing? Or, standing next to a windmill.”

I waited for him to go on.

“Cool,” I said. “Maybe he could be leaning against the letters, causing them to jumble together.”

Gerald considered it. It dawned on him. “Yeah,” he said. “I like that.”

“Or lying on top of them. Like he’s just been lying on top of them.”

He nodded. “That’s good, too. Anyway,” he said. “It’s just one idea I have. I have to think about it more.”

“I think it’s really good,” I said. “You’ve got to start somewhere.”

“Yeah.” He laughed a little. “I guess so.”

There was something else about the way he looked at me — a slight, decorous pulling back, as if he didn’t want me to think he expected anything out of our flirting. I could feel it. If it was going to be him, I was going to have to be the one to make a move.

I thought about it for the last half hour of the class. I was getting nervous. I kept looking at the clock above the chalkboard. Soon people would start gathering their things. I didn’t want to wait another week for something to happen — here was a man, we were flirting, and this was exactly what I had come here this summer to do. Of all the possible ways it could happen, of all the different men and varieties of the experience, a nice guy in a thick sweater from an art class was not the worst of all possible outcomes.

I was getting so focused on the end of the class that I was clamming up, going rigid while trying to bend myself into affecting the right kind of measured nonchalance.

Luckily, he gave me an in, and I went ahead and took the plunge.

“Crap,” he said, looking down at his rabbit’s foot, which was splattered with a little paint.

“It’ll come out,” I said.

“This was my favorite one.” He looked up at me while unclipping it from his belt and wrapping it in some newspaper. “I have a collection.”

“Of rabbit’s feet?”

“Yup.”

“I’d like to see it sometime.”

For a moment he seemed terrified. And then it dawned on him, what was happening. “You should.”

Strangely, I felt proud of him.

“When?” I said.

And then it happened so quickly, the way we made plans and exchanged numbers, as if we were both trying to trap something.

We looked at each other, both a little embarrassed, smiling.

I had it all planned out.

Viv and I sat across from each other, a few days after the watercolor class, at a restaurant that had fashioned itself like a French bistro. Smudged mirrors with lightbulbs around them hung on the walls, shedding a golden, cheerful glow. It was rainy outside and the windows were fogged up and it was humid. Viv’s hair was frizzier than usual, but she looked nice. She was wearing a silk blouse with a faint zebra print, and a necklace made of green stones and dangling, antique-looking earrings. They were swinging back and forth. She put up her hands to still them. “I think it should be incorporated more into our general vocabulary,” she said, “‘My personal Hillary Step,’ that kind of thing.”

She was telling me about a book on Mount Everest she was reading, and the people who have climbed it. We were on our first glass of wine, and color was leaping into her face.

“Yeah, that would be useful,” I said. “You could say, ‘Getting past that performance exam was a real Hillary Step.’”

“Exactly,” she said.

“It sounds good,” I said.

“I got it from Melayna,” she said.

“Who?” I said, kidding.

“Melayna,” she said.

“Yeah, no, I know.”

“She’s turned out to be interesting,” said Viv, with authority. She sat back and looked around in a pleased, dignified manner. “I like it here,” she said. “How did you find it? I never hear of these things.”

“There was an article about it in the paper,” I said. “The weekly one.”

A woman with a wet umbrella and hair plastered to her head walked by, brushing our table with her wet raincoat.

I shook my leg up and down under the table. I looked at my watch. In about twenty minutes, if things went according to plan, Gordon was going to show up with my sunglasses. I’d planted them at his store that morning, made a point of going there before work. Then that afternoon, I’d called the store and told him I’d left them there, and would he mind just bringing them by the restaurant right around the corner where Viv and I were going to be eating dinner?

I figured, maybe Viv just needed someone to shove her out of this cycle of misunderstanding she had with Gordon, someone to kick the whole thing into gear and get it ticking the right way. She’d seemed touched when I asked her out to dinner, my treat, to thank her for letting me stay there over the summer. Once we were all sitting together, and they’d started with their rapport, I would put down a bunch of cash, make up some excuse, and leave. All they needed was to be sitting across from each other, with a few glasses of wine between them. I needed to know this could happen.

“Except”—Viv sat forward again—“she has this sand garden. That she keeps at the front desk. I swear, it’s driving me up the wall.” We were still talking about Melayna. “She scrapes it back and forth, back and forth, and I can hear it from across the hall. Sometimes I want to go over there and take it and chuck it into the trash and just see what she does.”

I had a flash of what Viv would have been like in college, when she was young: daring and no-nonsense, probably really into theater, easily hurt, noble. A great friend.

“That would drive me crazy, too,” I said.

A waiter came and took down our orders for appetizers. A ceiling fan turned listlessly above. I played with my napkin and checked the time on my phone. Gordon should have closed up already, if he kept to the hours on his website. Maybe a customer was keeping him late. Next to us, a waiter cleaned a wineglass with his apron.

I could tell Viv thought I seemed distracted, but I couldn’t help turning around to look at the front of the restaurant, toward the door. As soon as I turned back to her she said, “Oh, God, it’s Gordon,” and her face flashed with something that looked an awful lot like irritation. I looked behind me again; he was weaving through the tables.

“Yes it is!” I said, facing her again. I tried to smile. “Actually, I told him to come here.”

She raised her eyebrows at me, confused.