Teddy Wayne - Kapitoil

I considered this, then said, “Fuck. Shit. Asshole.”

Rebecca laughed, and that softened the rigidity of our dialogue, and then we talked about a play she had seen the previous night that her roommate acted in, and about her brother and how he had joined his university’s newspaper, and then about how that might interest Zahira as well, as she was an excellent writer.

We entered an area called the Ramble which is known for birding. We spent several minutes watching different species, many of which we didn’t know the names of, but Rebecca made interesting analytical observations, e.g., how multiple birds frequently partner on a tree after a few birds first land there, as if the first birds are scouting to certify the tree’s safety. Although I didn’t learn as much as when I was with Mr. Schrub, it was more stimulating because I prefer problem solving to receiving data passively.

When we reached the end of the Ramble, we decided to progress to the reservoir at 96th St. By then I forgot about what happened on Thanksgiving and it was like we were still coworkers at adjacent desks, although we weren’t talking about work anymore.

At the Reservoir, Rebecca asked if I had anything else I wanted to do. “I am enjoying this,” I said. “Would you like to continue walking around?”

She said she would, and we shifted over to Riverside Park on the West Side and walked along the blue and green and gray water of the Hudson River, and through the Upper West Side aggregated with Jewish families and Asian restaurants, and finally all the way down to Chelsea and the variably angled streets and cafes of Greenwich Village and the classy and minimal clothing stores in SoHo and the less clean streets and caged athletics areas of the Lower East Side and the East Village. And although we ended up spending almost no money, minus water and some snacks (e.g., in Chinatown, where we ate dumplings and something called red-bean-paste bun), that’s not why I wanted to do it, but I’m glad we did that instead of paying for external entertainment. Sometimes merely partnering on a walk is sufficient.

When we were on Sullivan St., she was discussing her brother and the art classes he was taking at university, and I was asking her questions about art. “You know, there may be a bit of a language barrier, but you’re pretty easy to talk to,” she said. “Most people here, their conversations are intellectualized middle-school sarcasm. They’re just trying to prove how intelligent or cool they are. You’re not like that.” At first I thought she meant I wasn’t intelligent or cool, but then I understood she meant that I didn’t try to prove I had those qualities, and although I believe I am intelligent in certain modes, I’m of course not cool in any modes, so that part remains true.

We were both exhausted at 6:30 p.m. Rebecca asked if I was hungry, and I was, but so far restaurants in New York had caused problems for me with questions about halal food, and also I didn’t enjoy waiters serving me. So I proposed cooking dinner, and Rebecca suggested we do it in Brooklyn because groceries were cheaper there.

We discussed what to cook on the way there. Rebecca said she was trying to become a vegetarian, so we shouldn’t buy meat. She added, “And I’m not just saying that because it’ll be harder to find halal meat.” I told her I was glad she’d said that, and how I disliked it when Americans corrected their behavior around me. She didn’t say anything else about it.

We selected pasta with peppers and cauliflowers and a salad and divided the cost equally and took the food back to her apartment. Her roommate was out at her play. Rebecca asked if I wanted to hear music while we cooked.

“I liked the musician you played for me before,” I said. “The one who sings the line ‘Your hair upon the pillow like a sleepy golden storm.’”

“I remember,” she said.

This time she played a song called “Suzanne,” and it was equal in quality to the song she had played in her room. The line that intrigued me most was “And she shows you where to look among the garbage and the flowers,” because sometimes there is no difference between garbage and flowers, and things that people discard or ignore or forget or lose often contain the most valuable material or data, as Rebecca once said.

“Are you a good singer?” I asked.

“Yes,” she said. “If you consider the anguished cries of a fatally wounded dolphin ‘good.’”

She opened a bottle of white wine and poured herself a glass but she didn’t make any comments about how I could have some if I wanted. So I finished my glass of water and poured myself some as well.

We ate dinner in her living room, and when we finished we drank more wine, although I was careful to drink just a small amount. I discovered if I drank at the rate of 0.75 glasses/hour it slightly relaxed me but didn’t negate my control, which was optimal, especially in a situation like this.

In fact, I was still very nervous. When I kissed her previously, it happened because I temporarily didn’t strategize. Now I was strategizing too much, with ideas such as (1)the lighting was too bright; (2)we were both holding glasses of wine and a sudden movement could spill them (even though it was white wine and therefore less permanent); and (3)we were one foot apart from each other on the couch and moving closer to her would take too long.

I understood why movies about romance, such as the one I partially watched on television on Monday night, are so popular in the U.S., because they present high quantities of conflict, although I typically dislike the way those movies depict romantic conflicts, as they result either from simple misunderstandings or because the two main characters initially hate each other before falling in love, and although I am a novice at these situations, even I know that that conversion is illogical. In fact, frequently it is the opposite: People fall in love soon after they meet, and over time they lose it.

I said, “This wine has some pear notes.”

She smiled slightly and didn’t respond, and I had no other evaluations of the wine. Then I remembered my gift. “I have something for you,” I told her, and I retrieved my coat and depocketed R #1 .

“It is an algorithmic drawing,” I said. “I created it using the discrete Fourier transform, by mapping each spatial frequency band of a picture of a watermelon to its own color—”

She linked her arms around my neck and said, “Thank you.”

I was still nervous about what to do, but then I thought: You have to accept responsibility for your own decisions. She may reject you, but you will not know until you try, and if you do not even try, then it is as if you are rejecting yourself.

And then I shifted my head and kissed her, and she kissed me, and we stayed like that for a long time on the soft couch, and I thought how strange it was that two people could enjoy contacting their lips and tongues and hands for so long when most of the time we avoid contact.

She brought me to her bedroom, and our actions didn’t equal what I did on Halloween, but it was still stimulating. We enjoyed each other’s bodies but we didn’t say anything about it, as I did with Melissa. Rebecca wasn’t as thin as Melissa, but I preferred that. In addition, when I had difficulty releasing her bra, she whispered “It’s okay,” and did it herself. I also accidentally crashed my hand against her glasses at one point and they became asymmetrical on her nose. I apologized and was slightly humiliated by my poor dexterity, but she said “Look,” and intentionally made the glasses even more asymmetrical, then put her hands out in the air and rotated her head and eyes rapidly as if she could not see anything and was panicked. It was humorous, so I laughed, and she said, “Thank God glasses are sort of in now and being a nerd is almost cool. It was a rough stretch there in high school for people like us, right?” Initially I disliked how she accurately classified me as a nerd, but then I valued how she did not mind calling herself one and therefore I was careless that I was a nerd as well.