Saïd Sayrafiezadeh - New American Stories

“Do you need an answer?”

“You know me, always curious.” How stupid was that? She’d been trying, not for the first time, to lovingly make clear to Elliot why she could no longer sleep with him. During the first hours of the conversation she’d been able to control the impulse to bait and flirt. But the business of swapping phones, the walking from room to room in the stuffy apartment, had, as it were, weakened her. It was as if, in losing that first phone, she’d lost a line of defense, however symbolic, against Elliot’s desire. Or maybe, she thought as she stood in the kitchen, opening and closing the dumbwaiter door with one hand, the necessary act of sacrificing one phone for another could be read as a veiled enactment of the sort of ambivalence required for alternating between lovers in the first place. Or was that too absurd?

“Say that once more. I didn’t hear what you were saying,” she said to Elliot. The heating pipes banged; day was turning to dusk. She listened to the hiss of steam escaping from the radiator beneath the kitchen window. Elliot began again, “I was saying that I sometimes think that you think that because I’m a psychiatrist I can automatically see all the different sides of a situation. But I’m not that kind of psychiatrist.”

“Please don’t talk to me like I’m one of your postdocs,” she said, and he took a long breath.

He said, “Kate, we’re involved with each other, Kate.”

“Jim’s your friend.”

“And so are you my friend.”

“Your wife is my friend, too.” She continued, “Fuck, I hate this. Now this motherfucking phone is beeping. Hold on. Elliot, can you hold on?” She swapped the bedroom phone for the insufficiently charged kitchen phone, went with that phone back into the bedroom, and sat on the edge of the bed.

“Kate, why are you bringing up Susan? I need to know what your point is. We agreed that we weren’t going to talk about Susan. So where are you going with this? Kate? Are you there?”

He waited.

“Will you talk to me? Please, don’t do this. Don’t do this, Kate. All right, fuck this, fuck this, fuck—”

His phone was beeping. It wasn’t the battery. It was another call. He said, “Kate, hang on a minute. Hang on, Kate.”

He took the call. “Hello?”

“It’s me,” she said, and then told him in a miserable voice that both her home phones were dead, and that she was on her cell phone and just wanted to say that she didn’t much enjoy dishonesty.

“You’ll have to speak up,” he said.

“Can you hear me? Tell me when the signal is clear.” She pressed the cell phone against her ear and walked from the bedroom to the living room, then into the kitchen, then straight down the hall, passing the tiny second bathroom, with the broken, unusable toilet, to the apartment’s miniature front foyer.

“Here?” she said. “Here?”

“I’m losing you,” he said. And so she retraced her route, winding up back in the living room, where she turned on a lamp. The sky was dark. Everywhere on the city’s horizon she saw other people’s lit windows. Once again, Elliot had bullied her — or she’d let him bully her — into leaving open the question of their affair. What was the use in arguing, anyway? Jim would come home any minute, and, a little later, the two of them would go out and meet Elliot and Susan for dinner. How crazy was that? She still had to shower and dress. She conceded to Elliot, “All right, I’ll think about it.”

“Tomorrow, then?” Elliot said, and added, “I knew you’d come to your senses.” He joked that if he didn’t get out of his office in the next few minutes he’d be forced to show up at the restaurant in his white coat. They said goodbye, and she put down the phone and wept for a quarter of an hour.

Downstairs at the florist’s, Jim’s bouquet for Kate was growing and growing. It featured not only yellow roses but red and pink solitaires, along with sprigs of heather, freesia, and alstroemeria; green and white calla lilies; blue irises; mums; and some other things the girl had plucked from buckets and waved in the air for him to see and approve. “What else? What does she like?” she’d asked him, as she leaned into the refrigerator and reached for more.

“That looks so nice. I think she’ll like just what you like,” he said, and wondered whether it was okay for him to have said it. Was it provocative? There were no other customers in the shop. Staying close but keeping his distance, he followed the girl from one display case to another. He might as well have been buying lingerie, he felt; and, in fact, it seemed to him that the bouquet was somehow intended for the girl, as much as for Kate, who would’ve been, well, not exactly mortified to know that her husband was downstairs using a shopgirl as a proxy to get himself worked up for sex later that night.

“Baby’s breath,” the girl said to him.

“Excuse me?”

“I love baby’s breath.”

“In that case, we’ll have to have a bunch,” Jim said.

“Good.”

She turned away, laid the unfinished bouquet on its side on the countertop beside the cash register, and, with her back to him, said, “We have a lot to work with here.” She glanced back over her shoulder (did she want him to come closer?), then, quickly — what a great flirt, he thought — turned away again and set to work breaking down the bouquet and separating the flowers into groups, a variegated series of stacks that she arranged not by color or type (except in the case of the combined red, pink, and yellow roses) but, as became clear, by stem length. When she had her piles, she picked up clippers.

“This will take a minute,” she said.

He watched her snip the stems. He said, “Take your time.”

But there was a problem: What were these flowers going to cost? The bouquet as she assembled it — as it came to be, in her hands — was broader and taller by far than what he’d come into the florist’s wanting. It was less a bouquet than a proper arrangement, a centerpiece, thanks in part to the leafy green branches the girl stuffed between blossoms, and the pale white baby’s breath, which she didn’t so much layer as clump into the globular mass.

“Can we take some out?” he asked, and wished he hadn’t. What kind of man courts a woman by letting her make an enormous bouquet for his wife, then asks her to pare back?

“What would you like me to take out?” the girl asked. Was she annoyed? She had her back to him. Did she think less of him? Did she think he was a cheap bastard who cheats on his wife?

“It’s just that I was hoping to use a particular Arts and Crafts vase on the mantel, which, in my opinion, these would look lovely in,” he elaborately lied. (Actually, there was a vase on the mantel — but so what?) He went on, “What I mean to say is that the vase I have in mind isn’t very big.”

Did he need excuses? Did he need to bring up his home life?

He went into reverse. “Come to think of it, never mind about that vase on the mantel. It would be a shame to wreck such a nice bouquet.”

“I’m not going to wreck anything.”

Was she scolding him? Were things heating up between them? He waited for her next move.

“I can give you a bigger vase,” she proposed, finally.

He held his breath. She had to be at least twenty years younger than he. But it wasn’t their age difference, nor the fact that he was married, that made him feel uncertain of himself. The problem was his thought process: The lithium he was taking in small doses brought a slower speed to reality. It was the lithium or the antidepressant cocktail or all of it in concert. At times, when he spoke, he felt as if a kind of mental wind were blowing his thoughts back at him, forcing him to self-consciously order his syntax as he pushed words out.