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Truck

HAD A FANTASY IN THE SHOWER ABOUT EM. I’m in my room, at my desk, when the buzzer buzzes. I walk into the hall, press the TALK button on the intercom, say, “Hi, who it is?" then press LISTEN and listen. Em says, “Hi, it’s me, Emily." Naturally my limbs go sort of numb and I feel as though I’m paralyzed. Of course I’m not really paralyzed, even temporarily paralyzed, without question I could move, run even, if absolutely necessary, and yet I still feel paralyzed, or how I imagine I would feel if I were paralyzed, something like those moments when I wake or half-wake in the night unable in my stupor to raise my arm from the pillow, as though my arm were no longer a part of me, as though another person’s arm were there in my bed attached to my shoulder and so my only way of moving this alien arm is to move my entire torso or else grab the arm with the opposite hand and physically place it where I want it to go. At first I’m not sure what to do. Em is downstairs in the lobby waiting for me to buzz her in, but as I’ve said I feel sort of paralyzed and confused. I didn’t say confused, did I? I just said paralyzed, but it’s true, I feel not only paralyzed but confused. Should I hide? How can I hide when Em has already heard me say, “Hi, who is it?" – assuming she recognized my voice, which I assume she did because I recognized hers without even dreaming it might be her – and besides, there’s no way I’d hide even if I could, I know that. So rather than buzz her in or say anything else into the intercom, I walk downstairs and she’s standing there in the outer lobby, if that’s what it’s called, the area between the front door and the door that actually locks – the lobby door, I suppose – and she’s framed by the frame of the window in the door.

For a moment we simply look at each other through the glass.

She’s wearing a coat that looks like something a Russian peasant would wear, not that I know what Russian peasants wear, and of course she’s so fetching in this coat that I find it impossible to hold her gaze, so instead I glance down at her mouth and notice her two front teeth – her mouth is slightly open so that I can see these two teeth lurking there, in her mouth – but then I almost immediately stop looking at her mouth and her teeth because it’s way too unnerving and besides, it seems rude, particularly since I remember her saying in the restaurant that her teeth are too large. Which is ridiculous, her teeth her definitely not too large. Or they are somewhat large, but they’re also amazingly sexy, for teeth. So I make a mental note to find some way to tell her how sexy her teeth are, something I’ve never before told anyone, never before having found anyone’s teeth sexy.

How much time goes by before I finally reach out and open the door? Three seconds? Five seconds? However long it is, I can barely stand to look at her like this and to have her look at me, for us to just be looking at each other without saying anything and to wonder if it means what it seems to means, if our looking like this for three or maybe five seconds will one day become the sort of moment we discuss in retrospect, as a kind of turning point, the moment we both first knew what was to happen or at least what we both wanted to happen and were beginning to believe might really happen since it seemed that the other might want it to happen as well.

So after these three or maybe five seconds, I open the door, the lobby door, and invite her in with a sweep of my arm. She walks in and without any warning launches into a kind of monologue, there in lobby, saying something like, “Dude, you don’t know what I went through. The only thing I could remember was which side of the street your building was on and the slope of the street in front of the building – you know, the way the street’s a little downhill there – only I got the slope wrong, right? I mean I had no way of knowing when I dropped you off that time that I might come back, or maybe I did know frankly, frankly I don’t remember what I did or didn’t know at that point, or even if what I thought I knew was really what I knew, but I certainly didn’t think I was going to have to remember where it was, right? So here I am driving down your street as slow as I can, trying to gauge how sloped the street is, when I finally spot this building that looks familiar enough to maybe possibly be yours, although I don’t really think that it is yours, I mean it could be yours, I can’t swear that it isn’t, but deep down I really don’t think that it is, and so just to be certain I double-park and go into the lobby, and it turns out that there’s this guy there checking his mail who’s balding in a particularly unattractive way. I mean I’ve never found balding men attractive, but this guy is an especially sad case, he’s got this lonely little patch of hair in the front all by itself and I want to tell him to just shave it off, it’s not doing him a bit of good, but I don’t say this, you can’t tell a complete stranger how pathetic they look, in fact you can’t tell anyone how pathetic they look, can you? which is sad in a way because if some people knew how pathetic they look they’d probably want to do something about it, take some action, that’s what I think, assuming they could. But anyway, your name’s not on any of the mailboxes, not that I really thought it would be, only just to be totally sure I ask this balding guy if he happens to know you and then I try to describe to him what you look like, or what I think he would think you look like, and he says that no one fitting your description lives in the building, although he hasn’t lived there long enough to feel confident that he’s actually seen everyone who lives there – an innocent enough thing to say, I suppose – but then I start getting this weird vibe from him, like he’s lonely and wants someone to talk to, right?" “Right," I say – it’s the first thing I’ve had the chance to say – and then Em continues in this vein, ostensibly explaining how she figured out where I live, and the whole time I just stand there dumbfounded, or not dumbfounded, spellbound, until she finally arrives in the story at the right building and finds my name on the mailbox and I say, “Upstairs?" and she puts her arm in mine and says, “Dude, I forgot the best part," and we head up the stairs like that, with her arm in mine and her telling me the best part. In another version neither of us says anything until she says something like, “Aren’t you going to invite me up?" and I say, “Aren’t you going to come on up?" and then we both laugh and begin to walk up the stairs. In another version she strolls right into my arms as if the place had her name on it and holds herself against me like she did outside the restaurant and doesn’t say anything and I do likewise and we remain like this until one of the yarmulkes opens the outside door, at which point we break the embrace and stand there with our arms still loosely joined, smiling stupidly and not saying anything until the yarmulke walks past and safely up the stairs and then I say, “You coming up?" and she says, “Can I?" and I say, “You can," and she looks at her shoes and says, “Can I?" and then I tug the sleeve of her coat and we head up the stairs together. In another version she says something melodramatic like, “I shouldn’t be here," so I say, “Where should you be then?" and she says, “Anywhere but here," so I say, “Why come then?" No, I don’t say that, I say, “Is it really so wretched?" No, I don’t say that, that’s stupid, I say, “Look, I’m happy you’re here, I really am, now why don’t you come up and see where I live?" and she bites her lip in a way that seems deliberate, like she wants me to think that she’s torn when maybe she isn’t really so torn, and then she nods yes, still biting.

Only this isn’t even what my fantasy was about. No, my fantasy was about what happens upstairs. Because you see, once we get upstairs I consider giving Em a tour of the apartment but then decide it might be better not to have her meet my roommate Boris, or at least try to delay her meeting Boris, as Boris might get ideas, but then I think that’s ridiculous because there’s nothing for Boris to get ideas about, Em’s just this woman that I met two times, the first of which was during this date she was supposedly having with my best friend, but by the time I think this thought Em sees my room and says, “This is your room, right?" and I nod yes and she goes in and sits in the green chair and I move my desk chair over near the bed and sit down and remove my shoes and place my feet on the bed and as I do this I notice out of the corner of my eye the framed photo I keep on my desk of Tessa.

At first I consider trying to find some way to get Em out of the room so that I can hide the photo of Tessa, but then I think no, for all I know Em may have already seen the photo of Tessa and besides, Em already knows about Tessa, I told Em about Tessa in the restaurant before I knew or had any inkling of what was going to happen outside the restaurant, so hiding the photo is not going to change anything and besides, nothing has happened or is going to happen so there’s nothing wrong with Tessa being a witness, via her photo, of whatever’s going to happen, because nothing is.

But this isn’t what happens. What happens is, it’s much later and we’re lying on my bed – this is my fantasy now, the one I had in the shower – and we’re both fully dressed but for our shoes and we’re lying side-by-side on top of the covers and not touching. That is, except perhaps for our feet – perhaps her feet are resting casually against mine, exerting the slightest amount of pressure, but even so I don’t think there’s any rubbing involved, our feet just happen to be together like this, or this is how we’re both acting about it, like it’s some normal everyday thing, no big deal, although of course I’m totally focused on what it feels like to feel her feet through my socks, or rather through her socks and my socks both, and all this time we’re talking about nothing, I don’t even know what were talking about, it doesn’t matter what we’re talking about, what matters is this thing we’re doing with our feet, but of course we can’t admit this or even acknowledge this, in fact the only way we can allow it to happen is to pretend it isn’t happening, to pretend to be so engrossed in what we’re saying that we don’t even notice what’s going on down there. The key thing is to just talk and keep talking, to maintain a steady steam of more or less innocuous remarks, it doesn’t matter what so much, “I did this," “I thought that," “This is what I read on a box of cornflakes," only in the middle of this blather, because that’s what it is, it’s just blather, mindless blather, I suddenly hear myself say, I honestly don’t know why I say it, or yes I do know why, it’s because it’s what I’m thinking, I just suddenly say I’m thinking, I know I shouldn’t but I say it anyway, I say, “Have you ever been about to step out into the street when some humongous truck comes barreling down the road so that you actually have to jump back to save your life, or at least that’s how it seems to you when it happens?" and Em says, “Well, I suppose," and I say, “Good, good, because that’s exactly what this is like, except it’s scarier in a way because you don’t really look like a truck, do you?" and Em laughs and I laugh also, she begins and I join her, although it’s not really that funny when you think about it, what we’re laughing about, it’s actually kind of frightening, the thought of Em as this humongous truck, frightening because it’s true in a sense, the analogy is pretty accurate on some level, and so I want to put this uncomfortably accurate analogy behind me and move on to whatever happens after we finish laughing, because it seems that maybe we’re about to kiss, that maybe we’ll finish laughing then somehow just end up kissing, I don’t know how, I need time to think about it – but then I get stuck on this idea of Em as a truck and I see myself standing in the road with Em coming straight for me, I know it’s silly but I find I can’t move, I’m paralyzed, or rather I want to pretend that I’m paralyzed, yes, that’s it, I’m pretending that I’m paralyzed so that Em will run me down, I want her to run me down, and of course Tessa’s there too, in some sense, but I’m not letting myself think about Tessa, no, I’m thinking about Em and how she’s about to run me down, how we’re about to have this sort of slow-motion collision, only just as it’s about to happen, just as Em is about to plow into me, I realize – I’ve managed to ignore this till now, I’ve managed to put this out of my mind – that I’ve used up nearly all the hot water. You see, I’ve long since turned off the cold water and am just running the hot, but the hot has become more and more tepid over time, so that now I have no choice but to turn it off as well, I can’t risk waiting until it becomes any colder, I risk waiting until I’m standing in an ice-cold shower, so that’s what I do, I turn the water off completely, the hot as well as the cold, at which point my fantasy abruptly ends, it ends with Em and I on my bed, fully clothed, our feet touching through our socks and the both of us laughing at the thought of her as this humongous truck.