Tizita Page 18

  How could I have predicted what would happen that night? Of all people, I’m more than familiar with the power of the sensitive dependence on initial conditions, known commonly as the Butterfly Effect, a phrase coined by mathematician Edward Lorenz to describe the impact of small events on much larger ones in our interdependent universe. According to chaos theory, the flap of a butterfly’s wings in Brazil might lead to a tornado in, say, New York. The trouble is that, though we may take from that image the awareness that our choices really do matter, we never know exactly how.

  All I knew when I entered Bob’s apartment was that it was even more Bob-ish than his car, smelling comfortingly of spaghetti sauce, musk, and the heavy product he wore in his hair. The place was a warren of unmatched furniture, two-foot-tall mountains of books, only slightly shorter stacks of academic journals and papers, and Ikea-style shelving displaying carefully arrayed seashells of all sorts grouped by type, color, and size.

  I was aware of Bob silently watching me, as if daring me to make fun of his eccentric collection, but I was more interested in how he’d arranged his shells in patterns. I knew about patterns. At certain points in my life, they were all there was to give me a sense of cohesion and meaning, a perfect antidote to the void. Reflections of light in the waves of a pool, birds hopping in and out of branches, fractals, the Fibonacci Sequence playing itself out across the natural world. The possibility of a pattern in my own life was another story. If I could ever manage to discern that one, I might actually deserve my Nobel.

  But now a cluster of conch shells grabbed me from the edge of the abyss. I walked over and put one of the larger ones to my ear and heard the roar of the ocean. I commented on it to Bob, who favored me with a tolerant smile. “You know,” he said patiently, “my friends in middle school—not that I had many—used to make fun of people who thought they could hear the ocean in a conch shell, when in fact it’s captured ambient noise around them resonating inside the shell. But that’s never stopped me from sticking one to my ear when I’m stuck at home and missing the sound of the sea.”

  Mumbling, “Of course,” I felt mortified at my ignorance.

  But Bob was moving away toward a narrow hallway. He looked back at me. “Speaking of shells and sound, take a look at this.” I followed him obediently, noticing several Lakers pennants and a few framed science fair awards pinned up on the dimly lit wall. I turned after him into his bedroom. The effect was even more claustrophobic. There were more shelves here, one of them looming rather precariously over a single bed covered by—I blushed for him—a Star Wars-themed bedspread. He followed my eyes and shrugged without an ounce of embarrassment. “Never thought to get rid of it. Still crazy about those movies. Especially the first one. Thought it was the most amazing thing I’d ever seen. What about you? Did you like it?”

  Who didn’t? My feelings about Bob changed forever right there and then. A man who didn’t dissolve in shame at a moment like this was either very stupid (he wasn’t), very naïve (well, not that much), or supremely comfortable in his own skin. I envied him.

  Bob took a large brown and cream conch from the second to top shelf, and as he lifted it to his lips, I saw a tassel dangling from the other end. He blew into what I now realized was a hole at the tight end of the shell. It made a long, reverberating vibrato. Bob smiled at my obvious surprise. He rubbed the blowhole with the bottom of his T-shirt before handing me the instrument. As I put my lips to the shell, he remarked, “It’s called a nagak. Korean. They play it in rituals. The shell’s from a large sea snail, Charonia Tritonis. Triton’s trumpet.”

  I knew about Triton from the days I’d been tutored by Adam, knew he was half man and half fish, the son of Poseidon, or, as the Romans called him, Neptune. As Adam had remarked at the time, a little moist-eyed, “So it’s kind of poetic that we call the largest moon of Neptune Triton.” I’d learned by then that Adam had pretty much been deserted by his own senator father, and if I wasn’t already a little in love with him then, his teary eyes had sealed the deal. God, I thought with a pang, how I’d love to fall into Adam’s arms now, comforted by his Campbell’s Chicken Soup B.O.

  I found myself blowing harder than I’d intended into the nagak. “Wow!” Bob exclaimed. “You’ve got some serious chops.” I made him explain the expression, promising myself to enter it into my Diary of Patois, Cant, and Jargon when I got home.

  Returning the nagak to its place, Bob retrieved another shell from a lower shelf. I resisted the temptation to diagram the design of the dandruff on the top of his head. “Look at this beauty,” he murmured, passing it to me.

  I’d never seen anything quite like it. It was apricot in hue, with little tendrils of turquoise and a multitude of ornate figures carved into it. I looked up, “What?”

  “It’s from India. They call it a sankha. They use it in religious ceremonies.” He placed a finger on one of its delicate images. “This one’s Vishnu.” He slid his finger down. “And this one here’s Lakshmi.” He passed it to me. “The person I bought it from told me she’s a symbol of female fertility.” The sound of Assefa’s snapping condom in my ears, I blanched and passed the shell back to Bob with unseemly haste.

  He frowned. “Am I boring you?”

  I shook my head, spitting out a vehement “No!” Itching to get out of the room, I said, “You know, I’m a little thirsty.”

  Bob clapped his hand to his forehead, nearly blinding himself with the tip of the sankha. He set it back on the shelf. “Jeez, what a jerk I am. Definitely not a good host.” He hurried toward the doorway, then turned. “Red or white?”

  I looked at him blankly.

  “Wine.”

  “Oh. Well, since you ask ... red, please.”

  “Merlot?”

  “Great.” I followed him out of the room.

  His kitchen was a humble affair, more suited to a railway coach than an apartment. A few cereal boxes, a giant cellophane bag of popcorn, and a quartet of canisters containing various shapes of dried pasta lined a Formica counter of a particularly odious shade of chartreuse.

  He caught me staring. “Fifties. Lousiest period on the planet for interior design. It’s really a disturbing color, isn’t it?”

  I smiled, lying, “Oh, it’s not so bad. Just ... unusual.”

  “You think? They had it everywhere when I was a kid. Not in your home?”

  Thinking back to father’s modernistic, granite and chrome-heavy kitchen, expanded to feed all the babies he’d saved from the devil abortionists, I shook my head. And hurriedly changed the subject. “Seems like a lot of those conches are used for religious purposes. Are you religious yourself?”

  “Ha!” Bob pulled out the cork with surprising savoir-faire. Retrieving a couple of water-stained wine glasses and carefully pouring, he said, “I was the only child of a pair of Jewish atheists.” He gave a short laugh and passed my glass to me, clinking it so hard with his own that they both spilled onto an olive green linoleum floor embellished with haphazard flecks of baby-poop yellow. I grabbed a paper towel from its standing dispenser and knelt to wipe our spills, with Bob muttering, “You don’t have to do that.” He took the soggy paper from me, squashed it into a ball, and tossed it across the room into a wastebasket. “Not bad,” he crowed, then nodded toward the living room. “Shall we?” I took a nice long sip as we walked, deciding that Bob had surprisingly good taste in wine.

  As we settled onto a tattered but cozy slipcovered sofa, Bob clicked glasses with me again, this time intoning quite seriously, “Here’s to friendship.” I took what I realized too late was an indecorously long swig of wine. Bob raised an eyebrow and set down his glass on the pine coffee table. Running his finger around the glass’s rim, he said, “Now where were we? Oh, yeah. Religion. What I learned as a kid about the religion of my ancestors would easily pass through the eye of a needle.” He paused to make sure I got the joke. I smiled obediently, using the occasion to throw back another overzealous swig of wine. “Oh, I knew that Jews as a group laid claim
to the moral basis of Western Civilization. You know, the Ten Commandments and all. One of my favorite movies”—he grinned—“besides Star Wars, was Raiders of the Lost Ark. I learned from that about the stone tablets inscribed with the commandments being supposedly hidden in the Ark of the Covenant.”

  You can imagine where that took me. If only Assefa’s father hadn’t gone off to research the Ethiopian version of where that Ark was housed, I might be in my lover’s arms right now. But he wasn’t my lover anymore, was he?

  As if sensing my sadness, Bob rose abruptly and turned on a laptop sitting on a small brown side chair. He looked back at me. “Ryan Adams?” I nodded and took advantage of the moment to finish the rest of my glass. It really was good.

  When he sat down again, he seemed a few inches closer. He gave a little laugh. “My parents used to joke that I was breaking the commandment to honor your father and mother whenever I objected to the unfairness of their rules. They’d inevitably come back with something like, ‘Life isn’t fair,’ or as my dad liked to paraphrase his fellow Columbia grad, William Goldman, ‘Life’s not fair, but at least it’s fairer than death.’”

  I knew that was a cue to laugh, but I couldn’t. My heart felt like drying concrete. We sat for a long while without speaking, music filling the silence. Bob roused himself to retrieve the wine bottle from the kitchen. As he refilled our glasses, it occurred to me that he was keeping pace with me.

  Ryan Adams had reached his second refrain of “Damn, Sam, I love a woman that rains,” when I suddenly realized I had to use the toilet. Excusing myself hastily, I ran up the hall and pulled down my panties just in time to release a veritable flood and one tiny puce-ish poop that would fit in perfectly with Bob’s kitchen décor. I felt grateful for his fragrant green tea hand wash and poured a little into the toilet bowl after I dried my hands.

  Walking a little shakily back to the living room, I inadvertently plopped down an inch or two closer to Bob than before. He asked in a tone of concern, “Everything okay?”

  I assured him that it was, hazily aware that, right now, the word “Okay” had absolutely no meaning. The last time I’d investigated the word’s origins, I’d found multiple possibilities ranging from the French aux Cayes (referring to good rum from the Haitian port Cayes) to orl korrekt, a humorous misspelling of the “all correct” used in the U.S. in the seventeenth century. Tightening my lips with Germanic precision, I let slip a “But vich vun is korrekt, mein herr?” accompanied by a sardonic little laugh. Which seemed to send Bob on a defensive tear.

  “Listen,” he said, “just so you don’t think my family was gloomy all the time, you should know that we went snorkeling together at least once a year, sometimes in Baja or Hawaii, but more often in La Jolla or San Diego. That’s how I fell in love with the sea.” The tenderness with which his lips wrapped themselves around the word “sea” had the effect of softening my leaden heart. I gave him an encouraging smile. He cocked his head at me, perhaps not quite sure whether to trust me, but continued anyway, “We weren’t exactly rich. The take-home pay of a couple of high school science teachers is pretty pathetic. But my folks knew how to have fun. Almost every weekend, they’d have dinner parties. Mostly potluck dinners for other science teachers, whose kids were just as dorky as I was.” Bob leaned back and closed his eyes, as if summoning up a memory. “Benjamin Hurley was the most pathetic of the group; he actually let my pet parakeet Teddy out the window to see if he’d fly back again. He didn’t.”

  I was aware of Bob’s loss traveling on some invisible railroad from his heart to mine. I put my hand on his shoulder and he took it and held it against his chest. I could feel his heart under his navy blue shirt. Just as I registered that it was beating rather quickly, Bob opened his eyes, leaned forward, and kissed me on the lips. I was so stunned that I didn’t stop him. If anything, I felt like a neutral observer watching him fold his torso across mine, his hand slowly traveling from my hand to my neck, pulling me toward him. I let his tongue discover my tongue. Our mouths tasted of Merlot. Bob pulled away for a moment. He looked stunned. I said nothing, but reached toward the table and drained my glass. Bob followed suit and sent me a hopeful looking smile. I barely recognized him. In unison, we rose from the couch. I followed him to his room.

  I’d forgotten about the bedspread. I threw him a sideways look. He was close to my age, but so much younger. I sat on the edge of the bed and motioned him to me. I cupped my hand over the bulge in his jeans, then undid the button and tried to pull down the zipper, hampered by what I fuzzily thought must be the world’s biggest erection.

  Bob was breathing so heavily I thought he might have a heart attack. We fumbled together until we got the zipper down. I reached toward his member, painfully aware that it was nothing like Assefa’s, but he pushed me back onto the bed, and, stronger than I would have thought, lifted me up so that he could get me further up on the bed.

  He kissed my neck. Then my eyelids. They fluttered like shy butterflies at the touch of his lips. He inserted his tongue into my mouth. Pawing at my blouse, he managed with my own assistance to remove all my clothes. He put his finger in my tweeter. On a cloud of melt, I asked him to suck my little man.

  “What do you mean?” he asked thickly.

  I realized I’d used Assefa’s word for it, but at that point lust trumped everything. “My clitoris,” I responded, rather loudly.

  “Ohhh,” he breathed. And complied.

  Things moved rather quickly after that. He moved back up my body, his fingers pinching my nipple and his eyes locked into mine. “Condom!” I cried, as he came.

  As the sticky wetness trickled out of me, I thought, with some astonishment, This is getting to be a habit. With a shudder, it occurred to me that I might be inhabiting parallel universes in which the same things happen. The same unwanted things. I pushed that one to the farthest corner of my mind.

  From the other room, the sultry sounds of the Chromatics’ Cherry slinked in. Bob rolled off me, and I felt around for his T-shirt, which had come off somehow in the heat of things. I couldn’t remember him removing it, but also knew it would be close by. I lifted up my bottom, noting that Bob’s semen had spread like a Rorschach across the nose of Chewbacca the Wookie. I shoved the shirt over it before I let my bottom down again.

  Bob was lying on his side, his head propped up by his hand, his thick eyebrows furrowed with worry. “Was that okay? I mean, I know I ....”

  I rolled toward him and put a hand on his mouth. “Don’t,” I said. I put my lips against his damp forehead and left them there long enough to feel him relax.

  Before I knew it, I’d begun to cry. Bob, who’d been on the whole a gentle lover, was kind enough not to say anything. He stroked my arm. His tenderness had the effect of drawing my hurt and longing for Assefa to the surface like a phlebotomist’s needle. But there was something about Bob’s actual touch that reminded me of Grandfather. Grandfather, whose lined and pop-veined hand could soothe me in the most troubling of times. As my tears subsided, Bob traced a slow circle around my belly button with one finger and softly said, “Once upon a time, oh, maybe about fourteen billion years ago, the void got so weary of itself that it erupted into a giant explosion. The eruption took so much energy that it was followed by a dark and quiet state that took ages and ages, at least a couple of hundreds of millions to years, to cool into forces and matter that would coalesce into all kinds of new possibilities ....”

  I reflected for probably the zillionth time how much our scientific understanding of the origin of the universe was echoed by the Biblical myth of creation.

  Bob burst into my bubble. “You don’t regret it?”

  Momentarily disoriented, I thought he was referring to the birth of the cosmos. But then I realized he was talking about our having had sex. I shook my head. “Not really, but maybe I should. I saw this movie once—I can’t remember what it was called or even the name of the actor who said it. He said he had no regrets. I remember thinking, ‘What kind of ass
hole has no regrets?’” I stared at Bob, who lifted himself onto his elbows and stared back at me. “Maybe I’ve become that asshole.” I shrugged. “Oh, I don’t know. Aadita tells Sammie and me all the time that the key to tranquility lies in the capacity to let go.”

  It was as if I’d set off a land mine. Bob exploded. “Let go? I hate that shit!” He jumped off the bed and stood with his arms akimbo, his penis shriveling as if in fear of his rage. “As a scientist you should know better. The crisis of global warming is spinning out of control precisely because people have decided it’s too much of a giant bummer to do anything about, anyway, so let’s just ignore it. No worries. It’s all good. Great. Let’s achieve personal serenity while thousands of species, including our own, slip through our fingers. We need to feel regret if we’re going to stop this slide into disaster. And if we don’t change, all the Buddhists, Christians, and Voodoo Hoodoos are gonna regret it.”

  As Bob ranted, I could feel myself split into two Fleurs. I knew he was shouting out of a deep hurt, one that had nothing to do with what we’d just been up to, and it was almost funny, but not really, not when you considered what he was upset about. Of course, he was right, but his timing was, well, I guess you could call it Geek Timing. It was hard to believe that this shouting, naked giant was the same Bob who, only a week ago, was an object of mildly annoyed amusement in my eyes. At the same time, the raised voice, the male presence looming over me brought back with unwelcome vividness the voidish terror kicked up with some regularity by Father in his I-hate-children-underfoot moods. I wrestled free from the harness of politeness and flung myself off the bed and down the hall to the bathroom. Locking the door, I noticed that Bob’s clearly deficient plumbing had conspired to leave a vagrant portion of my previous little poop in the bowl. I resisted the temptation to lay strips of toilet paper across the seat, reminding myself that it was my own bottom that had been the last one to press against it.

  Bob knocked softly at the door as I peed. The heat had clearly left him. “Fleur, I’m so sorry. Can you forgive me? I can’t think what came over me.”