I was robust at understanding the structure of the game, although my limited English restricted me, and Rebecca won the first game easily.
We replayed, and when Rebecca created the word “C-A-NC-E-R-S” she clapped her hands and said, “Bingo plus triple-word score!” She laughed as she counted her points. I didn’t say anything, and she looked up and said, “What’s wrong? Afraid of getting blown out a second time?” It reminded me of what Mr. Schrub said after he won a point in racquetball. Americans enjoy boasting when they are winning competitions.
“I do not mind losing the game,” I said. “Your word made me think of my mother.”
She stopped scoring her move. “What about her?”
Before she could say something such as how she was sorry, I explained the basic facts of my mother’s death. I didn’t discuss the night of my birthday.
She didn’t say anything the entire time, just as Mr. Schrub didn’t. When it was over, she said, “I think you’re the first decent guy I’ve actually liked.”
“Decent means ‘average,’ correct?” I asked, because it did not seem like a compliment.
“No, not average,” she said. “Unusual.”
Suddenly I wanted to feel close to her in a way I hadn’t yet. I took her hand and we walked to her bedroom. It felt simultaneously familiar and new, which was an intriguing combination, and I thought that is how all experiences should feel, or how you should make them feel to you, but often they feel too familiar or we desire something exclusively because it is new. After a few minutes she said, “Do you want me to get a condom?” and I said yes, and she retrieved one from the bottom shelf of her clothing drawer.
My performance was slightly better than the time with Melissa. I paid attention to which actions produced no effect and which yielded a net gain, as in a boosting algorithm, and I utilized the strong ones in variable patterns so they wouldn’t become predictable, but after a period of time I merely let myself enjoy our actions, even if I wasn’t the cream of the cream partner. At one point we stopped moving and looked at each other at highly magnified range and she removed the perspiration from my forehead with her hand and I did the same for her and we both smiled, and I knew what it was like to know that your happiness was making someone else happy and have reciprocity for it, which was a true example of something that wasn’t a zero-sum game.
When I terminated, I lay down and was ready to fall asleep, but Rebecca took my hand and guided it on her body and instructed me on what to do until she also terminated. After that, she turned her back to me but placed my left arm around her body and my hand over her right breast, but soon she reversed and made a motion for me to reverse as well, with her arm around my body, and we fell asleep and remained that way, as if we were two open parentheses.
When I woke up in the morning, she was gone. The snow was several inches high on her windowsill and growing. She and Jessica were in the kitchen making pancakes.
“It’s pretty miserable out, and the trains are running a Saturday schedule,” Rebecca said as I served myself coffee. “So if you wanted to spend the night again.”
“You do not need to make external excuses for why I should stay,” I said. “I would like to even if it were pleasant out and the trains ran a non-Saturday schedule.”
Jessica laughed as she deposited chocolate chips in some of the pancakes. “Does he always talk like that?” she asked. But it didn’t make me feel bad. In fact, it made me feel unique, as when Barron said I had a sense of humor.
We stayed inside all day while it snowed and watched movies they owned and listened to music and read. I told Rebecca I had enjoyed the two Steinbeck books and she scanned her bookshelf and selected The Great Gatsby. F. Scott Fitzgerald’s sentences were more complex than Steinbeck’s and my progress was slow, but she told me to keep it until I finished. We played more board games and cooked a large lunch and dinner. It was one of the most enjoyable days I had spent in New York so far, even though nothing we did was exclusive to New York, but Rebecca and Jessica weren’t the class of people I would meet in Doha.
Jessica left at night, but Rebecca and I watched the movie Platoon on television. When it was over, I said it was interesting to observe the deviations from Three Kings in that they were about the U.S.’s two most recent wars, and of course the Gulf War movie was more optimistic, but they shared some parallels, especially in the way the male characters related to each other.
“Yeah,” she said. “Though they threw in a female in Three Kings and the Other is depicted in a much more generous light — concessions to PC tastes and Hollywood sensibility. Yet they both affirm the dominance of patriarchy and masculine excess transferred from father to son in warfare.”
After I asked her to define several of the words she used and to clarify her idea, I said it was very intelligent, and she said, “Good film critics borrow; great film critics steal.” I asked her to reclarify, and she said, “I lifted it from an essay I read in college. I’ll show you.”
She took me into her room and retrieved a book of essays on movies from a large bookshelf that incorporated, in decreasing quantity, books on history and culture, novels, computer science, finance, and poetry.
I tried reading the beginning of the essay, but it contained many larger words I didn’t know. Then Rebecca said, “It’s been a while since I’ve looked at it myself. Want to read it together?”
We sat on her bed and Rebecca read the first paragraph. Then she defined each larger word and explained the argument, and asked what I thought about it. We did this for each paragraph. The essay was 20 pages long, and it took us almost two hours. However, by the end I understood the idea very well and had gained some new vocabulary from it and the dictionary in the rear, e.g., “mise-en-scène” and “phallologocentric,” although I’m uncertain how valuable some of the words will be to know.
When we finished I said, “Rebecca, you will be a good teacher someday.”
She was quiet for a few seconds, then said “Thanks.” Similar to me, Rebecca doesn’t like to look boastful when she has performed well at something she truly is invested in, but I believe she was proud.
I also think she enjoyed that night’s activities more, because my skills were enhancing and I wasn’t as nervous about making an error.
The next morning it stopped snowing, but there were over eight inches on the ground. We read the Sunday New York Times, which was the solitary time the whole weekend I thought of Kapitoil, until Jessica suggested we go to Prospect Park.
The park was like a lake with thick white waves that were static. Many children rode sleds down a hill and built statues with the snow and some threw snow at each other, which caused at least two children to cry. Jessica worked as a waitress and had taken an orange tray from her restaurant, and we used it on the hill. It was one of the more stimulating exercises of my life, much more than racquetball, and Rebecca also said she missed doing winter activities in Wisconsin.
Jessica had to leave early to meet someone, but Rebecca and I stayed longer. We sat under a tree on a rock and cleared the snow off it and watched the sun set until just a few children remained. I wasn’t wearing my watch, and the only way to estimate the time was from the sun, and I wished we could spend several more days like this. It was as if time didn’t truly exist outside of us, which reversed how I always felt at work, when the world moves forward with or without you and you have to maintain progress with it.