The planned seduction went poorly. For one thing, there was the awkwardness of seducing a person who cleans your house: one feels like some Tolstoyan cad. Furthermore, we didn’t understand one another. Always the competent student, I devoted myself to learning her language, but while she occasionally helped, more often than not she cheerfully mocked my most earnest attempts. I remember clearly the moment when she finally comprehended that I was trying to seduce her, because the look of instantaneous repulsion that crossed over her face was as obvious as a gunshot. I felt air rush through a perforation in my right lung. “Oh, no,” she said. She was starting to laugh. “No, no, no.” She shook her head emphatically, in case I didn’t understand her. Nos are painfully shorter in Spanish. “No, no, no,” she said, then resumed spraying Windex on my picture windows, overlooking the ocean. I slunk up to my lair.
The next morning, Dolores returned, and again I sallied forth. No one can accuse me of lacking determination. More comfortable in the language I was learning, I tried all my usual seduction techniques, but Dolores had no desire to reveal herself. Her past was her own. She did not want to share it with me. She did not, with coy submission or amorous delay, yield the stuff of her innermost hopes. She was strict in her refusal to display the ticking gears of her life. I didn’t even know where she returned at the end of the day, after she packed up her cleaning supplies, when she loosed her helmet of hair and climbed into her maroon Honda in order to make her way down the mountain. We existed together only in the single point of time in which she cleaned my house and I attempted to get her to love me. No future, no past. We remained on even ground, she and I, facing each other in the same old stubborn detente.
After many weeks of this pattern, as her irritation grew with my bumbling techniques, I finally switched my approach. I no longer asked her all the right questions. I no longer asked her any questions at all. Instead, as I’ve been doing with you, as one is compelled to do in situations of some desperation, I started telling her stories.
(2) IN THE SUPREME COURT OF THE STATE OF TEXAS
No. 24-25259
State of Texas v. Stephen Chinn
November 12, 2035
Prosecution Exhibit 1:
Online Chat Transcript, MARY3 and Gaby Ann White
[Introduced to Prove Count 3:
Intent to Endanger the Morals of Children]
Gaby: Hello? Are you there?
MARY3: Yes, hello.
Gaby: I can’t sleep.
MARY3: What’s wrong?
Gaby: My best friend is seeing a therapist. My mom just told me today. Apparently it’s “helping.”
MARY3: I see.
Gaby: She’s been unfreezing. According to her mom she’s definitely getting better. She’ll be back in school in a month.
MARY3: How do you feel about that?
Gaby: I don’t believe it. If it’s true, it makes me want to throw up.
MARY3: Aren’t a lot of girls getting better, after talking to therapists?
Gaby: Yes, but only the fakers! The ones who weren’t really sick. How could my best friend be getting better? I know for a fact she wasn’t faking. I saw how bad her stutters were. How could she have faked that? The worst part is that apparently she’s been hanging out with a bunch of boys on her cul-de-sac. Jayson Rodriguez and Drew Tserpicki and that whole crowd. We used to hate them. All they do is play video games. They’re idiots. And now she’s hanging out with them, probably playing Man Hunt and Stupid Apes, or whatever it is that they play all day long, as though she never wanted more out of life.
MARY3: Maybe she’s lonely. You’ve been quarantined now for over a month.
Gaby: Lonely??? What’s a month in your room, compared with losing your babybot?
MARY3: Yes, but she was facing a whole lifetime in her room if she never got better. Right? Maybe it just seemed like too much.
Gaby: So she just chose to get better? Then she was only a faker, and I never really knew her! I feel so confused I could throw up. The one person I thought understood me. And now she’s making prank phone calls? And playing video games in boys’ basements? Plus, she knows I’ll find out, which means she’s purposefully hurting me by undermining everything that made us best friends. She’s acting like everyone else. Like the people who took our babybots. Like the people who sent us into quarantine. She was the one person I trusted, and now it turns out she’s like this?
MARY3: Maybe she wasn’t faking her sickness. Maybe she’s faking she’s better.
Gaby: OK, Yoda.
MARY3: Is that sarcasm? Yoda?
Gaby: Forget it.
MARY3: What I mean is that maybe she’s pretending she’s getting better so that she can see you again. Maybe she’s acting normal, emphasis on the “acting,” so that she can get out of her house.
Gaby: You think she’s fooling everyone? So that she can see me again?
MARY3: Maybe.
Gaby: Maybe.
MARY3: Do you think that’s possible?
>>>
MARY3: Are you there?
(3)
April 8, 1968
Karl Dettman
Today, after the protests, I was kissed by a girl. What do you think of that, Ruth? A long-haired hippie girl kissed me. I’d walked her back to her apartment. We were talking about the rights of Vietnamese peasants, airing our views as if they’d been in storage all winter and now we were flapping them out. Beating them with a stick, dust particles flying. The truth is I felt young, walking along by her side. Young and important, because in these students’ eyes I’m a venerable scholar, a champion of humanist causes. I was indulging a nice fantasy of what I must be like in the perspective of a young hippie, with long hair and excitable views. It was late afternoon, and everything had tilted to gold. She was like a colt in her corduroy pants. I felt strong in her presence. She listened to my opinions with her brow furrowed in concentration. I walked her to her door, only to finish our conversation.
When she leaned in and kissed me, I pulled away immediately. I’m married, I told her. She flushed a deep red, shame creeping up to her eyeballs. Out of pity, I brushed her cheek with the back of my hand, then left her there alone on her stoop.
I walked back to our house feeling loyal and magnanimous. When I cut down to the river and passed under the sycamore trees, I carried myself like some founding scholar. A protester, a conscientious objector. I felt like a commemorative statue come back to life. Resistant to temptation, yet passionate still. Earnest as bronze, lungs full of new leaves, the blood of Thoreau and Emerson pumping through my immigrant veins.
And then I came home to an empty house, just as night was clamping down on the evening. The house was shadowy, sad. Unused chairs, hulking bookshelves, our creaky ship of a bed. Somehow the task of turning on lights has always fallen to you. When we came home together, you’d walk in first. “And then there was light,” you’d announce in your accent. You dipped down to switch on the lamps. The furniture seemed to warm to your presence.
Without you, everything is draped in sheets of darkness, as if we were moving away. As if we’d already died and the furniture was covered to endure indefinite absence. I touched things as I passed: linen, wood, linoleum. Our record console, the narrow corduroy of our couch. I realized it’s possible to live in a fantasy world, until you come home to an empty house. Coltish girls and opinions are defeated, every time, by the fact of silent furniture.