“Fine, yes, there’s a surprise,” he said. “Do you really want to ruin it?”
She smiled softly. “I just hate surprises, that’s all. I mean, historically, surprises, given my anxiety disorder, were never very easy on me, but this is going to be different. I can feel it in my bones.” She closed her eyes and kept smiling, as if that, too, was a psychic premonition, but for once of the best kind.
All he told her was to dress up. She was about to complain and insist that she never dressed up, but then she saw the joy in his eyes when he got to tell his woman to dress up, and so she quickly consented. She went home — she had been spending less and less time there, just checking in on Willa and Willa alone, with Zachary still almost completely moved out — and picked out the only dress she had, a high school graduation dress her mother had bought for her, which she only wore that one time. It was a navy silk strapless number and it had been too sexy back then, though she had still worn it, out of a sense of duty. It still fit her perfectly, and she even took the tiniest bit of joy in its sexiness. Zal, this new Zal, this finally-boyfriend, would love it, she thought.
When she returned to his place, lightly made-up, teetering in old high heels, and wearing that dress, she saw that Zal was also dressed up and apparently had been for a while. He was sitting on a chair, just waiting for her, in the suit his father had gotten him for his Vegas trip, the only suit he had, which Asiya had never seen. He looked handsome, though more serious than ever, professorial almost, in that austere charcoal.
“Look at us!” Asiya exclaimed.
“We’re something,” Zal shot back, and held a glass out to her.
Pink champagne. It was the first time since Willa’s party either of them had had pink champagne. Asiya saw that he had poured it in a juice cup — either he didn’t own champagne flutes or he just didn’t know — but she took it gratefully, and they clinked glasses and drank. She started to think this was the only surprise — which would have been good enough, she thought, considering—when Zal looked to his watch and gasped.
“Oh no! I’ve been so good about it and now we’re almost late!”
“Late? To what?” Asiya smiled.
Zal was already up and scrambling for keys, wallet, phone. “To the surprise!”
She couldn’t help but ask: “Dinner, right?”
“Asiya, you’re ruining it! Yes, dinner, fine! But you don’t know where the surprise is!”
“Our café?” she guessed.
He gave her a look. “Dressed up like this?”
She laughed. “Okay, okay, I’ll just stop.”
He kissed her quickly on the head, grabbed her wrist, and led her out. There wasn’t much time left.
They caught a cab, and Zal handed the address to the driver on a card. “The destination is a surprise for the lady, so I don’t want to say it.” The cabdriver smiled, amused.
In the cab, he was breathing hard. It was his first real, expensive dinner for a woman, and reservations had been so difficult to get — he’d practically had to beg — and now they were almost late. He tried to meet her eye once in a while, but he met the face of his watch even more.
“We’re really close, but we’re running out of time,” he said, staring out into the twilight-struck lower Manhattan.
She didn’t say a word — just looked down at her palms, nodding slowly, trying to just focus on the present, trying to go back to the very joy of wondering what in the world was in store for them, just that night and that night alone.
When they were a block away, Zal ordered her to close her eyes. She did so with a big smile, her heart pounding with anticipation. She had no idea, no idea at all, she swore to him. “Right here is fine,” Zal said to the cabdriver, and he paid and got up and opened the door for Asiya, who was still blind.
“I have to open my eyes now, Zal!” she cried.
There in the dark blue of it all, he took her face and kissed each lid, just as he’d rehearsed, and, as if on cue, she opened her eyes. For a moment she didn’t recognize it, a patch of Manhattan she didn’t frequent, even though it was just a few blocks from his apartment — too close for a cab ride, though she assumed he did it so he could surprise her. She was indeed surprised, shocked even. She looked at them all the way up, the evening breeze whipping between their impossible height, all the way down to them.
“The World Trade,” she whispered, her smile suddenly gone.
“Yup! Dinner reservations up at the top!” Zal announced proudly.
“The World Trade,” she uttered again, as if in disbelief. “Zal, why. .? Why?”
“I saw that you’d marked it on the map,” he said, his pride making him blind to her sudden unmistakable uneasiness. “And I heard it was a really nice dinner-and-drinks spot, really special, and you know how much I love being high up, and I thought. . I don’t know. I just thought it would be something nice to do.”
He searched her eyes, which were squinting up at the towers, suspiciously.
“Oh, Zal, thanks,” she tried to gush, but it was easy to read the trouble in her voice.
“What, you’re disappointed? I built it up too much, didn’t I? Or did you guess?”
She shook her head and swallowed hard. “No, that’s not it. It’s just, I’ve never been there. Never really imagined it, especially tonight.”
“But you marked it — didn’t you? What did the mark mean?”
She looked at him, imploringly. You don’t want to know the answer to that, Zal, her eyes said, not tonight of all nights. She was determined not to ruin anything.
Perhaps he got the message — in any case, he gave his watch one more look and finally said, “Look, we’re officially late. We’ve got to go. I don’t want to blow this. I really want to do this for you — just enjoy it, okay?”
Again she let her wrist be taken and her feet nudged along. By the time they got to the great big lobby with its hallway full of elevators, she told herself it would be fine. They were cutting it close, but whatever was coming wasn’t going to get them for a little while anyway, that much she knew.
The elevators opened on the top of the building, the 106th floor, and Asiya felt the ground beneath her give a little. She stumbled, and Zal caught her just in time.
“Whoa, not used to heels, are you?” he said, trying to make a joke as he held on to her shoulders. “You okay?”
She looked very pale. She nodded anemically as she peered over the hostess booth to the room beyond it.
“Windows on the World,” Zal declared. “Great name, right? It sounds like we’re at the top of the world, and we kind of are!”
She nodded again, wiping her forehead. She was sweating, a cold sweat. “Is it harder to breathe up here? Air thinner or something?” She was using her hands to fan herself, as if egging on the air to rush into her system.
Zal motioned to the hostess, who was busy with two other couples in front of them. “It’s going to be fine, Asiya. Come on, it’s your birthday and this is a nice place. Just enjoy it. Everyone can breathe here, see? It’s all okay.”
She nodded. She tried to shake the anxious thoughts away and focused instead on Zal, his pride, his glowing handsomeness, him in his suit and her in her dress — how far they had come. “I’m so sorry, Zal. Just some vertigo. I’m fine. This is all so lovely.”
He gave her that look she knew would have been a smile if he had been able.
The hostess, a pretty girl in fashionable red-framed glasses, smiled and winked, not minding “Mr. Hendricks’s” lateness, which Zal profusely apologized for, and she led them through the large bar and dining area to a small intimate table by the window.