
no tiger
R
emember Algebra? How they said we would use it in the real world?
Hi there! + Looks like I’ll be in your neck of the woods Friday + Would love to do coffee or lunch + if you’re free = ?
I took apart her text as if it were an equation. It was so casual, or otherwise, carefully crafted to appear casual. Even the being here—the town in which she knows I live that is over one hundred miles from the city in which she lives—is passive: Looks like I’ll be, as if she’s watching this happen rather than making the choice.
Coffee or lunch are not dinner or drinks—they are the squeeze in rather than the main event.
I met Alejandra at a conference on climate crisis—something I write about and she does something about. She develops solar panels. She harnesses the energy of light.
She was storming through the hotel when I first saw her, a New York native, used to moving fast. Her eyes were dark when she looked at me, saw through me.
If you’re free. Obviously she doesn’t mean it to inquire if I’m free metaphorically, if I’m unbound.
I am, as she knows, bound. Bound to my husband who is okay with me not wanting children and makes sure there’s always orange juice in the fridge and likes to get stoned and watch movies but always lets me pick because when I’m high, movies get inside me.
When the word husband first left my lips, standing around the hotel bar at a happy hour, angling my body towards hers, she interrupted me.
“You’re married?”
I laughed at that question, strangely happy at her surprise.
“To a husband?”
“That is one of the things he is.”
“I thought you were gay. Oh my god, that was so rude. I’m sorry. I just, thought. You seem … ”
“I’m undefinable,” I say, liking the sound of that. “I’m a little bit in love with everybody all the time.”
I can tell she doesn’t buy what I’m selling even though it’s the truth. Maybe what she’s skeptical of is the way I’m smiling, pretending the way I am is a charming, romantic affliction rather than something constantly splintering me.
We spend the week in a blur of crying openly at the state of the planet, staring up at the Strawberry Moon, laughing butter out of our noses, and a few times she puts her hand on my shoulder and something in me says, this.
At the end of the week, when we say goodbye, she holds my face between her hands that look like they must know how to play a piano and says “You’re magic,” and I splinter.
Maybe what she’s skeptical of is the way I’m smiling, pretending the way I am is a charming, romantic affliction rather than something constantly splintering me.
And I can’t stop thinking about those hands on my face, her cold fingers, how I should have covered them with my own. Held her there.
I tell her I can’t get out of work at the time she suggests and ask if there’s any chance she could do later.
Ahhh okay yes. But here’s the thing. I will be SUBSTANTIALLY overdressed for wherever we go at that point. I’m in town for a conference and that time’s right in between events so I won’t be able to change. Will you be embarrassed to be seen with me?
I tell her no, never.
We agree on a wine bar I like where the ceiling is a mosaic of tarnished silver and antique mirrors, and I wear a blazer so she feels less overdone in her business casual and attempt to do pushups in my office before to get some of the excess energy out of my body. It’s useless because I’m early and all of the fizzies in my bloodstream restock as I sit, waiting.
I order a glass of Lambrusco and drink it too quickly. I look up and see my warped reflection and think, this is a moment in my life that matters. I think I am really seeing myself in a way that doesn’t happen in your own bathroom mirror.
When she walks in, I forget what hands are and before I can stop myself, my first words to her are, “What the fuck, Alejandra?”
She laughs, something big that has all the other patrons turning her way—or maybe that’s the literal ballgown she’s wearing—floor length and velvet and plunging. Or her lips, the colour of my wine. Or the streaks of shimmer on her cheek bones, down the length of her arms.
“I told you,” she says as she slides into the seat across from me without a hello hug. “I’d be overdressed.”
I try to speak but nothing comes out. I’d expected her oversized jean jacket and Lara-Croft-Tomb-Raider pants, her short, dark hair tugged every which direction from her pulling on it while she problem-solves the planet. I didn’t know she owned makeup. It startles me and makes me ache, that there are versions of her I haven’t seen.
“The truth is,” she says, placing those hands on the table, pushing herself up straight like an animal catching a scent. “I’m here for a cosplay thing.”
“What?” I can’t help my snort of laughter. “That’s so not … I don’t know … your vibe?”
“I’m undefinable,” she says, and I have to look away while she orders a beer and I make the motion for another glass.
I wonder if other people want to step out of themselves.
Not permanently, but like a momentary break in the universe in which they get to live a different life, be a different version. I don’t ever say this aloud because I don’t want anyone to doubt that I am grateful for my life—my husband and the crinkles beside his eyes and our plan to know each other our whole lives. My friends and the sounds of their laughs echoing over water. The way my house looks when all the lights are off except for the solar lanterns we hang in windows, the way that light glows off the wood floors where the dogs sleep and my husband buries his face into their bellies to tell them he loves them.
And also, life feels too vast to just have one.
And also, I’ve never wanted to touch an arm as much as I want to touch Alejandra’s. Not even her face or her waist or her hair. I just want to wrap my fingers around her arm and feel her temperature.
So I do. I reach across the table, drawing my finger as lightly as possible through the excuse of the gold sparkles that swirl up them.
“You’re sparkling.”
“Well, I’m a high lady of the Night Court,” she says matter-of-factly, but her eyes have darkened on me the way they do.
“You are,” I say. Then, “I’m so happy to see you. I’ve missed you.”
She nods, tilts her head, asks, “Yeah?”
Something about the way she doesn’t say anything else makes me say more.
“It’s crazy that you can know someone for a week and then miss them, right?” I laugh. “I mean humans are crazy that way, aren’t we? So wild to be a human. Do we need crackers?” I need something to put in my mouth to stop myself from talking. “Or like cheese or something?”
Alejandra shrugs, a small smile playing at the corner of that red mouth that looks like hers but also not. “Up to you.”
I wave our server over and keep talking as he makes his way to us.
“I just mean there’s so many humans, you know? Like so many humans that we walk past every day and so many that we’ll never meet because they live in Yemen or South Dakota and also so many that are already dead or haven’t been born yet. And then there’s all the lives that aren’t human, too—plants and animals and the million other things I don’t even know about and how crazy is it that any two humans get to like, glimpse the universes above each other’s shoulders, you know? Do you have any cheese?” This last bit of absolute word vomit I direct at the server who has made it to our table.
How crazy is it that any two humans get to like, glimpse the universes above each other’s shoulders, you know?
“We do a charcuterie board—it’s three local meats and three local cheeses along with–” I cut him off, spinning my finger in a keep em coming motion though I hope he understands that in this case it’s more of a bring it on because who can afford to keep them coming with charcuterie?
“Oh, shit. Was that rude?” I ask Alejandra when the waiter walks away. She is looking at me like either I’m insane or brilliant or a human body with a croissant head, like she could eat me if she could determine whether or not I’m poisonous. “I didn’t mean to be rude, I just really didn’t want to sit through the charcuterie monologue. Our time is so brief.”
“Do you need to sigh?” Alejandra asks after letting me sit for a moment in the echo of my own mania.
“What?”
“My last girlfriend broke up with me because she said I sighed too much and it was passive aggressive,” she says. “But it’s important for your parasympathetic nervous system. It knows you wouldn’t be sighing in front of a tiger. You sigh, your body knows, no tiger.”
I take a deep breath, blow it out.
“No tiger,” she says.
“No tiger.”
“How are you?” she asks.
“I’m okay,” I say, looking in her eyes for the first time since she sat. She is almost like a tiger, actually, so unafraid to stare.
“I don’t know.” I amend. “Honestly, I don’t think I have any idea how to be a human, but–” I let my sentence fade. I didn’t know how it ended anyway, was hoping she’d cut me off before I had to figure it out.
“But … ” I begin again. “But I’m really happy to see you.”
“You said that already.”
“Well I really, really mean it.” She smiles for real then, stretching across her face so wide it looks like it may cause her pain. It causes me pain. If the waiter hadn’t showed up just then with our cheese board, I don’t know if I would have been able to stop myself from crawling over the table and pressing my cheek against hers just so I could feel her smile on my own face.
As it is, I am dangerously close to dipping the lapel of my jacket into fig jam—the omnipresent supporting character of charcuterie.
“So,” I say, leaning back. “Tell me about your cosplay thing.”
“It’s for a book,” she says, dipping a triangle of toast into a cheese that simultaneously looks like cream and plastic. “It’s basically fairy smut.”
“Fairy smut?”
“Yes, but you’re probably spelling it with an i in your head and this is with an e. F-a-e-r-i-e smut. More dignified.”
“I didn’t realize that’s what did it for you.”
“I never thought I liked fantasy,” she says, not taking the flirtbait. “But recently, I’ve been devouring it. I think there’s something to that. Like the world is so hard right now, we need to live in another one for a couple hours a day.”
I toy with a grape. “I get that.”
“And there’s something to be said, for talking animals, for rivers and mountains with magic powers.”
The charcuterie board diminishes as she tells me the entire plot of the series. Summarizing isn’t one of her talents and she constantly backtracks to tell me why something is important, a detail she forgot, and I can’t believe this is how we’re spending our time together. But even as I lose the story, I watch her facial expressions like the goddamn ballet. Not that I’ve ever been to the ballet. But I would if it were this captivating.
But even as I lose the story, I watch her facial expressions like the goddamn ballet.
“Look, I have ears.” She reaches into the pocket of her dress—it makes sense that Alejandra wouldn’t wear anything without pockets, not even a ballgown— and pulls out two pieces of flesh coloured plastic. She fixes them to her real ears, but they don’t quite fit, so in addition to making her ears pointed, they make them too large and a little lopsided.
I laugh, I splinter.
A fleck of spit flies out of my mouth and lands visibly on a slice of chorizo.
“Look away!” I say as I reach for the meat and the evidence of my embarrassment.
I’m still laughing and chewing sausage when Alejandra says, “No, thank you.” The look on her face makes it hard to swallow. There it is.
There it is.
And I still don’t know what to say.
And I think she’s done waiting. She sighs, pulls out her credit card and raises it to our waiter. When he asks, together or separate, I cannot even speak to stop her from saying, separate.
I manage to pull out my own wallet even as I feel I might throw up, even as I realize this is getting away from me too fast, that when she leaves here, I will likely never see her again, and that I can’t do anything about that without wrecking something else. I realize how unfair this is to her, to everyone, my indecision. Life is too short, but it is also too long. There is no equation. There is no right answer, no right choice.
I take a deep breath, and as I sigh it out, lean my head back so that I’m looking at the mirrored ceiling. Maybe it’s the Lambrusco or the sudden flood of oxygen, but I’m dizzy.
“When I was little,” I say. “I used to sit like this and try to convince my brain that the floor was the ceiling and the ceiling was the floor.”
In the reflection, I watch Alejandra move, her head tilting back until our eyes meet in the mirror.
“I used to pretend the ceiling or the sky or whatever I was looking up at was a ballroom floor and try to imagine what it would feel like to dance on it.” My smile grows in the reflection, warped and upside down, me and not me. “You’re dressed perfectly for this activity,” I say.
I watch myself lift a hand and wave and then I’m watching both of us—two women, one in a blazer, the other in a gown and elf ears, both refusing to look away from the reflection of one another as they wave from beneath themselves and from above.
“Are we waving hello or goodbye, do you think?” is all I can think to ask.
“Is this the ceiling or the floor?” she answers.
In the mirror, I watch my hand reach for hers.
But a reflection lacks the dimension of depth, and I miss her. I just miss her.
For years after, after Thomas and I have had children and my life fills with so full of juice and socks and a lovefear so desperate I feel it both is and is not my own, I will rewrite this moment in my head. Some nights, I will lay awake and draft a story in which my hand landed on hers, imagine it so obsessively that I can feel the friction of finger against palm, palm against thigh, mouth between breasts. I can taste, like the anticipation of lemon on tongue, the shock of choosing another life, bright and sour.
And one night, while everyone else in my house sleeps, I will understand what Alejandra was saying that day in the wine bar—how the fantasies in which we dwell can become more real to us than the reality we can see, the people we can touch.
Is this what they meant? About the real world?