Kapitoil (20 page)

Although no one was looking, I was too afraid to do anything. As we approached Rebecca’s stop, I said, “Rebecca,” and she asked, “What?” but I responded, “I should consult the map,” and I went to the middle of the train to investigate how to get back, even though I knew from the party at Rebecca’s apartment how to return to Manhattan and also I had memorized most of the subway system before I left Doha.

Rebecca’s stop at Fulton St. was next, and I had to stay on one more stop to transfer, and we didn’t talk as we decelerated into the station. I walked with Rebecca to the doors and she again thanked me and said, “Sorry, number seven.” This was the optimal time. Her fingers touched her hair and she looked through the windows of the doors at the station’s columns that passed by us like pictures in a slide projector.

I continued thinking I should kiss her, and commanded myself to do it, but the doors dinged and opened and she said good night and stepped out and the doors closed.

I watched her on the other side of the doors with her back to me, and I also saw myself in the window. I looked foolish standing there. And then the doors dinged again and reopened, as they sometimes do, and I thought this was a golden opportunity and not a random accident, and without thinking I said “Rebecca” as I did before, and she rotated and I leaned across the vertical plane of the train doors and kissed her, and she reciprocated, and I touched her hand, and we remained there for several seconds.

I could still taste the sugary milk from the Tres Leches cake she had eaten multiple pieces of, and the inside of her mouth was warm and the outside skin was cold, and my eyes remained open but hers were closed, and I wanted to remain in that position for much longer, but the doors dinged again and began closing and I pulled back so we would not get compressed.

Then the train moved and I watched her through the window as she looked down at her shoes, and I could not see if she was smiling or worried, and soon I was in the tunnel again. The entire trip back to my apartment I wondered if I should call her or not, and if I should, when I should do it and what to say. It wasn’t like a mathematics problem with a definite solution, and I had difficulty deciphering an answer. I couldn’t consult with my father and especially not Zahira. Possibly my mother would have been helpful for this situation, but I wasn’t old enough when she died to know.

a big girl (boy) = an independent female (man)

look sharp = clothing appears sexy

mutual recriminations = reciprocal insults

pastime = a leisure activity

JOURNAL DATE RECORDED: NOVEMBER 30

Because I didn’t know what to do in this situation, and because possibly Rebecca did, I waited for her to initiate a dialogue with me that weekend. But she didn’t call.

I tried to reroute my brain by spending more time on my idea about Kapitoil and epidemiology. Typically I can force myself to concentrate, but whenever I looked at the text on the monitor, I thought of looking at Rebecca’s closed eyes when we kissed, and whenever I moved my mouse I thought instead of touching her hand, and in my brain I smelled her watermelon shampoo and remembered the feel of her lips like two small pillows.

Then on Sunday I did something I have never previously done. I was using my computer’s painting program to diagram an object-oriented classes of viruses, but instead I tried to draw Rebecca’s face. However, I’m not a skilled artist on paper, and I’m even inferior on the computer, so it didn’t look like her. And then I was struck by lightning, although it was different from my typical class of lightning.

I employed one of the algorithms in Kapitoil and programmed a macro for it to utilize the painting program. Of course it didn’t draw a face, but a random piece of art like abstract expressionism that derived from a picture of a watermelon on the Internet. Except I knew it wasn’t random, because it was based on an algorithm, and when I analyzed it closely I could see the causes behind its decisions. I thought Jackson Pollock would green-light my design, and I titled it
R #1
.

And then the design
did
seem Rebecca-esque, as sometimes one object can mirror another one not because they look precisely equal, but because something more tangential feels similar, e.g., much of the painting utilized the visible spectrum near indigo, and if I think of a color to represent Rebecca, it would be indigo, because
(1)
of her personality;
(2)
most people cannot identify indigo between blue and violet, parallel to how some people might not notice Rebecca; and
(3)
I once saw a CD of hers by a female band with the word “Indigo” in its name.

On Monday morning I still had not heard from Rebecca, and I was afraid we were both acting like negotiating holdouts and not making an offer to increase our value. Although I knew I should wait longer, later that morning I emailed her:

She replied:

I didn’t know if she was teasing me or not, but when I reached the coffee room she was already sitting at the small table and tapping her right foot on the ground repeatedly as if she were timing a song.

“Would you like to begin?” I asked.

“I’m not dying to,” she said.

This was problematic, because I had hoped she would start and I could respond. I began talking without a clear plan, which is a tactic I would never use in business.

“I enjoyed spending Thanksgiving with you,” I said. “And the subway ride.”

“But?” she interrupted.

“What do you mean?” I said.

“You enjoyed it, but…” she said again.

I didn’t know if she meant she had an objection to my enjoyment, or if she was predicting I had an objection planned. So I said, “This is not a ‘but’ statement. I merely enjoyed it.”

She looked like she didn’t know what else to say. The periodicity of her foot’s taps was decreasing.

Another employee who always looks like he is asleep even when he is walking entered for coffee. Rebecca and I didn’t say anything the entire time he was there. When he spent approximately 30 seconds deciding between real sugar and false sugar, I had to restrict myself from commanding him to take both packets and decide at his desk.

He finally left. “In my experience, it is beneficial to repeat events that are enjoyable. Do you agree?” I asked.

She said, “In my experience, that’s also true.”

“I am available to repeat events on Saturday.”

“So am I,” she said. “Wait, am I supposed to say I’m not, to play hard to get?”

“I do not understand.” At times like this I wish I had more mastery of English, but possibly these kinds of exchanges are challenging even for fluent speakers. “Are you available or unavailable?”

She said she was available. I said, “I will shoot you an email with further details,” and she consented, and when she left I couldn’t stop myself from smiling, and in my office I even slightly punched the air with stimulation, although I contacted my fist on my desk and it hurt because I’m not used to punching, but the pain didn’t bother me, and in fact it felt good to be feeling sensations, even unpleasant sensations.

I spent Monday brainstorming for our date. Now that I had more money I could afford to take Rebecca someplace classy. Jefferson probably knew of good places, but I couldn’t ask him. So I researched places on the Internet that might impress Rebecca and made a list with pros and cons about different restaurants, e.g.:

Bavarian Haus

PRO: CON

Received 3 stars: Most non-Germans evaluate German food as low quality

It was more difficult than programming in many ways, because in programming if you can’t predict results, you can still test out new variables and use trial and error to arrive at a solution, but with people you typically have one opportunity and their motivations and reactions are more difficult to understand, especially with females.

By Tuesday afternoon I still didn’t know what to do. So I forced myself to work on my new Kapitoil-esque project instead. I made some progress, and soon I forgot about my nervousness with Rebecca and reentered the world of programming where I have ultimate control, and I worked through the night in my office, and I remembered how enjoyable it is to concentrate on a project that stimulates me, and by the end of the night I had hurdled some obstacles and received encouraging results, and once I finalize my program and presentation I will propose the concept to Mr. Schrub. If he was impressed with me initially, then this will bowl him over.

not dying to = not stimulated to proceed with an action

play hard to get = create the impression of limited supply to raise external demand

JOURNAL DATE RECORDED: DECEMBER 5

I worked on the epidemiology project, but by Friday I still had no ideas for what to do with Rebecca. And then I decided to yield to my difficulties: I would simply not plan anything. It had the potential to be a growth experience. So I emailed Rebecca and told her to meet me in Central Park on Saturday at noon.

We met in Sheep Meadow. Rebecca blocked her eyes from the sun with her hand and asked, “What’s the plan, Stan?”

“I do not have a plan, Dan,” I said, because I thought she was doing a play on words with me and the only other American name I could think of that rhymed with “plan” was Dan. To boot, I now had a response for Dan when he called me “Karim the Dream.” “I thought we could walk around Central Park.” I had walked through parts of it before, but not much of it, and always by myself.

At first I wondered if we would discuss the events of Thanksgiving with each other, and because I was distracted our conversation was rigid, and I asked her several questions such as, “What did you do to entertain yourself last night?”

Rebecca said, “I know I always say this, but, really, you can let yourself go some. We’re not in the office. You can curse or whatever.”

I considered this, then said, “Fuck. Shit. Asshole.”

Rebecca laughed, and that softened the rigidity of our dialogue, and then we talked about a play she had seen the previous night that her roommate acted in, and about her brother and how he had joined his university’s newspaper, and then about how that might interest Zahira as well, as she was an excellent writer.

We entered an area called the Ramble which is known for birding. We spent several minutes watching different species, many of which we didn’t know the names of, but Rebecca made interesting analytical observations, e.g., how multiple birds frequently partner on a tree after a few birds first land there, as if the first birds are scouting to certify the tree’s safety. Although I didn’t learn as much as when I was with Mr. Schrub, it was more stimulating because I prefer problem solving to receiving data passively.

When we reached the end of the Ramble, we decided to progress to the reservoir at 96th St. By then I forgot about what happened on Thanksgiving and it was like we were still coworkers at adjacent desks, although we weren’t talking about work anymore.

At the Reservoir, Rebecca asked if I had anything else I wanted to do. “I am enjoying this,” I said. “Would you like to continue walking around?”

She said she would, and we shifted over to Riverside Park on the West Side and walked along the blue and green and gray water of the Hudson River, and through the Upper West Side aggregated with Jewish families and Asian restaurants, and finally all the way down to Chelsea and the variably angled streets and cafes of Greenwich Village and the classy and minimal clothing stores in SoHo and the less clean streets and caged athletics areas of the Lower East Side and the East Village. And although we ended up spending almost no money, minus water and some snacks (e.g., in Chinatown, where we ate dumplings and something called red-bean-paste bun), that’s not why I wanted to do it, but I’m glad we did that instead of paying for external entertainment. Sometimes merely partnering on a walk is sufficient.

When we were on Sullivan St., she was discussing her brother and the art classes he was taking at university, and I was asking her questions about art. “You know, there may be a bit of a language barrier, but you’re pretty easy to talk to,” she said. “Most people here, their conversations are intellectualized middle-school sarcasm. They’re just trying to prove how intelligent or cool they are. You’re not like that.” At first I thought she meant I wasn’t intelligent or cool, but then I understood she meant that I didn’t try to prove I had those qualities, and although I believe I am intelligent in certain modes, I’m of course not cool in any modes, so that part remains true.

We were both exhausted at 6:30 p.m. Rebecca asked if I was hungry, and I was, but so far restaurants in New York had caused problems for me with questions about halal food, and also I didn’t enjoy waiters serving me. So I proposed cooking dinner, and Rebecca suggested we do it in Brooklyn because groceries were cheaper there.

We discussed what to cook on the way there. Rebecca said she was trying to become a vegetarian, so we shouldn’t buy meat. She added, “And I’m not just saying that because it’ll be harder to find halal meat.” I told her I was glad she’d said that, and how I disliked it when Americans corrected their behavior around me. She didn’t say anything else about it.

We selected pasta with peppers and cauliflowers and a salad and divided the cost equally and took the food back to her apartment. Her roommate was out at her play. Rebecca asked if I wanted to hear music while we cooked.

“I liked the musician you played for me before,” I said. “The one who sings the line ‘Your hair upon the pillow like a sleepy golden storm.’”

“I remember,” she said.

This time she played a song called “Suzanne,” and it was equal in quality to the song she had played in her room. The line that intrigued me most was “And she shows you where to look among the garbage and the flowers,” because sometimes there is no difference between garbage and flowers, and things that people discard or ignore or forget or lose often contain the most valuable material or data, as Rebecca once said.

“Are you a good singer?” I asked.

“Yes,” she said. “If you consider the anguished cries of a fatally wounded dolphin ‘good.’”

She opened a bottle of white wine and poured herself a glass but she didn’t make any comments about how I could have some if I wanted. So I finished my glass of water and poured myself some as well.

We ate dinner in her living room, and when we finished we drank more wine, although I was careful to drink just a small amount. I discovered if I drank at the rate of 0.75 glasses/hour it slightly relaxed me but didn’t negate my control, which was optimal, especially in a situation like this.

In fact, I was still very nervous. When I kissed her previously, it happened because I temporarily didn’t strategize. Now I was strategizing too much, with ideas such as
(1)
the lighting was too bright;
(2)
we were both holding glasses of wine and a sudden movement could spill them (even though it was white wine and therefore less permanent); and
(3)
we were one foot apart from each other on the couch and moving closer to her would take too long.

I understood why movies about romance, such as the one I partially watched on television on Monday night, are so popular in the U.S., because they present high quantities of conflict, although I typically dislike the way those movies depict romantic conflicts, as they result either from simple misunderstandings or because the two main characters initially hate each other before falling in love, and although I am a novice at these situations, even I know that that conversion is illogical. In fact, frequently it is the opposite: People fall in love soon after they meet, and over time they lose it.

I said, “This wine has some pear notes.”

She smiled slightly and didn’t respond, and I had no other evaluations of the wine. Then I remembered my gift. “I have something for you,” I told her, and I retrieved my coat and depocketed
R #1
.

“It is an algorithmic drawing,” I said. “I created it using the discrete Fourier transform, by mapping each spatial frequency band of a picture of a watermelon to its own color—”

She linked her arms around my neck and said, “Thank you.”

I was still nervous about what to do, but then I thought: You have to accept responsibility for your own decisions. She may reject you, but you will not know until you try, and if you do not even try, then it is as if you are rejecting yourself.

And then I shifted my head and kissed her, and she kissed me, and we stayed like that for a long time on the soft couch, and I thought how strange it was that two people could enjoy contacting their lips and tongues and hands for so long when most of the time we avoid contact.

She brought me to her bedroom, and our actions didn’t equal what I did on Halloween, but it was still stimulating. We enjoyed each other’s bodies but we didn’t say anything about it, as I did with Melissa. Rebecca wasn’t as thin as Melissa, but I preferred that. In addition, when I had difficulty releasing her bra, she whispered “It’s okay,” and did it herself. I also accidentally crashed my hand against her glasses at one point and they became asymmetrical on her nose. I apologized and was slightly humiliated by my poor dexterity, but she said “Look,” and intentionally made the glasses even more asymmetrical, then put her hands out in the air and rotated her head and eyes rapidly as if she could not see anything and was panicked. It was humorous, so I laughed, and she said, “Thank God glasses are sort of in now and being a nerd is almost cool. It was a rough stretch there in high school for people like us, right?” Initially I disliked how she accurately classified me as a nerd, but then I valued how she did not mind calling herself one and therefore I was careless that I was a nerd as well.

When we were finished we didn’t say anything for a few minutes, until I asked, “Goldman is a Jewish surname, correct?”

“Yeah,” she said. “My family isn’t really religious, though. Is yours?”

“We are. My father is the most,” I said. “Both your parents are Jewish?”

“Just my father,” she said. “But he’s not really anything.”

“What is his job?”

She yawned and turned her body away from me. “He’s a surgeon.”

I was asking about a subject that wasn’t my business, but I didn’t stop. “Why do you not see him anymore?”

“Are you trying to find out if I have daddy issues?” she said.

I said I didn’t know what daddy issues were, and that I merely wanted to know why she didn’t see him, but if she didn’t want to discuss it, then I understood.

She turned to face me again. “He wasn’t abusive, he wasn’t an alcoholic, he wasn’t a philanderer,” she said. “Hope I’m not disappointing you with a mundane tale of middle-class neglect. He was a workaholic and never really paid attention to my mother, or my brother, or me. Sorry—he paid attention when he thought I would become a doctor, and when I accidentally-on-purpose failed bio, he gave up. They finally divorced when I was seventeen, which made for a fun senior year, we moved in with my grandmother in Wisconsin, he remarried, and I stopped talking to him four years ago because he never really seemed to care about talking to me. Satisfied?”

I didn’t say anything for a while. Then I said, “I have some daddy issues as well, although they are different.” I didn’t say anything about my mother, though, because it would seem like we were exchanging personal data for the sake of exchanging it. I would also ask her another time about why she took Zoloft, which I had researched and learned was for depression and/or anxiety, because it was not necessarily caused by her relationship with her father, e.g., that is why I don’t tell people about my mother, because they might think everything I do is caused by that, when human actions are the result of infinite factors and are complex and sometimes impossible to decipher.

connoisseur = expert in a field

daddy issues = conflict with one’s father

philanderer = a husband who is disloyal to his wife

workaholic = someone who works constantly to avoid the remainder of his life