Kapitoil (23 page)

I was going to shoot her an email, but even that was cowardly, so I called her. She answered in a flat voice.

“Rebecca, this is Karim,” I said. I hadn’t strategized, which was possibly foolish, but sometimes it results in saying truer things. “It is my bad for the other night. I have some issues that are independent of you.”

She said, “Uh-huh.”

“Let us see if we can’t resolve this problem,” I said.

“What exactly
is
your problem?” Rebecca asked.

I hoped she would already understand, but I said, “It is difficult to explain.”

“I can handle it,” she said. “You don’t want to see me anymore.”

“No,” I said. “I mean, ‘No, that is false,’ not ‘No, I don’t want to see you.’” I find the usage of “no” as a prefix confusing because it’s not always clear what the negative applies to. Then I told her my recent thoughts about Ramadan.

“Uh-huh,” she said again, and I could tell she was uncomfortable, but she asked me more about Ramadan and how I felt about it, and how I felt about being with her during it and in general.

I said I didn’t feel good about it but I enjoyed being with her. It was difficult both to decipher my feelings and to state them initially, but the more I did it, the easier it was. “Possibly I should learn not to view my values as a series of binaries and instead find a compromise,” I said.

“That’s what relationships are about, right?” she said. “According to my last issue of
Cosmo
.”

“Do you classify this as a relationship?” I asked.

“I don’t really know,” she said. “It’s just been a couple of weeks.”

“We are not in Kansas anymore,” I said.

“What?”

“I have not been in a relationship previously,” I said, “so I do not know the appropriate amount of time before it is technically considered one.” When I said it, I realized it was the class of statement that someone like Angela from Cathedral would reject me for, but I hoped Rebecca would be careless.

“I’m no expert, either. But this is pretty quick,” she said, and my heart slightly plummeted, but then she added, “Though we could keep seeing how it works. And I’m joking. I don’t read
Cosmo
.”

“I do not even know what
Cosmo
is,” I said.

We made plans to see each other after work on Wednesday night, and for a little while I forgot about Mr. Schrub and Kapitoil, but only a little while.

big for one’s britches = lacking humility with a higher-up

bougie = bourgeois; middle-class or materialistic

chef = used without an article, the term for a chef at a classy restaurant

Cosmo
=
Cosmopolitan
, a magazine for females that frequently analyzes romantic relationships

exploiter = someone who leverages; this is a word

lady friend = either female friend or romantic partner

philistine = someone ignorant of quality culture

phonies = false people

stab someone’s back = practice deception

steel-trap mind = a brain that does not forget many things

JOURNAL DATE RECORDED: DECEMBER 16

Mr. Ray replied and told me that Mr. Schrub would be very busy over the next week but he would contact me when he was free.

I should have said I was ready to sign the contract but that I wanted to meet with Mr. Schrub directly first. Now they knew I had reservations about the contract, and they were forcing me to wait so that I might reconsider. My father frequently negotiated with suppliers who used similar tactics, and I have read several business manuals on negotiating, although this was the first time I had ever had a real-world negotiating opportunity, which was why I made an error.

Of course I could simply write my proposal and try to publish it in an academic paper without telling Mr. Schrub, but he would fire me instantly for being too big for my britches and I would never have a chance to work for him again. Possibly if I waited and got him to see the idea from my POV, we could compromise.

I was relieved that Rebecca planned our date for Wednesday, which was to see her friend’s rock-and-roll band’s concert on the Lower East Side. The friend was the man from her party with long hair named James. He sang and played guitar, and although the crowd was not very bottlenecked in the dark room, several females stood in the front and watched him nonstop. People danced merely by rotating back and forth on an axis over their feet and not truly moving, so I didn’t have to worry about dancing poorly and looking foolish. I asked if Rebecca wanted a beer. She said, “Sure, but you don’t need to buy it for me,” and I said I would purchase this first set and she could purchase the second set. “It’s called ‘buying a round,’” she said.

By the time we were on Rebecca’s round, James’s band was done. After they put away their equipment, he located us at the bar and hugged Rebecca. “Thanks for coming, Becks,” he said. “Looks like you’re the only one who made it.”

She nodded at the females. “You’ve got plenty of groupies.”

“They’re a pale mimesis of you,” he said as he compressed her around the shoulders with his arm.

Rebecca retracted very slightly, just a few inches. “You remember Karim from my party, right?”

“No, nice to meet you,” James said, and shook my hand with great force. It was very loud in the bar, and I heard him say, “You a fan of Indian rock?”

“I am not Indian,” I said. “I am from Qatar.”

James’s upper lip rotated to the left when he laughed via his nose, but Rebecca didn’t and she said, “No, ‘indie rock’—it’s short for independent. Music not released on big record labels.”

“In that case, yours is the first band I have heard that is in that class, and I did enjoy your music,” I said, even though I didn’t truly enjoy his music and thought his voice was impure, unlike that of Leonard Cohen or John Lennon or even Bob Dylan, whose voice is impure but intriguing.

James said he could obtain free alcohol for us, and soon he had three small glasses of whiskey and three cans of a beer that tasted mostly like water, and we drank the whiskey and then the beer to reduce the burning, and after we finished the beers he produced a second round and we repeated our actions.

I was slightly dizzy, but Rebecca was very unstable, and when she almost became imbalanced James held her and her body became fragile in his arms, and he said, “Your hair always smells so fucking good, like strawberries,” which doubly angered me because it smells in fact like watermelons, and then he slowly danced with her even though the band was playing a fast song.

I wanted to leave so I wouldn’t have to see what was happening, but I was afraid that if I left James would attempt even more. So I stood by the bar and watched them dance in the middle of the room and felt my body heat up like a microwave at James every time he whispered something in her ear and also at Rebecca for frequently laughing at what he said and for acting like this directly in front of me while we were on a romantic date.

When James lighted a cigarette for himself and let Rebecca inhale from it as well, I decided that if this was what she wanted to do, then it was her choice, and I left.

Outside the wind burned my ears as I determined the location of the subway. Before I walked away, Rebecca exited the bar and almost fell. “Wait,” she said.

I rotated but didn’t speak. “Why are you leaving?” she asked. Some of her words blended together.

“You do not seem to require my presence,” I said.

She leaned against the wall of the bar. “I don’t normally act this way,” she said.

“Then why are you doing it now?” I asked.

“I don’t know. For attention,” she said. “Sometimes. When I drink. Even from sleazeballs like James.”

“But why do you want attention from James when I am already paying it to you?” I asked.

“Because,” she said, and she decelerated her words. “I really like you.”

I leaned against the wall next to her. “Then those are not logical actions,” I said.

She collapsed but I hugged her before she fell. She pocketed her hands inside my coat to keep them warm and got close to me and our breath was the only non-cold thing near our faces, and she kissed me and it made my entire body feel hotter, but not like the temperature spike of a digital microwave as before, as it was more like an analog toaster with gradual heat. “You want to come home with me?” she asked.

“Of course I want to,” I said. First we went into a store and I bought her a large bottle of water. She nearly crashed into a stand that stored snacks. When I helped her outside she almost fell again, and I said, “Maybe we should go home independently tonight.” She nodded. I retrieved a taxi and gave the driver $30 and wrote down his car’s ID number and said if he made her pay I would contact his employer.

After I linked Rebecca’s seat belt, I told her I would call later to certify her safety. She pulled my tie and body close to her and said, “You can hate me if you want.”

“I do not hate you,” I said. “Obviously, I also really like you.” She asked, “Yeah?” and I said yes again, and then kissed her on her hand. She smiled when I did that and touched the spot with her other hand, and I closed the door and watched her drive away.

When I returned home I had an email waiting for me from Mr. Schrub’s secretary. My heart became stimulated because I thought it would be about a meeting with Mr. Schrub, but she was forwarding me a message from Mrs. Schrub that read:

The event was to raise money for refugees from Kosovo. I knew she hadn’t told Mr. Schrub she was inviting me, because if he was there he would not have wanted me to also be there after my last email to Mr. Ray. And this would be my best opportunity to confront him again about my proposal.

buying a round = purchasing alcoholic drinks in bulk for several people

groupies = females who desire musicians

indie = independent

mimesis = imitation

sleazeball = James

JOURNAL DATE RECORDED: DECEMBER 19

On Friday afternoon a few small white objects fell from the sky, and for a moment I thought someone was ejecting shredded paper from a window above me. I opened a window and put my hand out to touch the snowflakes, but they deleted almost instantly on my hands. I wanted Zahira to be able to see them.

I called home. My father picked up. I disconnected.

Rebecca had invited me to go out to a bar with some of her friends and Jessica that night in Brooklyn, because she was leaving for Wisconsin on Tuesday for almost a week to work remotely on the Y2K preparations. We had to go to her apartment first to drop off some of her possessions, and we decided to eat something there first. When she looked out the window after we finished, she said, “You mind if we ditch the bar and stay in with this weather?”

“I am not dying to go to the bar,” I said. I didn’t feel like talking to new people, even though I liked Rebecca’s friends, minus James, and I also understood why Rebecca once said she liked Jessica but didn’t 100% connect with her.

She had a selection of board games, and I chose one that I thought would enhance my English: Scrabble. I would lose but I didn’t mind playing poorly in front of Rebecca.

She explained the rules to me and we started as we sat on the carpet next to her coffee table. “We can listen to some indie rock that’s better than James’s band,” she said, which made me smile to myself, “or this CD of ’50s songs.” I said I was unfamiliar with music from the 1950s so I would prefer that, and she said, “Me, too. There’s only so many scratchy-voiced tales of postgraduate alienation a girl can take.” I didn’t always understand Rebecca’s ideas, but I valued the way she stated them.

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.

The sun made the field of white look pink like the clouds at sunset, and the sylvan trees without branches were like the hands of elderly people. I told Rebecca it would be nice to take a picture.

“I don’t own a camera,” she said. “I don’t really think visually.”

So I looked around at everything and at Rebecca and removed my left glove and put my hand inside her glove next to hers and inhaled the air and listened to the sounds of the children, and closed my eyes and saved all the different sensations to my nonvisual memory.

But then I wanted to save the emotions I was feeling, and it was more difficult to classify and categorize them, so I concentrated exclusively on the feeling I received from the cold air that removed all odor except for a minimal amount of Rebecca’s watermelon shampoo, and it was still complex to classify it, but I tried anyway.

When I opened my eyes, the sun was almost 100% down and it was time for the Salatu-l-Maghrib prayer. Rebecca asked if she could watch. I consented, and afterward I taught her about the different prayer positions and the translations of what I was saying. Then, because she seemed interested, I discussed a few other subjects, e.g., the Five Pillars. “I’m pretty ignorant about this stuff,” she said.

“As a parallel, I now see I did not truly know much about the U.S. before I came here,” I said. “And I am ignorant about movies and music and books.”

We were quiet for a few minutes until she received a telephone call from her brother. She gave him advice on where to search for an airplane ticket and how much to spend. When she disconnected, I asked if he was visiting her.

She shook her head and picked up some snow and compressed it with both hands. “He always flies the day after Christmas to see our father.”

“I did not realize he still spoke with him,” I said.

“They have a little more in common than I do. Though not much. But David tries, and when my father isn’t caught up with his family, he deigns to let him visit a couple times a year,” she said. “He’s got a lot of lingering anger at our father. I mean, I do, too, but I’m aware of it, thanks to several hundred hours of therapy. I’m not sure he’s really conscious of how upset he is.”

She continued compressing the snow into a sphere. “I think I understand what you mean,” I said.

Her body vibrated from the wind, and she said it was getting late and that we should return. She was about to throw the sphere, but contained it in her glove, and it remained there as we walked home in silence until she dropped it outside her apartment where it blended with all the other snow.

decent = possessing positive values

deign = lower yourself to do something

ditch an event = do not attend an event

mise-en-scène = visual arrangement within a movie

Other = term for people who are not the majority

patriarchy = a society controlled by men, or a family controlled by the father

PC = Politically Correct; fearful of offending the Other

phallologocentric = I still do not understand what this means