Neat
A girl in a Santa Cruz T-shirt; long dark hair tied back from a pale face; long legs. She has dark eyes, like his, and the same narrow jaw, the same quizzically peaked frown like a spaniel’s. They might be brother and sister.
But she’s beautiful.
It’s unsettling to what degree the stranger is beautiful: in this dun, monotonous waste.
“Hello,” she says. “I remember you from the airport. But why are you kneeling in the middle of the desert?”
The sun blinds him and he looks down at her abbreviated shadow, whose hair blows and waves banner-fashion on the sand.
“Yeah . . . I guess I’m having a kind of dehydration episode?”
“Oh.” She waggles a can of Fanta before his eyes, crouches. “How neat. It’s like . . . a terrible advert.”
He takes the can and drinks. It’s hot like tea.
Her T-shirt has wet patches at the armpits and in a blaze on her chest. She’s older than he first thought – older than him. When he notices the yellow stains shadowing her index and middle fingers, the mark of a heavy smoker, he’s gripped by a strange remorse, a tug so violent it gives him a déjà vu of early childhood, when it’s okay to feel this strongly.
She says, “Now all your problems vanish.”
Kismet
She’s named Denise, but she prefers to be called Deesey. She’s from Britain, but has lived all over. Now she’s “just” on holiday.
He tells her his name is Jack, and she cocks her head.
“Jack what?”
They are picking their way back toward the Pyramids, barefoot in deep, baking sand, and when he says “Moffat,” she stops.
“Jack Moffat?” she queries, with that spaniel frown.
He takes a deep breath. He has been using his father’s name. “Yeah, why?”
“I don’t know. I think it sounds like someone famous.” She shrugs, and continues walking thoughtfully as if trying to place the name.
She’s staying at the same hotel; a coincidence. They agree that the showers are surprisingly clean. In an aside, she comments, “Well, Jack’s staying at the Hotel Raffles!”
Then they go on in silence; it’s understood they’ll spend the day together.
And when they come out of the long slog of sand to the road, there is a taxi idling by the now open drinks stall. He says, on an impulse,
“Kismet.”
She balks: “What do you mean?”
She has her sandals twined on one hand. They are spindly, chestnut leather; a bad match for her cheap cotton shorts. She stands pigeon-toed and her bare feet writhe with the heat of the road, her whole stance is this discomfort.
“Why don’t you put your shoes on?” he says.
But she laughs, unfooled, and states: “He refused to tell her what Kismet means.”
Morphic Resonance
The taxi ride is taking a long time. The heat has silenced them, and they are each draped out of an open window, eyes shut in the speed breeze. In that darkness, in which the whole world is warm and blows in on you generously, dirty and maternal, Eddie has fallen in love. He has decided he has fallen in love. Now that I’ve fallen in love, and How can I have fallen in love so fast, and, proudly, Love at first sight.
And then out of the blue, out of the turbulent warm darkness, her voice pipes courteously: “Did you know that the Sphinx was once under water? It’s older than the pyramids.”
She has leaned her head against the frame of the car window. It shakes slightly with the bumps, that passivity making her look sleepy. She’s smoking her third cigarette of the drive, poking the end out to let the wind strip the ash.
She’s still beautiful. It’s just, fucking relentless.
He says, “Did you know the first use of the Sphinx was as a four-star restaurant? They’ve found seating for a hundred on the lower level.”
The joke surprises him as it comes. He remembers that he’s funny, and sits back, relieved.
But she just smokes, shakes her head, deadpan:
“What’s amazing is that someone told me that same thing about the Tower of Pisa last month. Do you know Rusty? Blond, American, with a sailboat?”
“No.”
There is a long pause. She leans back again, shutting her eyes, and her passivity strikes Eddie now as indifference.
He says, “Maybe it’s going around.”
She says from behind her shut eyes, “It’s morphic resonance.”
“Morphic resonance?”
“Mmm.”
“Well, tell me. Now I gotta know.”
“It’s some New Age mumbo jumbo about how everything is really one,” she says, and her manner refers angrily to some third party, who has stubbornly adhered to morphic resonance, in the face of all her efforts to disprove it.
Lucky
They’ve gone for fiteer, the local pastry-bottomed pizza, in a low-ceilinged cellar where the chef has to bend his knees to make room to toss the dough. Until the beer comes, neither of them speaks.
And he is so in love. And he is so in love. He is in love. Love at first sight.
The radio plays soggy Ya Habibi Arab pop. She puffs a Cleopatra cigarette in time. He keeps being drawn to watch the chef tossing pizza dough – but she isn’t, doesn’t glance, so he is shamed and tries to resist the cheap spectacle. Arriving with the beer, the waiter places paper doilies on the table to receive the glasses, and the fans’ wind tugs them instantly; Eddie and Deesey have to pin them down until the glasses land.
Then the moisture roots them.
He remembers all these details, years later. The table tops were gray pretend marble. He was not hungry in a particular way that he would never not be hungry again, without her. When he turned his head, his sunburnt neck crinkled sensuously.
Years later, he does not remember: the frightening possibility of not really loving her, censored time and again. How he anticipated love’s euphoria each time he was going to look at her. How sometimes it took concentration and patience to pinpoint the detail of her that would yield the rush. He triggered it greedily, seeking to maximize it, like a man eating too many corn chips in search of the perfect one.
He had to make her love him back, at all costs.
He was about to drink beer for the first time, too ashamed to tell her why he shouldn’t. Sitting in front of the full glass, he watched the foam subside with a superstitious thrill. His mind parroted one beer, one joint, kablooey.
“Well,’’ she said, “to Kismet.”
“To Kismet.”
The glasses met in a graceless side-swipe that made him want to try again. That urge haunted him as he sipped with show relish. Somehow he had known ahead of time its gruff metallic taste.
She said:
“But do you know what Kismet means?”
Distracted by his sense of looming tipsiness, he bought time. “In what way? What it means.”
“Just, do you know what it means?”
He took a deep swig. Going down, the liquid numbed his throat.
She said harshly, “I’m serious.”
He smiled helplessly. Already the beer was turning him into a retard. His mind prattled, recurrence, grand mal seizures, chthonic-clonic.
“Look,” she said, “I’m not meaning to be heavy, it’s just something that happened to me recently, when we were in Australia.”
“Who’s we?”
“Just we. That doesn’t matter. We were in Australia. And we had an Australian friend, a girl, Jessie. We were at her flat, drinking, and we started talking about all the poisonous spiders they have in Australia. And Jessie told us a story about a friend of hers, also named Jessie. This friend Jessie was with a few tourists, like us, in her flat, telling them about the dangerous spiders. And suddenly she got up and went to the middle of the carpet and said, My God, there’s a funnel-web spider right there, and pointed. And the spider jumped up into the air and bit her on the end of her finger.”
Eddie laughed. Deesey said, “Exactly.”
“Exactly,” he echoed.
“So she told us this, and we looked around the carpet then. And she got up, laughing, and began to prowl about, you know, hunting spiders. And then she said, My God, there is one, I don’t believe it. And we yelled out, don’t point at it for God’s sakes, and she laughed and pointed at it to wind us up, and the spider leapt into the air and bit her on the end of her finger.
“We just ran and dialed the ambulance, and we were slicing her finger open and whatnot, sucking it, and they gave her a shot. But she was in hospital for a week.”
“Jesus Christ.”
“Well. The funnel-web spider.”
She shook her head and then very definitely turned away, turned her frown on the pizza chef, tossing his eternal dough. Eddie followed her gaze and for some moments they sat mesmerized by that deft swoop and catch and stretch. At last the chef winked at them, without missing a beat, and Eddie said, “So. What do you make of that?”
“I was hoping,” she said, “you might hazard a guess.” She shot him a fleeting scowl of reproach.
In the joshing, affectionate tone meant to enforce warmth, Eddie said, “That’s so totally unfair.”
She winced as if he’d sworn at her. She said, “It’s not that it’s unfair. It’s that I’m fucking desperate.”
Stung, he blathered, “Well, I’m not just saying this to fuck you up, the spiders were in league? Cause I was reading in the Washington Post on the plane, they did a study at MIT and spiders are actually highly intelligent, like dolphins. They have a sophisticated language that’s related to Basque, only much smaller. So that’s a possibility at least, but otherwise, I really hope you don’t hate me for saying this, but, for all I know, Kismet is just a Broadway musical.”
“Point taken.”
The pizza arrived then, ending it.
Over food, she mellowed and was again gracious.
As they got up to leave, he said, “I only know I’m lucky to be here with you, that’s all I know.”
She smiled and said softly, “That’s not enough.”