TOO NERVOUS TO SIT, MATT STANDS IN THE HEART OF THE Mall, watching the flow of people entering. There are benches before him, among red bricks and indoor plants, but he feels he would really look like a wimp if he was sitting down when she walked in. Guarded by the plants, he watches, and there she is, coming his way, moments ahead of time, for which promptness he all once adores her. To his surprise, though, she moves a little less boldly than he would have expected, even as a foolish smile is breaking out on his own face. She is black, he sees and remembers; yes, she is black.
He heads around the centerpiece to meet her; she is scanning shoppers sitting there. He sees her eyes discover him. “Hey,” he says in a laugh and, reaching—he had no idea he would do such a thing—takes her hand for an instant in both of his.
They turn to walk along the Mall’s avenue, past jewelry and cookie displays. He hears her say, “You seem really different.”
“I do?”
“Like you’ve changed,” she says.
Glancing at her face he sees that yes, it is the girl Vanessa, with her black skin, her flash of red lips and white teeth. And they are together, which gives him this complicated and sensational feeling.
“I hope nothing’s wrong,” she says.
“No,” he says.
“Not having second thoughts about being with a black chick?”
“Oh, no. No. Not at all. Are you?”
“Me? Heck, yes, man. Well, not second thoughts.”
“Say that again?”
“I’m aware I’m here,” she says. “It’s a little cool, but a little scary, too.”
“We just look like friends, don’t we?”
“Which is what we are—friends.”
“Want to get a Coke or something?”
“I guess it’s a little more than friends. That’s why it feels scary.”
“I like the way you say things,” he says.
“Meaning what?”
“You don’t fool around. I just like to talk to you.”
“Yeah? How about Papa Gino’s then, white boy, for a Coke?”
Turning, they go through an awkward reversal of direction and an amount of smiling. He touches her arm above the elbow, and it is nearly daring. What they are doing is no longer imaginary, he thinks. They are together.
At the counter, while she sits at a table covered with red-checkered oilcloth, he orders and pays for two medium Cokes. Standing among the pizza buyers, he smiles at the menu on the wall and smiles still as he carries the two paper cups to the table. He has never felt more self-conscious. To complicate things, she suddenly says, “Now what are you thinking about?”
He looks at her.
“Tell me,” she says. “I can tell you’re thinking about something.”
He lies. “I was thinking about what a good idea it was to call you up,” he says.
She seems not to buy it. “Really?”
“No, that’s not true,” he says. “What I was thinking was, looking at your hands—was that I’d like to touch your hands.”
He looks at her.
“Why don’t you?” she says. “I could go for that.”
He laughs and still doesn’t dare. It’s all too much, he says to himself. As if seriously, he looks into her eyes; she looks into his in the same way.
“Want to go someplace we can mess around?” she says.
He keeps looking at her and doesn’t move, as blood determines on its own to occupy his face. “Where?” he gets out.
She takes a moment. “Our garage,” she says. “My mother’s Buick. She never uses it.”
“Far from here?” he manages to say.
She only continues to look at him as if to say, what a silly thing to ask.
His face is flushed and he cannot hold her gaze any longer; he glances down. He strains at once to look up at her, but his neck is so stricken it doesn’t want to cooperate.
“God, I have messed up again,” she says.
“No. Oh no,” he says.
“Oh, I have,” she says. “I’m sorry.”
“It’s not anything,” he says. “I’m out of it, that’s all.”
“I shouldn’t come on like that,” she says.
“No, it isn’t you, really,” he is saying. “It isn’t.”
“Let’s just back up and start over,” she says.
“It’s okay,” he says.
“Tell me something else you’re thinking,” she says.
“Just what you said,” he says.
“Listen, all I meant by that was—well, I didn’t mean what you’re probably thinking I meant.”
He looks at her.
“I just said that, you know, for shock value.”
“Except you look like you found a rattlesnake in your lunch bag.”
He laughs, shrugs as if to say it’s true.
“So,” she says. “Tell me what you’re thinking now.”
“Same thing,” he says.
She pauses. “Okay, let’s go then. But it ain’t to do what you think.”
She smiles, looking at him over the red-checked oilcloth; he suddenly leans toward her and, surprising himself as much as he might surprise her, says, “I’m just dumb about stuff.”
He resumes his position, and now she is the one who appears confused. “Which means what?” she says.
“Just what it says.”
“You’ve never even kissed no girl before, have you?”
Well, that’s what he meant, he is thinking, and as he looks at her her larger meaning turns in his mind. “I gotta go to the bathroom,” he hears himself say.
He is in the center of the Mall, walking among people he doesn’t see, when he asks himself, as if realizing he has committed some kind of social error, do you say to a girl you have to go to the bathroom?
He walks through a wide opening into a department store and finds and then enters the men’s room, with its beige tile and brushed stainless steel, and seeing himself in the mirror, he cannot deny that something about what he sees is different. As an afterthought, he tries a breath in his hand.
Heading back, he feels no less light-headed. As if, he thinks, all his life he has been housed, held—in a membrane—and here at last he is breaking through. It was a little like this when he first realized he could swim.
Around him are women’s nightclothes, colors so lightly blue, so faintly pink and beige, so laced and silken that they seem to tend toward creating some puzzle of a creature within the trees. In the looks of a saleswoman whose lips glisten red, whose eyes and eyelashes look like miniature birds in small cages, whose cheeks are dusted perversely pale—in the midst of her perfume he seems to receive another glimpse.
“Ready to go?” he says, approaching the table, not sitting down.
Reaching to take his hand, to steer him into sitting again on his side of the table, she whispers, “One thing I want you to know. Don’t you go thinking I meant what I didn’t mean. I think it’s cute you never done nothing with no girl, if that’s what you meant. But don’t you think I meant what I didn’t mean, because that’s not what I meant at all.”
There are her eyes, her red mouth, her glossy hair like icing on a cake. There are her gold earrings. “I know you didn’t mean that,” he says.
“Let’s go do it then,” she says—and adds, “Just kidding.”