The Conversation

The sun reflected off the top of the TV stand at the perfect angle. Perfect enough to make it obvious just how dusty all his stuff had gotten over the last few months of neglect, since the last time her cared enough to put Swiffer to surface. He had contemplated cleaning everything before the move, making it look lustrous just as the moving guys would show up to drape old quilts to make sure nothing got damaged in the truck. But he realized that if he had done this, it would have been more for the show than for anything else, an effort to buy himself support among the observing public.

"Oh, how clean he is," they would whisper to each other under the crackle of packing tape being unwound, wrapped around the different pieces to keep the quilts in place. For surely they would notice such a thing. He didn't want to be judged for not cleaning his stuff.

Ultimately he let the laziness take over and left it all alone. He tried reading their looks, not that they gave him looks, per se, but they kept tossing glances around the room, to each other, having their Spanish-language communications.

"…Mas…"

He heard "mas" somewhere in there, sandwiched between words that could make it mean anything. All it took was one or two other perfectly placed words, pushing everything in a certain direction. Good or bad. Indifferent. Him being neurotic. It all depended on the context which he couldn't understand.

"More" what? What were they saying about him?

"It's not always about you," she said as she shifted her weight, recrossing her legs in the other direction and making the couch squeak underneath her.

He swiped his bare hand over the op of the TV stand, watching it carve a little avenue through the dust. He looked at the edge of his hand, now trimmed with a fuzzy collection of gray that represented the world's deposits into his space. Somewhere it was written that dust is mostly composed of dead skin cells and hair. Or had he seen it somewhere. The show "Nova" came to mind.

"Nova."

"What?"

"Nothing."

"Question," she finally restarted after he kept quiet. She thought his silence was a way of not wanting to continue on the vein of conversation she had initiated, of disagreeing with her unqualified use of the word "everything." But he was only distracted by the dust, the gray that was composed mostly of him. He slid it off his hand and started rolling it between his thumb and forefinger, turning it into a little matted ball.

"Yeah," he answered absent-mindedly, tongue slightly protruding from between his lips, the look of concentrated contemplation. "Shoot."

"What's this about Jewish men liking Asian women? What's that about?"

The dust ball drifted towards the floor in a soft decent, buoyed by the exceedingly warm air in the room. He should open a window maybe.

"Oh, well, I think it has to do with a common culture? Maybe. Like similar values. Or not. It could just be that a lot of Asian women are demanding and bossy and I think a lot of Jewish guys like that."

"We don't take any shit."

"I guess."

"OK." She paused and looked towards the ceiling without tilting her head back, holding her breath as if she was writing it all down somewhere, a note for future reference. Meanwhile he slid his had across the dust again, widening the path he had just formed. He shoveled this bit right off the edge of the stand.

"Also, we need to speak about your quarter-life crisis."

"Excuse me? What makes you say that?" She finally managed to capture his attention.

"Look, no one changes jobs and moves to a new borough in the course of two months unless they're having a quarter-life crisis. It's fine. Totally normal. But we should probably discuss." She made a little circle in the air with her finger, an effort to establish that "we" meant the two of them.

"Interesting," except he didn't really think so.

"I'm just saying. I want to know what's going on with you."

"Oh." He smiled. Actually, he found himself a little flattered that there was something interesting enough about him that someone else wanted to know more about it.

"I'll be back in town in a couple of weeks."

"When specifically?"

"No idea!" Of course not, how could he be so presumptuous. "You know how I am, I just sort of show up!"

"Well if you tell me more specifically, like ahead of time, then I can plan for it." He remembered the last time she was in town when he got a text from her at one in the morning giving him a small window of opportunity to meet her at a bar six avenues and fifty-four blocks from where he was. He opted instead for "Wedding Crashers" on DVD and a chicken fried rice he had ordered in.

"That wasn't my fault. I just forgot to call you. And who delivers chicken and rice at one in the morning anyway? Even in New York that's a hard thing to find."

"Not the point." Although maybe she was right, maybe he had made that part up. Was it pizza that he ordered in? It bothered him that he couldn't remember. What was this false history he had created for himself? There was something frightening about certainty disappearing so suddenly.

"Fine, so if it happens it happens. And if not, you can blame me."

He wasn't looking for a reason to blame her, but a part of him was still impressed because she never embraced the idea of blame so openly. She was extremely hostile to such things.

"Impressed?"

He rolled his eyes, a motion she didn't see because she had now gotten up off the couch and gone over to grab her coat from behind the door. Even with the stiletto boots she was wearing, she still had to raise herself up on her toes to reach it. He took a moment to evaluate her, tracing the contours of her back and sliding down towards the thighs that tensed inside the mini skirt she was wearing.

"Just try letting me know ahead of time. OK?"

"I'll do my best. Is that sufficient for you? God you're demanding."

"Like an Asian woman? Do I remind you of you?"

"Bye!" she said quickly and walked out of the room. A moment after she had gone it felt as if she'd never been there in the first place. It was only after he saw her briskly walking past his window that he confirmed that they had actually just had a conversation. Or an exchange; maybe it was more an exchange than a conversation.

The sunlight had shifted and taken a new angle in the room, abandoning the TV stand for the wall where it now sat perched above a bookshelf, the shadow of his head suspended in its arms. He thought it rude, that his profile should be borrowed from him like this, without his permission.

With spite, he moved out of the way, and the world's impression of him disappeared.