Getting to Know You

Flash Fiction by Clarissa Grunwald

The night your wife dies, you’re with me, drinking at Meyran’s downtown. Your wife’s death is unexpected, or as unexpected as it gets with cancer. If you’d known, we wouldn’t be doing this now. You come back inside after taking the call, jacket shiny with rain, and I can feel your guilt, pilling and sticky as the old varnish on the bar. 

You leave and don’t contact me again for one week, two weeks, three. I almost give up on you, but you text two days after the funeral. What time do you get off work tonight? And eleven o’clock that night, there you are, cruising slowly down the alley behind the restaurant in your Mercedes. I’m still in my uniform and smell like garlic and salmon; you’re in a loungy silk button-down and smell like guilt, guilt, guilt. 

Still, we get drinks. Afterward, you come to my apartment. 

You’ve never come over before. When your wife was alive, it was all bars and hotels. Now you say, “You live around here somewhere, don’t you?” and I admit I do. 

I am not a messy person these days, but this apartment is small, and most of the furniture in it is secondhand. I don’t think I’m ashamed of where I live, but my body does a little pantomime of shame anyway, the same knee-jerk duck-and-cringe that it does so often when waiting tables. Subservience baked into the bones. “Sorry, it’s not much,” I can hear the body saying. “Want a drink? I only have beer and water, sorry.” 

“Water’s fine.” 

You take a seat in the living room while I run the tap. I can feel your judgement from a room away. I could have put up more shelves in here, you’re thinking, to free up some floor space. It's understandable that I’m on a budget, but—maybe some art? Another bookcase? Still, you’re sitting on my ratty sofa, waiting for your water. “How was the funeral?” I ask, handing you the glass. 

“I don’t want to talk about that.” You do, though. “The service was nice.” 

“That’s good.” 

“A lot of people came. The speakers were good.” 

“That’s really good.” 

You sip your water, picturing your own funeral, wondering what they’ll say about you. It’s hard to describe how badly you want to be distilled into a eulogy. I join you on the couch and allow you to rest your hand on my thigh. All the while, you’re imagining your life, condensed into a perfect synopsis of itself, sorted and analyzed and rearranged, an adaptation that perfectly alters the source material to fit the medium.  

Even with your wife dead, you’ve not yet invited me home. I don’t think you ever will. You have a habit of keeping secrets. I can feel the compartment where they’re hidden. It’s well-locked and disguised, but its hollowness betrays it. If I tap my fingers in just the right spot, I can hear the echo of that space. 

I’m still not the only woman. That’s one of the easy secrets. As secrets go, you hold it so loosely that sometimes it feels like it’s not supposed to be a secret at all. Like you’re silently offering it to me. Like you know what I am. 

Only, of course, you don’t. If you knew what I was, we wouldn’t be doing this. 

Still, you buy me jewelry. Still, you want to see me wearing it. Still, you complain when I insist on straightening up the hotel room in the morning. “They have cleaning people,” you say as I try pointlessly to daub wine out of the carpet. “Come on, leave it be. I just wanted you to have something nice.” 

On New Year’s, we get drunk in a rooftop bar overlooking Times Square. Beneath us, a sea of people writhes on the street to the rhythm of a Beatles cover band, like little balls of drier lint, indistinct and graying in the artificial light of the Coca-Cola advertisements overhead. In the bar, the music is a pulse without a melody. The people are, too–heartbeats encased in big power chords of lust and alcohol. 

And then there’s you. Despite your precautions, I can sink inside you easily these days, feel the January air on your bare cheeks and the chill of your glass through a thin layer of cashmere glove. 

“Did you make any resolutions?” you ask me. 

I shake my head. “I thought about it, but I don’t know. If I want to change something, I’ll just change it. Why wait till New Year’s?” 

What have you changed? You wonder, but you don’t say it. “What about you?” I ask. 

“Made a few,” you say, but don’t elaborate. Secrets, secrets. They clink together like the ice in your glass.

The crowd below rumbles to attention. The screens synchronize: Fifty-nine. Fifty-eight. Fifty-seven. The people in the bar pause their conversations and look up. “Fifty-six,” you say. “Fifty-five,” we say. “Fifty-four.” Despite the clamor of counting and the sound of noisemakers in the square below, the world feels oddly quiet. No one’s thinking much. The cold, the scratch of zippers, the squeeze of too-tight dresses, of new shoes on tired feet—all of it muted in the countdown. Forty-five. Forty-four. Forty-three.

“I’m glad you’re here with me,” you murmur. Your voice is so quiet, I don’t think I’d be able to hear it amid all the ruckus, except that it’s you. So I can feel the words being born in your larynx, carved by your tongue. 

“Me too,” I say. I am almost entirely in your head. 

To tell the truth, I do have a resolution of sorts. I would like to be someone different this New Year. I would like to be someone with a Mercedes and a nice apartment. I would like to spill wine in hotel rooms and not think about surcharges, cleaning bills, and consequences. 

The crowd is nearing the single digits in their countdown. You pull me in for a kiss that lasts all the way to zero. “I love you,” you say, and just like that, I have it. “I love you,” you say, alcohol on your breath, but it isn’t true. I feel the vault where you keep your secrets crack open, and there’s no love in there. There’s nothing in there, not even sanctuary, not even air. Just emptiness, the same emptiness that echoed so temptingly when we were different people, iced over and smeared opaque with booze and boredom and guilt. 

I feel tricked—like I should have known. If I’d known, I wouldn’t be doing this.  

But I’m past the event horizon. So you try to say “I love you” again, but I swallow it. I swallow your fear of clowns, and your dead mother’s disapproval, and the way your wife looked as a young woman, and if any of it means anything, the meaning is lost in the surge. And when you realize something is wrong, when you try to scream, I swallow that too. The sky above us is alive with fireworks, and the bar is dark and loud, and I hope that’s enough–that no one will see this. Your eyes going wide, your pupils dilating, and they are my eyes now, my pupils. And the last thing you see with them before they shrivel out of your head is me growing your nose, my eyebrows darkening, my hair shortening, my mouth filling with your too-white teeth. And when it all is over, with the fireworks crashing into their grand finale, you are nothing more than the shattered pieces of the whiskey glass you dropped when your fingers caved in. 

And I am gone. And you are standing, in my clothes, holding my champagne flute. 

And I am you. 

I pull your long coat over myself, grab the rest of your clothes, and rush off to the restroom to change. There’s glass on the bar floor, but it will get picked up soon enough. I have to rip my dress to get it off, but the delicate fabric parts easily at the zipper. You always did get me such nice things. Outside, people are laughing, and the band is playing Auld Lang Syne. 

I push out of the bar and head down to street level, into the night. The square is littered with empty bottles and novelty eyeglasses. Bodies, swaying with drink, press in from all sides, laughing. I want to know what they know. I want to know anyone but you.