But it wasn’t easy for Ru
ena. She felt apprehensive when a menu appeared before her, panicky when she opened it, and paralyzed with fear when she read the fine script describing what was served on a bed of what and under which sauce. So many choices! So easy to make an embarrassing one! Ruena begged her lover to order something for her, anything, the same thing he wanted to eat. He agreed. And since his gastronomic preferences were limited to salmon, rice, and spinach, those three things invariably appeared on Ruena’s plate. Nothing could tempt Ruena to eat salmon (she was allergic to fish) or rice (she simply hated it), so she ended up eating only spinach. Ruena didn’t dislike spinach. She would even have said that she didn’t mind spinach, if it weren’t so difficult to slice.
On their first date they ate sautéed spinach with garlic and pine nuts in a red-brick Italian place. On the walls, black-and-white photographs glistened in candlelight. They had met a few days before on a bench in the Central Library while waiting for their order. The man pointed at the electronic board above their heads. “I can’t stand the thing. Reminds me of hours spent in Department of Motor Vehicles lines. The mere sight of those changing numbers stirs up memories of parking tickets, lost licenses, expired inspections. You know, that nagging feeling of driver’s guilt.”
The man shook his head, making his fine light-brown hair fly off his forehead and land back.
“Don’t you hate it?”
Ruena nodded, even though she didn’t own a car and wasn’t familiar with driver’s guilt. She kept peering at the electronic board as if her whole future depended on seeing her number there, not turning to the man, merely answering further questions with nods or one-syllable words. To the question, was she a student in New York? she said yes. To the question, where had she come from? she said Prague. And to the question, could he call her sometime? she answered with a nod. With her side vision, Ruena caught the vague shape of a tall man in jeans and a tweed jacket. She hoped his books would arrive first and he would leave without seeing hers, books documenting eighteenth-century birth control and female hygiene. Her wish came true and the man left, after putting a crumpled piece of paper with Ruena’s number into his jeans pocket.
Later that day, the hazy image of the man appeared to Ruena several times. First, when she sat in a subway car, squeezed between two chatting women whose voices seemed to bounce off the sides of her head. Another time, on the pages of her paper about an eighteenth-century diaphragm and the French prostitute who invented it. The last image appeared late that night, in Ruena’s tiny Brooklyn apartment, while she watched the news with her Polish roommate. They were both dressed in sweatpants, T-shirts, and oversized slippers and were munching on baby carrots rather than fattening chips; the man appeared to her on a train going through the countryside. They were sitting across from each other and talking — or, rather, Ruena talked and the man listened. By the time the weather broadcast came on, the train image was replaced with one of Ruena standing by the window with a little boy, vaguely resembling the man, nestled in her arms. The boy giggled and sucked on Ruena’s hair. Look, a birdie, she wanted to tell him, but she wasn’t sure which language should she use, Czech or English. “Definitely Czech,” she decided. “He will pick up English when he is older.”
“I’m turning off this crap,” her roommate said. She pressed the button and shuffled to her room, struggling to free a piece of carrot stuck in her teeth.
THE CANDLE on their table exuded a faint smell that resembled burning plastic. The flickering light fell on Ruena’s plate in a few uneven spots, illuminating the spinach that didn’t look like Ruena had expected. The twisted brown strips resembled malnourished earthworms. She attempted to slice off a piece, but the knife made whiny sounds and proved helpless before the rubberlike matter. Ruena was deciding between twisting the strips on a fork, as if it were pasta, or leaving the spinach jumble alone, when she felt the man’s hand just above her knee. His words rustled in her hair. “I want to take your clothes off and make love to you.”
What a cliché! the critical part of Ruena protested. Yet her uncritical part melted just like the plastic-smelling candle on the table. It had been more than a year since a man had touched her knee or whispered to her.
Ruena gulped ice water while comparing the man’s description of her beauty with her reflection in the stainless-steel pitcher. She did have an unusual face, with regular if slightly sharp features, dense eyebrows, light-blue eyes, and pale skin that easily blushed and broke into blotches. She wasn’t sure if she could be called “breathtakingly beautiful,” but she agreed that her flaxen hair looked “spectacular”—she had washed it just before the date and hadn’t spared expensive conditioner. As for her “magnificent” Eastern European accent, Ruena could only shrug. She’d always thought of it as an embarrassing handicap, imagining that the English words came out of her mouth either wounded or coated in mud.
“I want to be your lover,” the man whispered. He spread his fingers wider on Ruena’s thigh, elaborating a long speech in which Ruena caught the word marriage close to the end. “I don’t take marriage lightly. It’s probably not the sanest decision, but I’ve made it and I’m going to stick to it.”
For a second Ruena thought he was proposing to her. Then she realized he was talking about another woman, his fiancée, with whom he’d been living for almost six years. This man was about to marry someone else, but he wanted to be Ruena’s lover.
“I won’t push you,” he said, by the restaurant door. His fingers were cool as he ran his hand between her shoulder blades.
Ruena’s roommate wasn’t home that night, so she took the opportunity to eat cream cheese out of the container. Hunched on the kitchen windowsill, Ruena scooped up the cheese with brittle Ritz crackers, while repulsion at the man’s offer fought against the stubborn memories of his touch.
If he cheats on his fiancée, it’s his moral dilemma, not mine. I should enjoy myself now; I don’t care about the future. I’m not interested in marriage. How many people do I know who have benefited from one? Ruena had the whole arsenal of worn-out but sturdy arguments to defeat the repulsion. Still, repulsion probably would have won if only loneliness weren’t so exhausting. Loneliness followed her everywhere like an unwelcome companion, creeping in at parties she attended, sitting beside her at matinees in a movie theater, dragging along when she took a walk, staring at her mockingly from the cream-cheese surface littered with cracker crumbs.
She removed all the crumbs with a teaspoon before returning the container to the refrigerator.
ON THEIR second date, she ate old-fashioned creamed spinach in a crowded diner. It didn’t taste particularly good, but Ruena swallowed one steaming spoonful after another. They had just made love in his friend’s apartment, where the air conditioner had been blowing full blast the whole time. The man took her clothes off and stepped back to savor the sight. Ru