ena had never felt quite so naked. With her lovers back home, she had gone on dates for weeks, sometimes months, while they gradually revealed and touched all of each other’s body parts before going to bed. So when they saw each other fully naked at last, there were no surprises. They had enough time to get used to all the little imperfections and to begin to see each scar, each birthmark, and each stubborn twist of hair as a familiar and endearing attribute of the lover’s body.
This time, in front of the stranger, Ruena’s whole body shrank, resisting being exposed to judgment, wary of confirming her gender. She covered her breasts with her elbows. She resisted acknowledging that her pale pathetic mess of a body could actually attract a man, was so obviously attracting a man, while her mind begged her body to yield, to behave according to the situation, not to show its fear and embarrassment.
Ruena’s spoon clinked against the bottom of her bowl. The man whispered something, but she couldn’t make out the words in the diner’s noise.
“What?” she asked.
“You were fantastic.”
Are you kidding? she almost said, barely managing to keep her mouth from gaping.
“Was it good for you too?”
Ruena put her spoon down. It would have been awfully impolite not to give him a compliment in return. “Yes,” she said. “It’s been wonderful.”
They met once a week, during his lunch hour, at his friend’s place on East 18th. Soon everything in the apartment became so familiar to her that she could see the wallpaper pattern — green diamonds and lilac wavy lines — with her eyes closed and name all the titles in the bookcase, starting with the self-help books on the upper shelves and ending with the heavy art volumes on the lower. Their lovemaking usually took just over an hour. Ruena learned to glance up at the antique clock to see when her lover was about to climax. Afterward they went out to lunch, sampling rice and spinach in one or another ethnic restaurant in the neighborhood. They walked separately, so nobody would see them together. That didn’t bother Ruena. His shy request not to tell anyone didn’t bother her either. She even liked it in a way. She didn’t have a boyfriend, but she had a secret. Her life had become more interesting with a secret: more mysterious, less straightforward. Loneliness, if not disappearing entirely, didn’t follow her as closely as before.
ONCE THEY WERE seated at a table, the man smiled at her, made a quick compliment to their lovemaking, ordered their lunch, and began talking. “It feels wonderful to talk to you,” he often said.
Ruena had heard that before. She credited it to the fact that she didn’t talk much herself.
They talked about his job. He edited a respectable scientific magazine, which required dealing with impossible deadlines, an unpredictable boss, and his pregnant assistant, who broke into sobs whenever he pointed out her mistakes. They talked about his friends and his fiancée, whom he described as if they were television characters, labeled with one or two personality traits and behaving according to them. As they ate their spinach empanadillas, he confided that he was writing a book.
“I’ve been writing it for over ten years. Actually, it isn’t going along well. In fact, I often wake up in the middle of the night overcome with a surge of panic that at forty-five I’m a complete failure.”
The spinach empanadillas — tiny puffed pies — would have been very convenient to eat if the stuffing didn’t fall out so easily. Ruena didn’t know whether she should pick it up and put it back into her mouth or leave it on the plate. She asked what the book was about.
“It’s a memoir — well, not exactly a memoir. I would rather call it a novel with a strong presence of me.”
Sometimes he asked about Ruena’s school — she was pursuing a PhD in Women’s Studies — or about her country, which Ruena described in a calm and precise manner, without the ridicule or nostalgia typical of most emigrants.
They were eating spinach gnocchi when he asked, “Do you miss your country at all?”
Ruena swallowed the piece that she had just put in her mouth and was about to answer his question, when she felt a spasm in her throat. A scalding flow of tears coursed down her cheeks. She grabbed the linen napkin off her lap and pressed it to her eyes.
In a few seconds, her banquette sagged under the man’s weight. “Tell me,” he whispered. “Tell me, what is it?”
Ruena turned away, trying to hide her face behind the rough fabric of the napkin. She had nothing to tell, nothing that could justify a breakdown in a public place. He’ll either think that I’m suffering from a bad case of homesickness or that something horrible happened at home, Ruena thought in panic. For a second, she was tempted to invent a lie. She ran through a jumble of television images in her head, choosing between killing off her mother, her father, or her nonexistent twin sister.
She let the napkin slide down her face. Her lover looked blurry behind the screen of tears, his features distorted as in an abstract painting. He sat too close to her. There wasn’t enough space between them, not enough for her to lie.
She told him that she used to miss home very much. She told him that images of Prague, obscure, often false, used to haunt her during her first year in America.
“I would hunt for glimpses of Prague landscapes in New York streets. I would raid Brooklyn groceries in search of strawberries that tasted like the ones at home. I would go to my room at night, slump on a chair at my desk, drop my head on a pile of books, and just give in to longing. There was one place that I especially missed: a tiny bakery, which for some reason always smelled like fresh laundry. You know, the stuffy, hot smell of boiled sheets? I’d never liked that smell, but here in New York I became infatuated by it. I would sniff the air every time I passed a Laundromat, feeling the tingle in my stomach. I was reluctant to visit Prague for a long time, fearing I wouldn’t find the strength to go back to New York. But when I went home at last, I felt cheated. I visited all my favorite places, I saw all my friends, I ate all the food I had longed for, but I didn’t feel the tingle, not even in the bakery. The smell was still there, but it didn’t move me at all. I went back to New York, hoping my homesickness would return — you know, we always wish for something that we can’t have. But it didn’t. I went home every night and slumped in my chair with nothing to long for.”
Ruena dabbed her eyes and nose with the napkin and glanced up at the man apologetically. That was all she had to tell.
The man’s eyelashes blinked frequently as if they were operated by some mechanism. He suddenly moved toward her and closed his hands around her back in one startling movement. She felt the hard seam of his jeans on her stockinged calf, the stiff collar of his shirt pressed to her wet neck, the warm, stuffy fabric of his jacket touching her whole body, his breath smelling of Italian spices enveloping her face. She freed her arms and hugged him back.
Afterward they ordered more gnocchi. The man moved his plate from the other side of the table to sit next to her. He sprinkled freshly grated Parmesan over her plate, refilled her glass, and entertained her with some silly stories of his childhood.
Ruena, suddenly ravenous, ate all of her gnocchi and then some from his plate.