‘Is this a joke?’ she asked. ‘You’ve been following me? What the fuck do you want?’
‘Nothing, nothing at all,’ I protested. ‘I just thought it was an interesting coincidence, that I should see you three times in such quick succession and because we seem to have similar interests.’
Sneering, she glared at my hand. ‘You’re married. Go back to your fucking wife.’
Romance was the last thing on my mind but I blushed as she rose from her seat and got off at the next stop, people around us looking at me and shifting away, as if I might be carrying plague. As a consequence, standing outside the Lincoln Plaza Cinemas that Thanksgiving morning, I was wary of being too friendly, lest this young man also think I might be making a pass at him. In the end, however, he was the first to speak.
‘Did you ever find your ugly girl?’ he asked, a wry, cocksure look on his face, as if he enjoyed rude conversations with strangers.
‘Excuse me? I’m not sure—’
‘That student you were supposed to meet at Caffè Paradiso on Saturday, the one who didn’t show up and you couldn’t find her number.’
‘Why would you call her an ugly girl? She’s not ugly at all.’
‘On Saturday I asked you if she was pretty and you said no, not really, and so I said it didn’t matter whether she showed up or not.’
I could not remember having said anything of the kind, though looking back over this document I see that in my account of the conversation I implied as much. It was embarrassing to think I had been coaxed into such an unpleasant assertion, the sort of thing one man might say to another as a way of building a little unsavory misogynistic capital. Thinking back on my life, I doubted I had said anything like this since becoming a father, and the regret I felt towards Rachel, the way I had been thinking about and treating her since Saturday, tightened my chest. ‘That’s a crude way of looking at it.’
The young man kept smiling, showing his long white canines, teeth that had either grown naturally straight or had the benefit of expensive orthodonture. I had not paid much attention to what he looked like on our first meeting but I could see now that he was of average height, perhaps thinner than he should have been, with limp hair, and a hungry look. He was wearing dark wool slacks and black shoes and a black wool pea coat, all of them well made, expensive (designer clothes, I would have said, though I pay no attention to fashion), and he spoke with an accent I associated with well-educated East Coast families, so much so that he might have been part of Peter’s set, one of Peter’s former friends or classmates, the kind of privileged Ivy League frat boy who remains unmarried into his thirties, shying away from commitment or perhaps being passed over by women who see him for the jerk he is.
‘I’m a crude guy. So is she ugly or not?’
‘No, not ugly. I’m sure I never said she was ugly.’
‘But not pretty, you definitely said she wasn’t pretty, which means either she must be fat or she’s hairy.’
This young man was not, himself, particularly handsome, not objectively so, although he was no uglier than Rachel, which is to say he was neither handsome nor ugly, just as Rachel is neither pretty nor ugly, but quite unexceptional, an ordinary-looking person in a world of ordinary-looking people. In his case, the young man was too thin to be handsome, his chin too prominent, cheeks gaunt, as if he might have a drug problem or eating disorder, though eating disorders among men are, I know, a rarity. He did not look athletic, did not have the build or musculature of a runner or cyclist or triathlete, which might otherwise have explained the leanness of his face. His trousers were snug and his legs looked unhealthily thin, his neck sticking out above the broad collar of the coat was vulnerable in a way that made him seem pathetic. His hair was straight and aggressively parted on one side, slicked back in the way I knew was in fashion, the extension of a recent 1950s nostalgia that had unexpectedly started looking even further back, to the 1930s, with Hitler Youth haircuts now so common in London and parts of New York that for a historian of twentieth-century Germany it is unsettling to see this hallmark of fascism embraced by young men with so little knowledge of history that they can see their chosen style simply as a marker of urban sophistication and ironic appropriation of the past; whether they even know its fascist associations I cannot say (I suppose the great majority do not), but I hoped that if they discovered what those associations really signified they would lose no time in growing their hair long and affecting a progressive bohemianism, a fin-de-siècle extravagance to counter the global lurch to the right, at least esthetically speaking, though so much of this revivification of the signifiers of fascism has been accompanied by a swing towards ultranationalist political movements that one cannot help feeling emboldened to trot out the old maxim that history repeats itself. Please may it not.
I wanted to get away from him but also, instinctively, felt he might be the sort of maniac who carries a concealed weapon and would hold me hostage. For all I knew, he afforded his expensive wardrobe through armed muggings, and so I tried to make an exit that would be definitive without provoking him. ‘Listen, it’s Thanksgiving, and we’re strangers, we don’t know anything about each other, and I’m not really comfortable with this conversation. In any case, I’m expected somewhere.’
The young man’s smirk deepened, cutting a sneer into his pale right cheek. ‘Parade party?’
‘Something like that.’
‘Me too. Friend of mine in the Century Building.’
For a moment I thought of cancelling, or saying I had another errand to run before I went to the party, just to avoid him, but no one runs last-minute errands on Thanksgiving morning and I knew the lie would be transparent. ‘What a coincidence. That’s where I’m going.’ No such thing as coincidence, I reminded myself, not when it comes to meeting strangers multiple times in a short span of days, not when you speak to a man you do not know about intimate subjects twice in the same week, not when those conversations happen at times and locations where you have planned in advance to be present, especially not when you know between Meeting One and Meeting Two that someone is monitoring all of your communications. This sequence of thoughts flashed through my mind very rapidly without my reaching a definite conclusion, but as they did I looked at the thin young man with a greater sense of suspicion. He was smiling as I spoke, and then laughed, as if he found the situation extravagantly funny. Unhinged, I thought, unstable, already canvassing the wilderness beyond the borders of his personal microstate of sanity.