“I don’t think so,” I said.
And it wasn’t that I wasn’t happy doing what I was doing. When I told him I wasn’t interested, it had nothing to do with him or Eliza or my enjoyment of being in the shower, soaping up a naked body. I was like a kid saying, “I don’t want to play,” but really I did want to play. I did want to go to his house, but I was dissatisfied, and like a powerless child, the only thing I could do was not do. The only way I could protest was by saying no.
Saying no, however, can be a form of saying yes. That’s what I was thinking. I was thinking about water, and like water cascading down a running brook, or like electrical impulses, or like anything really, we move along a certain path, and along the path there are forks going in different directions, and by saying no to one direction we automatically say yes to another. Like my brief career writing about movies. Since I didn’t like the movies being made at the time, I wrote about other movies, older movies, movies that seemed better. I was saying no, and although I wasn’t getting paid for it, by imagining something better, my saying no was a form of saying yes.
Earlier, when I’d picked Alan up at the airport, because I had time, I parked my car in the lot. I went into the actual airport building, and we all know what airports look like, and this one looked like that. Normally I would have found it sterile and loud and repulsive. But you can say no, not only to an event, but to a way of experiencing an event, and for some reason I said no to the way I normally looked at airports. And when I did, it didn’t seem all that sterile. It was filled with human beings, living their lives and going about their businesses, and I felt oddly buoyed by the anonymity of watching them. The people were swirling around me, bored possibly, and preoccupied, and I was happy among them, and I walked for a while, through shops and seating arrangements, until I ended up in a small waiting area with an overhead monitor. I heard a voice recounting the news of a recent bombing. I watched an older couple walk through some yellow doors, and I’m going to skip how I ended up walking through the yellow doors myself, because the point I’m getting at happened when I got inside. First of all, it was quiet. It was a large room, bright, with leather sofas and chairs, cream-colored, and flowers on the table. People were drinking drinks and eating sandwiches, and quietly reading newspapers, which I noticed were mainly Italian. There were plenty of empty sofas so I sat on one, by a window, calmed by the luxury of the setting, or the modernity of the setting, or the air, which was very clean. The situation was foreign and I was foreign in the situation, and I watched people walking to their chairs from what I supposed was the bar, and my point about utopia is that we all know the condition of feeling satisfied or content, and then, after a while, we become dissatisfied or discontent. The requisites for happiness don’t change, but we do, and I did, because suddenly I wasn’t content to just sit there. I wanted to eat and drink, and the longer I sat there the more I wanted it. I watched a family in front of me, the kids polite, the father loving, the mother eating a sandwich, and although I knew the bar, in a place with well-dressed businessmen and — women, would be expensive, I said no. I said it, not to what was around me, but to what was inside me, to the person (me) who considered an airport bar a waste of money. I wanted a sandwich, and when I went to the bar it turned out that there wasn’t any bar. Behind an actual wooden wall was an area with a counter, and on the counter was a bottle of Prosecco sitting in a silver ice bucket. In a glass-front refrigerator there were elegant miniature sandwiches. I poured into an actual glass the sparkling wine, took from the refrigerator a sandwich on a plate, and I walked back to my comfortable sofa. And my point is that, yes, I’d lost my original utopia, but by saying no I’d found another.
It wasn’t just happening with me. Jane was also saying no. I called her the following day, but she didn’t answer. I called her a few hours later, and when she didn’t answer I left a message, “Just checking in, hope you’re all right,” and when I called again and she still didn’t seem to be answering, I decided to drive to her house. Which I did. I rang her bell and she came to the door, wearing pants and a man’s white shirt, and let me in, but I could see that something was wrong. She smiled when she said hello, but instead of sitting with me or talking to me or looking into my eyes, she walked into her kitchen and began looking in her cupboards. Water was boiling on her stove, and she was looking in her cupboards, at her tea selection, and she was having trouble choosing a tea.
“What are you looking for?” I said.
“Nothing,” she said.
“Tea?”
“No.” And then she turned off the stove.
When you like someone you want to make that person happy, and although the romance of our relationship may have been waning, I still liked her, and in an attempt to create a little happiness, I suggested we go out and find a tongue taco.
Tongue tacos were her favorite food, and the suggestion seemed to raise her spirits. Or maybe she just wanted to get out of her house. She closed the cupboard doors, and I drove her to a Mexican taco place near the corner of Sunset and Alvarado. We parked in the lot, got out of the car, read the hand-lettered sign advertising tacos al pastor and pollo and carne asada, but no tacos de lengua. A girl in a white dress said they would have tongue tomorrow.
I asked Jane if she wanted to try another place, but I could see that her thoughts had already moved on. She was looking at a sign hanging over an entrance about four doors down, to a pool hall. The sign was vintage and the windows were tinted, and inside it was large and dark, a cavern with pool tables and a billiard table, and there were two Ping-Pong tables in the back. We rented a ball and paddles from a muscular man, and I knew she’d played Ping-Pong before, but we’d never played together, and when we started playing I was surprised at how good she was.
We started hitting the little white globe back and forth across the net, and I didn’t really spin it, and she was just hitting it, very mechanically. We were just warming up, and as we got warm, we began to get a rhythm, and as our volleys got longer, the activity of hitting the egg-sized ball became like a conversation, a sometimes exciting conversation. We didn’t know when it would end or who would end it, and we didn’t want it to end. The very idea of coordinating this perfect sphere to bounce between us was funny, and the way we tried to win without really caring who won, that was fun, and we probably could have kept the conversation going between us indefinitely, except for one thing.
We began to keep score.
Jane was balancing the ball on her paddle.
“You ready?” I said.
“Oh, I’m ready,” she said, and we volleyed for serve.
She won the volley, and when the game began I could see she was serious about winning. She was slamming the ball and spinning the ball, and I was having a little trouble controlling the table, or more accurately, the ball on the table. I seemed to be hitting it off, or into the net, too busy returning her shots to land the shots I wanted to be making.
Then it was my turn to serve, and while she was taking off her sweater I could feel something happening to me. I should say that something was happening to Steve, because there I was, spine straight, holding the ball, and the feeling of Steve was fading. I should say I felt the desire to be Steve was fading. And as it faded I started winning points. The momentum shifted, and I became the one who was spinning the ball and she was the one having trouble. When she started serving, her serves, which had totally flummoxed me before, seemed like setups. And as I landed more and more of my trick shots, I could feel, not only confidence, but a kind of intoxication, and whether I was getting better or she was getting worse didn’t matter. I was creaming her.