Split

Jane was a little bit plump, so when she answered his Craigslist ad, she wrote, “I’ve never been a pixie.” On the first date, they met for Thai iced tea at a coffee shop on Telegraph Ave. She wondered what he thought of her, whether she exceeded or underwhelmed. When they talked on the phone to make plans, he told her she’d recognize him by his white hat. He didn’t say what kind of hat, so, on the drive from her apartment in downtown Oakland, she pictured him under a series of potential white hats: the great crest of a cowboy hat bleached by the sun, a mushroomy chef’s hat, the tricorn peaks of a nurse’s hat. It turned out to be a painter’s cap—a white baseball cap with the brim’s edge worn through to the pinkish support card. It made sense, she thought, since he used to be a carpenter. He was only recently a facilities manager, only now making reliable money. He still seemed surprised at that, grateful instead of entitled.

Underneath the hat, he needed a haircut, and she was just glad that he had hair. She knew she was being a hypocrite, but was glad he didn’t have a pot belly, which she’d almost been expecting after he’d revealed he was a beer drinker. His eyes were light, reflective like abalone, and when he unfolded surprisingly long legs, standing up to meet her, she decided she could live with his broken-off front tooth. Looking at his mouth, she tried to think of the bowling term that would apply: five-ten split, one-nine split. It looked like someone had picked off the front pin, the king pin. She told herself optimistically that it was charming, and that the story behind it, when she did know it, would endear him to her even more.

“This turned out pretty well,” he said as they stood on the sidewalk outside the coffee shop, saying good night.

“Yes,” she said into his shoulder during their brief and casual hug. “It did.”

As of the second date, she knew nothing more about the chipped tooth, though his attempts at dating formality had disappeared. For the second date, he invited her to his house to watch TV, calling just an hour before the program started. He’d never responded to the email she sent after that first date. She’d thought at first he might be following that foolish rule about waiting three days to respond to maintain some illusion of coolness. But she didn’t care about cool—hadn’t she made that clear on the first date? 

In her message, she’d given him a lot of latitude about when she’d be available to see him again. By the fourth day of waiting, she’d chewed over each word of the message and decided that he’d interpreted her flexibility as a sign that she had nothing else to do, that she was, in fact, uninteresting. She’d been unable to look at her reflection in the mirror and put on clothes as if she were dressing someone else, an invalid. If it wasn’t the excess of emotion or availability she’d displayed in the message, she reasoned it had to be an excess of her. She faced it: she was a short, verbose, plus-size brunette, still a secretary at twenty-nine years old, soft and sticky like an old, windfall plum. 

But then he called, and she found herself manufacturing optimism again. The unplanned nature of his request meant he’d been nervous because it was important to him, she was important to him. He’d waited so late because he’d been trying to decide what would make a unique second date. On the first date, they’d talked about how much they both loved “Whose Line Is It Anyway,” and now here he was, asking her to watch it with him. That was a good thing, wasn’t it? 

She found it hard to decide what to wear in the space of twenty minutes before he picked her up. She’d spent four days concluding that every pair of pants she owned must burn, and now she had to put a pair on. She chose what she was already wearing, old comfortable drawstring pants, and a new black blouse with pearl-like buttons down the front.

He called from his cell phone to let her know he was outside. She closed the window she’d had open to the early night air. She turned off the lights. With a sweater over one arm, she locked the door behind her, made her way out through the building to the street. She’d had a moment of hesitation when he called and invited her over—she barely knew him. The wait made him seem hostile, potentially calculating. He could be taking her back to his house and, with the roommate he’d told her might also be there, gang-rape her. He might pull a gun on her in the car and, instead of exiting at the Martin Luther King Expressway, keep driving along Highway 24, up into the high, dark Sierras. But as she came out of her building, he was waiting outside his car, and she saw that he had gotten a haircut—a good one, close and soft against the nape of his neck—and that seemed to make everything all right.

“Hi,” she said. “How are you?” When she came to stand beside him, she remembered again the length of his legs. He was wearing a plaid flannel shirt, red and blue, with the tails hanging loose around the pockets of his jeans, the sleeves rolled up to mid-forearm.

“I’m good. You?” He opened the passenger door for her. “Your chariot awaits.”

She laughed and lowered herself into the seat of the Camry. She hoped her laugh didn’t sound as odd to him as it did to her. She was trying very hard to stay in the moment, in her body, but that only made her feel more distant.

He walked around to the driver’s side and slipped in, pleating his legs up and under the steering column. As the engine turned over, he said, “Right before I left work today, this guy tried to pick a fight with me.”

         “Really?” She smiled at him, readjusted her feet against the floor.

         “Yeah. But I’m thirty-four years old. I used to have the conviction that I could take on anything that came at me—but now—”

         It was appropriate to laugh. She laughed. He seemed younger than that to her, somehow, and also older. During the first date, when he’d slipped off his hat at one point and turned so his legs extended out from under the small table where they sat at the back of the cafe, there had been something fatherly, something in the angle of his head, the way he laced his hands together and settled them on the table. He reminded her, she thought, not of her own father, middle-aged when she’d been born, but of the other fathers she’d witnessed—the young fathers of her classmates in elementary school. At that moment in the cafe, she’d felt young, smaller, like she was looking up at him from her height at age eight.

“So, that’s why I called you, really,” he said. He steered the car up and down the hills of her neighborhood, rolled to stop at a stoplight. “I was just going to spend the night reading, but after that—”

He read a lot, she knew from the first date—political thrillers, astronomy textbooks. He’d told her that was what he did each night, when he came home from work. On the weekends, he took BART over to San Francisco and walked the streets of the Haight, finding coffee shops, bookstores, places to read some more.

She didn’t quite see the connection between the fight and his finally calling her, and briefly, the anger at that wait and its effect on her spit inside her like a small firecracker. “You needed to work out your aggression by inviting someone over to watch television?” she supplied. “I suppose there are worse ways to sublimate violence.”

The light changed in their favor. He maneuvered the car through the intersection and smiled over at her, shrugging a little. “I apologize in advance if I do something stupid and male this evening. It’s in my system.”

“Okay,” she said. She wondered what stupid male thing he would do, what he had planned. She vaguely toed a few options in her mind—would he get drunk? Buy a firearm? Ignore when she said no?

“My roommate wasn’t there when I left. I wasn’t sure if you were, uh, going to be coming over, so he doesn’t know we’ll need the TV. He took off to get a video. I left him a note, though. It should be okay.”

She turned from watching the reflective signs posted along the highway to look at him. His lack of planning disconcerted her, but his uncertainty about her agreeing to come charmed her. Maybe she should have said she was busy that night, but could they reschedule? She could have said no, but yes at the same time. She could have dictated the terms of the second date more that way—public, driving their own cars from separate directions to meet—but when he’d been on the phone, she’d been too afraid that he would have heard only the no. And she reminded herself, she had wanted to say yes.

“You found your way all right?” she said. She’d tried to give him directions on the phone, but he’d insisted he had a map.

“Oh, yeah.” He laughed. His glance flicked over at her. “I got off one exit too early, so I came along Grand.”

She laughed, too. “Oh, that’s not too bad. A lot of lights, though.”

“Yeah, there are. It didn’t take very long, though.”

“Good,” she said. “I’m glad.”

They transferred to the next highway, took the next exit. So far, she knew where she was. The long parallel streams of Martin Luther King and Shattuck were familiar to her, and the tributaries of Ashby and Alcatraz. She realized she hadn’t been in Berkeley more than once or twice in the dark before. She was still so new to the area. In her head, she mapped each landmark in case—despite the reassurance of the haircut; despite the repetition, I wanted to come, I wanted to come—she might have to open the door of the moving car or, when they finally arrived at his house, she might have to hike back along the route at least until the BART station. They followed Martin Luther King east, up into the hills of north Berkeley, a better neighborhood and further than she had expected. He’d told her about walking into work in downtown Berkeley, and she realized that walking distance for him might be something much longer for her. The high streetlights were replaced by the less reliable light of porch lights and small street lamps, fewer and farther between as houses replaced businesses and apartment buildings. It was almost dark enough, she thought, to see the stars up there, and craning her neck a little, she could see the slip of the moon, not full.

On the first date, he’d described the house as being beyond anything he’d expected to live in growing up. He’d grown up a nomad, moving from apartment to apartment in a number of Midwestern towns. In his 20s, he saw on the TV news the demolition of the housing project where he’d spent his first year of life. He’d been staying with his mother, and she called him into the living room to witness an escaping flourish of dust the size of a city block. “I wasn’t brought up to expect much,” he’d said to her matter-of-factly. She’d thought it was the sweetest thing he could have said, so vulnerable, so non-toxic.

He made a left at a stop sign, and she realized she was only partly sure of her way back, just as he slowed. Cranking a half U-turn in the car-lined street, he backed the car up the circling slope of a driveway screened by low, leafy trees. The driveway leveled off, and he parked the car in front of a garage. A terraced yard rose above the driveway to a square, open box of a house, the extent of which was hidden by the angle and the dark. In the yard, the thin white trunks of young birches or possibly aspens marked the levels, like upended sticks of chalk.

As she got out of the car, he was coming around the tailgate, looking up at the house. “I left one light on. Is there more than one light on?”

She counted one light in the large, clean squares of the front windows, but the blue halo of a television also flickered on the ceiling.

“The TV’s on. Damn.” He shrugged. “Oh, well.”

“It’ll be okay?”

“Oh, yeah. Nothing to worry about.” She didn’t think he sounded certain. He started up the stairs—bricks laid on end, leveling and pitching with the elevations of the terraces. When he reached the top, he turned and smiled at her, the keys in his hand. She smiled up at him, took two steps at a time. He waited until she was there to open the door.

He unlocked it and went in first. The first thing she saw, across the shallow tiles of the entry, was an empty frame of chrome and glass, a high and intricate lattice of shelves with nothing on them. To the left, she saw an interval of low, carpeted stairs to an unlit part of the house. To the right, a rectangle of a room was filled by an L of two couches and a TV on a credenza. A single torchiere extended low, unemphatic light. Beyond the room, through the same panes she’d seen from outside, she could see the orange and blue staccato of the East Bay below.

“Hey,” said the roommate, standing up from one of the couches.

“Hey,” said her date. “This is Jane. Jane, this is Matt.”

The roommate reached forward a handshake. “Nice to meet you.” He was small, neat, and not unattractive, with close-cropped hair and round, silver glasses. He was wearing a white button-down shirt, which had no wrinkles, and jeans, which had no fading or fraying, and a black belt that matched his shoes. He looked like a young stockbroker, like someone who listened to tapes of daily affirmations and time organization methods.

“I left a note,” her date was saying.

“I saw it. I can stop the movie.” He turned back to the bare, obsidian oval of a coffee table, looking for the remote control.

“This is okay?” she said.

“Oh, yeah,” said the roommate over his shoulder.

“Which couch do you want?” said her date. “Plain or pattern?”

No invitation to sit next to him? She paused, unsure, then sat at the far end of the plain couch.He took the nearest end of the floral-printed. There was some confusion with the remote control, an episode of loud static, then “Whose Line” coming back from commercial break. The roommate took his seat at the far end of the plain couch. She was sharing a couch with his roommate, not him.

“Do you want something to drink?” her date asked.

“Water’s fine,” she said.

“We’ve got wine,” offered the roommate.

She looked at him, then at her date. “Okay. Wine would be nice.”

Her date swung his legs over the arm of the floral couch and past the lamp, disappearing behind her. She turned a little, seeing rectangles of ladder-back chairs around a long table, then  the doorway to the kitchen. He switched on the kitchen light, and she could see green tile on the floors, part of a countertop. She heard him move around, open drawers.

“So,” said the roommate. “You know Troy from work?”

She turned back, looked at him, looked at the black coffee table. She tried to imagine all the things his question implied. He and her date were not friends. Or they were friends, and he didn’t know who she was because men don’t talk about the women they date the way women talk about the men they date. Or her date was not eager to share that he was using Craigslist to date. Or he was, just simply, ashamed that, having risked Craigslist, she was all he had caught. Too big, throw her back?

“Um,” she said. “No. We just kind of met randomly.” She hoped she was giving the impression that they’d met on the street, at the post office, in line at the bank, somewhere more respectable, somewhere less comic, somewhere less suspicious than the personals. She decided to think of it as just one more detail her date had neglected to arrange in advance.

Troy came back from the kitchen, carrying a brown bottle of beer, an opened bottle of red wine, and a clean, delicate wine glass, which he held out to her and began to fill. At about a third full—it was a deep glass—she said, “That’s good, thanks.”

He nodded and took the wine back to the dining room. She was sipping the wine as he came back and took his seat, stretching his legs stretched over the cushions of the long couch. They both turned to watch the program.

Her laughter seemed insincere to her. Then, too sincere. She turned on one hip towards the floral couch, on the other hip away from the floral couch. Nothing about this felt comfortable.

At the commercial break, Troy said, “Would you like the full tour?”

The roommate stayed on the couch. Troy took her up the low stairs to the dark half of the house. He only turned on the hallway light and the bathroom light. The bedrooms branched out from the central hall. He pointed to his room, his roommate’s room. All she could see of them in the rectangles of light case through the doorways were the corners of two different futons, one with a navy blue coverlet, the other beige. In the shadowed portion of his room, she thought she saw an office chair, a shirt flung over it. The white stripe of the shirt hung mid-air for a moment like a ghost until she recognized the chair under it. In the bathroom, he showed her the tub’s flat faucet, which expelled water in a single, clean sheet.

“I may be a rube from the Midwest,” he said, “but this impressed me.” He turned on the shower, and jets of water angled out from multiple shower heads, low and high. She did her best to look suitably struck by its novelty, but mostly she watched his face in the even light of the bathroom. She was trying to pinpoint what was familiar and what was strange about it. When he smiled, it was more than just the broken tooth; there was something lupine about it, a display of gum, a protrusion of dental arch.

They moved on to the kitchen, a jigsaw of sinks and windows and marble counters. Then the chords of the show returning from break sounded, so they moved obediently back to the couches.

At some point, she excused herself to use the bathroom. Before she went, she asked, “There’s not anything unusual about the toilet I should know about?”

Troy smiled, as he looked up at her from the couch. “Nah.”

“Good.”

The bathroom door was ajar, and a thin strip of yellow light stretched itself towards the stairs and guided her up. The house was larger than she’d expected, an object of more money than she’d expected, and was, in this way, luxurious. But—though she knew he rented, though she knew there was only so much he could have done—she thought of the bedrooms, now entirely dark, how neat, how empty everything looked throughout the house, as if Troy and his roommate had been packing to move and were living with only the last necessary objects. There weren’t even toothbrushes out on the counter. There was toilet paper, though—not always to be expected in a house where only men lived—and she wondered how often that happened or whether it indicated some kind of preparation on his part for her visit.

She kept looking for signs of danger or its opposite, generosity.

In the bathroom, along the alcove of the sink counter, a sheet of mirror reflected back the dimensions of the room—the tub, the shower, the toilet, the clean walls of tile. As she washed her hands, the mirror reminded her of the apartment she’d lived in a few years back. It had been her first one-bedroom apartment, only the second time she’d lived without roommates. She’d had more space than she’d ever had all to herself. There had been no one to report to, no one to accommodate. So it had seemed natural—not artificial, like a personal ad—when Peter had become part of that space, that life. All at once, in Troy’s bathroom, she remembered, instead of the beginnings, that moment at the end of it: the vanity lights over the sink, the darkness of the bedroom behind them, the reflection, her arms around Peter’s torso, her body hidden by his. He’d balanced his weight forward, away from her, his fingertips on the edge of the counter. He’d had the warm, solid body of a big dog, and she’d tucked her face against his shoulder blades, felt his ribs under the circle of her arms. What had he been looking at? Himself, her?—unpleasant, acidly. He’d shaken her off, then reached down and stripped the condom off, tossing it into the angled bucket of the trashcan. His exhale had been a word she had tried to decipher.

I don’t, she thought, want to be here again.

She dried her hands. She opened the bathroom door and stepped carefully down the low-rise steps. Her date and his roommate were sitting on the couches, watching the television, their faces rapt, unreadable. In a fluid movement, not stopping, as she came to the front door, she turned the single brass knob to open it, pulled it shut behind her with surprising lightness, and started running.