After we hung up I felt sick. I realized I had been in despair for the past three days.
The phone rang. I would die if it wasn’t him. That thought, I knew, was itself lethal. In the time it took to pick up the phone and say hello, I thought again and again: What is man that thou art mindful of him. What is man that thou art mindful of him. What is man.
“Selin,” Ivan said. “Hey.”
? ? ?
“So what have you been up to?” asked Ivan.
“Nothing. Writing this philosophy paper. What have you been up to?”
“Trying to figure out how to get my stuff to California and put it in storage, things like that.”
“Oh, I know.” I said it seemed very hard that every single thing in the room had to be either thrown out, or put into storage, or conveyed somehow to my mother’s house.
“For you? Why is it hard for you? You’re coming back next year. Put everything in storage here and go home.”
I told him I didn’t have a ride because my mother would be in Turkey, and I couldn’t carry all my things myself on the train, so I was mailing stuff home. He asked if I was using the book rate, because that was the best deal. He said you could use the book rate for other things besides books—they didn’t want you to do it, but you could. He had talked the woman at the post office into it. I felt tired and hopeless.
“So,” Ivan said. “Do you want to go swimming?”
“Now?”
“Well, it’s hot out, don’t you think?”
“Yeah.” It really was hot. He said we could meet at the freshman cafeteria at five and have dinner first. He asked if I was brave enough to ride on a motorcycle. I didn’t think a motorcycle sounded scary. It was no antlers.
After we hung up, I paced around the room, thinking about the indignity of worrying about my bathing suit. It was my high school bathing suit. High school reminded me of Ralph, and how we were supposed to buy boxes. I called Ralph.
“I can’t do the boxes,” I said.
“Oh,” he said. “No problem. How about dinner—not that, either?”
I had forgotten we had said anything about dinner.
? ? ?
From a distance I could see Ivan perched on a parapet, arms clasped around his knees. I had never noticed this parapet, let alone thought of sitting on it.
He jumped down when he saw me. He had a black laptop case slung across his chest. Whatever was in it was lighter than a laptop. He asked if it was okay if we stopped at the express mailbox—he wanted to drop something off before the five-thirty pickup. We walked together down the stone steps.
The temperature had cooled in the past couple of hours. The sky was pale blue, there was no wind at all, and the air seemed to be exactly body temperature.
“There’s my girlfriend,” Ivan said, almost conversationally.
“Oh?” I said.
I looked around. I saw some trees, a road, two mailboxes, an old man walking a dog, a young man carrying a baby in a sling. The baby was dressed in pink, so that was a girl. But she was too young to be anyone’s girlfriend. A girl with long frizzy hair spilling over a vinyl backpack was walking in our direction on the opposite side of the street. But she looked right at us with no change of expression and kept walking.
“This was bound to happen sometime,” said Ivan. “Yooo,” he called. I thought he was going to say “yoo-hoo,” but it turned out to be “Eunice.” “Yooonis!” he called. Nothing happened. He quickened his pace. I hung back. “Hey, Eunice,” he said, in the same warm voice he used with me on the telephone. Only then did I notice a girl kneeling at the bike rack with her back toward us, unlocking a bicycle. She was wearing white jeans and a red-and-white-striped shirt, and her black hair was pulled back in a high ponytail that swayed from side to side.
The fourth time he called, she turned and stood up, brushing off her tiny hands. “Oh, hi,” she said, barely audibly.
Ivan put an arm around her waist. She looked really small next to him. “This is my girlfriend, Eunice,” he told me. “This is Selin, who I told you about,” he told her.
“What?” she said.
“Selin,” he repeated, “this is Selin.”
“Nice to meet you,” I said, extending my hand.
“Oh!” she said.
I briefly held a small, cold, unenthusiastic object.
“I talked to Vogel,” the girl told Ivan, retrieving her hand.
“Oh, really?” said Ivan.
“They’re giving me money, for the Chinese thing.”
“What?”
“For the Chinese thing, they’re giving me twenty-five hundred dollars. But I’m not sure if I should do it.”
“Uh-huh.”
“It’s so boring.”
“Yeah, you shouldn’t be like that.”
“What?”
“You shouldn’t do those things that bore you.”
“But I need the money.”
They talked for a while about the twenty-five hundred dollars and the mysterious, boring Chinese thing that she didn’t want to do.
“Can’t you just take the money?” Ivan was saying.
“What?”
“Can’t you take the money and not do it?”
“Of course not.”
He shrugged. “Well, it’s better than shoveling snow.”
“I know,” she said. She had a bright red mouth drawn with lipstick, slightly smaller than her actual mouth. Suddenly the image came into my mind of her putting on her lipstick in the morning while Ivan stood in the door and they talked about nothing, like they were doing now—about the trivial and contentious things that somehow made up the whole of life. Everything stopped. Space and time shut down, one dimension at a time, the sky collapsing from a dome to a plane, the plane collapsing into a line, and then there were no surroundings, there was nothing but forward, and then there wasn’t even forward.
? ? ?
“We’re going swimming!” Ivan was saying in a bright voice, like it was great news.
“What?” said Eunice.
“Selin and I are going swimming.”
She frowned. “But the movie starts at nine-thirty.”
Ivan frowned, too. “I know.”
“So you should come by nine-twenty.”
“Yeah, fine,” he said. “We’d better go, then.”
“See you.”
She got on her bike and we kept walking. Ivan came to a stop in front of the self-service FedEx box and set down his laptop case in such a way that it would certainly fall into the gap between the box and the wall. He opened the drawer under the box, took out a form, and started filling it out.
Ivan’s bag fell to the ground, following the dictates of fate. We both bent down. I was faster. I handed him the bag.
“Sorry,” he said. “I mean, thanks.”
I leaned against the wall and looked at the sky. A white line hung midair and the jet flew on. Ivan noisily crossed something out, then crumpled the paper into a ball. “This isn’t the one I need,” he said. He crumpled up two more forms before getting one right. He then destroyed an address label in the attempt to detach the backing, and had to fill out a new label.
I told him it was okay—we weren’t in a hurry.