“Well, maybe it isn’t so simple as that.”
I finished my tea and put our two banana peels in the empty cup. Outside the window, the light turned green. A biker with a blinking taillight sped alongside the river. When I looked back at Ivan, he was looking at me. “I have to go,” he said.
“Okay,” I said. I felt certain that something was finally over, and I didn’t feel badly about it—I felt relief. “Thanks,” I said.
“What?”
“Thanks, for today. I had a nice time.”
“Come on, Selin. I should thank you. I had a nice time.” He pushed back his chair and stood up. “Now it’s time for you to go home and take off that wet bathing suit.”
We walked away from the river, past his parked motorcycle, toward the yard. When we got to Quincy Street, Ivan turned left, while I continued straight. It was dark, and I lingered at the intersection a moment and watched him. He looked so free, walking slightly hunched over, his shirt flapping a little behind him. When I crossed the street by the bank, the clock read exactly 9:20.
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The next day, Friday, felt like a new era. Hannah had exams all day so I sat in our common room, working on my philosophy paper about action sentences. Nobody knew how to put action sentences into logic notation. Donald Davidson thought the action was an invisible extra thing, hiding in the sentence. He thought you had to call it “x.” I read and reread the examples.
I flew my spaceship to the Morning Star.
( x) (Flew (I, my spaceship, x) & (to the Morning Star, x))
Did spaceships even work that way?
The phone kept ringing.
First, a guy from my philosophy class called to ask if I knew the article where P. F. Strawson said that the paraphrasability of singular terms didn’t necessarily imply that you could eliminate singular terms from a language.
“I can picture it so clearly,” he said. “It looks like a manuscript, like in Courier font. I can even picture the paragraph I want. It’s on the lower left-hand corner of a left-hand page.”
“If you can picture it that clearly, why can’t you read the picture?”
“It doesn’t work that way.”
The minute I hung up, the phone started to ring again.
“Hello?” I said. I reminded myself that it couldn’t be Ivan, because I knew Ivan wouldn’t call me again.
“Oh, Oleg!”
“Ralph! How was chemistry?”
“Let’s just say that on reflection, one wouldn’t want to be a doctor anyway. It’s so terribly middle-class.”
“Totally. White coats before Memorial Day.”
“I do like those jade green scrubs.”
“Maybe something could be done with that, for afternoon wear.”
“Shall we discuss the designs over dinner?”
“In an hour? I’m still writing this paper.”
“The philosophy paper! One was so insensitive not to ask. How is the paper?”
“Well, it needs more words.”
Five minutes after we hung up, the phone rang again. It was somebody called Jared calling to ask whether I would consider voting him onto some committee I had never heard of.
“I hear you,” I said, and hung up. The phone started ringing again immediately.
“What,” I said.
“Selin?” said my mother.
“Oh, sorry,” I said. “I thought you were calling to ask me to vote you onto the Student Initiatives Committee.”
“No, sweetie, I don’t want to be on the Student Initiatives Committee. I was just thinking about you. I was wondering how your exams are going, and how things are with your Hungarian friend.”
I told her a short version of what had happened the previous day. “I think we’re not going to talk anymore,” I said.
“What will you do when he calls you?”
“He’s not going to call.”
“Of course he will. Womanizers always call back. That’s their best quality.”
I didn’t say anything. Womanizers?
“Sooner or later, you’ll have to speak to him again, and if I were you, I would decide in advance what position to take. I mean, let’s think about why he let this happen. Probably he just wanted to upset you.”
“He wanted to make me upset?”
“He wanted proof that you care about him.”
“But he already had proof.”
“Well, maybe you should pay him the compliment of being upset and see what he does.”
I tried to swallow away the lump in my throat. I heard some background noises on my mother’s end of the phone. A metal drawer slid shut. “Yes, I did. You’re absolutely right,” my mother was saying. “I’ll be there in a moment.
“I’m sorry, my sweet,” she said, “somebody I need to talk to came into the lab. I’ll call tomorrow. If I don’t find you, you call.”
“Okay.”
“Promise?”
“I promise.”
“Okay. Now, don’t let any of this lower your mirth index. Think of Tamerlane.”
My grandfather used to comfort my mother, during her childhood, by reminding her that they might have been related to Tamerlane.
“Okay,” I said, though I had never seen how Tamerlane helped anything.
“Remember, you have the best heart and mind, and whatever you do is right. Bye-bye, my sweet. Don’t forget the fruit group.”
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The phone started to ring. What if it was Ivan, and now I had to give him the compliment of being upset?
“Hello?”
“Hey,” said Lakshmi. “What are you doing tonight?” Noor was DJ-ing for a hedge fund guy’s birthday at a club in Boston. It sounded awful, but still better than sitting by the phone and pretending to write this paper and wondering whether Ivan would call, which was apparently what my dumb brain had lined up for me.
“I don’t have an ID,” I said.
Lakshmi said it wouldn’t be a problem. She said it wasn’t hard to get into these places—all you had to do was be an attractively dressed female.
“Oh,” I said.
“What’s the problem?” asked Lakshmi. “You’re female. You can be attractively dressed. Isabelle is buying me some tequila, and I already have salt. I’ll probably get depressed seeing Noor with other women, so then we can do tequila shots and unburden our souls. I’ll finally learn all your secrets!”
“Great,” I said, wondering what the salt was for.
After we hung up, I sat staring at Einstein for a few minutes, waiting to see if the telephone would ring. It didn’t. I reread the last sentence I had written in my paper. It wasn’t very clear. How could I capitalize on this unclearness to make my paper longer?
“In other words,” I typed.
But the action sentences were really difficult to think about, and instead I found myself wondering about Eunice, what she studied, how old she was, whether she was also graduating, whether she was going to California. I minimized WordPerfect, opened Netscape, and searched the university directory for the first name “Eunice.” There were eleven Eunices. All eleven seemed to have the power of making me feel bad.
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