“No, tell me.”
“Nothing. I asked what Thailand is like. Dumb question.”
“No, it’s not dumb. Let me think,” he said. “Thailand is really hot. They sell really good food on the street, that you aren’t supposed to eat. One day I ate a lot of it anyway.”
“What happened?”
“I got really sick.”
There was a pause.
“Did you say something?” he asked.
“No.”
“Oh. I thought you said something.”
“It must have been the plane.”
“Hm?”
“It must have been the plane that made a sound, and you thought it was me.”
“Oh? You’re pessimistic. I would think that by now I can tell you apart from an airplane. Are you comfortable standing like that?”
“No. Are you comfortable sitting like that?”
“No. Let’s try that chair.” He opened a fold-down chair that was strapped to the wall and sat on the right edge of the seat. I sat on the left edge. On the movie screen, the woman in camouflage was wading through mud. What made her so beautiful? Her cheekbones and throat and waist. Orange light flashed through the forest. The woman was flung against the wall of a trench.
“It’s weird to see it without sound,” I said.
“It doesn’t look like we’re missing that much,” Ivan said.
A man appeared in the trench, also in fatigues. The woman turned to face him, lips parted. They kissed passionately, then moved apart, and their expressions turned grim. The man said something. The woman nodded tightly.
Our conversation turned to the subject of deafness. Ivan described to me a comedy sketch in which a deaf man invented a vibrating light-up headset to let him know when the telephone was ringing. The sketch ended with the phone ringing and the deaf man saying proudly, “Hello?”
I told him a Turkish joke about two deaf fishermen. “Are you going fishing?” the first fisherman asked. The second fisherman said, “No, I’m going fishing.” Then the first fisherman said, “Oh— I thought you were going fishing.”
Ivan told me a joke about a scientist who had a grant to study fleas. He would shout, “Jump,” and measure how far the flea jumped. After a while it got boring because the flea always jumped the same distance, so he pulled off the flea’s legs, one by one. The distance got shorter and shorter, until finally he had pulled off all six legs and the flea didn’t jump at all. “If you remove six legs,” the scientist concluded, “the flea cannot hear.” I thought it was really funny.
“So, tell me about it,” Ivan said.
“About what?”
“Tell me what you were angry about. Before, I mean—when you were angry.”
I tried to think back to what I had been angry about—to what the first thing had been. “When we ran into your girlfriend, and you didn’t call me afterward, it made me think that you did it on purpose—like you brought me there, and staged this meeting, to give me a message.”
He nodded. “I thought about that a lot,” he said. “Whether I did it on purpose.”
“Really?”
“Yeah. My girlfriend and I had a fight when I went back. I was still wet, I didn’t have time to take a shower. She asked where I’d been. I explained I was swimming. I had to tell her about you, how we had been meeting. I think she got jealous. She said, ‘So what’s going on, is she in love with you?’ And I said, ‘I think she used to be.’ She said, ‘Does she want anything from you?’ I said, ‘I don’t think so, not anymore.’” He paused. “And then she asked me, ‘Do you want anything from her?’ I said, ‘No, of course not!’”
Even before I had understood the words, I felt a blow. “I see.”
He glanced at me. “I had to say no.”
I nodded. “And then?”
“And then? And then she got really nasty. I said, ‘You’re being really nasty.’ And then she stopped. And, well, if you see her at the airport, don’t think I did it on purpose—because she’s coming to meet me.”
I wondered if I should ask him questions about his girlfriend. At that moment there was nothing I wanted to know. But I remembered how curious I had felt when I had looked for her name in the directory, and thought I should probably shore up some knowledge against the future time when I might feel like that again. “Did your girlfriend just graduate, too? Was she a senior?”
“What? No, she’s a doctoral student—she just got her MA. You know, it’s a coincidence—today is her birthday.”
“How old is she?”
“Twenty-six.”
“Twenty-six?”
“She’s a little older than me,” he said, sounding proud. “The guy she dated before me was a professor—he was ten years older than her.”
“Wow,” I said. That professor had been alive for almost twice as long as I had. What had happened to him? Instinctively I glanced around, as if he, too, might be on the plane.
“In the fall I’m going to Berkeley,” Ivan continued, “and my girlfriend is staying at Harvard. So I don’t know what’s going to happen.” I felt him looking at me. “I thought a lot about whether I was doing something wrong with you. I wanted to give you a chance to stop this whole thing, if you wanted. I guess you thought that was—what word did you say in your email? ‘Presumptuous.’”
“For you to assume I’m so heartbroken,” I said. “It is presumptuous.”
“Yeah, I get it.” He sighed. “My friend Imre said I was behaving really badly toward you. He said I was—what was it, it was a funny expression. Leading you on. He said I was leading you on.”
It felt like being hit again, this time in the stomach. Ivan was looking at me. With a sinking feeling, I realized he expected me to say something.
“And you, what do you think?” I said. “Do you think you’re leading me on?”
“Well, I tried to explain to Imre that it’s not like that, but he was really dismissive. He said I was starting to sound banal, and like a real asshole.”
“But that doesn’t matter, what your friend thinks. What do you think?”
“Well, obviously I hope I’m not being an asshole toward you. But I did worry that I’m leading you on, because of what you wrote to me when I was in California. When you wrote that letter to me—it was nice for me, I really liked it. I’m worried it’s just good for my ego.”