She was waiting right there for you in the passenger pick-up area in her old, gold Audi Coupe just as she promised she would. But the headlights had made it impossible to discern one car from the other, and all you could see through the windscreens were silhouettes. Then you saw the headlights flash and you heard the horn, and you knew it must be her. You switched your duffel bag to your left hand and waved, and walked to the waiting car. You pulled open the door and it squeaked. You eased yourself into the leather seat and put your bag at your feet and you looked at her and before you could say a word, she kissed you. You’d always been self-conscious about how good a kisser you were, but not then. That’s what a kiss should feel like. You knew it was right. Better than right. You knew it was perfect. You’d never had a perfect kiss before. Not even that night you met her at the company Christmas party four months earlier. But this was perfect.
She put the car in gear, and she pulled away, and the airport faded into the distance behind you until it disappeared. Forever, you wished. But you knew you’d be back in less than 48 hours in that same gold Audi, the leather seat beneath you, the duffel at your feet. And you could only hope that when you kissed then it would be perfect, too.
On the drive back to her place, the two of you kept repeating different versions of the same thing: that you couldn’t believe you were seeing each other, finally. But the disbelief was true. That you met at all was the result of pure chance. You both work at the same company, but different offices—hers on the other side of the country. She’d come to your office with some of her colleagues as part of a business trip. But then their flight back was canceled due to a rare December blizzard, So they attended the Christmas party. That’s where you met her. She was impossible not to notice, not to meet. She was young and outgoing and gorgeous. That she noticed you at all was a surprise. She saw you standing by the bar, sipping a glass of Chardonnay. It was only your second glass in as many hours, but you felt buzzed. She walked right up to you, said she couldn’t decide between red or white and asked if she could taste yours. You thought she was joking. But then you saw she wasn’t. She sipped from your glass and then handed it back and she gave you a funny smile and you realized you were giving her a strange smile back.
You introduced yourselves. You told her about the work you do on the Key Accounts team. She told you all about her work on the Marketing team and how she was new to the company, having previously done her time at a few boutique ad and branding agencies. You asked her if she liked it. She shrugged and said she wasn’t sure. She said it was much more stable, much more secure, but that there was a risk of it getting boring. You assured her it wasn’t a risk, and then you waited a moment and followed that up with, “it’s a guarantee.” She laughed uproariously and leaned into you and you felt her thigh and forearm on your thigh and forearm, and you felt almost dizzy with attraction, which made you feel ashamed and embarrassed.
Your boss joined your conversation, and you felt as if you’d just been caught doing something naughty by your parents. You were suddenly much too hot, and you couldn’t seem to stop stammering. You’d made one good joke about it being a guarantee that she’d be bored, but now you were in a muddle. You shifted your weight from one foot to the other and back again and you started to introduce her to your boss and then you realized you’d completely forgotten her name. Had you even heard it the first time?
You excused yourself as soon as it was polite to do so, and went outside where you cooled down in the winter air. You looked up and down 21st Street, wondering how much longer you had to stay before you could leave without everyone in the office asking why you’d left so early. The fact is, you hate parties. You always have. You go to them hoping you’ll be invisible, but it breaks your heart when no one notices you. But there you were, finally noticed, and you made a mess of it. Stuttering and stammering and forgetting her name. Your boss was probably charming her at this very moment. If not him, someone else. Everyone else. In the glass of the office building, your reflection was a solitary smudge with the lights of an empty city behind you. You thought about how fiercely you were turned on by her, feeling the heat of her thigh on yours, and you hated yourself. What is wrong with you? Why are you like this? you demanded silently of your smudge of a reflection, but it didn’t answer. It just stood there, indistinct and wholly uninteresting.
You made up your mind to go home right there and then—questions from colleagues be damned. No one was likely to notice anyway. But then a second reflection appeared behind you. You turned and saw it was her.
“It’s a Christmas party, and I’m lonely,” she said. “Do you mind if I hang out with you for a bit?” she asked.
“Of course,” you said, before correcting yourself. “Not at all.”
And then all at once, she was kissing you. It was timid at first, and you were so taken aback by it, you could hardly do more than stand there, your mouth open on hers. But gradually you began kissing her back and she kissed you harder and you drew each other in close and continued to kiss. And then you stopped and looked at each other. You looked shocked, you knew. She looked satisfied. You kissed each other again, and then she walked inside. You followed her. You watched each other all night, smiling knowingly.
You rushed to find her when the party was breaking up, but she was gone.
A month later, she emailed you, apologizing for not saying goodbye. She gave you her phone number and told you to call her, and you did. She told you how she couldn’t trust herself to do something foolish or rash so she left quietly without telling anyone. She figured maybe she was just drunk and feeling the spirit of the holiday, but she couldn’t stop thinking about you. You admitted to her that you hadn’t stopped either. The phone conversations were constant from there. Sometimes they were about work. Sometimes they were about movies you’d seen or books you’d read. Sometimes they were intensely detailed discussions—imagined scenarios of what might have happened if you’d seen each other again at the end of the night. What would you have wanted to do with me? Don’t leave anything out.
She invited you to visit, said she would pick you up at the airport and you could spend the weekend together at her place. You’d never done anything like this. But within an hour of her invitation, you’d bought your plane tickets.
You looked over at her in the Audi and she looked at you. “You’re here,” she said and squeezed your hand. “I can’t believe you’re here.”
Your insecurity rose up into your throat, and you almost said, “I can’t believe you want me here,” but instead you just squeezed her hand back and whispered. “I am. I’m here.”
She led you into the bedroom by her delicate arm and she flung you onto the bed and she devoured you, and you did your best to not feel self-conscious, to wish you’d at least showered first, and to your surprise those thoughts fell away, as if they were nothing more than morning dew and she was the burning sun. You gave in to her completely and you let yourself go and then you shocked yourself with how you devoured her. The bed squeaked in rhythm with your bodies. She breathed deeply and so did you as your bodies became slick and soaked with salty sweat.
But, later, when it was over, and you lay next to her on damp sheets in the darkness of her room, you looked straight into her peaceful smiling face, and yet you couldn’t make it out. All you could see were features. An eye. A curve of a lip. She looked like a stranger. She looked like someone you knew. She looked like everyone you’d ever known or had ever seen on the street, on the bus, in a grocery store. Was it the dark, you wondered, that was playing tricks with your vision, or was it something else? That’s when you realized you couldn’t even remember what she looked like. She was next to you, but she was gone, and all you could do was conjure the idea of her, the feel of her. Her face as you’d known it had slipped away, vanished, it seemed, from existence. You wondered if she could really see you, and if not, you wondered if she couldn’t remember what you looked like, too, and you almost asked her, only you knew it would come out all wrong. And then you fell into a fitful sleep in which you dreamed dozens of versions of the same dream in which you were trying to find her face in a million silhouettes in a million cars that all looked the same in the bright, burning light of their high beams.
You awoke in a sunlit room you’d been in for ten hours but had never seen before. The darkness of the previous night had not only obscured her face, but it had hidden the bookshelves, the louvred closet doors, the mid-century burled cherry dresser. You were alone with these things and for a few moments you could almost imagine what it would be like to be her, and it felt happy—happier than it felt to be you.
You were searching for your underwear which were lost somewhere in the bed when she appeared at the doorway in flannel pajamas. You dove beneath the sheets, and pulled them up to your chin and she laughed and she said “Why so shy? I saw all of you last night.” And that’s when you remembered that in the darkness of the night before you’d stared straight into her face and still couldn’t picture what she looked like, but here she was saying she’d seen all of you, and you almost asked her, Really? Did you really see me? But you didn’t because it would come out all wrong, just as it would have the night before, and so you did your best impression of a playful person and you smiled and asked her how she slept. “Never better,” she said. And you believed it. “You?”
“Yes.” It was the first lie you told her. And it made you wonder if she’d lied to you yet. You could only assume she had. Many times perhaps on those countless long-distance telephone calls.
Only, you couldn’t guess what they might have been.
She took you around her city. Like your city, the blocks sported storefront after storefront with windows filled with flyers promoting lunch deals, buy-one-get-one-half-off sales, comedy nights; on top of the stores and restaurants, there were apartments with open windows and cats on the sills. Like your city, there was a din of traffic, horns, construction, music, rapturous gossip, irate men yelling into their mobile phones. Like your city, there were signs posted every few sidewalk tiles warning motorists of when it was permissible to park and in what circumstances those were suspended and for whom these rules did not apply. And yet it was also completely different to your city. The trains ran above the ground. The air was sticky and smelled of refinery and roasting pork instead of rotting fish, salt, and exhaust fumes rich with unburnt fuel. The street signs were a different color, and they were posted above the intersection rather than on the corners—and the names were just that: names, not numbers which told you exactly where you were in space.
There were no alleys here. How could there be no alleys?, you wondered.
She brought you to her favorite cafe a few blocks from her place. It was all beige and glass and the names of the coffees were the names of various foreign films and somehow you were supposed to know that 400 Blows was a light and fruity roast, but that The Bicycle Thief was an espresso. She bought both coffees and the total was more than you typically paid for lunch. You drank the coffee even though you would have never bought a coffee from a cafe, let alone one like this. You only drink it at home because it’s brewed automatically every morning thanks to your programmable drip machine.
After the cafe, she took you to one of her favorite bookstores. Confusingly, it had pinball machines and a snack counter where customers could buy bowls of cereal to eat while they read old comics and reprints of vintage pulp magazines. They were playing The Clash’s Combat Rock so loud you could hardly hear what she was telling you she loved about the place. Your favorite bookstore is a used bookstore next to a dry cleaners, and it’s staffed by volunteers, none of whom are under 75 years old, and the only sounds you hear in the place are the ancient cast iron radiators wheezing heat sourced from some exhausted boiler in the basement.
She took you to a dive bar called Blackbird, and she kissed the bartender on the cheek, and the bartender kissed her back. Then she ordered you a cheap can of beer and a shot of well whiskey, and another for herself, and yet one more for the bartender. You almost protested, but what? What would you order in a place like this? And this was supposed to be her showing you how she lives. So you said nothing.
As the bartender poured the shots into clear plastic cups, she introduced you as her friend. The bartender looked up at you and grinned. “Friend,” she said, lifting an eyebrow and then grabbing three green cans of beer from the cooler beneath the bar. She was probably gorgeous under all that heavy black makeup, you thought to yourself. And then you admitted that she was gorgeous no matter what. And then you caught the reflection of yourself in the mirror behind the bar, and you saw a scared, lost, and ugly person and you wished you were back in her bed, or better yet your own bed, pulling the sheet not just up to your chin but over your head completely.
“Bottom’s up,” the bartender said, and you lifted the small clear plastic cup of whiskey just as they did. And then you tapped the bar with the bottom of the cup just as they did, and then you poured it quickly down your throat just as they did and you pretended it didn’t burn. But it burned and it was wretched. You gulped down the cheap beer, and it was frothy and tasted vaguely of metal, but it washed away the whiskey. You did your best to not look back into the mirror behind the bar, but there you were. And there she was, staring at your reflection, too. And that’s when you became aware that her hand was in your back pocket and you almost turned to her and asked, Why do you even like me? But it would have come out all wrong and ruined the mood and, anyway, it was too late now because the bartender was pouring a second round of shots.
You stumbled back to her place as she helped you stay upright. She sung and she laughed as you mumbled apologies for your low tolerance, which she either didn’t hear or chose to ignore. She dropped her keys three times before she managed to unlock the door. When you both fell inside, she went straight for the stereo and put on a record, which you didn’t recognize. Through her faux-woodgrained speakers, the drums pounded and feedback howled. You excused yourself and went into her bathroom and vomited the four shots and three beers into her porcelain toilet which, beneath its glossy glaze, was the cooling color of spearmint. You hoped whatever record it was that she was listening to had masked the sound of your heaving and the liquid splashing into the water.
Your stomach felt better, but now you felt exhausted. You flushed the toilet and then stood in front of the mirror seeing two of your reflections, one overlapping on the other. You closed an eye and now there was one of you. You closed the other eye. Now there was none of you. You opened the other eye. Now there was one of you but shifted a few inches over from where you’d just been. You opened the other eye. Now there were two of you again. No, you thought, three of me. Two in the mirror and me. Three. There’s three of me. And with that, you started giggling. You’d never seen yourself giggle before, let alone two of you. The giggle turned to laughter. Is this what you looked like when you laughed? You liked it. You liked how the two of you looked, and the two of you looked back at you and they liked how you looked. The three of you were happy.
You brushed your teeth and giggled as you did it. You spat white foam into her sink and then you splashed water on your face and you cleaned your face with her cleanser. You didn’t even ask permission. You just did it. Then you rinsed your face again and dried it on a bath towel hanging behind you and then you massaged some of her lotion into your face. You looked back into the mirror and saw two refreshed yous. You left the bathroom and found two of her in the living room dancing to the pounding drums and throbbing bass and howling feedback, a glass of red wine in her hands.
“There you are,” she yelled joyously over the music.
“There we are,” you corrected her and slipped an arm around her neck and kissed her.
“We,” she agreed. And it all felt perfect. Absolutely perfect. You never wanted to leave. You wanted to live like this—just like this—for the rest of your life. No more jobs. No more streets named with numbers. No more rotting fish smell. Just this. Her city. Her film-themed cafes, cereal-bar bookstore, grimy dive bars tended by gorgeous women in heavy makeup. Her apartment with her disorienting music. And her. Just her.
“All five of us,” you said dreamily and kissed her again.
“Five?” she laughed. “Huh?”
“Two of you and three of me.”
She had no idea what the fuck you were talking about, and you almost started to explain, but it would take much too much effort, you realized, and you were so tired, so tired, so exhausted.
“Well, I’ll take as many of you as I can get,” she said, playing along. “Come on, what do you say we get into bed?” she asked.
“Bed,” you said. “Yes. There’s things I want to do with you,” you tried to say, but you have no memory of whether or not you even managed to finish the sentence before you passed out.
You awoke at three o’clock in the morning, parched. But otherwise, any sensations of a hangover you might have had were entirely eclipsed by a rush of panic. You were mortified. For what, you couldn’t be sure. But surely you had done or said something terrible, something humiliating. You chastised yourself for getting so drunk. You chided yourself for not having more control. You hated yourself for being you.
You desperately wanted water, but you did not want to wake her up. She was snoring softly next to you. As with the night before, the darkness taunted you, daring you to remember what she looked like even as you stared at her. And, again, you couldn’t conjure the image of her face, even though it was inches away.
You let your head fall back into the plush feather pillow. You would not sleep. You would only replay the scraps and glimpses of what you could recall of the day before. The expensive, pretentious cafe. The obnoxious bookstore that sold cereal. The dive bar with the gorgeous bartender who grinned at you knowingly when you were introduced as a friend. The burn of well whiskey, the metallic froth of cheap beer. Her hand in your back pocket. Stumbling. Puking. Music. The two of her. The three of you.
You looked at her clock and it was almost four o’clock in the morning now. In seven hours, you would be boarding a plane back to your city with its numbered streets, its underground trains, its faint whiff of fish. Back to your job. Back to your practical programmable coffeemaker. Back to your stuffy used bookstore clerked by an 85-year-old woman who couldn’t figure out how to work the credit machine. Back to your life. Back to your solitary life. Just you. And no one else.
The snoring stopped. She rolled over. You were staring at the ceiling, but in your peripheral vision, you could tell she was staring at you.
You turned to her, prepared to hear what it was that you did or said that you would regret for the rest of your life. Instead she said nothing at all. All she did was smile. And there in the darkness of her bedroom you looked into her smiling face and it no longer seemed strange or unknown. It was a face you’d seen before. A beautiful face—like the ones staring back at you in her bathroom mirror.
*
David Obuchowski is a prolific and awards-nominated author of short fiction and writer of long-form essays. His work appears in The Baltimore Review, Longreads, West Trade Review, Road & Track, Westchester Review, Fangoria, Jet Fuel Review, Salon, and many more. His first children’s book, HOW BIRDS SLEEP (a collaboration with artist Sarah Pedry) was published to much acclaim by Astra Publishing in the spring of 2023. His website is davidobuchowski.com and he can be found on Instagram @HelloDavidO.
New Critique 