Chapter V - Dinner
I sat on my plan for two days, refusing to call Raphaella until I felt ready. I went to work and wrote continuously. I even reworked a short story I had set aside three months earlier. Being alone was tremendously efficient but the thought of my life out there, up there, at 103rd Street, always hit back in my most self-assured moments. On the third day, I called Raphaella and told her I wanted to see her. She sounded like she always did, blithe and satirical, but I would not be deterred. I went to work that afternoon with my bags packed for a night uptown.
The workday was sluggish. Rain covered Manhattan like a balmy blanket. It fell through thick, humid August air. I was a counselor for a non-profit support group called The Plateau. The Plateau set up offices in troubled high schools around the city and provided services to young people mired in life’s difficulties. My title was Employment Specialist. There were four other counselors in the office with me. Summertime, especially late summer, was the easiest, most lackadaisical time of the year. Few kids remained involved with outside agencies such as ours, and of the thirty kids I had on my summer caseload, twenty-five were strong characters in need of little direction. The other five kept me just busy enough to avoid an overwhelming feeling of guilt.
I got the job a year earlier because I begged the founder of the program to help me out. He had been my professor at NYU where my studies and my New York odyssey had begun. I started at NYU as an education student but dropped out after two years. Ostensibly it was a cash problem. I told my folks I didn’t think taking loans to teach was a good idea. I remember my father mumbling relieved approval on the phone while my mother immediately moved to confront me, a son who was “jeopardizing his future.” She was kind about the whole thing, but in the end my father’s approval and my insistence got me out of NYU full-time. I re-enrolled part-time, this time as a student of literature.
Studying the great wordsmiths made me more comfortable, and it allowed me to swill the New York nightlife and peruse the chic, clandestine East Village, writing clichés without a hint of remorse. At the time it was an exciting idea, and it would have remained exciting if I had continued to pursue the obvious: writing. But writing simply lost out to the one million other options available to a twenty-two-year-old in New York, and most of these options had long legs. I was always on the lookout for love. If I found myself bleary-eyed and broke, it was always with a beautiful companion. All of this was like a compost pile for writing, I told myself. I had to experience life before I could write about it. Of course, this was a dismissal of the rather simple assertion that perhaps, maybe, I could do both at the same time. Eventually one of the distractions became the only distraction, and that, of course, was Raphaella.
At work, with the rain and humidity, I became lost in the undulations of love and self-enrapture, which meant I didn’t do crap all day. On the verge of reprimand from another counselor who was slouching through a list of summer students in need of re-adjusted paychecks, I waxed on, oblivious. (This was far too banal a chore for someone like myself. I was in need of deep, romantic, philosophical thought, clearly.) He looked at what must have been a rather glassy-eyed dolt. I looked back and smiled.
“Hey Mel, how’s that list coming? It’s quite a list, huh?”
Mel continued to finger the fat pile of paper. It was printed on unwieldy green computer paper, the kind with holes all along the edges and folded back to back. Leafing through it all was like swimming through seaweed. One of the pages had folded unevenly and Mel was having a hard time getting it unfolded. He tried to coax the wrinkled paper back into shape but could not. Finally he took an oversized dictionary and slammed it down on the pesky paper, grinning menacingly at me.
“Yep, David, quite a list all right.” He leered. “Maybe you’d like to take a look at it, maybe retrieve some of these names from it. I don’t know,” he paused, “maybe earn a dollar or two, what’ya say?”
I took the list because I was afraid if I didn’t, he’d report me. Then on top of losing my girl, I’d lose my job. Mel slipped on his leather jacket with aplomb, like a biker guy. The jacket jingled. It had many long, dangling tassels and beads and gilded decals. His hair was long too, nearly greasy, and he had a bushy goatee. He looked more like a murderer than a man dedicated to inner city kids. He didn’t fit here the same way I didn’t fit there, with Raphaella and her family. But didn’t I have to fit? I mean, I was going to be a father. I had to be right for Raphaella, I had no choice. Of course, this wasn’t really true. I could leave and avoid this future. I could tread back to my family home, a failure in the city, a father without his child, just another man who couldn’t hack the repercussions of a night’s passions. I could do this. It wasn’t impossible. My mother would frown a bit but my father would ultimately open his doors and give me a bed.
The thought of such a scenario was enticing; it tugged at me as I put my raincoat on. I could do it now, immediately, without having to face Raphaella’s discerning eyes, and her bewildering ways. I could, I thought as I locked up. The clank of the door reverberated up and down the cavernous corridors of the big school. Because it was summer, everything that had been waxed and polished was still waxed and polished, clean and antiseptic. The walls were free of posters and announcements put up by aspiring school leaders. One I remember from the school year read, Don’t Be Wack, Vote for Mack. It was gone now. Only the clip-clop of my shoes escorted me through the gaunt hall. I left the building and wove my way to the subway where I stood and looked at a sign reading Downtown-Uptown. I thought, Comfort-Pain. I fiddled in my pocket for a subway token. Downtown-Uptown, Comfort-Pain…
I chose pain, and sure enough, got it. The lock had been changed. Mitkin had done as he said he’d do and now I stood in front of her place a stranger. I rang the bell and looked through the front door into the apartment just as Mitkin had done before. I looked frantically for anyone who could let me in. I even banged on the window to the first floor apartment, a bay window just within reach to my left. No one had lived there as long as I’d known Raphaella, but I banged anyway. I buzzed again and started the process of killing myself with my imagination.
He must be up there right now, I thought. Right at this very moment, Mitkin is probably kissing her neck. Right now. I looked in again. No one came. Surely they were locked in some scientific love embrace meant to maximize the orgasmic potential of a woman. That was it, I thought. I banged again. It was 6:15 p.m.; I was right on time. I peeked in the window yet again and came to the conclusion that in three short days Raphaella had given up a life of would-be marital bliss with the father of her child for the cold, reptilian love of an intellect she’d known for less than a week (no matter what she said about knowing him from before). My resolve to serve her was ebbing away. The heat melted it like it was melting me. I began to sweat. I was a mess. Mitchell Mitkin confirmed this for me when he appeared on the sidewalk behind, carrying a bucket of something, a hammer, and a painter’s dropcloth over his shoulder.
“Wow, David.” He looked me up and down. “I sure hope it’s the heat or you’re about to go into cardiac arrest.” He dipped his shoulder and off fell the tarp. “I don’t sweat,” he said, “I try to avoid it by keeping my system clean of pollutants.”
I started to answer but didn’t know if this was a greeting or a command or an attempt to humor me, or what. I just looked at him, confused. A bead of sweat darted off my scalp and into my eye.
“Raphaella’s not answering because she’s on her way back from the hardware store. She’s helping me paint my apartment. It’s a kind of payback for running some telephone wire in hers.” He smiled amiably and without inference. I smiled back trying to keep my teary-eyed promise of just three nights before, the one that would make me a willing slave. “She’s right around the corner, or at least she should be. She’s picking up Chinese food.” He smiled. “There’s enough for you if you’d like some.” He was on the stoop now and standing next to me, smelling tart, his ruddy face wrought with activity, indicative of a mind in motion. He was wearing a T-shirt with sleeves cut off, and his sinewy arms and defined triceps nearly rubbed against mine. I did not look at him, afraid I would become very angry.
“Do you think she’ll be here soon?” I asked. “I’d like to speak with her, if I could.” But of course I could talk to her, I thought. Why was I asking him, the new neighbor, if I could talk to her, my old girlfriend? I wanted to reclaim my dainty petition, but of course, it was too late. Mitkin spoke up and over the rattling door, which he now opened.
“Why couldn’t you speak to her? I mean, I think she’ll speak to you. She doesn’t have laryngitis or anything if that’s what you mean.”
I nodded and hid a leer, and was inside by the time I realized Raphaella was right behind me. I stood in the front door while Mitkin held the inside foyer door open with his foot. Raphaella waited for us to enter, holding in her hand a plastic bag stuffed with Chinese food, the customary red and white Styrofoam cartons peeking through. Her face betrayed no anxiety. I stared until I got a smile from her, and then I looked at the food. It looked good, until I realized it wasn’t for me.
“Don’t worry,” she said, “I got General Tso for you. It’s still your favorite even in exile, right?” I shot her a look and grabbed the bag. The three of us made our way up the stairs to the third floor. We went single file, Mitkin first and Raphaella last. I was in the middle.
Thankfully, Mitkin broke the silence by talking. A lot. He rambled on and on about things I’d never considered. Most of what he said concerned epistemology, a dry subject he made fascinating. He was pretty good with words, not that they were poetic or majestic, to the contrary. His words were cunningly conserved, streamlined and without excess. He spoke adroitly about everything he chose to speak about. Where he did not know, there he did not speak. This precise silence made him appear wise. I must admit, I liked to watch him talk. How could this kid be nineteen? I listened to him and Raphaella all night. In the course of our dinner conversation, Raphaella sought to question most of what he said, and that surprised me. It was not what I expected, given her outburst about “wanting what he’s got,” and “loving his gig.” At one point, as we all sat on couches around her low glass table, she asked him why he thought religion was a waste of time. He started in with a mouth full of chicken lo mein.
“Because, it takes no discipline. It,” he paused to swallow, “is inspiration, not dedication. That is what has always angered me about these real didactic types who spend their lives trying to find a proof for God. I mean God has to elude proofs or he’s not God. That is the first and only logical premise of theology. But in history it has not been this way at all. Instead, little balding men spend wasted lifetimes researching the un-researchable, if I may use that word. I guess another way to say it is, if you’re going to be a scientist, be a scientist. Accept what science says, and what it doesn’t say.”
“And what doesn’t it say?” asked Raphaella.
“It doesn’t say anything about God. It says we have no empirical proof that God exists.”
“And that’s the end of it?” Raphaella reached for her drink.
“That, Raphie, is the end of it.”
“How do you know what exists then?” I asked, trying to get into the thick.
He sort of lurched. “You know the answer already. What exists is what your senses tell you exist. Like I told you about the philosopher David Hume, your namesake, we are what our bodies and brains tell us we are, and no more.” A smug calm could be seen on Mitkin’s face. He liked this conversation.
“Miracles?” said Raphaella, chewing.
“What about them?”
“Aren’t they proof of something else?”
“It’s all excess. Someone has some psychological baggage, maybe a fear from childhood or the belief in demons, and in turn they create an occurrence which relieves them of their baggage, frees them from the freedom of life.” He held up both his hands, palms down. “Think of a see-saw, Raphaella. Miracles are the unstable person’s see; a response to their exaggerated saw.”
She looked at me with her hands positioned just like Mitchell’s, palms down, seeing and sawing. She smiled. “See and saw, right.” And just slightly, she rolled her eyes. I liked that she rolled her eyes.
“You crazy, Mitchell.” She kept smiling. “See and saw. Who says that? Crazy.” He smiled too, but a bit awkwardly. Raphaella leaned back into the couch, and rubbing her belly, struck an earnest expression.
“But something’s not right. What about the gut, gut feelings? Huh?”
Mitchell Mitkin reached across the table and speared a potsticker with his chopsticks. He dripped soy sauce across the table and dragged the damp, cooling aroma of lukewarm vegetable with it. “Gut feelings are, well, something, but not something worth a whole lot of attention.” He pointed at Raphaella with his chopsticks and potsticker. “Even they are a product of the empirical.”
“A product of the empirical, wow,” she said, grinning. “Something I can trust?”
“Right, but it’s still worthless.”
“My own gut feelings are worthless? Who can believe that, Mitchell?”
“I can. See, the objective realities arrived at by man’s collective and constant scientific inquiry, that’s what’s important.” He took a breath. “This is what gives us everything we know today. Microwaves, and microchips, and cars, and catalytic converters, this is the mind of a race which chooses to move forward, always improving.” He motioned out and up with his arm, as if climbing a ladder. “Free to be anything he wants to be. Perfection exists for us, ultimately.” He looked at Raphaella with resolute eyes. “Your gut feeling is just a hunch until you get out and prove it.” Mitchell stood straight up, “Test it!” He sauntered down the hallway where Raphaella and I could hear the refrigerator open. Bits of ice plinked. “You gotta doubt everything!” He returned with a bottle of brandy and three stout glasses of ice. “Now for the ultimate empirical reality.” He poured. “You’re about to partake of my father’s favorite. Thank the distilleries for such perfection.” He beamed a cheers and we drank. Raphaella took a tiny, polite sip and put it aside. Mitkin nodded in approval.
All three of us liked learned conversation. I liked it because I was taught to. Raphie liked it because she was naturally curious and simply smart as hell. But neither of us were like Mitkin. He liked it because it was his destiny. He was an intellectual. He knew he was an intellectual, and by his gestures and haughty speech, so did everyone he spoke with. He just knew that one day he would write a great book or coin a tumultuous phrase, basically change the lives of millions. It unnerved me a bit that he could so easily command our attention and talk to us as children, and it made me helpless too. With him in the room, I could never impress Raphaella. But strangely, I was not urged to with Mitkin around; it was only after he’d gone that I’d feel nervous. It was his absence and the impending silence which I feared most. I watched Mitkin go on and on.
“Take for example, this uproar over fetal tissue. Why not use it for experimentation? Do you know they have been trying to learn about fetal tissue since 1922! 1922 and all we get are roadblocks, roadblocks and more roadblocks. Why are people scared? What is there to be afraid of? Change is the answer. Most are just afraid that some fictitious past will be forgotten in favor of the evil future. What a waste. I say heave-ho, chuck it and go forward. It’s not like a man is more than what he makes of himself, and I don’t mean that like my mother means it. When she says it, it has this pseudo-mythic sentimentality.” He imitated a female soprano and spoke, “Be all you can be Son, don’t let anyone say you can’t. Say oh yes I can. You know, this little engine that could crap. I mean, man used to be weak and susceptible to any multitude of viruses: bubonic, influenza, consumption, polio and the lists go on. Today, man is more than these diseases. We have fought back.” He looked at Raphaella. “Haven’t we?”
“Cancer?”
“Soon there’ll be no cancer either, Raphie. I am not saying that man’s scientific mind is flawless, it requires data. I’m just saying that we make ourselves great when we apply our minds collectively in pursuit of empirical truth. The end of cancer is coming too, you’ll see.”
Raphaella wagged her head and smirked a little. “If you say so, but it sounds like you’re just spouting your father’s stuff. Come on, most of this comes from him, right?”
Mitkin looked perplexed, hurt almost. He took another sip from his brandy. “I didn’t get this from anybody,” he said swallowing. “Knowing the world is a vocation, it’s a higher calling. It’s religious really. Who do you think the priests of the future will be? Shrinks, Raphie, shrinks. Get sick, feeling a little depressed? Visit the shrink. Priests will run to them, too. Heck they already do. I’m an alky, I like boys, fix me up, Doc. Thanks, Amen. It’s all science, Raphie. All of it is calling, it’s all out there for us. I just hear the call louder, maybe. But everybody should be investigating something.”
“Like jobs?” I said. “I already do that. My latest investigation tells me there ain’t enough of them.” I wanted to laugh at my self-sissification, but Mitkin just kept on.
“Yes, like jobs. If economics was done more accurately and without such reverence for intangible indicators it would make for better policy.” He spoke coldly. “The same goes for sociology and psychology. Everything we do should be systematic and ordered.”
“I think we’re already too ordered,” I said.
“Who? You? Are you telling me that you, David, the guy who wants to be a writer, are too ordered? There’s nothing you’d like more reasonably ordered in your life?” He sipped his brandy again, pointing with the glass as he put it down. “Nothing?”
“I meant we, as a society.”
“But you’re pretty representative of society, aren’t you? Would you say there are more you’s in the world or more me’s? Honestly now, David?”
“You know, Mitchell,” said Raphaella, “you talk a lot. If you talked less, you’d make more friends.” Like crawling into a warm bed, I felt comforted by Raphaella’s rescue.
“What, am I boring you?” asked Mitkin lightly.
Raphaella glinted. He wasn’t. Mitkin smiled and nodded.
“But wait,” Raphaella started. “There’s something missing here. People mess up all the time, we regret things. It just doesn’t seem like we are naturally the way you say we are. I mean, humans really aren’t very rational at all.”
“Yes we are.” He was unrelenting. “We are just ignorant, unaware of all the data we need for each important decision in our lives. I don’t debate our ignorance. If we had more data, we’d make better decisions.” He leaned forward in his seat. “Let’s say you knew more about your future financial status. Knowing you’d be dirt poor or disabled or both, you’d probably make a reasonable decision to have an abortion right now.”
“You sure?” said a thin-eyed Raphaella.
“I’m not sure that you’d choose an abortion, but I am sure that such information would give you the opportunity to make a more informed and rational decision. A decision closer to correct.”
“Well, big deal,” Raphaella retorted. “I agree. I make decisions based on what I know. But what I know doesn’t change what is right. If I know giving up my child’s hiding spot to killers will save my life, I still can’t give her up. I mean, we can know a whole lot a shit and still do the wrong thing, can’t we?”
“Not if you choose rationally. A truly rational man gathers as much knowledge as possible, assesses his desires and makes a decision that contributes greatest to his assembly of wants. Then, with a smile on his face, he calls his decision the right thing. Why do you think people live together before getting married? Knowledge. They want more empirical data on their mate. Eating habits, cleanliness, bed sheet preferences and bathroom hours. The more you know, the better your decision. Right and wrong change; change of data, change of values.”
“But Mitchell, there must be more to right and wrong than just getting a good deal for yourself?”
He held up his hand. “Look. The more you know, the closer to good, if you want to call it that, your decision will be. But the decision is only good because it is informed. You guys keep thinking that empirical truth is like an emotion. It’s not. It’s revealed.”
I was on the verge of confusion. And restlessness.
But what did Mitchell care? He hid his brandy behind his back and then slowly wound it around and into the open without spilling a drop.
Okay? I thought. What’s with the hidden brandy trick? And why the heck is this creepy kid drinking brandy in the first place?
“See, truth is just hidden behind ignorance. Brandy is good, but as we learn more about drunkenness and what it does to the body, well, it’s not so good. It’s like fetal tissue.” He smiled. “Fetal tissue has always been advantageous, it’s just we’ve only now in this century pulled back the curtain to reveal this. These facts exist whether we like them or not.”
I decided to weigh in. “So it’s just like that scene from Wizard of Oz where Oz gets exposed by Toto. That curtain was green, emerald really, and Toto yanked it back and there he was: Oz. Even though it was clear that Oz was also the guard and the servant, Dorothy was sort of stupid on that one.”
Mitkin looked at me deadpan. Raphaella shook, holding back a belly laugh.
“You’re messing with me, David,” he said flatly. “Go ahead, but it doesn’t change what I’m saying.”
I started to lighten him up with an apology of sorts, but Raphaella just waved it off. “Relax, Mitch, we are having a conversation between friends, that’s all.”
Friends, I thought. Yeah, I guess so.
I noticed that dusk had fallen. The room was smeared in it. Raphaella lit a candle, as she loved to do, and its glow mingled with the new night creating a gentle mysterium. A simple painting grew louder on the wall. In it, a yellow man looked up and out and into the yonder of space, where, in a deep and distant corner, a little yellow dot of a man looked back. It was the yellow I remember best. It glowed under the light of Raphaella’s candle, while at the same time Mitkin’s discerning voice grew more incongruous, scraping shrill against the gloaming of the setting sun. I looked at him. He was sipping another brandy and smacking his slender lips as if preparing to speak.
“Once a friend of mine told me I’m the way I am because I was afraid of what I’d find beyond the data of my existence.”
He was foundering a bit and I interrupted. “He said it like that?”
Mitkin smirked. “Next he made reference to my father. Said he had no heart, said he wasn’t human.” He drank and scowled. “He’s no longer my friend.”
“But I thought… I mean, technically, your friend is right. According to you, your father doesn’t have a heart, in that way. You see?”
“He was a sap! Don’t you get it, David? He was dishonoring my father by appealing to emotions. Waa, waa, waa, childish emotions, sentimental crap. The truth of the matter is he was just revealing his own insecurities. His father abandoned him when he was two, there’s the information of importance. Now do you see? There’s the key.”
There was a sliver of silence.
“So did mine,” said Raphaella.
Remarkably, Mitkin became like a child. He sat up and cocked his head slightly and squinted; he was disbelieving. “Your father, too? He left you? Why?” It was the first non-rhetorical question Mitkin had asked all night.
Raphaella leaned all the way back into the thickest and most comfortable part of her couch. “Issues, I guess.”
“But you haven’t told me anything,” said Mitkin.
“Because I don’t know anything,” said Raphaella. “My father was a Romanian. He had a two-week affair with a black woman from New York City. He had urges, macho stuff. You tell me, Mitchell, can we explain that rationally? Does it make any sense? A man makes a baby and then abandons that baby? I mean, what led him to make that decision? It sure feels like he was missing some crucial information to me, like how his daughter would feel.” She smirked. “Yeah, in fact, that’s a good question for you. His best interest was not mine, does that mean you can’t call him wrong for abandoning me?” The coupling of the personal and theoretical charged the room. Raphaella was irritated, though I did not see the great depths of resentment I’d become accustomed to between us. She was not bitter or dismissive; a bit of her was reserved in homage to Mitkin and his stalwart love of an idea. I wanted to see the resentment, I wanted to see her hurt him. I poured another drink.
“That depends,” replied Mitkin, unencumbered and clearly intoxicated. “He may have done himself more damage by hanging around here. He may have done more damage to you, but that’s not even the point really. The point is this: If he weighed his options sensibly and if he chose soundly, without emotion and sentimentality, then he chose rightly. Pain, I’m afraid,” he averted his eyes, “is not part of the equation.”
Raphaella stoically found his averted gaze, and looking directly at him said, “Well for some, anyway.”
They were locked in some sort of soul-defying eye battle and I felt a little left out. With my face warm from drink, I added, “And when her father dies? Won’t he regret all of this on his deathbed?”
“If he’s on a bed when he dies, he might,” shot Mitkin. “Who’s to say he won’t be incinerated in a terrorist attack or spontaneously combust? Who’s to say he’ll have time for the cartoon deathbed scene?” I felt the root of anger waggle inside me, but it did not move me to act. Raphaella spoke up.
“So, okay then, he might feel pain, good enough for me. How about a new topic, something, well, further from home?” She smiled resolvedly.
Mitkin was not finished, however. His voice ran on, higher now, a voice filled with the sing-song of appeasement. “Don’t get me wrong, Raphie. While the goal is to minimize regret by making good decisions, I don’t consider your father’s decision a good one. A father should stay with his children.” He smiled, oddly. “A father should serve his daughter.” Mitkin was gushing and it was not befitting.
And then that feeling hit me again, it rushed into my head and exploded. It’s for love.
My innards turned flush red. He loves her. He loves her, dammit. Just like I felt on the roof the other night, the same thing! I brooded on this. I felt like my head was swelling to absurd and grotesque dimensions, my pride was bloating and breaking the skin in which I was trapped. Don’t let her notice, I thought, it will only piss her off. I was shaking. Can she tell? Don’t let her see. Go to the kitchen. Why though? I’m her man, not this guy, this boring twig. I sucked down my brandy. She’d think I was an idiot if she could see my jealousy, but I know he loves her.
I was a wreck. I looked at him. Now, eighteen years later, I don’t imagine he was doing anything particularly crass or spiteful, but sitting there, I was convinced he was mocking me. Arrogant bastard. Look at the way he’s holding his mouth, he’s ugly. What is he doing with his mouth anyway? And then, on cue, Raphaella spoke as if to pop my bloated self.
“How about your love life, Mr. Mitchell Mitkin?” I groaned inside.
“There’s nothing to discuss,” he said, getting up and going to the kitchen again. Where had Mitkin gone? Was he going for more tasty toxicants, more seduce juice? I surveyed the room. Little rice crumbs dotted the rug where I sat, and the couch was strewn with chopsticks and chicken carrion in Styrofoam cartons. But no, Mitkin’s area was less chaotic. He had not spilled his food, bastard. He lingered in the kitchen, browsing through Raphaella’s refrigerator. A legion of jealous minions marched in my breast; refrigerators, I thought, are personal items. I looked at Raphaella. She didn’t seem to care at all, she was stretched all the way out on her couch. That’s my couch, I thought. I bought it on one optimistic Saturday at the local resale store on the corner. The recliner Mitkin had just vacated retained the imprint of his butt. Ugly butt, I thought. I searched the hall for his return, but heard only more rumbling. I turned to Raphaella and broke down, quietly, with my eyes. I felt myself giving in to that warm, pitying emotion men know so well when faced with the specter of a woman’s rejection. If she recognized my pain, she showed no signs.
I let go into the silence. “I brought my bag, you know. I’ve been thinking, I want things to change between us. Can we have some time together later?”
She didn’t respond immediately; she didn’t want to have this conversation. I could tell by the way she ignored me. Cold neglect. What I wanted to talk about paled next to the buoyant, heady conversation of Mitchell Mitkin. She sighed. I should have realized right then that my decision to start this conversation was not in my best interest. Everything that I had suppressed for three days came back. Confused love, envy, desire, security and sex all welled up and I wanted Mitkin to leave. I searched again for him. He was there, this time carrying three bowls of ice cream. Cold.
A relieved smile curled on Raphaella’s thick, kissable lips, and the whole scene was murderous. I thought about screaming at the top of my lungs, flipping a chair or two, running top speed out the door. Anything I do, I thought, will just be met with an invitation to leave or a Mitkin discourse on the merits of dispassion. I was without recourse, pinned down by enemy fire so strong I felt I would forever crawl on my belly. Mitkin gave me the bowl of ice cream. I wondered where he’d gotten it. Was it a last-minute pickup or a scoop from his very own carton, stored in her freezer, like a lover stores underwear in his partner’s dresser? I was ornery and sexual and I had forgotten about my pledge of submission. I remember thinking, I’m a mess and I don’t give a damn. And Mitkin? He just sat back down on his ugly buttocks indentation, reminding me of his permanence. This frickin’ guy lives downstairs, I thought, how would I ever catch him cavorting? My mind, a minute ago comfortable and enjoying the undulating waters of our conversation was now loosed from its moors. I stood up abruptly. Mitkin eyed me, surprised.
“Raphie, is it over between us?”
Raphaella rolled her eyes. “David, sit down.”
I stared dumbly.
“Sit down, David.”
“I want to know. What’s the deal? I’ve made many promises to myself. I promised that I would make this relationship work and that I’d be the father that your father was not. I’ve promised to always be there for you, to listen to you, obey you. I’ll do whatever it takes, Kiwi, whatever.”
“It takes sitting down,” she said. I sat down. It grew very silent. I looked around the room and found Mitkin staring at me while pulling a loaded spoonful of ice cream through his lips, flattening the top of the frothy, rounded scoop. His blue eyes did not commiserate with mine, but neither were they opportunistic like he’d been waiting for us to blow up, waiting to take her from me when the time was right. He was just studying me to see why I was acting the way I was. I wished he’d find out, because at that point I didn’t know myself. I had abandoned the plan, and seemingly against my will. I looked starvingly at Raphaella. In her eyes, I saw a congealed mix of pity, irritation and anger. And then, for a moment only, I saw profound sorrow. She looked at Mitkin.
“As you can see, we’ve been having our problems. David doesn’t think that I know he’ll be a great father.” I entered a half-catharsis. It wasn’t like she said I love you, but still, I thought, it’s a start. I wanted to give her a kiss, but she was still looking at Mitkin. She wanted a response so she could get on with less anxious conversation, but of course, the little word-general did not oblige. He just scooped up another spoonful of ice cream and slowly slid it between his lips. The room remained loaded. Raphaella scooped and ate too, and I sat still. The little candle in the corner burnt itself out, and the conversation was over. In the yellowish dark of the room, Mitkin got up and the three of us exchanged niceties.
“I’ll have to ask you about that love life some other time,” said Raphaella. I glanced at her. She ushered Mitkin out the door, but to add to my drunken angst, he left all the items he’d brought. Raphaella said something else about seeing him later and shut the door. She turned around and stood looking at me. I stared back and smiled.
“That went well,” I said. I gave her a hug, but she did not hug back. I gave her another, this one was more repentant. “I think I’ll clean up a bit and meet you in bed.” She remained in her silence. It was another of her many forms of torture, and she shoved off to the back of the apartment. I wandered into the front room and stared at the mess. Reason, rational thought, it’s all bullshit. Mitkin is wrong about life, our impulsive life together was testimony to this. Alone in the dark, I wondered if I’d ever find happiness with the woman who carried my child.
By the time I got into bed, Raphaella was nearly asleep. She was on her side, facing the wall. I crawled in and felt my head spin. I gently laid my hand on her hip and then fit it snugly over her maternal belly. She was crying. “Baby, what is it?”
“It’s nothing, David. Go to sleep.”
“Should I worry?” I said.
“Yeah, you should worry. Worry a lot. You’re out of control, David.”
“But what am I supposed to do? I love you.”
“You don’t even know what that means. I don’t even…” and she began to cry again. Her sobs were deep and she shook. She cried uncontrollably. I had never seen her cry this way, I had never seen her cry at all.
“What is it, Raphie? Tell me.”
“Something is happening to me, something I can’t explain.” I held her tighter but she did not respond. I was there, but she was alone. I hung on for a long time, long enough to see the dark shades of night grow lighter and whiter. And then I let go and fell asleep.