KNOWING

For years he had studied the imagery, tropes, and stylistics of contemporary English literature. It began in junior high as he listened to passages from To Kill a Mockingbird while staring at the stockinged legs of his English teacher, Ms. Winston, swinging back and forth in a casual way. From then on he knew a powerful passion for words. In his third year of high school, as he performed a short and admittedly amateurish speech (even then, he would have admitted it) about the romanticism inherent in The Great Gatsby, going on and on about Platonic conceptions and the tragedy of the billboarded eyes, he could hear Ms. Landon exhaling in brief gasps and moans, and when he dared to look at her, he saw that she had her hands clasped over her small but not unattractive chest. His speech was supposed to take five minutes but he began to bowl over and through the rest of his words and he was finished in four. Afterward he excused himself to the bathroom to wash his face. She had applauded and he felt it was a comic gesture because no one else had applauded, and neither had he expected them to applaud.

At his mid-tier university he began to master his words. He enrolled in as many lower-division Shakespeare courses as he could find and he seized every opportunity to read out loud in discussion sections, listening and watching for the freshman girls who would touch their fingers to their mouths or lean forward in their chairs or simply open their mouths in the tiniest way, revealing a little bit of darkness between glossed lips. He took from them their phone numbers and he read to them in their twin-sized dormitory beds. If any of them had loved him he did not know it, or he chose to not know it. And even if they had, it was probably nothing but the blushings of girls who had read too much Shakespeare. Or Jane Austen: she was often on the curriculum. He loathed Jane Austen.

After graduating from his mid-tier university he did the only thing that made sense to him and applied to a few mid-tier graduate schools for a degree in English Literature. One of these schools accepted him and so he went to it. Instead of Shakespeare, he read Derrida. Instead of Austen, he read de Man. The lyricism of deconstruction persuaded girls of a different age into his embrace but he always held them at arms’-length. It seemed the rational thing. He kissed their half-lidded eyes while speaking of the violence of language and he never saw their colors.

And then the strangest thing occurred: he fell in love. She was a waitress at a bistro that served contemporary American and French fare. She was incredibly discriminating in most aspects of her life but was given to rare choices that he found simultaneously beneath his standards and incredibly charming. She was appallingly uncultured in regard to films, music, art, and literature, but possessed an almost-encyclopaedic knowledge of cheeses. She did not drink wine and in fact rarely drank anything at all. He knew he was in love with her because every time he ordered the steak frites from her his voice became two degrees softer, just loud enough to be heard in the din of the restaurant, and sometimes quiet enough to force her to lean forward, stray strands of blonde hair dangling prettily, so that she could hear him say “I’ll have the steak frites, medium rare”, which translated to “I love you”.

After his eighth visit to the bistro in the span of two weeks, he asked her out on a date. They went to a movie theater and watched an animated children’s film that had been incredibly well-reviewed by the critics. After the end of the film they smiled at each other and walked to a coffee shop, always standing close enough for the backs of hands to accidentally brush against the other’s. They discussed the film. He enjoyed it for its narrative arc and sophisticated visual language, which may or may not have referenced French new wave cinema at least a few times. She enjoyed it for its indelibly cute animal characters and subtle rhythms of movement and motion. An employee of the coffee shop, a tall girl in her late twenties, told them for the second time that the coffee shop was going to close, was in fact already closed, and all the while she smiled, baring little white teeth.

When they spoke on the phone he was nearly always smiling. Comparatively she seemed to smile a little less, as far as he could hear, and this unnerved him.

They went to: museums, zoos, aquariums, theme parks, restaurants, movie theaters, theatre theaters, shooting ranges, race tracks (horse, Formula 1, and dog, but just once), and her parents’ house, both of whom were incredibly cheerful people. They cooked a delightful quiche lorraine for him. They all drank a little bit too much red wine and played Trivial Pursuit. She won, barely, as he was collecting the last piece of his plastic pie. Her parents beamed with pride despite being slaughtered by these two young upstarts and then went to sleep. He made love to her on the living room couch, quietly, under blankets. He had thought it would have been too awkward but then her blonde hair dangled so prettily over her flushed red cheeks.

Ten months after that first date, she asked him to dinner on a Wednesday evening, prefacing the invitation with a statement of intent: “I seriously need to talk to you.” He wondered at the list of probable, serious topics of conversation. She was taking birth control. No natural disasters were imminent. Her parents wanted him to be there for Christmas. He was faithful, had never even considered infidelity, there was no question of it; she reminded him of a snow leopard out of a nature documentary shown in an IMAX theater. Sometimes while looking at her he craned his neck to try to see more of her.

In an upscale French restaurant, the recipient of one or two Michelin stars, they sat across from each other and looked at their menus which were simply and elegantly designed, with an attractive typeface and not a single decimal point to be found. To start they ordered the sauteed foie gras served with a light cranberry jam and rounds of toast. They drank Scandinavian water poured from tall, perfectly cylindrical glass bottles. As he admired the buttery texture of the foie gras on his fork, she spoke of an incontrovertible distance growing between them. But the only distance he could note was the white linen surface, and the table was not that large because it was a small restaurant. Had she been smiling even less over the phone than was normal? Face to face she remained beautiful in a vague fashion, as if the frames of sight were only just slightly misaligned.

For the gentleman, the Kobe beef short rib, and for the lady, the loin of veal. From her purse she retrieved a numbered list of his faults and listed them with a steady voice. She never sang in public and rarely sang in private but on the occasions in which he had overheard her singing, each note, each lyric, caused his heart to push outward against his ribcage a little harder. But it could never have been said of her that she had a singing voice. He had no need of the knife to eat his short rib as it was incredibly tender and matched incomparably well with the asparagus puree. As she stated that he was cold and distant, unnecessarily combatant and antagonistic in daily conversation, her loin of veal soaked up more and more of the red wine reduction off the plate. Once he had spilled wine on her kitchen’s tile floor and she had knelt to the ground with rags to clean it up and he had pulled her away from the floor to kiss her mouth, her angled neck, the jut of her collarbone.

They shared crème brûlée. The burnt sugar crisped upon his teeth and she said nothing, having exhausted the numbered list some minutes ago. He could think of nothing to say in response as she, unlike all the others, did not enjoy being read to. She asked for the check. She offered to pay but he refused. She said, again, that she would pay and he refused. He paid with a credit card. One-third of the crème brûlée remained but neither he nor she would lift a fork to it. Finally she said “I’m sorry” as she gathered up her purse and coat and she said the words softly but they manifested themselves as an unendurable gravity in his lungs and although it was his heart that was breaking the main thing was that he just could not breathe at all.