The Decent Proposal (11 page)

The main door of Richard's building was open, so she went directly up to his apartment and knocked.

He opened the door. Shirtless.

“Am I early?” she said, averting her eyes, but not before noticing he had a healthy amount of chest hair. It was embarrassing to admit it, but she found this au naturel look appealing, though it was surprisingly rare among the myriad surfers, swimmers, and sun worshippers whose bare chests she couldn't help observing on the beach year-round. She didn't understand why so many guys shaved themselves these days.

“Not at all, I'm just running late,” he said, turning around and padding away from the door. His back, on the other hand, was perfectly smooth—and surprisingly muscular. She forced herself to stare at his naked feet. They were nice too.
Lord.
Was every single part of him pleasing to the eye? A burst of heat prickled at her hairline, a momentary flare due to where this innocent query had transported her, unawares. Elizabeth felt a rapid throbbing in the space behind her navel, accompanied by a hunger she tried to neutralize by voicing it without delay:

“I'm starving!”

He whirled around, the flat of his hand rubbing against two of the eight abdominal muscles carved into his lower torso in obscenely high relief. “Me too.” He grinned.

It was the grin that did it. He was too pleased with his own beauty, she decided, too gleeful of her admiration. His vanity counteracted his pulchritude, shrinking it to within an accept
able range.
Show's over
, she wanted to say.
Go put a shirt on.
And somehow, this thought must have communicated itself, because his grin faltered and he held up one finger, disappearing into what she guessed was his bedroom.

“Food came already, it's on the table!” he shouted through the wall. “Soda's in the fridge!”

Elizabeth did a quick survey of his kitchen and living room. He had all the right appliances and furniture (his TV was
enormous
), and it was obvious he'd neatened up in preparation for her visit, but it was equally obvious he hadn't given the place a thorough cleaning in a long time, if ever. There was dust everywhere, and the poor carpet in the living room looked as if it had leprosy or smallpox, there were so many scars and stains on its mottled gray surface. A thin layer of green mold circumvented the drain in his kitchen sink, and she would have scrubbed it away right then and there if any dishwashing liquid were in the vicinity. She slipped some Purell out of her purse and doused a knife and fork with it, setting them aside for herself. She was debating whether to clean another set for him when he reentered—with a shirt on, and white athletic socks covering his shapely feet.

“I cannot
wait
for you to see this movie,” he announced, resurrecting his trusty grin.

THE POINT AT
which the titular alien burst out of the guy's chest was actually the
third
time Elizabeth would have stopped watching, had it been up to her. The first was when that same guy and two of his crew members (idiotically) entered the spooky alien spacecraft, and the second was when the “facehugger,” as Richard called it—assuring her this was the official term—attached itself to the guy's face.

“Wait, so it basically laid an egg
down his throat
?” she asked. “Which then hatched and burst out of him?”

“Exactly.” Richard helped himself to a little more chicken tikka masala. “And notice it's the
guy
who's getting forcibly impregnated, and the
woman
who leads the action and survives. Totally subversive, especially for its time.”

“So it's a horror movie.”

“A hundred percent.”

Which explained why she hated it. “I always thought it was an action movie.”

“A lot of people do, cuz the second one
is
an action movie. Pretty good one too, although the third one's shit even if it
is
Fincher, and the fourth one's got issues even though it's not as bad as everyone says it is. Do
not
, however, get me started on the alleged prequel.”

“How old were you when you first saw it?” she asked, more than a little concerned that getting started on the alleged prequel was exactly what he was about to do.

“Ten.”

“There's no way I could've watched that when I was ten.”

“Well, I wasn't supposed to,” he said. “I was at sleepaway camp—which by the way was the only Jewy thing my very
un-
Jewy Jewish parents did for me while I was growing up—but anyway, we had this counselor, Paul, and even though in my memory he was a full-on adult he couldn't've been more than seventeen. And Paul was having this
epic
love affair with one of the girl counselors, Sara. And we all thought it was disgusting, or at least I did cuz I was immature for my age—you're shocked, I know—but by the end of the summer Paul would do whatever he had to to get rid of us and spend time with Sara, since he lived in Connecticut and she lived in Virginia and that was like living on
opposite ends of the earth
, and they needed to make the most of
what little time they had left
, like one of them had cancer or something. So one night he announced we'd be watching
Ferris Bueller's Day Off
for the eighteenth time before lights-out, ex
cept he was in such a rush to get out of there he put in the wrong VHS tape—God, that makes me feel old to say ‘VHS tape'—and by the time
Alien
started, he was already gone.”

“Oops,” said Elizabeth, spooning her second helping of chana masala onto a hunk of garlic naan.

“I was totally hooked. When I got home I begged my mom to buy the sequel, and it took her about ten minutes to figure out what happened. Paul didn't get asked back the next summer, but Sara did, and she of course immediately started hooking up with this other counselor, Barry. There were always guys named Barry at camp, but
only
at camp, you ever notice that?”

“I never went to camp,” she said.

“Anyway you'll be relieved to know it all turned out okay in the end, cuz a few months ago I got
aggressively
bored and looked up Paul on Facebook and guess what? He and Sara got married! They have two kids now. I was so relieved. Thank God for Facebook, right?”

Elizabeth opened her mouth—

“I know, I know,” he said. “You're not on Facebook, and you're very proud of that.”

She shot him a look of crinkle-eyed annoyance she couldn't remember giving anyone since high school. Was that the last time anyone had openly teased her? He chattered on:

“I think I can honestly say watching
Alien
for the first time is my best memory from childhood, hands-down. Wow, that's kind of sad, isn't it?”

Elizabeth shrugged. “I don't see why. You love movies, right? You even made a career out of them.”

“If you can call it a career.”

She knew he wanted her to give him a pep talk now, to say something like:
You'll get there!
or
Look how far you've come already!
But this was not her style. She allowed the pause to lengthen, broken only by their respective munching.

“Okay, your turn,” he said finally.

She looked at him questioningly.

“Favorite memory from childhood?”

His mouth was coiled, as if on a spring, and his expression was more impish than usual thanks to a reddish tinge around his lips (a remnant of the masala sauce). There was no mistaking the challenge inherent in the question. She guessed this was payback for not propping up his ego, an attempt to throw her off balance by asking her a personal question. For this reason (and this reason only), Elizabeth took great satisfaction in replying:

“That's easy. When I was eight I had to stay home from school one day, which was really unusual for me. Most years I had perfect attendance—”

“Of course you did,” he interjected.

“—but I threw up at breakfast that morning, so there was no way I was going to make it through the day. By the afternoon, though, I was feeling better enough to go with my mother to the laundromat. It was just down the street, and I used to love it there, all the women laughing and talking at the top of their voices, the clanking machinery. . . . It was like going to a party. At that age anyway. My mother gave me this Ziploc bag of pretzels—the ones shaped like little nuggets?—to help keep my stomach settled, and I laid them down on one of the washing machines we were using.”

Elizabeth closed her eyes. Richard noticed for the first time that her eyelids were darker than the rest of her face, with little smudges on them that looked like makeup. But he knew her well enough by this point to guess it was a natural effect.

“Whenever I picture them I'm still this tiny eight-year-old who can barely see over the top of the washer. And they're rattling inside the bag like they're alive, and they're all I can see. Even the salt grains are huge—these enormous squares glittering
in the sunlight like they're diamonds or something. . . . They fill up everything. Not just my field of vision, but
everything
.”

She opened her eyes.

“I felt completely . . .
safe
. But it was more than that. You have to know what it's like to feel
unsafe
before you know what
safe
feels like, you know? And I hadn't experienced that yet. It's stupid, but the only thing I can think to compare it to is a baby in the womb. With the vibrations from the washer, and my mother right there, and all these other women who loved me and would protect me if they had to. . . . It's like I was able to re-create that feeling of total security for a few minutes—or maybe it was hours, or seconds, I don't know—and preserve it in a memory.”

She paused. Richard wanted to say something, but he maintained his silence so as not to spook her, as though she were an exotic bird that might fly away at a moment's notice. This was by far the most personal thing she had ever told him.

“If I ever have trouble sleeping, all I have to do is picture the pretzels shaking in rhythm with the washer, and I drift right off. It's like my personal sleeping pill.”

There was another, much longer pause, at the end of which she jumped up:

“I'm going to do the dishes,” she announced, making her way to the kitchen sink and waving away his protests. “Where do you keep your dishwashing soap?”

“Oh,” he said, “I ran out.”
Three weeks ago
, he added to himself. “Here”—he ran into the bathroom and emerged with a liquid hand soap dispenser—“you can use this. It's the same stuff. But seriously, you don't have to.”

“I want to,” she said, which was half-true. What she really wanted to do was eradicate that ring of mold around his drain.

With a guilty pang, he thought back to dinner at her place the night of
Harold and Maude
. He hadn't even offered to clean
up. His mother would have been ashamed of him. There were moments—such as now, as he watched her roll up her sleeves and get down to business—when Elizabeth actually reminded him of his mother, and as Richard stacked the plates on the counter, he thought back to the most remarkable instance of this phenomenon, that same night in Venice.

They had walked to Campos before the movie, since the restaurant didn't deliver and was only one block away. Elizabeth's bungalow was near the “Canals” section of Venice, which was the final vestige of the neighborhood's glory days a century earlier, when there had been canals crisscrossing a much larger area, with gondolas manned by authentic gondoliers imported from the motherland. These Italian strongmen transported coat-tailed men and corseted women in search of a day of pleasure, who were meant to feel as if they were traversing the canals of Venezia, except that it all ended in a big amusement park on the Pacific Ocean. Since then, all the canals had been drained and filled in except for a small, three-block grid that had essentially become an oddly shaped pond. In the spring and summer, all that standing water in an urban neighborhood filled with tourists and trash created a haven for ducks—lots of them. They were like stray cats: dirty, battered, and distrustful of humans, especially when caring for their duckling broods.

While Elizabeth was fiddling with her lock, a bedraggled mother duck waddled in front of them onto her tiny square of lawn, a teenage brood of four in tow. Richard and Elizabeth froze, as humans generally do when nonthreatening animals approach, to see how close they might come. Richard raised his eyebrows, murmured, “what the duck,” and after a few seconds looked away, but Elizabeth clasped her hands in silent jubilation. She watched them waddle; she listened, delighted, to the mother's perturbed quacking. The last duckling was too slow and lost his family around a corner. He quacked—high-pitched,
panicked—and Elizabeth looked to the corner, concerned on his behalf. The mother came speeding back, snapping at him and nipping his neck, and the little duckling hung his head as he scrambled after her.

Elizabeth laughed aloud, clapping her hands. Richard gaped at her.
This
was what made her laugh? A few dirty ducks? It was exactly how his mother would have reacted, and as much as he loved his mother, the comparison was in no way comforting. He liked to think his brand of humor went deeper, plumbed murkier depths. It was one of the many attributes he'd fine-tuned during college, with Mike, and he'd always pointed to a shared sense of humor as the number-one characteristic he required in a mate (as opposed to a mother). This incident made him feel disconnected from Elizabeth, and he despised feeling disconnected from people while he was still with them. The alienation born of the failure to connect was the worst sort of loneliness there was, much uglier than simply lamenting a person's absence. Had they been on a regular date, he would have felt more than justified from this single experience in never calling her again.