YOU KNOW

HOW THIS GOES.

You know how this goes: She’s twenty in her second year at Penn, she lives on Pine in a splitup mansion with a lattice of leaves giving the facade an argyle smile. She studies Virginia Woolf and Marianne Moore and in the evenings she walks over to Baltimore and looks at the moment a city shifts into a mass of winter thorns across the street. The trolley rings low. He’s twentysix and has returned from abroad with a Master’s degree and a pack of biodegradable filters. It’s twentyseventeen. Now it’s Faulkner in February. In class she looks at him with the flap of her book and a few thin pages kept between her fingers. The cover is glossy and new and she hates it. His is old –– a seventies type of modern. It’s beat to shit. When he speaks he holds the body of the book out towards the class, and from the front she can see wellwritten marginalia. He thinks. She uses a purple Pilot. He writes with a Micron like he’s stitching a wound. When their eyes cross in class, she can say only one thing: I am listening.

         It’s after Valentine’s Day when she emails him asking for feedback on her thesis statement. She says multiple narration, as a technique, eases over some of the difficulties of the narrative. She means for it to disguise her dislike of the book. It doesn’t disguise anything. When she writes the email, she’s sitting alone in her room with only her desklamp casting a heavy yellow light on her hands. She types with spiderfingers and sends it and washes her face and faces her phone in bed, where she looks at the syllabus and looks forward to a European author, not Camus, maybe Kafka. No one understands what’s going on outside themselves so faulkner is kind of a liar, she types in her notes. When she sleeps, she dreams of a California parking lot and sitting across from her highschool not-boyfriend in the back seat. She wakes up in Philadelphia.

         He doesn’t respond for another day. When he does, it’s kind: I think you’re onto something but not allowing yourself to consider that maybe there really isn’t a main character (main characters are normally the least-flawed characters) and here we have to enjoy being in the fucked-up mess of things. This is the first time she’s seen someone use fuck in an academic email. She’s already rewritten the thesis statement, it doesn’t even matter, so she sends back a Thanks, that’s great.

In March he starts coming to class a few minutes later. His tan is gone and she can really see the sallow skin now. His hair makes shaggy blades at his neck. For Kafka, he makes them watch the opening scene from a too-long movie adaptation. She wonders what the point is.

         After class she asks him what the point is.

         Honestly, he says, I don’t like The Trial.

         Oh, she says.

         Do you like it? he asks.

         I think it’s better than the Americans.

         Well that’s a great point, he says. I think Kafka, I get it after The Metamorphosis. It’s all very dark. Like, I hate waiting in line too, dude.

         Yeah, she laughs. What’s next?

         Ask the syllabus, he says. He’s mounting a heavy wool jacket around his high shoulders.

         Do you live, um, near campus? she asks.

         No. He laughs. I live in South Philly.

         Oh, she says. I’ve never been there.

         It’s ass, he says. Cold as fuck commute.

         Do you walk?

         I bike.

         Oh, she says.

         Yeah, he says. They’ve arrived at the sidewalk. Which way are you going?

         That way, she says, pointing.

         Oh, I’m going this way.

         The whole walk home she kicks slush and wishes she said the opposite. Toincoss loss.

In April the darkness recedes. There are flowers that bloom and perish in a quick cold wind. She wakes up before her alarm and the morning sun kisses her woodpanelled room. She looks at drunk texts from the night before and wonders if she was too mean to the boy who kissed her, laughed, left, came back, texted her, fucked her, fucked her again and told her he wasn’t sure where things were going. She wasn’t. Her roommate takes a shower that lasts approximately one hour. When she goes to class that day, she stares out the window watching the first warm day come too soon. She thinks about yellow flowers. He’s lecturing on Zone. In the end you are. Parching you within. The women are blood-red. Sun corseless head. Gathering her things, she pretends to take a while to organize her pens in the front pocket. When she zips it shut, she sighs. She’s the last one out. He’s behind her with a thick hand gripping hard the stack of books. Two of them he didn’t even open.

         Did you like that? he asks.

         I have a hard time with translation, she says.

         How do you mean?

         I just feel like we don’t know what they’re really saying if it’s in French then it’s in English.

         Right, he says. We don’t. But we don’t know what Shakespeare meant either, really, or anyone from not that long ago. Languages die more than they’re born.

         Oh, she says. I guess I didn’t think of that.

         Maybe it’s a bad translation, he says. The French is much better.

         You speak French?

         Un peu, he says.

         I don’t know what that means, she says.

         Oh, sorry, he says. A little. I picked up some living in Lille one summer.

         That’s cool, she says.

         Are you going to study abroad? What year are you? he asks.

         I’m a sophomore, she says. I don’t know. The deadline passed.

         Deadlines are fake, he says. I studied in Spain and France, and England on my Fulbright. They’re at the sidewalk again. Let me know if you want to pick my brain about it sometime.

         Sure, she says. She waits for him to take the first step then says, Actually I’m going that way too.

         Oh. Cool. Well yeah. The French are the masters.

         I don’t speak French.

         You can learn, he says, and looks at her from above. They pass a tree bearing soft green bulbs hardening darker.

         Where’s your bike locked? she asks.

         It got stolen, he says. I take the trolley now.

         Oh, that sucks, I’m sorry.

         It’s fine, he says. She feels some anger on the edge of his lip that doesn’t come out.

         Well I guess if you wanted to talk about abroad stuff, I’m pretty clueless, she says.

         Where are you from?

         California, she says.

         That’s like the opposite of abroad.

         She feels like saying sorry but she doesn’t say it because she’s tired of saying it. Where are you from?

         Massachusetts, he says.

         Um, where’s your office, then? Should we like set up a time? she asks.

         I have a cubicle, he says. It’s not exactly a colloquial environment. There’s a bar I normally do my reading at. It’s on Shunk street.

         Oh, she says. You do your reading at a bar?

         I do everything at the bar, he says. What’s today, Tuesday? I have a meeting tonight with my advisor but I’ll be there tomorrow. Rosewood on Shank.

         Sure, she says. What time?

         How’s seven?

         Great.

When she goes home that night she looks at pictures of Lille, which she has to type three times before the right thing comes up. It looks like what Europe looks like. When she’s falling asleep, her hand wanders. The seams of her belly go to my heart, she’s thinking to stop herself. Afterward, the sweat puddles in the back of her neck.

Escaping Oregon avenue she comes up the stairs. Marconi plaza is empty. She walks north a block, turns, crosses, arrives. She looks at her phone and makes sure the address is right. It is. When she enters, he’s already looking at her from across the room, from a back booth. She smiles. Crosses. Says hello. He says it back.

         What do you want, he asks. Stands.

         What’s that, she asks.

         Yuengling, he says.

         That’s good.

         He gets her one. They cheer, both holding the bottles by their necks. He tells her some basic things about life in France: They are actually very kind, the bread is very fresh, they forcefeed geese to make foie gras. She smiles and nods. She says she’s not sure what she really wants to be doing. He asks if she has any plans. She says she’s going to work a finance internship this summer and his face gives hate, so she tries to shrug it off but he’s a little too forceful telling her they’re going to kill the literature thing she has going on. You’re a good student, he says. She wonders if he’s ever worked a real job. She wonders if his parents are still together. Under the table her knee touches his. She notices how bony he is: How they spring straight to the orbs at the sides of his wrists. She looks around at the sadlooking white people with harsh beards and Phillies caps and says: Why do you come to this place?

         I live around the corner, he says. Do you want a shot?

         They take a whiskey shot together. She downs it and purses her lips, looking down then looking at him. He laughs and covers his mouth with a loose fist. He asks her about California and the West Coast and the fires and the flights home and her strict parents and the thing she wrote for Thirtyfourth Street. You should publish more, I wish I had. They’re three rounds in. She doesn’t know it’s his sixth. When they get up to leave, he says, This was really fun. You’re sweet.

         You’re sweet too.

         Outside: Cold. They shake their faces. I live right there, I can get you an uber.

         Sure.

He’s running his nose along her thigh with his hands on her calves. She’s looking down at him hoping he doesn’t look up. He does. She feels fat. She feels drunk. She shuts up. You are in jail with the examining magistrate. When his lips touch her cunt, she holds her breath. She hears him licking but doesn’t feel it. Then she feels it. A gnawing blooms through her torso. Her eyes shut. She touches his hair. You really don’t have to. No. He doesn’t stop. When she comes, her cheeks are warm and narrow and there are tears resting in her eyes. He keeps going: Moves over top of her, kisses her wet, undoes. When he sits aside to unroll a condom over his cock, she looks at the layers of his stomach, his patches of bodyhair, how his fingers shake checking which end opens right. She keeps her hands over her sex without realizing it. He moves them, moves over her, spits, fingers, spits, parts, moves, enters. He kisses her hard and shuts his eyes and she feels some sick embarrassment for him. When he comes, she smells breaths of beer sputtering out of his hot mouth. He falls at her side. His hand rests easy on her breast. He plays with her nipple and she wishes he would stop. The room is carpeted. She balances a foot against it uneasy, pulling a sock on her other one. I can get you an uber. No, it’s fine. But when she looks back at him, there’s something soft in his eyes or his eyebrows, and he says You’re really beautiful, and it sounds just like he means it. She says Thank you. She says I think you’re very smart.

The rest of the year she sits in the back and he doesn’t look up from his book. She gets an A minus. He leaves town that summer.

For months then a year his hand stays on her leg, the baldness of her thigh, then slows, recedes, becomes only a memory. In notebooks and notes app she records portraits of two people she names Harry and Mary, then Charles and Maya, then Mason and Anita. She tells herself it’s fiction. In her stories they reunite: Anita looks up from her drink to see Mason’s eyes like two foglights across the bar and they fuck in the bathroom. Mason is waiting for an airplane to an academic conference in Rome when Anita sits down next to him. Anita gets into a fight with her boyfriend, rages out into the night and finds Mason walking to the movie theater. They sit in the back and kiss. Their hands are always pushing into one another like they’re digging through dirt. They move on from their tryst knowing there’s another coming. That he’ll be dressed different and she’ll be in the thinnest slip, he’ll take wrinkles and she won’t, his hair will streak grey and she’ll put him down on a chair, stand over him, look down at him, keep his hands still, kiss.

After a spring in London the stories stop.

It’s five years later and she’s living at a converted office building in the Financial District, downtown, above a Duane Reade. White drywall with big windows. She overlooks a playground. She stays at the office late then meets her friends at Forgetmenot, at Vazacs, at Dream Baby and they buy each other drinks and on Thursdays and Fridays at Saturdays cut lines of cocaine on their iPhone screens in the bathrooms. She reads everything she finds on the street and has spent a year looking for the right midcentury bookshelf. But everything in her room is white and correct and she wants something worn and brown. She goes on dates at Little Branch and her roommates listen to the guys say things like Ah god and Oh my god fuck and she laughs at them when they leave. Sometimes she washes her face twice with Cerave cleanser because she needs to get the feeling of their thumb off her cheek. Sometimes she drinks the whole bottle on the couch and cracks the window and waits for the cigarette roommate to come out of the flex room so they can put the ashtray between them and shake their heads.

One night her friend drags her out to Elsewhere and she winces thinking about the warehouses and the L train, but she goes anyway. A friend of a friend is a DJ and she doesn’t know how much attention to pay during the show. It’s April and too warm and she drinks five Aperol spritzes. In a sidebooth she watches a man chewing gum fix a woman’s hair. Everyone says they’re going to Oneninetyone Knickerbocker now, do you want to come? She’s about to say yes but a headache splits through her. She doesn’t know where it came from. Everyone seems like they don’t care. She wants them to pressure her but she can already see her friend looking crooked at her keys. I’m tapping out, she says. One time only. My head. She walks down and out. She boards an evening train from Jefferson.

She finds a seat while some kids record themselves laughing, halfdancing. The pain’s behind her eyes now. She wasn’t drinking enough water. She closes her eyes and tries to let the train cradle her around its bends and ebbs. At Montrose she checks her phone.

         She locks her phone and closes her eyes. Opens them. There’s always a body appearing here: That’s. He. Yes: He’s sitting there. She sees him sitting at the far end of the opposite bench. He wears a full beard and kempt hair. He’s on his phone. She looks straight ahead. Tunnel silence. At the next stop, he looks around. He’s staring now. His lips part. Sad untrimmed hairs rustle in his breath. She doesn’t look. Turns the music up in her ears: It only sounds like noise. Now Lorimer: He stands, staring, lingering, bones of his fingers wrapped around a silver pole. I can’t. Don’t. I won’t. And when he turns, she glances to see the back of his black jacket escort his body out of the subway car. Then the people crowd him by his shoulders and the train shuts her in and starts again, and she stands to look out the window and it’s him and he’s looking at her, his eyes are green now, and heavy with white. His mouth makes an awful shape. Finally those tears come forward all these years as the wheels smirk against the crooked track and the girl’s body sways in the turn then stutters, balances –– No, not balance: Trembling.