Show Don't Tell

by Curtis Sittenfeld

I always showed up for class. I met deadlines. I made eye contact. Of course I was chronically sad, and of course various phobias lay dormant inside me, but none of that was currently dictating my behavior.

“Great literature has never been produced by a beautiful woman.” I stared at him for a few seconds. “That’s ridiculous.” “Name a book. I’ll wait.” “Virginia Woolf was a babe.” Of the many foolish things I said in graduate school, this is the one that haunts me the most. But I didn’t regret it immediately.

I stood near a platter of program-sponsored cheese.

Although I haven’t seen either of them for years, I have the sense that I was present at the Big Bang of their family, except for the fact that I’m guessing their family doesn’t believe in the Big Bang.

“Is there anything you need that you don’t have?” I meant a toothbrush, but as soon as I said it I wondered if I’d offered him a blowjob. He seemed sad, though, and not lecherous, when he said, “Sweetheart, there aren’t enough hours in the day to tell you all the things I need and don’t have.”

But there’s another surprise, which is that most of the questions she asks him, he asks her back—before they move on to the next topic, he says, “What about you?” This is surprising both because he’s famous and because he’s a man.

They never kiss, and they never talk about any of it—about hating each other, about sleep sex, about not kissing.

I intend, as I suspect most people do, to be moral, but when in the day am I supposed to research ethical sourcing of coffee beans, and am I really expected to pay four times as much for them?

How was she to know then that this would be the most intensely romantic moment of her life? Which is pathetic, right? But that doesn’t make it untrue.

One of the surprises of adulthood has been that, as the years pass, it has become less rather than more clear to me whether I’m a good or bad person.

I hadn’t thought adulation was something I wanted or needed; I had thought companionship sufficed. But I’d failed to anticipate how calamitous the standard erosion of affection over time could be when you started with a modicum as opposed to an abundance.

I’d done the whole middle-aged dating app thing, and been mildly burned more than once by my own tendency toward frenzied early texting in the absence of confirmed in-person chemistry.

kissed each other’s cheeks just once. There are a fair number of habits that preppy men have that I no longer find endearing, if I ever did—smugness, resource hoarding—but, on occasion, a preppy man with good manners and beer on his breath can still make me weak in the knees.