Acts of Service

by Lillian Fishman

He had said, “You won’t write a book about me.” But I haven’t written a book about him, neither have I written a book about myself. All I have done is translate into words—words he will probably never read; they are not intended for him—the way in which his existence has affected my life. An offering of a sort, bequeathed to others. ANNIE ERNAUX, SIMPLE PASSION

I don’t have any idea. I think that first I have to get the thing I want, and maybe then I can figure out why I wanted it, or whether it’s good.

I felt warm and stupid under the beam of his attention.

Throughout most of my childhood, my father was a perfectly good parent. We got along. He was grateful not to be alone, I think, and grateful that I was a quiet, easy kid. Our years of comfortable coexistence ended when I was fifteen.

I felt a swell of love for my father. Yet I chafed when he insisted on his own particular suffering.

It was a feverish feeling, like running toward a door that continued to recede each time I neared it.

Now it felt like a narcotic to hear what I knew was wrong, yet if it were true could only mean that I was chosen. That I should be special—momentarily and yet spectacularly special—because I had stumbled into such a body?

Do you really do this? I said. Have girls stay? No. But you smell very good, he said archly.

It’s like we’re obedient planets caught in the same little orbit

experiencing with gratitude, I imagined, the soft unpredictability of the midday train car, the way it seemed a place out of time, hurtling along between the real rooms in which people got older.

As I listened to him, trains I was not waiting for roared in and out of the station. I knew I would go any distance he asked of me and yet I entertained a kind of game with myself, a game in which I believed I was beyond his control.

I would really like to see you tonight…. All right—let me know. You enjoy that I cancel plans for you, don’t you? Very much, he said. Very much.

craved and feared whatever I imagined real life was. To hear Eve Babitz describe it, a cold English winter, nothing more. In this sense life in New York was very real.

The usual tragedy. The way they always end: in tears and hiccups, panic attacks in the back seats of cabs, sleepless nights.

Instead of harassing my father about our differences I had begun, years ago, to practice what I believed was forgiveness by trying to act as though I was impervious to his disdain or his disappointment. Over time this imperviousness was hard to distinguish from silence. My father couldn’t imagine that any action on his part had provoked or encouraged my reticence.

From Nathan, I had a short, rare message: I’ve been thinking about you.

the carafe so I wouldn’t be forced to stare at her. How had I stooped to this: Can you get Olivia to talk to me?

I felt myself poured into those fingers as though I could remain so surrounded and warmed. How could it be this that I wanted? Muted, held, warm, told what I was. By a man like him.

I still thought sometimes it must pain her, how indebted she was to a feeling to which he was immune. I knew she was afraid of his leaving her. But I had underestimated her, that was also true. I had thought that, despite her intelligence, she was somewhat delusional.

The mood between us felt achingly tender, the sense of earned leisure exquisite, as though the reward for the long, strange winter was this exact intimacy.

After four breaths I remembered everything.

I was in an unforgivable ecstasy—the ecstasy of having everything I wanted, having more than I had imagined was possible,

She isn’t who you thought she was. That’s it. Maybe not. But I’m not who she thought I was either. All right, Eve. That’s what a breakup is. You learn some things, you change your life. But I didn’t change my life. No. It’s been changed for you. And for the better, in my book.

There were tears and hiccups, panic attacks in the back seats of cabs, sleepless nights. It was very hot all month,

She said, Isn’t it exhausting—being wiser than everyone else?

Isn’t this nice, Olivia said. Meeting like this normally? As though we’re just normal people in the world?

I imagine that must be hard. Especially when you feel some kind of distance. A familiar look, as though she was swallowing her words, thinking better of them. And then shame floating quickly across her features. He’s just been busy, she said. You know how sometimes he disappears.

Was his lust not genuine, was it only what he knew I hoped for? He was not truly selfless; there was something in it he enjoyed. But was it the sex itself or the ease with which he manipulated me?

You don’t hate me. I should.

In the end of the Brooklyn summer the air was a friendly blue, growing greener as it deepened, as though the breeze were rushing through the gates of the park and turning everything lush and fragrant. I sat on the half wall in front of this lot, smoking or not smoking, as the light seeped out of the sky and into the ground. I wasn’t going to text him.

wasn’t going to text him. I had decided. But every time I checked my phone I expected that he would have texted me—never mind that in the weeks since I had last walked out of his apartment his name hadn’t appeared once. And if he did text me I would have the pleasure of ignoring it.

I thought his expression was a kind of offering. He wanted to show me that he could behave, that he wasn’t a monster, now that he had convinced me that I loved his monstrousness.

It’s good to see you, he said, without turning toward me. Did you think you wouldn’t? No. He smiled. No, to be honest, I felt sure I would see you. Were you waiting for me? I don’t know whether I would say I was waiting. I thought about you. I wondered whether I would hear from you. Were you angry at me? About last time? No, Nathan said, with a look of derision. Why should I be angry with you? I know I can be sort of pushy.

he had found something in me to admire. There was a pause in which I thought Nathan could hear my pulse. I’ve missed you, he said after a little while. I think we’re a bit alike, you and me.

You aren’t shocked. Don’t pretend you haven’t missed me. I won’t pretend.

I lay there, my whole being collected into the inch of skin on my shoulder where his fingers rested. My room was small and strange. How was it that I thought of it as my home and believed that it belonged to me? It was just a temporary space that I had hung with things I’d purchased, so that I could believe I was safe inside it. And this was true, too, of everything I had believed about myself: that I was moral, that I was political, that I cared for the realities of strangers who were linked to me by parallel circumstance. These were beliefs I had pinned up so that I could imagine that I belonged to something valuable and that something valuable belonged to me. It was so easy for Nathan to take them down. I wanted to see them fall. I wanted to be brand-new, to experience love and pleasure as though I had never been hurt and never felt fear. And what more could be owed to a woman than that? What more could a woman ask for?

I do enjoy that, I said. I do. I love it. I know, Nathan said.

She does, I said. She enjoys your games, because you give them to her and you like them and she likes what you like. But she’s heartsick too.

Not everyone is like you, I said. Not everyone can move between different worlds and live like you do. Detached. You can, Nathan said. Yes. I think I can. But you know how it is. I looked at him. How does it feel? he said. Most of the time I think it’s a curse. Like I’m haunting my own life.

Isn’t it? That you and I are the same, more than you think, but you’re afraid of it,

was allowed to love him now. There was space for my love. Nathan, I said after a moment, this makes me happy. Isn’t that strange? You are very strange. Why does it make you happy? To find out you go home to love.

Despite how I envied him I felt high, near tears, the way I might at the end of a film or a novel. The proximity of Nathan’s life was intoxicating. Our world seemed a landscape of good intentions and possible freedoms. Love seemed to occupy the room with us, as concrete as a body, generous and inextinguishable.

When I wasn’t with him I experienced a new and fickle solitude. Sometimes, when I met people, I felt resigned tenderness toward them: the awareness that they were lonely and seeking a moment of intimacy, just as I was.

And yet I could not shake the instinct I had that I was safe.

Afterward we both started to laugh and couldn’t stop. Our bodies rippled with laughter. He kissed my forehead. He kissed my collar. He let his hand rest on my belly. God, no one is like you, he said, no one is like you, do you know that? When I said that I was greedy, he said, You are, you’re my greedy thing. He kissed me again and again. If I could smell anything for the rest of my life, Eve, he said, it would be you. — The next time I saw him it was like that too.

When I thought of him I didn’t text him because it felt good to know that he thought of me too but that we had no need of each other, that we would ask nothing of each other, that what we offered each other was sheer and uncompromised pleasure. When we saw each other he would say, Every time I come I think of you, every time I come I think of you, every time I come I think of you.

He’s not a bad person, Fati. He’s not. Are you this blind? The dick is that good?

I sat on the stoop in the morning to call him. It was still winter, and there was a clear, desolate feeling on the street, a sense of brutal reality.

The intrusion of childhood, of childishness, made me nauseous and claustrophobic. I remembered this vividly: owing gratitude to someone for whom I represented a kind of error to be corrected.

There was a pause during which I heard only the wind and the shudder of a train passing underground. The skin of my hands felt raw. I pushed my left hand into my coat pocket.