Best Mistake

05 | halt

———

He is behind me as I cut through the yard and into an alleyway, the reminder that he has become an inseparable part of what happened that night in the bathroom turning my stomach, and then I feel myself falling through a cracked pavement, my feet losing tread on the asphalt. I see a student watching from the above-ground library, and I am embarrassed, shamed by the professional backdrop of this cul-de-sac. The research papers and unmanned printers and me, breathing heavily over a mistake. So I turn my head sideways and let him take my damp hands, then have him pull me to my feet.

"I know what you are thinking," he murmurs under his breath. There is sweat beading his forehead and loose strands of hair, which against his immaculately pressed suit is more disturbing to me than the event that just transpired. "I'm not here to discuss that."

"I know that." Of course I don't know that, but now that he has said it out loud in an attempt at clarification, I feel chagrined.

"I just wasn't finished looking at you. I haven't seen you since that morning," he says, and the student rises up from his seat and slips back inside the building.

"I see."

"It's almost lunch. You should join me." He thumbs the bruise that is forming in my arm, and it is an understatement to say that I would rather do anything else, but then I feel his expectation, that he is not so much asking a question as allowing me time to confirm an obvious conclusion—that in exchange for his compromise, for his cooperative silence about everything that happened, something is owed. He directs me to a lounge reserved for faculty members and alumni, looks me over, and says, Let's order, which is an indirect way of bringing my attention to the thing I am already aware of—this skeletal shiver-me-timbers happening underneath my clothes. I look at him, and he is staring at the angular shape of my joints. He takes the menu and orders for the both of us. When the meals are served, he offers a smile that takes up the most minuscule portion of his face, and when I open the stainless covering the plates, I begin to suspect he is trying to humiliate me. It is so big that finishing it comes at the expanse of ninety percent of my digestive capability. This potential cruelty is so specific, so much like a courtesy that has merely gone awry, that I feel obligated to be a good sport. I consider escaping through the bathroom window, but then he looks up at me through his fringes, grains of rice caught in-between his chopsticks, and I think of his mother's smile, the sound of her laughter as she attempts to fashion my hair into something more than a straight line. How I wanted her to do it again.

So I force every piece in that plate down my throat, each mouthful a threat to the durability of my esophagus separating the contents of my stomach from everyone in the room. I wish I had known there would be this many side dishes, Ukyo's omission of this information makes me wonder if this is, in fact, deliberate. It's clear this is a test of some sort: in the ample time it has taken me to finish half of the main dish, the man in front of me has completely ignored his own meal, instead he is looking at me as if someone just dared him to do something ludicrous and super-chucklesome and he is just going along with it, waiting for me to call his bluff.

"Is it distracting?"

"What?"

"The bruise," I say, and his smile thins into a straight line.

"I just didn't think I would ever get to see it again."

"I'm sorry you had to."

"It wasn't your fault someone spilled their champagne on me," he says, and I like him less and more. Less because he appears now to be observant and impractical, and more because this is something he can afford to be. "You weren't the one who made the mistake. Don't be so polite," he says, directing all his attention to one side of my face where the bruise sits, and it feels petrifying to be probed like this, to have been sought specifically for the inconvenient truth, and for him to sit on the other side of the table and unravel all the crepe.

"It was a mistake. My father is not a bad person."

"I'm sure," he says, a little patronizing. Our table is not particularly private, and I don't want to be reminded of the humiliation. I reach for the chawan as he pulls out a worn-out paperback and flattens it out with his hand. "It's not my place to tell you how to live your life, or what to do with it, so I'm not going to."

"Come downstairs for dinner tonight," he continues, sliding the book further forward. I steal a look, take it from the table, and this is the first time I made contact with his past.

"You wrote these," I say, scanning what seems to be annotations. The papers are soft and deeply creased, as if they have been flipped and unflipped frequently.

"We have similar handwriting, don't we?" he says, and when I lower the book and look at him, I see him, the man who insisted on accompanying me back the night of my father's wedding. And I can't tell if this oppressive generosity is meant to be a compensation, because here is precisely the time he tells me that during the evenings, sometimes he sits by the railing and watches me read the notes stuck to the refrigerator until he has to go to the bathroom or to work, and he tells me that I am a welcome addition, and I laugh at this because rule number one is that I cannot appear to be desperate. But after I laugh, I realize I am sunken in the middle, exhausted in a way that is cemented by time, and I remember the gentle clinking of my father's flute, the silk and stilted silence under the golden light of the chandelier, and I think about the long periods of inebriation I call vacations and wonder if patience is a virtue, if all the suffering I had endured so far has no substantial meaning and no actual purpose than merely being dealt a bad card. And when Ukyo smiles at me, whatever conviction I painstakingly fostered has been blown to a mere suggestion, and I tell him I am going to be there for dinner, and his smile widens as he returns to his plate. At first it is relieving, but as I watch him pick up his chopsticks and tear the belly of the fish, I realize that I hate it. I hate it a lot. I can't decide if it's the familiarity, the instinct to be soft and obedient every time a person offers the smallest gesture of kindness, or his sympathy for my condition—the consideration in his disappointment, the willingness to bargain anew what is unnecessary.