Code

by Elizabeth Tallent

....Noguchi lamps, boy waiters with the ice-cold chic of geishas, the haunting music of a recently executed Peruvian quintet playing over street noise, low tables of black lacquer, dolphin-friendly sushi. Near a floor-to-ceiling window of smoky glass, they face each other on a tatami platform. His chopstick handling is nuanced—now sly, now reflective—for he’s eating as he listens, eating communicatively, a nip of his chopsticks meaning “Ah,” a pause in his rapacity conveying “Go on.” The dark hair of his left forearm when he reaches—he’s left-handed—is so utterly sleek she thinks brushed. He must have brushed it for it to lie so smooth. The gold face of his watch rests there like some kind of prize for male beauty, shining, uncrossed by a single strand: How does he get it to do that? He’s achieved such a high degree of finish that not a hair strays from place, while she—she cheats. Tonight in her sweltering studio, dressing for him, scrolling a black stocking upwards, her nails caught the silk wrong. A droplet of white thigh swam to the surface, dilating fascinatingly. The sheen of her long black leg was rent, there was a hole! And what did she do then but sit on her bottom and with a fat gasoline-smelling marker color in all the flesh showing in the hole? Why did she do that? Really, why? Other stockings nestled in the drawer. It was, in some obscure way, payback for his having aborted by cell phone the time before; it gave her a child’s satisfaction in non-sequiturish, unlikely-to-be-detected revenge. She had Magic Markered her own waxed, bathed, perfumed skin: they were even. Except that if tonight does end in sex, there’s going to be a weird part, his curiosity about the Rorschach blot on her thigh. Tell me what you see. Butterfly. Vagina. Slut.

If she shakes her head at herself, her gesture fits the self-aware irony of her life story—the virtual version for courtship consumption, refined to a supple fable in which quick wit triumphs over absurd reversals in love and work. How little honesty there is in this tale, she’s no longer sure: the thing’s so smooth with repetition, it would be like trying to discern dishonesty in the alphabet. Still, the insinuating wish to improvise, to cut loose from the script, forces her to concede, if only to herself, how very much she likes him....

Elizabeth Tallent (ZYZZYVA 25) teaches at Stanford’s creative writing program. Her most recent collection of stories is Honey (Knopf).