Part 5

“That’s understandable. I’m the same way. It’s the loneliness spilling out.”

“Maybe instead of dinner, you take my confession and watch me open my veins? I saved your life, so I do own you.”

“Well, we all know best how to bleed.” He laughed. “So, go ahead, my master, confess,” he replied to the emotional proposition, but he couldn’t do so without levity and its cold, drunken cousin cynicism, and so he made a sign of the Cross over her.

Tamara pulled at her hair, frowned, and pouted. “My hair. This brown colour is just terrible, and so thin it curls at the ends. It’s as if a vacuum pulled apart a nylon carpet.”

Adrian laughed and Tamara drank.

“What else?”

“This Baltic face.” She pointed. “All thick-boned with a pointy nose. It’s a menace.”

Bartender replaced their drinks, Adrian dropped the bills, service from the heart. The climate was too hot for spirits and the Manhattans were sending electric shocks from his cerebellum throughout his body.

“Pretty enough for someone to stalk out the lobby all afternoon and then lose their nerve when you finally showed up with your mom.”

“No!” her mouth opened in amused awe.

He nodded.

Her face flushed.

“No,” she dismissed the idea. “That was not the face – that was the body. Definitely. I mean, come on!” Tamara straightened in her chair; her arms opened and presented the body top to bottom like a new car model. “Take it in, son.”

He laughed but looked thoroughly.

“Okay, maybe. It is a good body, a great body, a beautiful body.”

“Thank you.” She slurred.

“But maybe it was your mom that made me lose my nerve, too.”

They laughed.

He realized he didn’t want her to stand in front of him exposed alone, so he contributed a confession to even the score. “Well, I’ve never been keen on this body either,” Adrian stretched his arms forward and presented it as she did hers.

“Why? You look good. Thick frame maybe, but nice and solid.”

“It’s like pegged driftwood padded with rubber; as if Pinocchio had built a Golem.”

Tamara exploded with laughter. She saw in him the Lumberman he described – square body, shoulders rounded forward from office work, a square head, the whole built from rough edges, splits, burls, and crooked nails, and the whole experiment padded by dense discoloured rubber.

“You do! You look like a plastic Ganesha from a poor corner of Mumbai. All that’s missing is an elephant head,” she patted his shoulder smiling. “Ouch!” she exclaimed, pulled her hand back, and watched bright blood dripping from her finger.

“Are you okay?” he asked and checked his shoulder.

“Nothing – it’s nothing,” she smiled and let go of the finger. He looked at it. It was a nice hand with nice fingers and no wounds.

“You know what else?”

“Yes?”

“My mind plays tricks on me,” she slurred and looked down at her unscathed finger. “Things are not always true to my mind. I can mostly tell the difference but sometimes it all relapses and breaks my heart. I have a prescription to stay in reality, but not for heartbreak.”

“It sounds like you are left all alone to cradle a demon.”

“That’s a calamitous way to put it.”

“Tamara, I apologise for asking, do you suffer from a mental illness?”

“Just a mild case of schizophrenia,” she slurred. “How about you, what do you suffer from?”

“Comparatively, my torments are very middle-class: my mind tells me that I’m never enough. No one really disputes that, though,” He smiled. “I keep seeking some purpose in life, or God, and neither ever materialize. It seems that over the years only the emptiness has set like concrete at my core with a dull ache. I think it’s emptiness that moves in mysterious ways.”

“Adrian!?”

“Yes, Tamara?”

“You are a bummer.”

They laughed. “Yes. ‘My name is Adrian, and I am a bummer.’ You see? We are only talking like this because this moment is but a future memory. A memory most real and vivid because being open is the most rousing thing.”

“Are we in love, Adrian?”

“In love with the possibilities.”