Just Maybe - by Dominic Amerena
ISLAND | ISSUE 158
It begins and ends with Miranda, standing in front of me, one arm by her side and the other massaging my shoulder, the fingers splayed and the nails somewhat ragged and covered in a clear solution that possesses similar chemical properties to antifreeze, which she informs me over our third pair of whisky and apple juices under an oil lamp affixed to the courtyard wall of the Spotted Dick, a cocktail bar on the corner of A’Beckett and Stuart streets, which is already so full by the time we arrive that our conversation takes place at a slightly more intimate distance than would have been appropriate for an occasion which would be considered our first date, subsequent to the encounter two days previous at Oh La La, the North Carlton brasserie where we exchanged numbers following a brief but promising têtê à têtê towards the rear of the checkout line, which was initiated by her saying that ‘you [i.e. I] look familiar,’ after our hands had momentarily brushed together as we reached for the same walnut-and-fig sourdough loaf, a system of movements which induced her to draw her hand away as if shocked by my touch, her mind quite plausibly imagining that the touch conveyed a sort of connection or feeling which was atypical, or that somehow transcended the expected sensation of any physical contact between two perfect strangers, an unspoken attitude which I attempted to suggest and even to emphasise through my dazed or awestruck facial expression, as if I too were somehow surprised at what had just happened, when in fact I had been leaning against the hutch of culinary gadgets adjacent to OLL’s bread shelves for close to ten minutes, and it was getting to a point whereby the upper section of my gluteal muscles had begun to lose all feeling, and I was beginning to wonder whether any young women were going to approach the piles of loaves, and reach for one, giving me the opportunity to move, or as it were to swoop in, and initiate such a prosaically spontaneous moment, a moment which two nights later, that is to say tonight, was a frequent point of reference during the downing of whisky & AJs I and II (the latter having been ordered by Miranda ‘on the proverbials’), and the frequency of her references to ‘the moment’ were directly related to the ‘sheer force’ of the sensation that Miranda purported to have felt at the exact instant that our hands touched, a feeling which she acknowledged may have been a ‘projection’ associated with the ‘love at first sight’ delusion she believes ‘everybody operates under’, even those of us she considers to be part of the ‘Tinder generation’, and according to her the fact that ‘it was like something from a bad movie’ did not mitigate the ‘overwhelming power’ of ‘the feeling’ it produced ‘in me [i.e. her]’, the scale of which she attempted to transmit via a flexion of her dangled wrists upwards, the fingers’ tips fully adducted and pointing towards the sky, which by that point had blistered over with cloud, reducing the amount of ambient light in the courtyard, meaning that the light of the oil lamp shone on Miranda’s face in a more pronounced way, delineating a shadow that ran across a blood-flushed cheek and up and over her forehead and scalp, creating a contrast between the areas of her face in shadow and those in light, which was so great that it conceivably could have been described as chiaroscuro-esque, and as she attempted to quantify the depth of her ‘feeling’ in the space between her palms, I realised that I was literally seeing Miranda ‘in a new light’, and employing a number of techniques I had learnt in the patient empathy tutorials, I tried for a few moments, that is to say seconds, to imagine what it was that she’d been feeling, not merely at that moment when the sides of our palms had briefly touched two days ago, but also what she felt as she remembered this moment, and as I was experiencing this (i.e. my moment), I felt myself stepping forward and my right hand extending through the gap between Miranda’s palms towards her face, its trajectory plotted without any reason or design more defined than an attempt to feel the line where the shadow and the light coalesced on Miranda’s finch-like face, and all I wanted was to see if I could feel the heat of the lamp on the back of my wrist, or a coolness on the shadowed skin of her forehead, but as my hand moved forwards in space, hers dropped to her sides and she stepped forward, that is to say closer to me, patently interpreting my movements as a signal that I was ready to engage her physically, all of which brings me to here: with my back pressed against the restored redbrick façade of the bar’s left exterior wall, face to face with Miranda and her left hand on my shoulder and the right cupping the base of the highball, all the while worrying that even though she is the ‘wrong side of 25’ she still doesn’t conceive of herself as ‘a real-life adult human’, but rather as someone who has been ‘treading water for as long as I [i.e. she] can remember’, and as her fingers manipulate the collar of my shirt, their distal edges emit a thin chemical odour which, when combined with the scent of kerosene from the lamp a few inches above my head, makes me feel somewhat lightheaded, a sensation that is so pronounced that I find it a real effort to maintain even the most perfunctory level of eye contact while she speaks, and even to insert the right number of nods between her words’ spaces, while maintaining a facial expression designed to appear empathetic, and as Miranda’s fingers creep along the navy blue stitches bisecting the collar of my shirt, the smell forces me to recoil, my neck hyperextending upwards, so that the back of my head makes contact with the brick wall, barely missing the metal underside of the lamp’s brass fixture, and as I grimace in pain, the pressure of Miranda’s hand increases on my shoulder, and an expression of concern crosses her face as she ascertains whether or not I am ‘okay’, and which, after assuring her that ‘I am’ she absentmindedly puts a finger to her lips and worries the hangnail of her index finger, causing her to make an involuntary wretching sound, which she stifles with a mouthful of her drink, before eventually informing me that the solution she has been applying to her nails ‘smells and tastes totally gross’, that is to say, bitter, or acrid, and is of course intended to act as a kind of gustatory deterrent to arrest her compulsive nail-biting, a ‘problem’ she claims to have been ‘dealing with for as long as I [i.e. she] can [i.e. could] remember’, which she believes is a nervous response to her parents’ repeated spousal bickering, which is a ‘state of being’ that she associates with her earliest memories, a bickering which seemed to revolve around Miranda’s mother’s belief that Miranda’s father worked an inordinate number of hours as a member of the data analytics branch of Deloitte’s forensic accountancy service, and that these hours, which frequently extended to over 80 per week, were ‘killing’ their relationship, and that his ‘slavish dedication’ to his job, which largely consisted of running thousands of credit transactions through a computer-generated algorithm to identify patterns of irregular spending by the employees of Deloitte’s clients, and the severity of Miranda’s nail-biting was directly correlated with the ferocity of her parents’ arguments, especially when accompanied by the ‘gnawing’ (she employs the verb seemingly without irony) worry that ‘I [i.e. she] am [i.e. was] a burden to them [M’s parents]’ and that ‘they [M’s parents] never really wanted me [i.e. her {i.e. M}]’ nor did they ‘value me as a person’, a particular phrase which I have been waiting for throughout the entirety of M’s discourse, as it (the phrase) will allow me to insert a comment concerning the etymology of M’s name, which is the feminine gerundive of the Latin verb mirandus, meaning ‘worthy to be admired’, a fact which I ‘Googled’ prior to this encounter, and it will be her use of the word ‘valued’ that will trigger this comment, and even though it is a different word to ‘admired’, the similarities in connotative meaning and/or tone will almost definitely ensure that my comment will appear for all intents and purposes relatively spontaneous (at least from M’s POV) and the deployment of this information will most likely cause her to pause for a few seconds and will probably elicit a smile, as well as her declaration that ‘you [i.e. I] are [i.e. am]’ ‘cute’ or ‘nice’ or ‘sweet’, which will be followed by M’s invitation to ‘tell me [i.e. her] about your[i.e. my]self’, while her left index finger tucks under the fold of my collar and comes to rest on my clavicle, which will provide me with an opportunity to divulge the fact that I am in the terminal year of my Bachelor of Medicine (which is true) at the University of Melbourne (which is false) and that I will endeavour to study at a postgraduate level (T), and hope to become involved in the clinical research of idiopathic diseases (F), for example what is referred to in ‘layman’s terms’ as Parkinson’s disease, and this particular avowal will abruptly halt my speech in midsentence and precipitate my looking up to the lamp’s flame, and further up to the sky, and in the ensuing series of moments M will ask me ‘what’s wrong what’s wrong’, and after spending an appropriate amount of time trying to convince M that ‘really I am okay’ and that ‘we’re having such a nice time and I don’t want to kill the mood’, I will make a number of confessions, or recitations of remembrances of my ‘mother’ and her ‘battle with that disease’, that is to say Parkinson’s, which in this scenario will only have ‘ended about a month ago’, and as M will begin to increase the rate and/or pressure of her fingers’ tips’ taps on my clavicle, I will begin to sketch or render a narrative comprising a series of stirring images that will include: her (my mother’s) progressively festinating or shuffling gait as she walked laps of our half-acre block on the right side of Balwyn, followed by a description of my parents’ tear-rubbed eyes at the morning breakfast table, and later, when M is hanging on my every word, I will present a vignette concerning the occasion when my mother, a former second-chair violinist for the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra, dropped her instrument while practising the adagio for Bartók’s sonata, and I will identify this moment, or more specifically the image of ‘her [i.e. my mother] just standing there, in the centre of the living room’ (the contents of which I will casually describe, alluding to the opulence of the furniture and artworks within the room, and accordingly, the prospective financial remuneration that my potential spouse or life partner could enjoy), with my mother’s arms shaking up and down and up, the fingers in and out of spasm, as if they were attempting to run away from the rest of the hand, and her violin at her feet, with the scroll almost detached from the neck of the instrument, as if this object, which had until this point been an extension of my mother’s personality, had become a painfully accurate visual metaphor for her, that is to say my hypothetical mother’s, broken or even shattered physical state, and before I begin to divulge the deathbed sequence that inevitably follows, I will pause for a few moments and my hands will begin shaking so much that I will have to put the highball down at my feet, and M will leap forward and bury her face in my shoulder, and her head will be out of the lamplight’s range and I won’t be able to see any of her features anymore, and the only part of her which will be catching any of the light will be her hand resting on my chest, and it will be so close to my face that I will be able to see the veins on the back of her hand, not merely the cephalic and basilic veins, but all of the tiny vessels branching out from them, the vessels that have no names because there are too many to count, and perhaps at this point I will try to think that this is another person next to me, and I will try to imagine the blood moving through her veins, all of the blood that has been inside her for all of the moments of her life, and I will try to think of her blood as an index of M’s humanness, but even if I am successful in achieving this state of empathetic connection it will not change anything, because the fact that M will be believing my almost pathologically mawkish narrative, undoubtedly ‘like something from a bad movie’, will significantly increase the likelihood that I will not feel anything when I reciprocate her public display of affection and put my hands on her shoulders, gripping her deltoids fairly passionately, and I will not feel anything during the hand-clutching walk back through the bar and into the street and up to my apartment two blocks down A’Beckett, nor tomorrow morning when I steal out of bed to make her buttered toast and tea (the bread being the remainder of the walnut-and-fig sourdough loaf [the very same loaf which precipitated the moment and all of the moments that will have followed]), and even if I come back into the room and she is lolling on the mattress with her palms pressed over her eyes, trying to keep out the light, which will be streaming through the bay window to the right of the bed and dappling her face and pillow-pressed hair, even if this light is so bright that I will potentially stand there for a few moments attempting to see her in a new light, it won’t change anything, because when it comes down to it that expression doesn’t mean anything, as all the light we (meaning me and Miranda and you) are seeing is new, all the time, even when our eyes are closed, new light and new lights, each as dead and drawn and nothing as the last, and tonight, in a few moments, when I stare up into the middle distance and further out towards the pressed square of sky above the buildings, and in about thirty minutes time, back at chez moi, I will wonder if it could have turned out differently, I will wonder what if she could have appreciated the pathos in the fact that my parents are in reality still married and perfectly healthy and that they frequently sit on each other’s laps and get up in the night to go to the toilet, and holiday in Thailand and are trying to cut out wine over dinner because wine is something that you can get to rely on and you shouldn’t rely on anything unless it can rely on you back, and I will wonder how I could have conveyed the strange sadness in the fact that throughout my childhood and adolescence my parents frequently told me that they ‘love[d] you [i.e. me]’, and maybe if I could somehow explain to Miranda (instead of the comment about her name, instead of the story about my dead mother), that I could never reciprocate my parents’ hot, wet, unshakable love, which seemed to radiate off them so strongly that I thought that they must glow in the dark, a love which made me feel deficient on an almost cellular level, like I was this high-powered diagnostic instrument, a word computer built to discern vital information about other people, but for now there is just this moment: standing here with Miranda, thinking about how to express myself, and maybe if I can do it, just maybe, I will be able to actually kiss her in a few moments, rather than just opening and closing my mouth in time with hers, and my heart will beat faster when I tilt her face up so it is in the light; maybe when I lean in I won’t know what’s going to happen when our lips meet and her eyes close and her fingers begin to stroke against my left mandible, the skin of which is/will be covered in a grey-black stubble almost a centimetre in length, a length which I carefully calculated in my bathroom mirror two hours previous to this moment, a length which, when combined with the premeditated dishevelment of my grey worsted suit, seemed to indicate a man who, while concerned with his appearance, with the way that he appeared to other people, really had too much on his plate to worry about such trifling matters as the length of the stubble on his face.
Just maybe. ▼
This story appeared in Island 158 in 2019. Order a print issue here.
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