EVE
A CUBAN RESTAURANT ON CHRISTOPHER STREET
Ben met me outside my building and stood waiting for me at the bottom of the steps, rubbing his hands together in the cold.
“Nice place,” he said, looking up at the pink facade.
“Very funny,” I said. “You could have come inside.” I zipped up my jacket and fixed my scarf so that it protected my nose and chin as we started walking.
“I wanted you to have the real date experience.”
“Well, if you had come inside, you would have seen me agonizing over which turtleneck to put on.” I smiled at him.
He concentrated on the ground for a few seconds. “Oh. Because it’s the least appealing thing you could wear?”
“Exactly!”
“You’re insane.”
“Ah, you know me so well, considering it’s our first date.”
“Yeah, well, unlucky for me.” He put his hands in his pockets and ducked his chin into the collar of his jacket.
“You wanted this!” I pointed at him.
“I know. I know.” He held his arm out in front of me so that I couldn’t cross against the light and into oncoming traffic. I bumped up against it. “It’s just . . . I forgot what happens when you talk,” he said.
Ben, impressively, surprisingly, chose a restaurant with a nice vibe—the walls covered in murals, warm lighting from hanging lanterns, a tiny votive candle on each table, and the sweet smell of plantains, mixed with garlic and onions, drifting from the kitchen. There was a man with a beard sitting at a large round table and rolling cigars, the flecks of brown in two piles next to him.
“Very authentic,” I commented, pointing at the man as we sat at our table.
“I wouldn’t know,” Ben said, glancing back with a smile.
We sat in chairs covered in white leather. Ben gave the menu a serious look, as if trying to solve some complex mathematical equation that was written on it. I, on the other hand, looked at the menu for two seconds and then decided on something that felt safe involving rice and chicken. It didn’t matter. When I was nervous, I tasted no food.
We closed our menus and drank water. Ben told me a story about a Russian lady who incorrectly dialed his cell phone several times that day. It was hands down one of the worst stories I had ever heard him tell. The story went on through our drink orders and went absolutely nowhere of any interest. In an accidental declaration of boredom, I knocked over my water glass with my elbow. Our date was officially off to an awkward start.
The waiter arrived with a steaming plate of fajitas for Ben. He then hesitantly placed a gigantic mound of yellow rice, with tiny specks of chicken, in front of me. Ben eyed my dish.
“That’s . . . a lot of rice,” he said. I brushed him off and started to take my fork to it. Pretended it was nothing. I eat this amount of rice all the time! But he was right. It was a lot of rice. I could barely see him over it. Note to self: next time don’t be such a crazy person, and take an extra minute or two with the menu, okay? To save face, I launched into another topic, anything other than the fact that I was so nervous that I’d accidentally ordered a side dish.
We talked about our friends from college, which felt easy, harmless. That drifted into conversation about our families. Ben told me about his brother, who had just moved to Costa Rica, which upset their mother.
“When she’s around my brother, they fight all the time. They’re literally at each other’s throats. But she doesn’t want him to be so far away either. It makes zero sense.”
“If by zero you mean total, then yes, you are correct.”
“I don’t get it!”
“What’s not to get?”
“Explain it to me then.”
“It’s like they love each other too much to actually love each other. The fighting is easier sometimes. But it means the same thing. It’s just a different way of expressing it.”
“A more violent way.”
“Yeah, well, sometimes, violence is the answer.”
“How do you know all this?”
I smiled. “It’s basic human psychology.”
“Oh, you’re full of baloney.”
“Rice. I’m full of rice.”
By the time the tres leches cake arrived, it seemed as if the first-date jitters had somehow lifted, and Ben and I started to have a pretty good time.
“I’d like to visit him there, sometime. Have you ever gone surfing?” Apparently, Ben wanted to learn to surf. Yes, I imagined with some adjustments we could go to Costa Rica together and be one of those couples that surfs. It reminded me, for a brief second, of the guys I dated in Colorado. It wouldn’t be too hard to drift into that pseudo-outdoorsy girl again, for him. But instead, I let it all go.
“No. I haven’t. And I don’t really want to.”
“Why not?”
“I’m scared of the ocean,” I said firmly, as if it was the most obvious thing imaginable. I needed Ben to know this. I needed him to know everything, as it really was. That was how things had always been between us, and I didn’t see any reason to alter that now.
He laughed. “What’s to be scared of?”
“Um. Hello? Sharks? Ever heard of them?”
We left the restaurant and walked across Washington Square Park. There was an ice-cream truck pulled up next to the entrance to the park. The lights weren’t on. No music. The guy inside was leaning out the window, looking for customers, wearing a red Santa hat.
“It’s a hard day to be selling ice cream,” I said to Ben. “We should get something.”
“It’s freezing!”
“Yeah but maybe the ice cream will be so cold that it’ll make us warmer.”
“That’s not how temperature works.”
“Tell you what. You buy me an ice cream, and I’ll let you spend the rest of the walk telling me how temperature works.”
Ben perked up. “Deal.”
We walked up to the truck. I asked for a small vanilla cone with colored sprinkles.
“Colored sprinkles?” Ben’s eyes widened. “How old are you?”
“What toppings do you get? Butterscotch?”
“I don’t get toppings.”
“Why not?”
“Because I’m an adult,” he said proudly.
“That’s a mistake,” I said. “Adulthood is highly overrated.”
As we walked, I felt my teeth chattering. I took a few last licks and then tossed the remains of the cone into a nearby garbage can and tried to wipe my hands with a crumpled napkin. Then, I put my gloves back on as fast as possible.
“Told you,” Ben said, shaking his head and interrupting his own lecture on thermodynamics. He put his arm around me.
“Look at that magnificent fountain,” I said, pointing to the facade of NYU’s library, as if referring to something majestic and not just a small stream of running water down the side of the building. “It was built in the eighteenth century, which you can tell from the pattern of the bricks and the . . .” I tried to feign as much structural engineering knowledge as I could, doing my best Ben impression. “You see . . . the Pilgrims came here in 1734, and they wanted to build something that would reflect their old way of life so . . .”
“That’s not a fountain,” Ben said, rolling his eyes. “That’s a leak.”
“Oh.” I stopped walking. “Should we call someone?”
Ben reached for my hand to hold as we walked. It was a clear night, the sky had been dark for hours, and we seemed to be the only ones on the street. We got to my building and stood there.
“You know, I don’t sleep with guys after the first date.”
He laughed. “Ohhh, only before the first date, huh?”
“That’s right. That is my policy.”
“You know I’ve been up there several times before.”
“Yeah, but . . .”
“What’s the matter? Don’t think I know how to take off a turtleneck?”
I pretended to be frustrated and kept my eyes on the sidewalk, and maybe I was a little frustrated because I couldn’t think of what to say or how to stop him from coming upstairs and couldn’t stop smiling and was almost embarrassed by how happy I felt. And then he came closer and kissed me and sort of knocked all the thoughts out of my head. After the kiss was over, I couldn’t move, couldn’t think, definitely was not going to tell him not to come upstairs.
Everything quieted down after that, like the city after a big snowstorm. I don’t remember deciding to go upstairs, but we did. All that I can remember clearly is that kissing him suddenly felt like the only thing I’d ever done of any importance. I remember reality slipping away. I remember letting go of everything. I remember that it somehow became seven o’clock in the morning, that we were still up talking, yes—even Ben was talking, a little bit, that the sun was coming up, threatening to end it all, to usher us on to the next activity, but we didn’t care. We just kept doing whatever it was that we were doing, and laughed at the daylight.