“It’s good to see you, too,” V replies hurriedly. “It’s this way—follow me.”
The place she’s chosen is named Iris; the man at the front desk speaks to her with such familiarity that J supposes V eats here often. The waiter is equally friendly, although in this case J thinks he just happens to be a very friendly person.
“The moussaka is very good,” V says, barely looking at her menu.
J can’t help but feel this is a passive-aggressive move on her part. Surely she remembers that he dislikes moussaka?
“You look nice,” J says after deciding on an eggplant dish.
“I’m a shell right now. An exhausted shell. So you’re basically complimenting the shell. I’m glad to hear it doesn’t look like it’s cracking yet.”
“Things are busy?”
Oh, yes, things are busy. V spends the next ten minutes talking about how busy things are, what with investors and logistics and Thor being too in love with Meta to do all the management he needs to be doing. Even the friendly waiter stays away, since no break is provided for him to swoop in and take their orders. Only when V pauses for water can he make his move.
J is not uninterested in V’s work, but he’s much more interested in their relationship and its imperilment. But, as with the waiter, she isn’t giving him any port to dock in.
It’s possible she’s nervous. It’s possible she’s as at-sea as he is.
The frustrating part is that he can’t tell.
Not until she finally takes a rest from talking about her job and asks him how his flight was and where he’s staying. She is asking about his itinerary, his geography, his transit experiences. She isn’t asking abouthim.
Polite. Not sincere.
Her interest might even be genuine. It’s just that she’s interested in hearing about the least important things.
Polite. Not sincere.
Once his head notices this as a refrain, he can’t shake it. And it feels like a worst-case scenario. V can be a bald-faced liar sometimes, a queen of bullshit. But the twist is that the lies are sincere, the bullshit is sincere, in that they always have a force of conviction behind them. Negative conviction, perhaps, but not the neutered neutrality of politeness.
The polite thing would be for J to go along with it. Lord knows he is guilty of retreating into politeness all the time.
But, Jesus—not with V.
“What are you doing?” he asks her.
“What do you mean, what am I doing? I’m asking you questions.” Her immediate defensiveness is, at the very least, sincere.
“You just asked me about my subway ride here. On what possible plane of existence would you care about my subway ride? How is that even remotely relevant to the conversation we should be having?”
The waiter takes this moment to deliver a mezze plate, compliments of the house.
“Please thank the house for us,” J says. The pita looks fantastic, still hot and inflated from the oven. He rips some off and sweeps up some hummus, making it clear he will not speak until V gives him some kind of response.
She holds the moment hostage with a long sip of water, then sets it free with a sigh. “What is it you want? If you want to cut to the chase, so be it. What would you like to be happening right now?”
“I want us to be the young lovers who haven’t seen each other in years!” he says, perhaps a little too loudly. (There are looks.) “I know a lot has been happening for you, and I know I’m walking in right in the middle of it...but I’ve come all this way, and I thought I would get more of a greeting than being told we only have an hour. I’m not so naïve that I expected you to fall into my arms. But we’ve shared our lives for a while, haven’t we? At the very least, I would have thought there’d be some recognition of that. Even if it’s over,even if we’re truly through, isn’t what we had worth more than idle conversation?”
“Wow,” V says. “I’m not sure I would have asked that question if I’d known that would be the answer. I didn’t come here to disappoint you. I thought we could just have lunch. We used to be very good at lunch.”
J tries another dip and can’t help himself. He says, “This tzatziki is really good. You should try it.”
V breaks off some pita but goes for the hummus.
“You told me you didn’t fly here for me,” she says. “You told me you flew out here for a wedding.”
“I did,” J says between bites. “I sent you the invitation. It’s tomorrow night.”
