“You smell ash?” he asks.
“I smell seared flesh,” Wendy says. The words come out snarkier than intended. Her defensive stance is so deeply ingrained that it’s hard to turn it off. “It smells good, though,” she adds, to clarify.
“I keep smelling ash,” Michael says. “They say the smell should be gone by now but I can’t get it out of my nostrils.”
“The royal They,” says Wendy, holding up air quotes.
“Maybe it’s a phantom smell at this point,” says Michael, ignoring what she thought was her scalpel-sharp insight into the media’s post-9/11 paternalism. Wendy’s been watching the news for weeks, though by this point it’s all recycled material, the same slideshow of the rubble and the chisel-jawed firefighter and Bruce Springsteen sweat-soaked at the benefit concert; the same news anchors, and human interest stories, and teary interviews. And yet, despite her awareness that this barrage of imagery has been consciously arranged for maximum emotional manipulation, at certain moments Wendy is able to suspend her cynicism and find comfort in imagining this messy tragedy as a well-plotted serial drama populated by heroes and villains, and moving toward some kind of narrative resolution.
It might be the survivor interviews that make her feel this way, interviews with those who escaped from the burning buildings or lost loved ones, yet still manage to face the camera and answer questions designed to make them cry. Because even if these people are faking optimism and faking patriotism and faking the can-do resilience that comes from living under God’s real or imagined grace, the fakery itself is an act of courage.
Michael continues: “Maybe I’m imagining it. Normally I can’t smell anything because of my sinuses. Did you know that phantom smells are a symptom of strokes? People smell burning right before they stroke out. Or maybe it’s heart attacks, not strokes. I can’t remember. Either way, I wonder if people thought they were having heart attacks when the towers came down. If they smelled the burning buildings and thought they were stroking out.”
“It’s strokes,” says Wendy. “My grandfather had one.”
“I’m sorry,” says Michael.
Wendy says, “I was two at the time.”
She sips her water. Michael drums with his spoon, then becomes aware that he’s doing so and stops. He tries to change the subject but they can’t land on anything. Instead, he focuses on the swinging kitchen door, willing Bernice to emerge with a bread basket. His leg has returned to its prior state of restlessness and Wendy finds herself clutching the edge of their table to hold it in place.
“That’s a nice shirt,” Wendy says.
Michael takes the compliment as cue to further unbutton, freeing a carpet of Ashkenazic curls. Sweat drips from the freed curls onto his placemat. The shirt is an L.L. Bean plaid his mother gave him for Chanukah, gold and green and iron-scorched around the collar. It brings out Michael’s eyes.
“So tell me,” says Michael, but then can’t think of anything to ask. He has go-to topics: eighties comedies, secular Taoism, his interest in urban farming, plus an anecdote about the community service trip he took to the Carolina Sea Islands in high school that mostly involved smoking pot and complaining about having to do community service. The latter usually gets a laugh, then leads to a self-critical discussion of privilege. Instead of playing up the humility of his working-class upbringing, Michael points out that even he, son of a laid-off factory worker, is relatively wealthy in the grand scheme of the global class system.
None of these topics are right for Wendy; he senses she’d see through to his calculating heart. She says, “Tell you what?”
Before Michael can answer, Bernice is back with their entrees. The waitress places the shell steak in front of Michael, though he appears more interested in the pendant nestled between Bernice’s breasts. When Wendy catches him looking he turns away with an exaggerated swivel.
“That’s a nice necklace,” Wendy says to Bernice, encouraging the waitress to lean over the table and further diminish the distance between Michael’s nose and the perfumed expanse of her cleavage. Wendy’s not sure why she’s doing this, if it’s cruelty, perhaps, or a test of Michael’s chivalry, or maybe, perversely, because a sense of competition seems necessary in order to heighten the stakes of her date. If there’s one thing Wendy will learn over the long years in marketing that lie ahead of her, it’s that all action is transaction, and that nothing—not sex, not romance, not marriage—can be completely extricated from capital exchange. But though this might sound cynical to a romantic like Michael, Wendy will come to understand that the transactional nature of these arrangements does not fundamentally degrade them. She will come to understand—and perhaps, unconsciously, she already understands, as Michael attempts to avert his eyes from Bernice’s breasts by craning his neck to look down at his steak—that love’s status as a narrative construct doesn’t detract from its intensity of feeling. It doesn’t make it any less real.
Bernice says, “Saint Francis of Assisi. I got it for my confirmation. I’m not religious or anything, but I’m so used to it, you know? Most of the time I forget it’s there.”
“I know what you mean,” Michael says.
Bernice leans her cocked hip toward Michael and stares intently at his face. “Sorry if this is weird,” she says, “but aren’t you, like, that medical rap guy or whatever? I think I saw you do a show at the Knitting Factory.”
It’s a miracle that Michael doesn’t fall from his chair.
“That was me,” he says.
“That’s so cool,” says Bernice. “You guys
