Chapter 23
Zuri Balewa had given herself a ten-minute break from work to do some wedding planning, entering RSVP information into the spreadsheet she shared with Rob, secure in the knowledge that her life was going to plan.
And then the head of her program, Dr.Levitt, knocked on the door of her office. “Zuri? Got a second?”
When Zuri nodded, Dr.Levitt walked into the room with an apologetic smile on her face, leading in a man in tight pants. “Meet Michael Garrido. He’ll be joining us for the semester as a guest lecturer.” The pants on this guy were flashily tight, impractically so. “We’re all very excited to have him here! He was at the Phoenix Art Museum for a while and now runs a successful gallery there focusing on contemporary art. But the pipes burst in the room we were going to give him, so he’ll be sharing with you for the time being.”
Immediately, Zuri was annoyed. Her office was her oasis. She had three succulents placed at nice intervals and some scented candles burning. Tasteful scents, of course. (She couldn’t burn the candles at home because Rob was sensitive to smells.) She was junior, yes, but not the most junior.
“Why not with Boris?” she asked.
Michael and the department head exchanged a glance. “It became clear that Boris’s office was…inhospitable,” Dr.Levitt said. “We’ll hopefully get the pipes fixed soon. And in the meantime, I’m sure you two will have lots to talk about!” She walked out of the room, leaving the two of them alone.
“Thank you, you’ve saved me.” Michael grinned at Zuri, an impish kind of smile, while she gave her interloper a cool, appraising stare. His whole body had a loose ease to it, as if he danced happily through life thanks to his moderate good looks and charm and, she supposed if he were here as a visiting lecturer, some amount of intelligence. People like that irked her. She found them unreliable and lazy, giving up on whatever didn’t come at the snap of their fingers.
“Well, I didn’t have much choice,” she said. “But it’s not your fault.” She pointed to a table in the corner. “You can sit there.”
He began to unpack his bag, laying out his computer and notebooks while she turned back to her laptop, trying to block out the distraction.
“I know I should let you work,” he said, breaking their silence and her concentration. “And I will. But I really want to tell you the real reason I’m not staying in Boris’s office. If you’d like to hear it.”
She considered leaving him hanging. But, actually, she did want to know. Because if it was something sexist, Boris claiming his work was more important than hers, she could lodge a complaint, and then perhaps her oasis would be hers alone again. “Fine, what’s the real reason?”
He perched on the table and leaned forward confidentially. “It smells like something died in there.”
“Do you think something did?” she asked as she continued typing, pretending not to care, curious despite herself.
“It could be a mouse behind the wall,” he said, then flashed her a sideways grin. “Or maybe Boris needs to start taking more showers.”
“Rude. Boris is my best friend.”
“Shit, I’m so sorry,” he said. “Please forget I said—”
“I’m kidding. Boris is a jerk.” Boris regularly made demeaning comments about her work in comparison to his, and when she called him on it, he pretended that she was overreacting. “So I’ll allow it.” She tossed her head. “Now, I have work to do. You’re welcome to use the office as you’d like until the pipes in your room are fixed. But don’t distract me, or I’ll stop taking showers too.”
He guffawed at that. She didn’t make people guffaw often. “I’ll be a perfect office mate, I promise.” She looked at him. He had a rather nice laugh. He probably deployed it all the time to win people over. “So, what are you waiting for?” he went on, and she realized she was still watching him. “Get back to work.”
She did, biting down on her own smile.
That was a Friday. On Monday, she walked into her office to find Michael already there, working diligently on his computer to plan a lesson. He gave her a silent nod, and so she beelined to her desk, hopeful that he’d be a nondisruptive force after all.
A framed drawing sat next to her pile of books. “What’s this?” she asked, picking it up to examine. She recognized the style. “Is this a Nia North?”
“I wanted to say thank you for letting me invade your space,” he said.
“She’s one of my favorites.”
“I know. I read your article.” Zuri had published a piece recently about up-and-coming artists who were working in a postcolonial framework. Nia had gotten a whole page to herself. Michael went on. “We’ve worked with Nia at the gallery, and I bought this piece after the show. I drove back to Phoenix this weekend to get it. Figured as long as you have to put up with me, you might as well get to look at this to make up for it.”
Zuri looked at the messy lines of the drawing, something welling up in her. This was why she loved to study art. Sometimes she felt herself on the outside of the world, an observer of her own feelings, or rather the feelings she was supposed to have. But a beautiful, interesting piece of art could poke a hole in the border between her and her emotions.
A tear came to her eye, and she brushed it away.
“Oh no,” he said. “I didn’t think my presence was that bad.”
“It’s not you. I just love the way she puts her whole soul on the page.”
“I know. During the run of her show, every time a potential buyer asked me about this piece, I kept steering them to something else, until I finally realized it was because I didn’t want them to take it away. So I bought it for myself.”
They kept geeking out over Nia, then about other artists his gallery had featured. He told her about why he’d wanted to open the gallery in the first place, how so many galleries were run for wealthy people, helping them collect art for the purpose of enriching themselves even further rather than for the sake of enjoyment or real love. He wanted to change that, to make things accessible while still helping artists thrive, to feature people who maybe weren’t at the top of everyone else’s list. He made her crack up with the way he imitated some of the blowhards he’d met in the art collecting world. And she made him laugh too with her academic perspective, which was an odd feeling, because she’d never thought of herself as funny. Perhaps sharing an office for however long it took to get the pipes fixed—it couldn’t be more than a couple weeks—would not only be peaceful but actively pleasant.
At home that night, as she and Rob ate dinner, Rob asked her, “Are you all right? You keep touching your face.”
“Oh,” she said. “It’s odd. The tops of my cheeks hurt.”
“Too much sun, maybe?”
But that wasn’t it, she realized. Her muscles were sore from smiling.
As the semester passed, she and Michael began to get to their office earlier and earlier, staying later and later. Whenever she hit a dead end, she’d groan, and he’d shut his computer and spin around. “Talk it out,” he’d say, and she would, with him challenging every weak spot in her argument, forcing her to defend and rethink.
One day, a few weeks in, they’d both eaten big lunches and were starting to get sleepy in the midafternoon despite having a lot of work to complete. “We need to wake up,” Michael said. He clicked a button on his computer, and the iconic opening to Biggie’s “Hypnotize” began to blast. She turned around, and he was rising to his feet, shrugging his shoulders in time.
“Oh no,” she said.
“It’s happening.”
“It doesn’t have to.”
In response, he leapt into rapping the first verse. He did it with the infectious enthusiasm of someone who had worn out this CD as a teenager. When it came time for the woman’s part, Michael pointed at Zuri. She demurred at first, covering her face, but he danced closer.
So as the second Biggie Biggie Biggie, can’t you see began, she broke into a grin and began to sing along too, getting to her feet, her body moving of its own accord. And when Biggie started the next verse, she kept going. Because she’d also worn out this CD as a teen, though she hadn’t thought about it in forever. Somehow, she’d stopped listening to music over the past few years. During commutes or chores, she put on podcasts instead, not wanting to waste time on songs she already knew when she could be enriching her mind. When had she become so rigid?
“Oh! Okay!” Michael yelled, as Zuri rapped the second verse, and then they did the rest of the song together, a couple of minutes of unbridled joy, finishing it breathless and alert, their former sleepiness totally gone.
After that, whenever they needed a midafternoon pick-me-up, he’d blast a song from his computer and make her dance around with him in order to wake themselves up. (Not with him, exactly—he would not swing her around the room. They would simply dance at the same time for the length of one glorious song, spitting the lyrics at each other.)
She ignored it for as long as she could, this strange tension between them. But over Thanksgiving break, when she took Rob home to feast with her family and they pumped them for details about the wedding, she couldn’t stop herself from checking her phone to see if Michael had texted. And when they all went around the table to say what they were thankful for, Rob squeezed her hand tight before turning to the rest of her family and saying, “I’m thankful I get to spend the rest of my life with your daughter,” and Zuri felt a tiny curl of dread begin to grow in her stomach.
This thing with Michael was simply a crush. Cold feet. A side effect of forced proximity. She was a sensible woman, not the kind to spin out fantasies of throwing away everything good in her life to do long-distance to Phoenix with him. (Although the drive was under two hours. Plenty of people commuted for longer than that every day.) Besides, he was a charmer. Owning a gallery required one to be a salesman, and he was selling her on himself. Perhaps he left a trail of swooning office mates everywhere he went. Yes, she could tell he was attracted to her from the way he looked at her lips sometimes when she talked. But that didn’t mean she was special. If anything, he wanted a quick secret fling for the semester before he went back to his real life.
And she would never do that. She was not a woman made for lies and late-night texting and frenzied, clandestine couplings in a car parked down a back road.
And Rob. Rob was so good and loved her with a steady commitment and was all she’d dreamt she wanted in a man. Not flashy and smooth and a little too confident like Michael, which meant she could trust Rob, could trust that their life together would be safe.
So she said nothing. Did nothing. And the days flew by, each one bringing her closer and closer to the end of his time at the university. The last day of classes arrived. Students still had their exams and their papers to turn in, but Michael was heading back to the gallery, which needed his attention.
He packed up his papers and books, then turned to her. She tried to hand him the Nia North drawing, but he shook his head. “You keep it. She belongs with you.”
“That’s too generous,” Zuri said. “And I haven’t given you anything.”
“You gave me a place to stay for three months,” he said, “and a wonderful semester.”
She swallowed hard. “Well.”
“Well,” he said, and held out his hand to shake hers. “Goodbye.”
They didn’t let go when the handshake was done. Outside, students trudged along the campus, lost in thought, or shrieked with laughter with their friends.
“Nobody ever ended up fixing those pipes,” Zuri said, and finally withdrew her hand, waving it dismissively through the air as if she could brush her own feelings away. “Academia, it’s always slow.”
“I bribed him,” he said.
“What? Who?”
“A repairman came two weeks into my time here. I gave him four hundred dollars to tell the department that he wouldn’t be able to fix them until next semester.”
“Why did you do that?”
He gave her a sad smile, no touch of his usual impish grin. “You know why.”
A breath escaped her.
“I’ve never felt…” he began, his voice choked, then cut himself off. “I’m sorry. You’re engaged. This is inappropriate. Please forget—”
She kissed him then. In the split second before their lips met, Zuri wished for the kiss to be disappointing, a pale imitation of whatever she’d built up in her head. Then she’d go home to Rob and confess it to him. He’d be able to forgive her a single kiss, even if it might take some counseling. It would be the one thing she’d needed to get out of her system, her one moment of dubious morality, of impulsivity in a life that had been so rigidly disciplined.
But the kiss was not disappointing. It knocked them both sideways. That border between Zuri and her emotions, through which she could occasionally make a small hole? This kiss ripped the border down entirely. On the other side of the wall lay a rippling sea of possibility. Who she could be, what she could feel, if only she was brave or foolish enough to take the plunge.
That night, she went home to Rob, who was typing diligently in their wedding spreadsheet, entering the allergies and food restrictions of the guests who had responded in the affirmative so far. He’d been so good about the planning, taking exactly half of it, offering to do more. He’d gotten a little obsessive, actually, spending far more time price-comparing DJs than anyone else might have done, reading every single online review of their venue before they booked it. It all seemed to take up more space in his brain than his academic work did, a pattern he’d need to break if he was hoping to make tenure.
“Do you think Celia is gluten-free, as in she’ll be sick for days if she eats a crumb,” he asked by way of a greeting, “or as in ‘gluten-free is trendy’?”
How could she be the kind of woman who called off a wedding? Especially when the groom-to-be had done nothing wrong? Her family would be ashamed, her friends would whisper, worried that she must be losing her mind. It was so entirely out of character. And yet, knowing what she knew, feeling what she felt, how could she not?
“Robert,” she said, and he whipped his head up at the tone of her voice, penitent.
“I didn’t mean to make fun of Celia. I just want to tell the caterers exactly how careful to be.”
“That’s not it. Can we talk?”
He looked handsome and vulnerable in the black-frame glasses he wore when he was working, a wrinkle of concern in his forehead, his hair mussed from his habit of running a hand through it while concentrating. He had become her best friend, and if she said the words hammering in her throat, she would lose him forever.
“I kissed someone else,” she said.
He sat up straight, blinking a few times. “What?”
“I’m so sorry.”
His shock was written all over his face, that she could be capable of such a thing. Rob saw her as she’d always presented herself. Everything she told him and herself about who she was, about what she wanted, he took it at face value. Perhaps because they were so outwardly similar, they never pushed each other to dig for their own sharp corners, the mess inside, the parts that made them interesting.
“One kiss?” he asked, and she nodded. “When? And who was— No, I don’t want to know. We can go talk to someone about why it happened, what I should be doing differently.” She’d thought he’d react this way. It was how she might have reacted too, the same way as when an obstacle came up at work. “We can fix this.”
“No,” she said. “I love you.” She forced herself to keep going. She considered herself a brave person, but this was the most terrifying thing she’d ever done. “But I don’t think we’re in love the way we’re supposed to be.”
“I don’t understand what you mean.”
“It’s not just the kiss; it’s the feelings that went along with it. I’ve tried to push them away.” She thought of Michael dancing and grinning in their office. “But these are the kinds of feelings people write songs about.” She was not normally a woman who trafficked in clichés. Love—axis-spinning, all-consuming, eye-opening love—had stunted her intellectual agility. All her blood was flowing to her heart, none left for her brain.
“But I am in love with you like that,” Rob said, a plaintive note in his voice as he reached for her hand.
She squeezed his palm and shook her head. “You’re not. One day you’ll understand that you’re not.”
He withdrew his hand, stiff, his eyes dark. “I don’t need you to tell me how I’m going to feel.”
They sat silently for a moment. “The wedding,” Rob finally said, his voice raw. She put an arm around him. He was shaking, even as he stared resolutely ahead into the middle distance.
Alongside her deep sadness, she couldn’t help the flare of anticipation that rose in her, for the unknown that came next. “We need to call it off.”