The Pickup

Chapter 6

To continue in their present state: his situation in itself, alone determined this. He is here, and he is not here. It’s within this condition of existence that they exist as lovers. It is a state of suspension from the pressures of necessity to plan the way others have to plan; look ahead. There is no future without an identity to claim it; or to be obligated to it. There are no caging norms. In its very precariousness the state is pure and free. The state the friends of the EL-AY Café table would like to attain by some means they are not sure of, can’t define, only argue over?

So she is taken by surprise, off the perfect tightrope balance, when he suddenly speaks out of one of his silences.

You have a mother and father. Why don’t you take me to know your parents.

Ah yes, and his are far away! Even further away, farther than sea and land, in her idea of them. She wants to respond with a surge of tenderness and guilt at having to have been reminded of this — the nostalgia she thinks he is expressing. But at the same time her self-protective instinct — which is the image of herself she believes to be her true self and that she has contrived to project to him, prompts her to head him off with an explanation commensurate with that image.

Four of them. A father and stepmother, a mother and stepfather. As I’ve mentioned. So I’d have to subject you twice over. Both couples and their sets; very boring people. I haven’t wanted to do that to you.

Julie. We are together — five months now, yes. We are still all the time only with your friends.

No. I thought we’re alone together.

Yes, we are together, living in your place, everything … More than five months. If a woman chooses a man for this, or a man chooses a woman, it is time for the parents to know. To see the man. It’s usual.

Maybe where he comes from. For the first time, the difference between them, the secret conditioning of their origins, an intriguing special bond in their intimacy against all others, is a difference in a different sense — an opposition.

I have to tell you. You’ll hate it. I wouldn’t know which to choose first, my father and his new wife, my mother and the casino owner who’s her latest husband.

Just to confirm: You have no sisters and brothers.

No, she is not part of that constellation of siblings which, she sees, he probably knows himself in even though it is not visible from under these skies where he and she lie together.

My life is my life, not theirs. And she repeats, not knowing how to say more: I didn’t want to subject you to them.

He sulks; or is it lonely sadness in that profile? She is distanced and distressed. Love engraves a profile definitively as the mint does on a coin.

She is ashamed of her parents; he thinks she is ashamed of him. Neither knows either, about the other.