“I mean,” he said, reaching over and taking her hand, “what did Krishna do when you went out for coffee with him?”
“Oh,” she said. She was quiet while they drove a narrow road over a steep hill. “He made me laugh.”
“He doesn’t seem that funny,” Alan said.
“We went out to this coffee shop in Little Italy, and he sat me down at a tiny green metal table, even though it was still cold as hell, and he brought out tiny cups of espresso and a little wax-paper bag of biscotti. Then he watched the people and made little remarks about them. ‘She’s a little old to be breeding,’ or ‘Oh, is that how they’re wearing their eyebrow in the old country?’ or ‘Looks like he beats his wife with his slipper for not fixing his Kraft Dinner right.’ And when he said it, I knew it wasn’t just a mean little remark, I knew it was true. Somehow, he could look at these people and know what they were self-conscious about, what their fears were, what their little secrets were. And he made me laugh, even though it didn’t take long before I guessed that that meant that he might know my secret.”
“So we drank our coffee,” she said, and then stopped when the body thudded in the trunk again when they caught some air at the top of a hill. “We drank it and he reached across the table and tickled my open palm with his fingertips and he said, ‘Why did you come out with me?’
“And I mumbled and blushed and said something like, ‘You look like a nice guy, it’s just coffee, shit, don’t make a big deal out of it,’ and he looked like I’d just canceled Christmas and said, ‘Oh, well, too bad. I was hoping it was a big deal, that it was because you thought I’d be a good guy to really hang out with a lot, if you know what I mean.’ He tickled my palm again. I was a blushing virgin, literally though I’d had a couple boys maybe possibly flirt with me in school, I’d never returned the signals, never could.
“I told him I didn’t think I could be romantically involved with him, and he flattened out his palm so that my hand was pinned to the table under it and he said, ‘If it’s your deformity, don’t let that bother you. I thought I could fix that for you.’ I almost pretended I didn’t know what he meant, but I couldn’t really, I knew he knew I knew. I said, ‘How?’ as in, How did you know and How can you fix it? but it just came out in a little squeak, and he grinned like Christmas was back on and said, ‘Does it really matter?’
“I told him it didn’t, and then we went back to his place in Kensington Market and he kissed me in the living room, then he took me upstairs to the bathroom and took off my shirt and he—”
“He cut you,” Alan said.
“He fixed me,” she said.