THURSDAY
14 NOVEMBER, 1996
ISAIAH

               My heart jolts at the single knock against the passenger seat window. When I spot Dorian peering through the glass, the adrenaline spike morphs into something like thistle infesting the space between my lungs, but, with a deep inhale and internal stream of curses, I open the door.

He climbs inside in that clumsy manner of his that makes me wonder whether he's recently been transported to the twentieth century from the regency era and has never sat in a car before. Once settled, door shut, he adjusts the twists out of his joggers and looks at me.

We've been avoiding each other for a week.

Dorian has created a routine to follow: wake up at eight, use the computer in the reception to look through his emails, then work on his music until he prepares dinner. He hasn't invited me to eat with him again nor have I dared to eat the food he makes even when there are several portions of leftovers.

I, on the other hand, decay into an unholy mess. I blame it on the amount of coffee I'm drinking but maybe it's the grief. Either way, I don't sleep more than a few hours at a time and the fog stuffed into my mind — whether caused by fibro, anaemia, grief, nicotine withdrawal, excessive caffeine intake, or plainly November — guarantees I can't focus even on recreational reading.

When I'm not packing away her things and don't have to deal with the logistics of my mother's death, I spend most of my time driving around and listening to music as though I can afford to waste so much petrol. I'd like to take walks instead but my body seems adamant to kill me, more so than usual.

Like Auntie Tamila, several people have invited me to tea and thrice as many have brought flowers or food once word spread I was staying at Moonlight. Gifts and condolences are hard to accept after I renounced all of Halsett to flee my mother.

I regret that now. There's so much love here. God is so much louder in the country.

Dorian watches me, tentative in a way to be expected from a man who shares the bed with an ex who refuses to talk to him. 'What are you doing?'

I chew on the plastic lollipop stick still between my teeth though the sugar ended an hour ago. He's not asking me what I'm doing: he can plainly see The Black Tulip by Alexandre Dumas open in my lap and Dorian never speaks just for the sake of using his voice. What he's asking is what am I doing reading in my car in the parking of our motel at midnight.

'Thought I'd come in late and you could pretend to be asleep like we been doing every night.'

'I've not been pretending.'

'Yeah, you have.' The lollipop stick clashes against my molars. 'I've been avoiding you too.'

Dorian says nothing and we listen to the first verse of Waiting in Vain in stillness. I thumb the laminate wrapping around The Black Tulip, a copy I borrowed from the school at Mrs Carter's insistence, probably so I have to go return it and she can come up with more insanity about me becoming a teacher.

When the chorus ends, I slip the novel onto the dashboard, pull the plastic stick from my mouth, and force my eyes back to Dorian. 'I'm sorry about the dissertation. I shouldn't've asked you to do that.'

'I was glad to.'

'It helped a lot if that makes it any better.'

Bob Marley saves the car from sinking into silence as into wet cement until the song ends and I Can't Make You Love Me comes on.

Dorian's attention fixates on the stereo and I watch his brow furrow in my periphery. My lips twitch at the pained confusion that conquers his body. The display reads "CD" in orange letters but generally albums don't hop around different countries and from one decade to the next; his brain attempting to decipher a non-existent pattern is practically visible through his skull.

'What are you listening to?'

He presses the eject button before I can get out more than a consonant of protest and the CD feeds into his hand. In the dim interior light, he reads the marker on the otherwise empty surface of the disk: "FUCK YOU DORIAN."

'You made me a break-up mix?'

The intrigue in his tone takes me aback for a split second before I remember the first and only time we got high together, Dorian spent three hours forcing me to teach him everything from our GCSE literature syllabus and started crying if I stopped. Curiosity has always been his default state.

But his relaxed inquisitiveness — or lack of hurt, to be more accurate — does nothing to ease my discomfort. 

Dorian feeds the CD back into the disk slot.

'You gonna listen to it right now?'

He nods. 

It whirs for a few seconds before it resets to track one and How Am I Supposed to Live Without You? fills the car. No better way to spend an evening than listening to the "my life is over" compilation I made when my best friend and lover left me with said ex-best friend and ex-lover.

The first song hasn't ended before Dorian cuts over it. 'You're not supposed to listen to music with lyrics that aren't from a religious text.'

My eyes sharpen as they flick to him. 'You don't reckon I get enough scripture quoted at me as is? I'll pass.'

He lifts a hand to tell me to pause. 'It was a joke. Well, it's not a joke. But I was joking. Since apparently, the only thing I do is judge you on your observance of halakah I thought I'd do that as a joke.' His eager explanation wears out. 'I'm not very good at this.'

Dorian smiles, refusing to recognise how awkward this is supposed to be.

I chew the stick to stop my own smile from forming. 'What verses do they put in these songs then? Proverbs chapter twenty-three verse thirteen would be my muma's favourite. Or Deuteronomy twenty-three verse two; that's everyone else's favourite.'

His eyes pour into mine. 'Shir Hashirim.'

'Are you flirting with me?'

'Yes.'

'It's working.'

We stare at each other for an infinity. The weight on my chest eases but without the constraints, my insides swell in uncomfortable ways I'm no longer used to.

I look down at my hands, trace the vitiligo on them. 'I'm sorry. For the fight — both of em. You hate it when people put words in your mouth. I did it cause I knew it would piss you off. It was immature of me. I'm sorry.'

'I need to learn to think before I speak.'

I shake my head. 'You came all the way here for me and I've been awful the whole time.'

'You're not awful. You're grieving.'

Tears flood my vision. He's so kind. I'm sorry for ever believing you cruel. 

'My mum emailed me,' Dorian announces. He continues to whisper like an oracle warning of a blood bath. 'She knows I'm here. She wants me to go home next Shabbat.'

Don't! I bite the word down at the fringe of my lips and rub my tongue against the roof of my mouth to hone my response into something acceptable between two people who aren't friends and certainly aren't strangers. 'Are you?'

'No.'

Dorian irons creases out of his trousers with his palms.

'Being back here... it's bringing up memories from America that I'd rather not think about. The yeshiva they sent me to was strict. They had privileges that could be granted and withdrawn and I never... I didn't cooperate. So I stayed in isolation. My dorm didn't have a window. I didn't have a roommate. And during lessons when I was let out I had to wear this yellow band–' he imitates where it would be around his arm '–that meant I wasn't allowed to talk to anyone and if someone spoke to me, they'd get detention.'

I gawk at him but it's his turn to stare at his hands. 'Was this a school or a prison?'

'Something in the middle.' It's a non-answer. It's obvious that this is only a sliver to peer through into the dark basement. But the crack alone lets in sufficient warmth to melt more of the anger I stubbornly clutch. 'So now I'm much worse at the socialising stuff. That's why I haven't gone to listen to any music. There's no point in it without you anyway.'

My hand twitches in my lap but I don't reach for him. 'I'm sorry.'

He shrugs.

'When I was at Julliard, I walked to school. The underground was terrifying and I like walking. I still walk in Oxford most days. Anyway, I'd have to cut through Central Park.' He's so into the story now that he forgets to be anxious and I get to watch him in his beauty. 'Every single morning, I saw the same elderly couple who came to the same spot to eat their breakfast. Every morning with their picnic blanket and basket they carried in the man's walker. No matter what the weather was. Even in winter when they brought sleeping bags to stay warm... It always made me think of you.'

My smile drains from my face. I turn to the motel wall though I can't make it out through a mist of tears. It's not that he thought of me every day that hurts but that he thought of me, not in bitterness or longing or hatred, but in love. In mundane and quiet love.

He's silent. I don't know if he's waiting for me to respond but I can't. What could I possibly say?

'There were no American boys. I haven't been with anyone but you.'

'For six years?'

Dorian shakes his head.

'Oh...' I didn't expect it but of course I knew. It should reassure me but somehow the knowledge only makes me nauseous.

He takes no mercy on me. 'I've never even held hands with anyone but you. I meant it when I said I don't understand it, wanting to have sex with people. It's just you.

'When I think about physical touch with someone, all I think about is how their hair would feel against my skin or what if they eat breath mints and kiss me with the aftertaste and it'll be in my mouth and it's powdery and cold and horrid. And when I think about it with you, I want to bottle your sweat and wear it as perfume. Oh.' He grimaces. 'That's weird now I've said it out loud.'

'It's really fucking weird.' A smile cracks on my face before I can resist it. 'Weird's okay.'

And because he's always been too kind to me, Dorian takes the plight of figuring out where to go from our filtration off me.

'I thought the US would be an easy country to find my footing in, that it couldn't be that different, and at the very least, they speak English. But, honest, it's not the same language. I struggled more with Americans than I have with anyone else.' He crams his giggles down to his stomach, not because he's suddenly aware of its inappropriateness but because he doesn't want to spoil what he'll say next with his inability to guise emotions. 'The panic I felt the first time someone complemented my pants. I thought I'd walked around all day with my underwear on top of my trousers.'

Laughter bursts from me. The more I try to restrain it the more out of control it gets. It comes with enough strength to tire my abdomen and ache through my ribs within seconds even when I drop my head back to ease its roam through me.

Dorian allows his own grin to bloom across his features. Dimples burrow deep into his cheeks and his eyes squint so his already long eyelashes look otherworldly.

He wades through our laughter. 'Every day, I'm terrified. Still every day I check ten times before I leave the house that I'm not, by any chance, accidentally wearing my pants over my trousers.'

All I manage to say through my laughter is his name. Dorian. It means: shut up before I suffocate and thank you for making me laugh and it's so easy to exist with you.

Once we calm, he tells me more about America. How wonderful the Jewish community in New York City was the few times he dared to explore it, how a man called Benjamin had baked him babka that tasted so much of the one his family cook used to comfort him with that he started crying. He tells me about all the times he was scared by squirrels and pigeons and cars. He tells me how beautiful the nature is, how the first time he managed to compose any music after his departure was at the Plotter Kill Preserve. 

I'm enchanted by him. The poetic rhythm of his speech, the melody in his sentences. In the way people struggle to shake the tempo and intonations of their native tongue even when fluent in another, Dorian can't ever hide that he learnt to speak in Tchaikovsky and Boulanger long before English.

It is so easy to exist with you.

Notes

Proverbs (Mishlei in Hebrew) 23:13-14: "Withhold no discipline from your child; for though thou beat him with the rod, he will not die. Thou beatest him with the rod, and wilt deliver his soul from the grave."

Deuteronomy (Devarim in Hebrew) 23:3: "A bastard* shall not enter into the assembly of the LORD; even to the tenth generation shall none of his enter into the assembly of the LORD."

Shir Hashirim (Song of Solomon and Song of Songs in English): Essentially erotica. Here is 2:3-6: "As an apple tree among the trees of the forest, so is my beloved among the sons; in his shade I delighted and sat, and his fruit was sweet to my palate. He brought me to the banquet hall, and his attraction to me [was symbolic of his] love. Sustain me with flagons of wine, spread my bed with apples, for I am lovesick. His left hand was under my head, and his right hand would embrace me."