Short Story: The Art of the Subtle Wink
--
She had perfected the art of the subtle wink, which was meant to confuse the recipient — sparking an internal conflict of whether or not the wink had occurred and, if so, what to do about it — and designed to attract only the boldest of responses. And on Sunday, it had worked.
She had recently dismissed a lover, knowing that it wouldn’t work in the long run but missing him all the same. The one brutal act led her on a careening course of conquests, dispassionately dispatching one after the other till she could no longer tell if the discomfort in her lower abdomen was real or imagined: exhaustion or an accumulated weight of guilt.
But on Sunday, she had gone to a party.
She liked to say she didn’t cross a bridge to get anywhere worth going in New York. But Park Slope is the best of Brooklyn, and the friend who had invited her, Melissa, an undergraduate acquaintance who had moved to New York a year ago and was making a good-faith effort to reconnect after these several years, had made her home in one of Park Slope’s iconic brownstones, which was worth seeing — if not merely for its own beauty, then for the stunning Instagram shot she would be uniquely positioned to share.
It was the first day of May, so the windows were open to welcome the year’s first drafts of warm air. Perhaps in a whimsical way, hosting a brunch on May Day was Melissa’s way of showing liberal solidarity; but fortunately, Park Slope was isolated from the raucous parades in the city so the sound did not drift through the windows with the wind.
As any good hostess, Melissa was thrilled to see her — “Brenna! How are you?” Melissa beamed — and she returned the warmth with a generous hug.
The mimosas were exquisite, as were the cupcake omelets Rebecca had brought. The crowd was quite larger than she had anticipated and Melissa had attracted an engaging circle of friends in her short year in the city. Many were the creative types in Melissa’s orbit of marketing and publishing; some lived in the world of nonprofits or, like her, the harder-to-define dimension of for-profits doing good in the world; many others were in finance, particularly the clean-cut young men who were repopulating Williamsburg.
One such man was Daniel. She thought it interesting that he did not go by Dan or Danny, as so many Daniels do, and this was how they began their lengthy conversation after being introduced.
Finding themselves more engrossed than they had expected, they feigned the need to sit down and perched on the sofa. When he saw the hostess place a tray of pastries on the coffee table, Daniel sucked his teeth and smirked, “Doing that herself? Where’s the help?”
Brenna felt her eyes retreat in on themselves and form slits.
“You’re north of the Mason-Dixon Line,” she said — and could not stop herself from adding, “sweetie.”
And then the wink.
She had done it to toy with him. Yet, she found herself simultaneously recoil from him and wish she could wipe that part of him away, like a smudge on his cheek.
“My friends and I joke like that all the time,” he said, with an effort at being disarming. “We really don’t mean anything by it.”
And as she heard more of his thoughts strung out in conversation, she realized he meant it; he was more informed than his comment would have suggested. She wondered if his hint of a Southern accent was a put-on, if he knew the effect it had on Northerners and used it strategically — if the allure was, in fact, a lure.
Lures, she told herself, were things she could easily spot and just as easily evade.
This was not to say she was not enjoying herself, playing ball with a man a few years older than she, and when he asked her out to dinner, she consented without second thought and he immediately pulled out his phone and they made the reservation for that Thursday.
Afterwards, she would not forget the song that Melissa had playing in those slow-motion seconds: Andra Day’s Cheers to the Fall.
Memorial Day weekend arrived just two weeks later. Dinner had not been too memorable, but it had given each of them enough of a taste to want to try more.
Friday night they joined a holiday yacht cruise with some of his friends, who were refreshingly warm and welcoming.
On Sunday, they found their way together to the Lower East Side Festival of the Arts, where they laughed at the thespians in their age bracket trying, each in their own way, to climb that ladder only offered in New York.
They walked hand-in-hand to Tompkins Square Park, where they laid down together and whiled away an hour or more talking about where they would like to travel and the foods they liked and the best books they had read.
They were drunk on each other’s company and in this intoxicated, intoxicating, passion their hands strayed and their tongues lingered past brief pecks and the sun began to sink.
At long last, breathing heavily, they separated. And he insisted they leave it there and each go home.
“I don’t want to rush this,” he said, “…this relationship we are building.”
And so they parted. And she floated home to a bed that, she realized, would not be half-empty for too long.
Sometimes, she told herself, stories do end happily. Why shouldn’t she — why was it so unreasonable to think she could — get a chance at a Happily Ever After?
Why did her life have to be—why couldn’t it be a Christmas ride in a Central Park horse carriage, Sunday mornings sipping coffee and reading the Times together, summers spent in the Hamptons? Was she too jaded (or naive) to think this was impossible? or was this the wrong way to think of happiness, the wrong thing to want? Was life all—ultimately unhappy?
Summer passed as summers do: long and lazy. She became used to the coolness of his sheets and the warmness of his body. She began to savor the way her body fit into his as they slept; once, without meaning to, she stayed awake watching him slumber and he did, deeply. He didn’t make a sound, as if doing so would break the spell. But the spell was unbreakable; she was thoroughly charmed by this man who had inserted himself into her life without invitation and without care for the consequences.
It was then that she knew, instinctively, that they would either love each other indefinitely or…she could not bear to finish the thought — even though she knew, in this moment, that both conclusions were equally possible. The probability of their love had not yet passed fifty percent; there was not yet a greater chance of eternity than of devastating brevity.
But now, she crossed the bridge to Brooklyn regularly.
Once, she met him at his Williamsburg apartment for dinner as he returned from the grocery store and apologized that, although he knew she liked The Atlantic and meant to pick up a copy for her, they were out at Whole Foods.
Once, on another home dinner date, he had needed to call his mother with a question and ostentatiously put his phone on speaker so that they could meet each other for the first time.
Once, after returning from a week at his family’s summer home, he purred, “Maybe next year you’ll be joining us.”
Once, they joined a group of friends for brunch in the West Village, and these building blocks that, for her, were mounting into a body of evidence of a strengthening bond came tumbling apart into their component moments, isolated in time and space.
“She thinks I like her,” he said to a friend, casually, teasingly. But it had stung.
It had come after she had complimented him, after what otherwise might have been a moment in which the building blocks fused more firmly together.
And now that he had said it, it sat there like a physical object between them. It was as if he had added a glass dish to the mantel of their lives; it was now always present; if not always consciously aware of it, they were almost always in sight of it.
When she fell silent as they walked, hand-in-hand, down Grove Street and away from the awful aftertaste of brunch, he moved to assuage her.
“I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have said that,” he said, and they both knew instinctively what he was talking about.
“I think you say things like that because you worry you are not as attractive as you think you are,” she said — or wished now that she had said, that she had given him some clue of her ability to read him and understand him.
This, she knows now, is what he craved and what attracted him more than anything else in that precious moment of their lives.
Instead, she accepted his shallow apology with a shallow kiss.
On Labor Day weekend, they retreated from the city to tour the Vanderbilt mansion in Hyde Park. The sprawling estate, in the late summer light, would be a romantic getaway, she believed, which would merely extend their rollick into the next natural season.
But Daniel had left his heart in the city. And his mind seemed, still, to be on the drive, past Yonkers and Scarsdale, through wine country in Peekskill and the long loop around Poughkeepsie.
To him, the mansion’s stonework was captivating, but not too captivating, as if he would see another site just as breathtaking in his future and he knew it.
After they had returned the rented car to its proper location in Brooklyn, he walked in circles with her, clenching her hand with a clammy fist. And eventually, he confided that he was not ready for what they were doing, that he never had been ready.
“This moved really fast,” Daniel said —
— “I agree,” Brenna said, because it had —
“and I think I need some time alone,” he finished.
He refused to clarify if this meant a break, even though she asked.
After a pause, Daniel exhaled:
“I feel like I need to throw up. Is that just me?” as if he wanted to be congratulated for confronting his own feelings, for being honest with himself and with her.
“I feel more relieved than anything else,” she heard herself say from the far end of her own shock. “I’ve felt how you feel for the last few days and now I finally know why.”
They parted, and then a week went by in silence, until she finally pressed him for an answer and they agreed to have dinner.
After the awful aftermath of that weekend, Daniel moved quickly to befriend her. He sent her a message about an article he had read in The Atlantic: had she seen it? yes, she responded curtly, it was good.
Unlike their first dinner, she would remember every detail of their last.
Daniel’s attention had returned; he was not distracted, but he was possessed by something even more chilling: a focus on the task at hand, a task which, Brenna deduced from his refusal to have bodily contact with her, was to separate himself from her as cleanly as possible without saying outright what his task really was.
The cause, she came to realize, would forever be unknown.
Was it the one political disagreement they had had that went beyond teasing banter, proof that her worldview was simply too different from Daniel’s? Was it her poor sense of managing money, which perhaps could put Daniel’s future financial security at risk, a thought he no doubt entertained when assessing partners?
Or, she wondered, was it her own professional ambitions, not yet realized, which forced Daniel to confront the inadequacies in his own life and refocus his efforts on himself?
In the end, she reasoned, it had to be none of these things. Daniel could not be assumed to share her previous romantic exhaustion. Youth and maturity were not opposite ends of a spectrum, and age did not correspond to the latter. Daniel, who had earned a second degree before she had finished her first, who had come to New York after her and conquered it before her, was, in fact, trapped in a boy’s body.
Throughout dinner, he tried to carry on a conversation as if nothing had happened, like a boy evangelizing cloud formations to an indifferent adult.
“I don’t want to be your friend,” she said finally. “I want to be the love of your life.”
In saying it, she was denying—or attempting to deny—that she loved him. She was throwing all responsibility for their broken bond back on his shoulders, where it belonged. She was not saying that he was the love of her life, but that she wanted him to feel that way about her, so that she could make the ultimate decision of whether, in fact, he was Heaven’s preordained match for her. She was angry, not at him but at the fact that she had lost the game she had so recently played so well. And lost, no less, to this little creature of a man who had been able to discard her as he would last season’s loafers, as she had discarded countless men before him. And now, she believed, she hated him.
The most he could offer as a response was a meek “I’m sorry,” and, perhaps feeling that this did not carry enough weight, he added, “My intention was never to hurt you.”
It was like adding too much milk to too little coffee.
Now she winked too much. Whenever she told friends a joke, the wink would accompany her narrative like an uninvited passerby listening in.
She winked so much, so casually, that she began to question whether it was a wink at all or something else — a twitch, a nervous tic.
The tool of a confident provocateur was now, like everything else in her life, an unconscious act that demanded conscious attention. She was temporarily returned to her adolescence, to reminders from her grandmother to stand up straight, to stubborn bathroom mirrors which refused to change the image of the subject staring into them, to bathroom stalls which revealed her humanity to her with bloodless abandon. The optimism often associated with youth was refracted through a new lens, revealing the silent isolation born of the failure that sprouted before the hope could bloom.
This, she knew, was what youth was: toiling alone to work and work and work at the person one was trying to be — to fulfill the self-image one had— and to do so with the hope, even the presumption, that this was in fact possible. But youth was toil without advice, work without the promise of reimbursement. Youth was setting sail without knowing the direction or speed of the winds.
The magic of the wink was gone. The art of the subtle wink had been reduced to a science; it was a malady that, perhaps, required a professional hand to fix, not an inexperienced one to admire.
And in it — in the stop-start motion, she saw the ghost of the lover she had dismissed with the same rapid-fire surety; what she had given up to perfect her art had ultimately seized it from her: call it Karma, call it the Wheel of Fortune — life had come full-circle, so that she really was reaping the field she had sown.
And these grapes were much too sour to produce anything as sweet as wine.
