You Exist Too Much. Zaina Arafat

looked at me, paused, then offered an effortful smile.

      For the first time I noticed the dimple that appeared above her lip when she smiled, like a second, smaller smile. While we stood there, I began to fall into its span. As I gathered up my things and walked toward the classroom door, she asked, “Is it so bad?”

      I stopped and turned toward her. “Is what so bad?”

      “To have an affair?”

      Her question seared—it felt both suggestive and forgiving. At the time, a photo of Eliot Spitzer and his scorned wife, Silda, adorned the front page of the New York Post. I felt myself blush. “I don’t know,” I said. “But it is in this country.”

      She laughed. Her laugh was deep and started in the back of her throat, getting increasingly lighter as it worked its way forward. “True.”

      My body surged with heat. When I got home after my set that night, I googled her. I discovered that she wrote fiction. A short story with her byline came up, a simple piece about a woman struggling to keep her marriage intact as the other couples in their circle divorced. I wondered if it was based on truth, and I searched for details that matched her reality as I knew it. During class the following week, I made a point to mention it.

      “I read your story,” I said, nervous to admit it and tingling with excitement, as though I’d accessed some part of her that was now laid bare between us.

      “Oh,” she said. She nodded once, then offered the smile. “Thank you.”

      She appeared not to care whether I liked it, confident that it was good without my approval. Still, I felt encouraged to say, “It would be nice to meet up sometime. Maybe after the class is over.”

      She nodded in return. “It would.”

      We met in early September, at the Nespresso store in Midtown East, three blocks from our classroom. I showed up in a pencil skirt and a silk sleeveless shirt. We sat down and ordered cappuccinos, and I resisted asking for skim milk so I wouldn’t seem too weight-conscious or too American. The conversation flowed. She talked about walking her daughter to school, her husband’s startup, their vacation home in Saint-Paul-de-Vence, on the Cote d’Azur. I tried to match her level of privilege and exposure. “I’ve been to Nice once,” I said. “For a week.” I didn’t mention that I’d gone with Kate, toward the end of our relationship. Nor did I mention Anna, worried that, as a straight French woman, the entire concept of queerness would make her uncomfortable. I felt slightly tipsy as we left, though we hadn’t had anything to drink. When the bill came I hesitantly asked if she would send me some of her unpublished writing to read.

      She placed her credit card on the table as I reached for my wallet, waving my hand away. “You want to read more from me?” she asked, sounding almost suspicious.

      I panicked—until then I’d felt emboldened, but her response made me embarrassed. “I thought I’d ask,” I said. “If that’s okay.”

      “Sure,” she said. She smiled again; it was starting to feel more natural anytime she did so. “I’m just surprised, is all.”

      We stepped outside the café, and I felt overwhelmed as we walked off in different directions. I wanted her, I wanted her life, I wanted to live inside her life while still living inside my own. I wanted, above all, for her to like me.

      Two days later, when she still hadn’t sent any of her work, I followed up. Three essays arrived in my inbox that night. She seemed to be a guarded person, so reading her unpublished writing was like cutting to the front of a long line. She wrote about her French Colonialist guilt, which as a Palestinian I felt uniquely qualified to absolve. She wrote about reading La Fontaine fables to her daughter. She wrote about middle-of-the-night despair, about wanting more. I couldn’t believe how much her inner world resembled mine.

      The problem, as always, was asymmetry. Not only was she straight, but she had a husband to share her inner world with. I presumably had Anna’s world, yet somehow hers was never nearly as captivating.

      I read each of the essays several times. “They’re nice,” I wrote in response, still afraid to shatter a veneer of detachment.

      A month later we went to lunch, but I couldn’t eat. I wore a dress that once belonged to my mother, her gold hoop earrings, her Michele watch. Anything beautiful that’s mine was once hers. Now that I’d read the professor’s writing, now that her sapphire wedding ring was refracting light from every surface, I was too conscious of my motions to land the fork in my mouth, so I stopped trying. “Sorry,” I said, laughing dumbly. “I can’t eat and talk at the same time.”

      She had chosen a place on the Upper West Side known for its burgers, but I ordered a salad. I imagined she was judging me in that moment. I’m familiar with that judgment, after years of anorexia. I was past it by then, but still, how could I eat something so unsexy as a cheeseburger in front of the sexiest woman in the universe? She continued to look attractive and in control as she ate her burger, chewing with unapologetic authority. I had the ridiculous salad packed up though I knew I’d never eat it. When the check came I offered to pay. I’d looked up the place beforehand—cash only—and I fumbled self-consciously through bills fresh from the ATM. My eyes began to blur, I put down too much for the tip. We got up and left, and the minute she turned the corner from the restaurant tears spilled down my cheeks. I was certain that I’d given myself away, though I admit: by then, a part of me wanted her to suspect.

      I assumed that would be our last encounter. But in the spring, I heard from her again. We exchanged a few emails, mostly about writing, and eventually developed a frequent correspondence, delving into what I perceived to be intimate and pointed subject matter, including love. Though usually we discussed it theoretically, rather than applying it to either of our specific relationships—I continued to keep Anna out of our conversations. When she needed a reader for an essay she was planning to send out, about Laclos’s Les Liaisons Dangereuses, she came to me. I immediately bought a copy, bypassing a second viewing of Cruel Intentions. The central theme of the piece danced around the question of marital infidelity and its moral implications versus its permissibility. “Maybe you should come out and say what you think,” I suggested in my feedback. “As of now, it’s hard to tell where you stand on the issue. I’m sure readers are curious to know!”

      Where do you live? As I sat in our bedroom, Anna on the other side of the closed door, I repeatedly read the professor’s question, which I interpreted as an imperative. I imagined her sitting in front of her computer, staring at me from behind her Prada glasses. It was a direct challenge—was I ready to pluck her from possibility and encounter her reality? Sometimes I closed my eyes and pictured her while kissing Anna. It was always somewhat awkward and not as exciting as when I pictured it in the abstract, devoid of hideous circumstance. What if our sex was clumsy? I was in between post-anorexia plump and all-night double sets, with no snack breaks—what if she didn’t like my body? My mother had recently impersonated me, puffing up her cheeks and holding out her arms beyond her stomach like an ape. Maybe I could love her from a distance and keep myself intact. Maybe I needed to protect myself against debilitating and devastating heartbreak. Maybe I thought that was possible.

      Three weeks earlier, the professor had written to tell me she was four and a half months pregnant with her second child. After reading her note, I put my head on my desk and cried. I continued to cry for two weeks: on the subway into the city, at the taco truck outside the club, inside the DJ booth. I was used to feeling envy when it came to pregnancy. It’s something I’ve looked forward to since I was seven, after a day spent with a pregnant friend of my mother’s who I thought was the most beautiful woman in the world. I cried tears of jealousy the whole car ride home, and my mother promised me I’d have a turn one day. “You’re just too young right now,” she’d said as I buried my face in stuffed animals. But I wasn’t prepared for the unbearable pain I would feel when it was a woman I fancied myself in love with. Nothing highlighted the one-sidedness of our relationship more than having no idea she was midway through her second trimester, thinking instead that she was falling for me. How stupid was I to believe she could’ve cared about me in some way, in any way