It is a small thing. A quiet thing. The pressure of five human fingers through the fabric of my dress trousers, and the specific, overwhelming acuity I have noticed is unique to her, this woman who is not large enough to reach my shoulder without standing on her toes but who has occupied more square footage of my waking thoughts in the last three weeks than any variable I have ever tried to model. The pressure saysI knowandI'm sorryandyou don't have to perform anything right nowin a vocabulary that requires no words, and I experience the deeply inconvenient sensation of wanting very badly to leave this table and take her with me.
I do not do that. I lift my fork again and I eat the lamb, which is extraordinary, genuinely extraordinary, she slow-cooked it with rosemary and something else I couldn't identify and the flavour is precise and complex and I have been rationing myportions all evening to avoid consuming the majority of the serving dish, which is a genuine ongoing effort.
Dev asks me something about actuarial tables. I answer it. Maya asks about whether I enjoy living in the city. I answer that too, the whole truth of it, the particular, specific pleasure I take in the organised noise of it, the logistical density of millions of humans operating in close proximity according to a thousand overlapping sets of rules. James makes a decent joke about the oyster card system failing at rush hour. I laugh. The laugh is real. The conversation rebuilds itself around us, tentative at first and then more confident, and Greta says something to Livia that makes Livia throw her head back and I notice the clean line of her throat from the corner of my eye and think, with the quiet certainty I have been accumulating for three weeks, that I am absolutely in enormous trouble.
Priya, to her credit, spends the remainder of dinner being perfectly pleasant and refilling everyone's glasses with the democratic generosity of someone making unspoken amends.
I excusemyself to use the bathroom at approximately nine forty-five.
This is partially true. I do need a moment of vertical space that does not require me to angle my shoulders around a dining chair designed for a physiology approximately three-quarters the mass of mine. But I also stand in the narrow hallway outside the bathroom for ninety seconds with my back against the wall and my eyes closed and I do the breathing exercise my GP recommended, the one I have never actually admitted to anyone I use, slow counts and deliberate exhales and the mental exercise of listing measurable, concrete things in my immediate environment. Coat rack. Six hooks. One large coat, olive green. Three smaller coats including a scarf that smells like Livia'sperfume, the vanilla one she wears on occasions that matter to her.
I open my eyes and look at myself in the mirror above the hallway table.
Wire-rimmed glasses. Broad, heavy jaw. Tusks that I have filed and polished with a meticulous monthly maintenance routine specifically so that they look less like what they are, which is a residual evolutionary feature of a species that humanity has, throughout history, found comprehensively threatening. Sage skin under the warm yellow of her hallway light. A shirt that fits my arms reasonably well but pulls noticeably across my chest regardless of what size I purchase, which I have resolved as a problem through the tactical deployment of blazers. The blazer is on the back of the dining chair right now. Without it I look, someone once said in the background of a conversation they didn't realise I could hear, like something escaped from a mythology textbook.
Barbaric, Priya said. With the breezy, unguarded ease of someone stating a thing that to them is simply a shared cultural understanding. A given. The category she reached for first, with no awareness that I could hear it land.
I have been calculating something all evening and I have been avoiding the result.
The result is this: Livia is extraordinary. She is precise and funny and unexpectedly fierce and she came to my office three weeks ago with the energy of a woman who had decided to conduct a forensic emotional audit and was not leaving until she had the results she required, and she is also entirely human, embedded entirely in a social world that functions on human assumptions and human categories, and I am, permanently and without any corrective possible, not that. I can wear the sweater vests. I can file the tusks. I can research the correct fork for the salad course and make the decent joke about pension fund riskand listen attentively to her friends' careers and opinions and I can do all of this indefinitely, and there will still be a moment, every single time, in every single room, when the conversation goes quiet and someone reaches for the word that arrives most naturally, and the word is notinterestingorimpressiveor evenintimidating.
The word isbarbaric.The word ismonster.The word is the gap in the record where I don't fit, no matter the argyle vest.
And Livia will be sitting next to that gap at every dinner table for as long as she is with me, absorbing the silence and the dropped forks and the Priyas of every future gathering, and she will hold my knee under the table and say nothing because she is loyal and fierce and she has decided, for reasons I cannot fully model, that I am worth the expenditure. But I can model the cost. I am, professionally, exceptionally good at modelling long-term costs.
I straighten my glasses. I go back to the table.
I insiston paying for dinner.
This requires a brief negotiation because Livia has already reached for her card and she argues with the energy of someone who has opinions about financial equity in relationships, which I find deeply endearing and which I win anyway by the simple method of making eye contact with the server across the room before she can intercept the transaction. The server, to their credit, processes it with the professional efficiency of someone who has decided not to get involved in whatever dynamic is currently operating between the very large Orc and the very determined small woman in the glasses.
"Narod. I had a budget for this."
"Your budget can remain intact for another occasion."
"That is not the point."
"I know." I help her into her chair as people begin collecting coats and bags, and she twists around to look at me. "The lamb was extraordinary," I tell her, honestly. "You should make it again sometime."
She looks at me for another three seconds before Greta says something that requires her attention, and I put on my blazer.
Priya, in the small corridor where coats are being retrieved, touches my arm. Her hand barely reaches it. She looks up at me with the slightly rueful expression of someone whose filter has reassembled itself and is providing a full retrospective assessment of the evening's lapses.
"Narod. About the thing I said earlier. At dinner."
"It's quite all right."
"No, it was." She exhales. "It was a stupid thing to say. I don't actually think that. You're. You've been really lovely tonight and I said a stupid thing."
I look at her. She is sincere. She is holding her coat against her chest and she is looking up at me with the discomfort of someone confronting their own thoughtlessness, and she is sincere, and I believe her, and it doesn't change the model I've been running all evening.
"Genuinely," I say, "don't worry about it. Thank you for a lovely evening."
I wait until the goodbyes have finished and the group begins moving toward the door. Livia is mid-sentence with Maya, something about a work situation, and she has her hand on Maya's arm.
Then I zip my coat and slip out the door.
The cityat ten o'clock on a Sunday is its own particular organism.
