In The Eyes

There was a promotion that night and I wanted to dance and have some cheap drinks and maybe pick up a little something nice to go to bed with. I’d been dragging my ass around Rome all day getting my shit in order before I headed back to the States in the morning and doing all kinds of admin work on my contacts¹ in the meantime to make sure I had everything ready to go before I headed out, and I needed to get out to calm my nerves from the exertion.

The deal at this bar was that they were doing a discount special that worked like this: you all had to wear your contacts to be allowed in, and by default the girls were blurred out to the guys by their contacts, so all you saw was an outline where there was a person. When a girl said she was interested in the guy, the guy’s contacts opened up and let him see her clearly. So if he could see her, he knew she wanted him to approach her, and if he couldn’t, he couldn’t see her well enough to know what he was missing out on anyway. Maybe heteronormative, but this was a straight bar and things unfortunately work out unevenly for people.

I’m a handsome enough guy, or at least I’ve not had trouble with ladies, as far as I’ve been able to tell, so I expected that I’d be able to see a few girls here, and even if I didn’t talk to them, the thrill of looking at someone and seeing their face clearly and knowing that they wanted you to see them as someone you should go up and talk to was its own reward enough to motivate me to drag myself out. And besides, I’d been moping since Elsie broke up with me, and I needed the time for myself to forget her.

It’d only been two weeks since I found out she was making out with some guy she swore up and down she’d never met till that night at a bar we used to go to together on discount nights but that she said she wanted to go to alone that night because she needed some space to be with her friends without me, and I said that was fine because her friends were vapid twits anyway, never mind that they’d always been nice to me when we’d met, if a little difficult to talk to because of the lack of common ground and the fact that they all had crushes on me.

Maybe not literally — that’s the kind of thing that pissed Elsie off, when I’d say things like that — but it felt that way when I was with them: the way they looked at me, with open faces and smiles… I don’t know what else it could mean that they looked at me that way except that they saw me as something to conquer, some sexual prize to win. Not that they weren’t little prizes themselves, but since meeting her I’d only had eyes for Elsie.

We met at a hostel: we were staying in the same room. When I checked in she was in the room brushing her damp hair, fresh and clean in her jeans and white t-shirt, her bare feet on the floor with chipped burgundy nail polish. She was sitting on the bottom bunk with her bag open on the floor in front of her, and I could see the underwear she wore sticking out of the duffel bag. I can see it all exactly as it was, in every detail, still.

I looked at my key, then at the numbers on the bed, then at my key again, then took a small step towards the bunk she was sitting on, stopped, and coughed into my hand. I hadn’t made eye contact with her yet or looked at her directly. From the glances I’d had of her in my peripheral vision my heart was moving quickly, and I’d seen more than enough out of the sides of my eyes to know that she was so beautiful she’d burn my eyes to look at straight on. I looked hopelessly at the upper bunk above the bed her things were on and took another step in that direction. “I’m…” I gestured towards the bunk above hers.

“Oh, sure, yeah,” she moved her towel off the ladder where it had been hanging drying, and shoved her bag aside with her foot. I started to climb the ladder, but thought a moment and took my shoes and backpack off before going up. My phone desperately needed a charge, as did my contacts, so I took them out of my eyes and put them in their case, and plugged both pieces of kit into the outlet at the head of my bed.

As I crawled around above her I heard her below putting her socks on, then saw her put on her shoes as I came down and watched her head to the door. As she left she turned to me and smiled with her mouth and eyes without any guile or flirtatiousness besides the inherent confidence of someone who knows that they are beautiful and doesn’t care because they don’t know what it’s like not to be that way and said “bye,” quietly but not under her breath and looked right into my eyes and kind of bit her lip a little and then she was gone.

When the door closed and left me in silence I sat and felt wings budding on my heart, burning and pricking me as they grew. It was terminal from first contact: I was in love as soon as I saw her. “Damn,” I said out loud to the empty room. “Goddamnit,” more emphatically.

That night Elsie and I and a bunch of the kids staying in the hostel went down to the bar on the ground floor of the hostel, a place Elsie and I’d go back to many times in the future. It had good vibes for us. We’d not said any more to each other since meeting in the room, nor seen each other since then, and I’d had a busy day putzing across Rome. She’d been out in Rome that day too. I know because she told me about it at the bar as we waited for our drinks to come.

“I think the Parthenon was my favorite,” she was saying, “but tomorrow I’ve got a tour of the Colosseum booked.” I ran my finger along the bar and felt the sticky coating of spilled soda over the wood.

“I’ve heard that’s cool,” I said into her eyes that were looking right into mine, “I walked around the forum today and saw at what it used to look like through my contacts, but I wasn’t organized enough to book a tour of the Colosseum, and anyway I hate waiting in line.” I snorted. “Too impatient, I guess.” I think I thought I was flirting. We got our drinks and moved to a standing table in the middle of the bar, a little round table just big enough for two people’s drinks and elbows. “So why are you in Rome?”

“I’m studying abroad here for the semester, but I haven’t found a place to stay yet. I’m crashing at the hostel till something comes up. You?” She took a sip.

“Yeah same, actually.” I sipped too and tried to break eye contact now and again to keep myself from losing focus on what we were talking about. “It’s been kind of a hassle: they keep sending me around in circles. ’S kinda crazy.”

“Yeah, totally,” she laughed, “it’s been a pain in the ass.” We’d established already we were both from the US, which is the ironic thing about traveling: you never feel so close to your fellow nationals as when you’re abroad. I guess that’s what you get when you’re at the American University.

Another guy from the hostel came over and put his arms around both of our shoulders. “What’s up guys, where’re you from?”

“The States,” I said.

“Me too,” said Elsie.

“Cool,” he said, “so am I.” A beat. “Crazy. How’re you liking Rome so far?”

“Yeah it’s alright,” I said, “only been here a few days, but so far it’s pretty cool.”

“Yeah,” said Elsie. I could tell we were going to get along by the expression she was making at me, like can you believe we’re having this conversation again when we only just got through it ourselves and were barely making it to the interesting part?

“Totally bro. Listen, it’s nice to meet you guys. Name’s Ralph, I’ll be around for a few days, hit me up if you’re doing anything cool. I’m gonna grab a drink though. See you around!” He went off in the direction of the bar.

“Seems like a nice guy,” I said.

“Yeah, I guess. Looks like all the others to me,” she rolled her eyes towards a bunch of Ralph-model guys in the bar.

“I’m choosing to take that as a compliment.”

“You should.” You can imagine the rest for yourself.

Now I was at the same table as then, and time’d worn on, and we were both getting ready to go back home, and goddamnit if I didn’t miss our time together. I raised my cup silently to old times and took a long gulp. The cold and the fizzy and the booze did me good. Girls started flitting into focus for me.

I drank some more, the night wore on, I chatted to a few guys staying at the hostel upstairs, but I didn’t start talking to any of the girls that were visible yet. It’s sort of complicated when there’s one in-focus girl standing in a group of blurs, and she’s clearly talking to them, but it’s impossible to see what they look like or what they’re up to.

I was making eyes at one chick, and she leaned aside to an adjacent blob who may or may not have turned, and the top of whose blob might have wobbled in some kind of way, and then this girl I was beginning to think was actually kind of interesting slid right out of focus. Damn, but those are the risks we take in this life. It’s hard out here, man.

Towards the end of the semester, Elsie and I were out, and it was a contacts discount night at this other bar, and I thought we’d talked about it already, like we weren’t going to use the thing, we were just there for the discount, and it’s actually kind of nice for my jealousy, which what with these Roman dudes could get pretty bad, to go out with someone as pathologically beautiful as Elsie and not have guys all over her groping her or whatever. Made her feel safer, too.

But here comes this guy sidling up to her, all hair gel and gold earings, all like, “ciao, bella, come stai? Sai che sei una bellissima ragazza? Vuoi ballare?” and all that other suave Italian shit, and I was kind of surprised, like how could this even happen? She’s got to be blurry to him? Is this some kind of bit? And I’m standing there looking around like an idiot, and she’s sort of embarrassed but turning towards him and looking at him more than at me, and he’s standing closer to her than he is to me so that for a weird moment the three of us are dancing together and then it’s me dancing next to the two of them dancing together, and Elsie’s trying not to look at me, and this Italian only has eyes for her.

So that was basically the end of that. I tried to pretend like she hadn’t taken out my heart and stomped on it and torn out all the wings that it’d been growing by the roots one at a time leaving raw bloody holes that throbbed all over each time my heart beat, which is to say, literally once a second or more for as long as I continued to be alive, which as far as I was concerned from that moment on had better not be a long time. But I needed the credits from this semester abroad to graduate and drag my GPA above a 3.0, so I stuck through it because that’s the kind of guy I am, and anyway I’m not gonna let some bitch get me down.

I tried to bring my heart rate down, because it was elevated, and my cup was gripped so the ice and drink were about to overflow. I relaxed my hand and took a calming sip, then another, then the cup was empty and I walked up to the bar to get some more. As I was waiting a fully in-focus girl slid up next to me and kinda posed herself there like she was waiting for something, and it wasn’t the bartender who was gonna give it to her.

“Hey,” I said, “where’re you from?”

“Germany,” she said, with that funny closed ee the Germans do at the end of their country’s name when they say it English. “And you?”

“The States.” She rolled her eyes and turned away from me into a blur, which didn’t keep me from seeing the cold shoulder I was suddenly getting.

I didn’t even wait for the drink to come. I didn’t have to put up with this shit, what, like I’m some less than person, some fucking Ralph. I shoved my way past some blurs towards the door and as I went I reached up to slide the contacts out of my eyes: I didn’t need to wear them if I wasn’t going to drink there. And as everyone blinked into focus around me there I was face to face with Elsie, who to my naked eyes looked just exactly like anybody else.