To J.N. Thanks for the ride home, the tunes, the conversations, and everything
“I actually prefer working with American tech companies,” says the man whose name I for the life of me can’t remember. “They’re way more diverse.” He makes his face into a grin, widening his eyes, expecting me to say something. When he realizes I have nothing to contribute he adds, “Working with German companies means working with a lot of white men.” He snorts. “I swear, everyone at those places looks like me, has my background exactly. Straight white guys.” I smile politely while getting increasingly nervous about not having said a word for what feels like a very long time.
The urge to fidget with my phone is overwhelming — even just holding it in my hand, just sliding my thumb across its cool, glassy surface would offer relief right now. I reach in my back pocket and feel the coarseness of the faux-leather case that’s wrapped around my delicate gizmo. I picture the screen lighting up to reveal a picture of me and my girlfriend on a trip to Italy last year, the bottom halves of its large time-indicating numbers tattooed on our foreheads. Perhaps a quick glance at the time will relax me. I pull my phone out and my interlocutor immediately takes notice. “You got somewhere to be?” he asks sarcastically, unselfconsciously showing off his yellowed teeth. I struggle to put my phone back in my pocket and decide to just place it on the couch next to me.
“I just realized I had no idea how long I’ve been here,” I answer. It’s been about thirty minutes.
Narinthip — the birthday girl, the reason I’m sitting on this dirty couch, have my brand-new black socks on this dirty carpet — walks out of the kitchen, carrying a plate of pasta salad in her left hand and three bottles of Ratsherrn in her right. She puts the beers on the coffee table — a mess of crayons, drawings (birthday gifts from her friends’ kids), used napkins, and potato chip crumbs — and sits next to the man I was just having this thing resembling a conversation with. They kiss and I look at my knees in embarrassment, making sure to keep a fake smile frozen on my face.
I met Narinthip, whom everyone affectionately calls “Chip,” while reading on a bench by the Binnenalster. She walked past me — graceful, dressed in a black blazer and matching black skirt, a heavy golden buckle adorning her platform loafers — and I did my best to hide my stares behind innocuous posturing and the dark, over-sized sunglasses that covered my eyes. She sat down a few benches over and whenever the sun would emerge from behind the thick clouds she would tilt her head back, close her eyes, and fall into a kind of trance that only the sun’s periodic disappearance could break. After about two hours of working up the courage, I finally asked her if she wanted to grab a drink sometime. She said yes but she made it clear over text that she was seeing someone and that it was serious.
I talked too much during our first meeting — having arrived in Hamburg about three weeks earlier, it had been a while since I had a real conversation with anyone and the words just flowed out of me while I looked on, powerless to stop them. I asked about her work, what she does for fun, what music she likes and would meet her brief answers with long monologues of my own. “This was fun,” I said after we stepped out of Berliner Betrüger, a dimly-lit bar somewhere in der Schanze. My clothes felt heavy from the cigarette smoke that had made its way to our table from the large smoking room. “And sorry for monopolizing the conversation.”
“You didn’t. And if you did, I didn’t notice.” She laughed and for the first time, I noticed she had buck teeth. I offered to walk her home but she insisted I didn’t have to since she lived just two minutes from where we were. She kissed me on the cheek and began pushing her bike home, swiftly disappearing into the static of rowdy partygoers that surrounded us.
“So what do you do, man?” Chip’s pony-tailed boyfriend asks me, his inamorata’s face poking out curiously from behind his even though she already knows the answer.
“I’m unemployed. I mean, I’m looking for a job… but right now I don’t have one.”
He ponders this. “So are you seeing anyone?”
“Pardon?”
“Dating somebody?”
“Oh yeah. No. Well, I have a girlfriend but it’s not going so well. I’ve been going on dates with other people since I got here.”
Chip chimes in, “How does she feel about that?”
“Don’t worry, she doesn’t know.” A few brief chuckles, then an awkward silence falls over our little corner of the living room. I run my finger across my eyebrow. “I’m kidding. We talked about it of course. She’s free to see other people too.”
Across from us, sitting cross-legged on a large pillow, is Tina, a short woman with blonde hair and piercing blue eyes. She’s breast-feeding her tiny baby boy while trying to wrangle her five-year-old daughter by grabbing, in vain so far, at her shirt every time she runs past her. The kids are her and Chip’s boyfriend’s but the two broke up while she was pregnant with the son whose head she is currently holding against her exposed breast. She looks to the kids’ father with mild annoyance. “Pascal, könntest du mir bitte mal helfen?”
A gentle authority comes over Pascal’s face. “So Lena, jetzt setzen wir uns erst mal hin, okay?” he says with a pedagogue’s diction, patting the narrow space on the couch between him and myself. For his effort, he gets a loud “Nein!” in return. He drops the matter immediately. Tina rolls her eyes as Lena continues storming back and forth between the far walls of the living room.
I scan around the table for someone to make eye contact with — Jaël, Chip’s gray-haired hippie burnout roommate; Tobias, a balding graphic designer whom Chip shares her studio with; Biana, a middle-aged lesbian who plays accordion in a cover band which, I assume, is terrible; Ignaz, the only person at this party who has said less than I have — but everyone is busy watching Lena, their faces all communicating a conscious, progressive acceptance of the girl’s rumpus.
Finally, Chip looks, smiles at me, amused by the absurdity of the situation. She announces to the room, “You know, Travis is actually a really gifted artist.” Every head turns to look at me — even Tina and Pascal’s baby momentarily loses interest in his mother’s nipple and begins studying my expression, giggling with excitement when I stick my tongue out at him. “Ein wirklich großartiger Künstler,” Chip continues. “You should see his stuff. It’s beautiful. So moving. Wunderschön.” She grabs her phone off the dirty table, shakes and wipes it semi-clean, and opens her photo app. “Look at this one.” She hands the phone to Tina as I crane my neck to at least see which piece she’s showing her.
“Wow, this is really good,” says Tina after appearing to give it much thought. “Speaking of art, I went to an exhibition with Johannes two weeks ago. I can’t remember her name — excuse me, their name — but it was an indigenous artist from Australia who paints famous biblical scenes from a queer, anti-colonial perspective. It was very interesting. She was there the night before but we missed her —”
Pascal interjects. “They.”
“Yes, sorry — they were there the night before. It’s too bad we couldn’t hear them speak.”
“It’s crazy how male-dominated the art world still is,” says Pascal. “When you go to the Kunsthalle here there are almost no women or Pee Oh Cees.”
Everyone nods in agreement — including me. I wait a beat and say, “I went to the Kunsthalle when I first came to Hamburg and I thought the same thing.” The room seems pleased with this input.
It’s a strange thing, speculating on the totality of someone’s life — their habits, relationships, sensibilities, politics. Clothes alone don’t tell you as much as they used to. When I met Chip, I imagined her as a mostly solitary being, surrounded by work, books, art, and the occasional short-term romance with a well-dressed man who works in finance or marketing. Meeting her boyfriend for the first time was a bit of a shock: his eyes were dull, his dirty blond hair looked stringy and greasy, his goatee gave him the appearance of a “head” from a badly-dubbed Italian exploitation flick, a junkie badgering the main character for a fix. His bony frame, ill-fitting washed-out jeans, and Baja hoodie not only made me think less of him but also of his girlfriend.
Chip introduced us while we were out for the third time. “Oh, my boyfriend’s close by. Mind if he joins us?” I did but shook my head no, regardless. “Of course not,” I addended my gesture. “I’d love to meet him.” He was all smiles and friendly nods but I was relieved when he left less than an hour after he arrived.
Three days later, Chip and I went out again, again to Berliner Betrüger because we couldn’t think of another place and also because I didn’t remember the way my clothes smelled after our first rendezvous. “I never thought of myself as someone who could feel comfortable being monogamous,” she said after I asked her how things were going with “the boyfriend.” Later, she invited me back to her place for Albanian raki. She ended up showing me pictures of the night she met Pascal and I tried my best to seem interested but couldn’t take my mind off the fact that I would have to throw my favorite pair of black jeans in the laundry tomorrow.
“I used to have to bring up non-monogamy with my boyfriends. But now that Pascal was the one to bring it up… I don’t know, I’m just not attracted to the idea anymore. It’s strange. Too bad, really.” Her eyes were heavy with an exaggerated, drunken melancholy.
“I should probably leave,” I said but made no effort to do so.
“Yeah, maybe that would be for the best.”
Her breath tasted like stale beer and garlic, mine was sour and sticky from the gin and tonics I had been knocking back. At one point, her buck teeth scraped painfully against mine but when I opened my eyes, I saw that hers were still closed so I joined her in pretending nothing had happened. After I got home, I brushed my teeth, trying my best to get the taste out of my mouth which had turned unpleasant as soon as I heard her apartment door close behind me. The next night, I dreamt I was in a church for Chip’s funeral. She had broken her neck after jumping down a flight of stairs and a pale, limbless, fly-infested corpse was rotting in the open casket. Pascal kept looking back at me from a few rows ahead, a thin-lipped grimace exposing his nicotine-stained incisors.
Lena is babbling about Princess Peach, her latest fixation. Tina turns to me: “You know, my boyfriend, Johannes, and I bought a Nintendo Switch for ourselves but Lena soon found out about it and now she can’t get enough of Super Mario.”
Lena yells, “Bowser wollte die Peach heiraten aber sie wollte nicht! Und am Schluss hat sie ihn zur Strafe einfach eingesperrt!” She laughs loudly at the memory of Mario, Luigi, and Princess Peach’s triumph over Bowser at the end of The Super Mario Bros. Movie.
“Ist doch super, dass sie sich gewehrt hat,” says Pascal. “Ist nicht richtig, dass er sie einfach zum Heiraten zwingt.” He notices me looking at him and mistakes my incredulity with an inability to understand their Hamburger Dialekt. “Sorry Travis, Lena was just talking about how, in the Super Mario movie, Bowser tries to force Peach to marry him and how she gets her revenge on him by the end.” This seems to put him in a good mood. “I think it’s great that little girls can watch a kids’ movie these days and see a woman like Peach standing up for herself.”
Tina yawns and asks Chip for the time. “The people from the institute are coming over for lunch tomorrow and I have to bake a cake for them.”
Chip leans forward. “You don’t ‘have to.’”
“Well yes, I do. I said I would do it so I’m gonna do it.”
“No, listen to me. You don’t ‘have to.’ It would be totally okay for you to say you didn’t feel up for it.”
“Yeah, I know. I’m still gonna do it. But I know what you mean.”
“I just want you to know that ‘no’ is an option.”
Tina mouths a playful “thank you.” I take this opportunity to get on my feet. “I should probably head out.” I grab a few plates and empty glasses and walk to the kitchen. Chip follows me. “You okay?” she asks once we’re alone.
“Yeah, I’m good. I just really wanna meet this girl I’ve been messaging on Tinder. You know how hard it is to get a match on there. I feel like she could slip away at any moment.” Chip just looks at me. To break the silence I ask her, “Was I acting weird?”
“No. I just hoped you’d stick around for a bit longer.”
Why? For what? “I’m just tired. I’d only get sleepier if I stuck around. And I don’t like being around kids for this long either.”
I leave the kitchen and lean into the living room to wave goodbye to everyone. “Bye guys, it was really nice meeting you.” Chip’s boyfriend gets up and walks towards me. “Travis, dude, so awesome seeing you again.”
I realize I have once again forgotten his name. “Yeah man, likewise. Take it easy.”
Chip steps out into the hallway with me, leaving the apartment door ajar. She puts her hand on the back of my neck and presses her lips against mine. “Are you coming back later?”
“I don’t know. I don’t think so.”
She takes a step away from me. “It’s okay, you know. We talked about it and Pascal’s fine with us hooking up. He doesn’t know about our kiss, though. I didn’t tell him about that.”
“This might all just be a little too weird for me, honestly. I already have a girlfriend, I don’t need two more people to worry about.”
“A girlfriend.” Her mouth laughs but her eyes don’t. “And that girl you’re gonna try and fuck tonight? Are you not gonna worry about her after?”
“That’s different.”
“How?”
“She doesn’t have a weird…” I pause briefly. “Cuck boyfriend who keeps looking at me like a psychopath barely keeping his shit together.”
“You’re a fucking asshole, you know that?” She looks at me with disappointment before fixing her face. “Have fun tonight, I’ll see you soon.”
I stupidly hold out hope for another kiss but she walks back into the apartment without turning around. I check Tinder only to see that the beautiful black-haired girl still hasn’t responded to my last message. I’m self-conscious about walking to the subway alone so I decide to call my girlfriend — the phone rings four times and then my call is declined. While I descend the stairs, I text Chip that maybe I should see her later tonight after all but after pointlessly waiting by the front door for a few minutes, I walk outside. Instead of heading right for the station, something possesses me to circle the block first.