“Well,” said the girl in azure chiffon, the chandelier’s homuncular reflections dancing in her eyes. “Have you had it enlarged?”
Her rising pitch caught Timothy like an uppercut beneath the chin. His insides did cartwheels. The buffet tables tumbled and swooped like amusement park rides. Sweat squirted from his clenching palms. Her beauty was more striking now without the lag, the grainy undersaturation, and her English was smoother, as smooth as her calves, as if it, too, had undergone a strict regime of waxing. Her presence here was an anachronistic shattering. His reality lay in pieces on the floor.
“Have I…,” he echoed, casting about for firmer ground, “have I…have I?”
Leila’s eyes dipped downward, rose again like swans.
All he could think to say was, “Why?”
“You said you wanted to,” she said, her voice a feather on the wind. “You said you were working three jobs.”
“I’m a hard worker,” he agreed. “I work hard.”
“You even showed us!” She let loose a tinkling, glass-breaking laugh. “Three times, you showed us.”
“I must’ve had too much to drink,” he said. “I must’ve been really out of it. Really tired. I work really hard.”
“And we thought, Why is he showing it to us?” she went on. “Is he hoping we’ll say that it’s good as it is? It’s up to you, you know.”
“Why are you here?”
“To support the cause, of course.” She flashed him a pearly-toothed grin. “To make the world accessible. To save the blind.”
“No,” he said, “I mean in America. Why are you here in America?”
“Oh! I didn’t think I’d be meeting the border patrol.” Then, seeing the mortification on his face, the shame, “Just teasing. I’m here as a student. I’m doing law.”
“I’m volunteering,” said Timothy. “I work three jobs, and in between, I volunteer. Right now, I’m volunteering. I don’t work here. I just volunteer.”
“But why not get a fourth job if you’ve got the time? You’ll get it done a lot sooner that way. If you’re still wanting to, I mean.”
“I like giving back,” said Timothy. “I like having a positive impact. You know. On the community.”
“Do you still call girls every night,” asked Leila, “to help them with their English?”
“No,” he lied.
“You’re too busy saving the deaf and the blind?”
“That guy who was talking a minute ago,” said Timothy, swelling with pride, “on the stage. I’m the one who brought him. I’m his chaperone.”
“That guy whose face looks like an elephant, you mean?”
“Don’t say that,” said Timothy. “That’s really rude. He’s got an amazing story, you know. An amazing story. I’m the one who brought him here. I’m his driver. I’m the one who’s enabling him.”
“You’re still the same, aren’t you?” Leila giggled. “You still talk the same.”
“Well, yeah. I always have. I didn’t have to learn.”
“No,” she said, “I don’t mean your English. I mean, you still say ‘enabler’ and ‘enabling’ like they’re good things. When I talked to my American teachers, they said it’s a bad thing, enabling.”
“It is a good thing,” said Timothy. “It means, like, making someone more able. Enabling. Like how I enabled you by helping with your English, and now you’re here, studying law.”
“I don’t think you helped me with my English, really,” said Leila. “Actually, I had to relearn lots of things. I had to stop saying advocate for everything. I had to stop saying empowering. My friends at the American Language Center were always making fun of me, saying, ‘Leila, you’re not enhancing your salad’s resilience through strategic capacity-building. You’re just adding onions!’”
“I never said anything like that,” Timothy mumbled. “About salad.”
“Amal and Fatimzahra,” Leila went on, “the other girls you met, remember? They were the only ones who ever got what I was saying—oh! Good. Timothy, this is Nathan.”
The man who’d materialized beside Leila was chiseled and blond, dressed in a navy-blue blazer and a long, black-and-white speckled tie. Encircling her with his arm, he cast a curious glance down at Timothy, as if peering at something he’d just turned up beneath a stone.
“Hello,” said Timothy, not extending a hand.
“I’m doing an internship with Nathan,” explained Leila, beaming. “With his firm, I mean. He’s the reason I’m here.” Leaning closer, she whispered, “We have a public-private partnership.”
“Well.” Nathan’s smile might as well have been painted-on. “Shall we?”
“Yes,” said Leila, liltingly. “We shall.” When she moved, not away from Timothy, but toward him, he thought she was about to put her arms around him, maybe even kiss him on the cheek. Instead, she patted him lightly on the shoulder. “The world,” she said, her eyes flickering almost imperceptibly downward, “is so small.”
Timothy’s esophagus tightened, and his straitjacket button-down seemed to be shrinking and constricting, and his eyes rolled about on the floor like lost grapes beneath hard-bottomed shoes, and his dry tongue crawled over his teeth as if searching for oases in all the wrong places.
“So small,” he agreed.
END