Samarkand

Short Stories

Dear Friends,

I’m sharing a short story from the collection ‘New Yorkers.’ I wrote this a few years ago. At

The Metropolitan Review

,

Vanessa Ogle

writes on Sally Rooney, and the man, the mystery that is

ARX-Han

writes on the enigma that is Tony Tulathimutte. At

Inner Life

,

Maya Slouka

writes on the melancholies of “sonder.”

Best,

Sam

SAMARKAND

Once upon a time he was in Central Asia, in Samarkand, and he met a famous German novelist — not really famous; Daniel had never heard of him, but he had a Wikipedia page and some appreciative reviews. It was the kind of encounter that Daniel spent that whole phase of his life anticipating, fantasizing about, and it really happened only that once. The novelist and a friend of his were looking to meet Samarkand whores — as research for the novelist’s next book. Daniel knew that he was intruding a bit, the friend in particular didn’t want to waste time talking to him. But the novelist was intrigued — he must have sensed that Daniel, even in this embryonic phase of his, was part of the same tribe. He wrote out his e-mail and he gave Daniel his life wisdom. He said, “Your 20s are all about sluts; then in your 30s you have a girl and she’s cooler than you are and you suffer from that; your 40s are the same thing except that now you’re a bit cooler and she’s getting more insecure; your 50s are about younger women coming out of nowhere and falling in love with you.” This wisdom made Daniel a little bit unhappy — for one thing, he was still in the grip of a campus feminism. “What about for a woman?” he asked and the German got annoyed. “I don’t know,” he said, “I’m a male novelist.” For another, it seemed a bit fatalistic and pre-determined — at this phase in his life, Daniel had so many conflicting ambitions, he felt that everything was pretty much just a matter of choice. “Well,” the German said, softening a little, “if you know it, you’re not so afflicted by it. For example, just now, I just saved you five years of having to figure it out on your own.”

What the German told Daniel turned out not to be completely accurate; he didn’t, for instance, spend his 20s chasing sluts. He was in what felt to him like a very dignified, mature relationship. He was happy and would have been perfectly content to ride that out all the way to children and grandchildren, but when they were both 29, she had some sort of major existential crisis — she felt that she hadn’t really explored, experimented, hadn’t sown her wild oats, hadn’t fully gotten in touch with herself. With a deep breath, Daniel suggested an open relationship — she could sleep around if she wanted to, he thought he wasn’t the jealous type, and was willing to put that to the test. That way, she could have the best of all possible worlds, but, quietly, decisively, she shook her head at that. “I don’t want to be on a leash,” she said. “Even if it’s a long leash. I need to be on my own, really on my own, make mistakes on my own — I can’t have the security of you if I’m going to do that.”

So that was the end of love — of the beautiful, lifelong monogamous relationship that Daniel had internally committed himself to. Now that he was in his early 30s, had been single for a while, had gotten over the learning curve of it, had settled into it, the advice of the German novelist came back to him like a prophecy. He was just doing things in a bit of a jumbled order, he realized, but, basically, the German had told him exactly how it was all going to be.

Which is not to put things too strongly. He wasn’t some kind of whoremaster. He spent most evenings, most weeks really, very alone. He was a familiar face at the corner deli. The guy behind the counter there was always watching basketball highlights on his phone. He always looked annoyed when he had to pause to ring up Daniel — his beer, his eggs, his kimchi. At the end of it, he nodded sharply to him in a way that Daniel found unpleasantly intimate, as if the guy behind the counter were acknowledging him, claiming him as one of his own. On the plus side, though, he had learned to diversify a bit. He had his friends, pretty much all of whom were girls — at one point or another, he had hooked up with most of them, they had gotten that out of the way, many of them were in relationships now. He visited them, brought a bottle of red wine, they stayed up late gossiping. They were all very educated, but the kind of education where they didn’t show off, didn’t, say, talk about books. There was a tone they shared, a set of references. They liked to hear about Daniel’s love life. Occasionally they argued about a movie or something. If it was late, he fell asleep on one of their couches. Meanwhile, he was learning to talk to a different type of girl. They were from all over, online for the most part, but, increasingly, bars, coffee shops, just little chance encounters. He didn’t know why these girls had seemed so remote to him before — probably, he had been testing them, gauging suitability, which now he didn’t do at all. He was open to pretty much anyone, he really didn’t mind if somebody had an extra pound or two around her waist or if she, whatever, didn’t know who Rilke was. For some reason, this catholicism of taste really bothered his old college friends and they kept trying to talk him out of it whenever he went over for wine, but, secretly, he was very pleased with himself — it really was something to move out of an economy of scarcity when it came to sex and he found himself broadening a bit, he was in bed now with more tattoos, with girls who sang along to pop songs, with girls who asked him earnestly about his horoscope. He found them all to be interesting, in different ways interesting — as far as he could tell, it was only snobbery, snobbery and shyness, that had kept him from exploring all these worlds before.

Mariam probably was part of this wave of girl. She had gone to Columbia but dropped out — Daniel, over multiple dates, had never been able to extract a clear reason why. She had her different projects that she talked about in grandiloquent detail, writing projects and art projects and community engagement projects, and she lived hand-to-mouth. Daniel met her when she was working at a coffee shop. He went outside to smoke a cigarette. She came out, asked him for one. They chatted for a bit. At the end of the cigarette, he said, “You have to go back to work?” She said, “Naw. I just quit.” Her whole life seemed to be like that – it was always a bit hard to keep track of her, to pin her down. Daniel told her what he was up to for the afternoon, just some walking around, enjoying the change in weather, asked if she wanted to join him. She said she couldn’t — there were some extra steps in quitting, she’d need to gather her things, she’d also need to have it out with her boss — but in the evening she texted him to see if he was still walking around. “That sounds really nice,” she wrote.

She ended up staying the night. She was very small, with frizzy hair. She had tattoos of musical notes and of a typewriter. She liked to tease him, to straddle him on all fours, and then to dart away when he tried to kiss her or touch her.

After she’d been over a few times, she casually informed him that she was living with her ex. She wanted to know if that shocked him. He told her truthfully that it didn’t — he was used to the complexities of dating, especially the complexities of breakups, which had a life of their own, and in any case it was really her business, he was happy to see her whenever she wanted to come over, he wasn’t going to get jealous or anything of somebody he hadn’t met, who had obviously been in her life a much longer time than he had.

His work life was changing quite a bit. He had been office-bound for a long time, had regretted the career he was in — it seemed to be an accident, one of these typical stories where you end up in a profession that’s adjacent to what you really want to be doing — but he had been diligent and professional and now he was rewarded by being given these road assignments, a company card, a modest expense account. He got used to the check-in process at the airport, the expert way he would strip himself of all his possessions and reassemble them at the other end of the TSA screening, the trusty roller suitcase that accompanied him everywhere. He felt very attractive every time he arrived at an airport, every time he swiped his card for incidentals at a hotel – had a feeling that others would as well. He wasn’t some kind of surefire seducer, but he was starting to learn a few tricks — how to set his dating apps to travel mode, for instance, to give the Tinder community of Orlando or Houston a heads-up that he would be there in a week’s time. Not that that gave him such a great advantage, he was working hard on his trips, he almost always ended up in the hotel rooms alone, it wasn’t really possible to meet a girl through an app, have a drink with her, and talk her into bed on the same night, but he was starting to glimpse something — if it had taken him most of his 20s to move beyond his Ivy-educated group in New York, now he was starting to see how it would work to be beyond New York altogether, to have his archipelago of girlfriends scattered around the country, no attachments, no judgments. They could be Christians, Republicans, whatever, he was getting to a place where he knew what he wanted and was getting more adept at spotting people who were thinking the same way.

When he was back in New York after a long trip, Mariam texted him and asked if he could meet her in a coffee shop. He assumed that meant she was putting an end to things and that seemed more formal than the situation really warranted. But when he got there, she had suitcases and handbags stacked on top of each other. She explained that she and her ex had been good for a while and then it had fallen apart, he was moody, he had a temper. “I can’t do it anymore,” she said. “I can’t.”

“You want to stay with me?”

“I’m really sorry — it’ll only be temporary, only for a little bit.”

He shrugged. He couldn’t think of any real reason not to accept — and the scenario struck him as a bit thrilling. “I’m barely there,” he said. “I have a whole bunch of travel coming up. I was trying to figure out if I should Airbnb or something. Much better for it just to be your place.”

***

His clothes were a bit strewn around. He folded them up neatly on one side of the closet and the other side became hers, with her suitcases stacked on the floor underneath. She was hustling, constantly running to copy shops to print out her résumé and drop it off at places in the neighborhood, but she seemed to be in the apartment a lot. She had a thing about breakfast — enjoyed making it and serving it to him. She would always make a big deal about her projects, she would tell Daniel the plot of one of her screenplays, want him to think it through with her. She would set up her work station very carefully at his coffee table, and press her temples in frustration when it didn’t go according to plan. He had never had trouble with concentration, wrote prolifically on airplanes and during downtime at the office, didn’t know why she had to announce the work she was doing in advance, why she had to be so neurotic about getting in exactly the right headspace for it, but, once again, it wasn’t really his place to interfere. In bed he found her to be an adventurous and giving partner. He had gotten tired, before she did, of the move of pretending to squirm away, but he found that he could just sort of tap her, run his fingertips along her side in the morning, or nuzzle her neck when he couldn’t fall asleep and she would be breathing deeply, she would spring into action in response to his touch.

He was going on dates occasionally — although not so often when he was in New York. For one thing, he was getting busier with work than he had been; he had a new position, which involved supervision and which gave him more responsibility and stress than he really wanted. For another, he had Mariam to look forward to. With her haphazard schedule, Mariam was often gone in the evenings, at one of her short-lasting jobs or talking through an art project with one of her creative circles, but it was a real thrill for him to be there, writing or drinking alone or even falling asleep, and to hear her footsteps on the landing, her key turning in the lock, the quizzical look she had standing over him, as she took off her coat, as if she were trying to remember who he was, and then the way she allowed herself to be drawn into his kisses, how they ignited some other, ferocious energy deep inside her. The road was different — there his sex drive was completely out of control, he sat in airport gates swiping through hundreds of profiles of women in the place he was about to visit, and most of the time of course it didn’t lead to anything but once or twice it did. By common consent, he and Mariam didn’t text each other except for essentials when one or the other was out of the apartment.

He went for a run and a girl stopped him to ask for directions. She’d lost battery on her phone, she was late for a meeting and didn’t know where she was going, she had a real desperation to her. Daniel might have pointed out that he didn’t have a phone either, that he was exactly the wrong person to ask, but he steered her towards Columbus Avenue. When he’d gotten her situated, he asked for her number and, kind of spitting it out, like it was one more chore she had to deal with, she gave it to him. He jogged back home repeating the number to himself. Her name was Lindsey. He had a drinks date with her that lasted a couple of hours. There was no kissing, it probably wasn’t going to lead anywhere, she was pretty but a bit corporate, she seemed to have that bit of software installed that a lot of the corporate types did where they inspected everything someone else said to see if it was ‘awkward’ or ‘creepy,’ he found himself reviewing all of his jokes and stories just before he told them, had a sort of nervous relief when each one seemed to pass muster. When he got back home, Mariam was lying on the bed, her knees up and her laptop resting on them as if on a table — her careful work stations usually collapsed into something like this.

“Where were you?” she said.

He told her he was out for drinks with a couple of college friends.

“Which friends?” she said.

She didn’t know any of his friends. He named a couple of people — she wouldn’t have heard of either of them. He took off his shoes and peeled off his coat. He could feel her eyes on him.

“What did you have?” she said. He told her two Sierra Nevadas and a whisky. “It’s not nice to lie to me,” she said finally, with conviction.

He pretended not to hear her. He went to the kitchen, he filled up a tea kettle with water, he put it on the burner. He went through his cupboard looking for tea bags. He could feel her eyes boring into him until, finally, she turned away, back to her project — he was doing her a huge favor with the place to stay, she must know that, it didn’t give her any rights to exclusivity, in any case they had never talked about such a thing. But he couldn’t fool her, he knew that now, it had been a mistake to lie. She was an odd person, she was so impractical, she probably had a screw loose, wasn’t bright in the ways his college friends were bright, but she saw through him, that much was clear, he wouldn’t be able to put anything past her.

He hadn’t expected much of anything to happen with Lindsey, but she kept texting. Her texts tended to be a bit pointless. She would send him some Instagram gif that she thought was funny or she would text that she’d just rewatched Independence Day and wanted to know what he thought of Will Smith — the kinds of things that really got him stuck trying to say anything funny or intelligent in response — but the texts from her came at all times, a lot of them came at midnight or one in the morning, and he imagined her lying there in bed, this lonely frazzled girl, watching her movies by herself, wanting to share them with him. He turned to the side, used his body to hide the screen from Mariam, who was asleep next to him. He’d been going down-market for a bit, his girlfriends seemed to be baristas and waitresses and actresses-between-gigs. With Lindsey, he was thinking his charm worked upscale as well, he didn’t have the prejudice his college friends had against the corporate crowd, Lindsey looked good, she dressed well, she had a quirky, barbed humor, a funny, windswept energy, she had her points as well.

He met her for a sushi dinner. When they were leaving the restaurant, she nodded across West Broadway, she said, “That’s my place. You want to come over?”

In the morning, he came home, thinking to change into his running clothes. Mariam was at the coffee table. She reminded him of a cat waiting to pounce. “Where were you?” she said. She was enunciating each syllable. “And do not tell me that you were out with your college friends.”

“I was with a girl,” he said drily.

“What girl?”

“Her name is Lindsey. We met while I was out running once.”

“Is she the same girl you were with when you lied and said you were with your friends?”

“Yes,” he said. “That was our first date.”

She reached forcefully to her scalp. He was worried for a moment that she was going to rip out her hair.

“Why did you lie?”

“I don’t know,” he said truthfully. “It’s not like we signed a contract, it’s not like we’re committed to anything. I guess I just didn’t want to make you uncomfortable.”

“You didn’t want to make me uncomfortable?”

He was getting tired of the way she was enunciating each syllable. It reminded him of bad acting.

“And when you spend a night with somebody else?”

“I’m free,” he said, “just like you’re free — I didn’t mind when we started hooking up and you were still living with your ex. If you were sleeping with him, if you were sleeping with other people, I would have been totally fine with that.”

She stood up. She marched to the bedroom. He heard the suitcases being wrenched out of the closet, he heard her grunting sounds as she shoved her clothes into them. The closet hangers were rattling to the floor.

“That is so disrespectful,” she said when she came out. She had assumed a stance, her hand on her hip. He assumed that some part of her was enjoying this. “I was here all night, sleeping all night, not knowing where you were, running these scenarios in my head, you out somewhere, fucking some stupid bitch, not getting even a text message — ”

“Well,” he said levelly. “Would you have preferred if I’d sent you a text message saying where I was?”

She fixed him with a malevolent stare and then she charged past him. He heard her footsteps on the landing, he heard her dragging the suitcase on the staircase behind her. A few times that day, he composed a text message in his head, but nothing felt right and he didn’t bother writing any of them. He figured she would be back — she’d done a lousy job of packing, her stuff was scattered all over the bedroom and the bathroom. That evening he went back to the deli and he loaded up on beer and pickled sides. He drank in an angry, reflective mood. He’d always been so nice, so easy, that was basically how he got all the girls he did, he was pleasant, he was polite, that was how Mariam had ended up living in his apartment in the first place, he was open, he was accommodating, a strange girl, a broke girl, a girl he barely knew, had come to him with an insane request and he had said yes to it. He had taken his decency so much for granted that it was a real surprise to see it crumble. There was something different about how he was sitting, the way he extended the bottle in front of him, the way he grimaced at it, and he thought of the German novelist in Samarkand — the older he got, the more he thought about it, the more accurate the German seemed to be, not necessarily about the specific ages, but the concept, the patterned way it all unfolded. It was like an imprint, he’d been wandering along, an amiable, hapless guy right out of college, and then he’d met the German and the German had rerouted him, left his imprint on him — or maybe that was the direction he would have gone in anyway, that hardness, that cynicism, the pleasure in that cynicism, and it was just like the German had said, he’d put him ahead of the curve, he’d let him know what was going to happen.

Mariam stayed away two nights and then she came back on the third day. Daniel happened to be sitting at the coffee table drinking a beer. He was a bit buzzed. She let herself in, sat on her upright suitcase, her hands on her knees.

“This girl, this Lindsey,” she said. “Is that your love, is that who you want to be with?”

“No,” he answered truthfully. “She’s just a cute girl I met running in the park one day.”

“Are you sleeping with lots of girls? When you leave here, are you going to meet girls?”

“No,” he said truthfully again. “I go to work, I work out, I meet up with friends. That was one time — it wasn’t nice what I did that one time. I’m not sleeping around with girls behind your back.”

“And on the road? When you travel? Do you meet up with girls on the road?”

Wearily, he told her what he did, he told her about the travel mode on Tinder, about the way he scrolled through profiles before the trip, about the two times it had happened, once a girl from an app, once from a hotel bar. She listened to him intently, stared at him without blinking. He sensed that this other, mysterious part of her was scanning his story for any lies in it.

“That’s what you want,” she said when he’d finished. “You want girls — you want lots of girls, you want to be a guy who’s traveling and who picks up girls.”

“Yes,” he said, feeling there was no point in trying to lie to her. “That’s exactly what I want.”

She fixed him with her quizzical look. Then she sputtered her lips, as if she were blowing a raspberry — he took it to be an expression of complete and total disdain. Then she went into the bedroom and fell facedown onto the bed. He was in no rush to join her — he’d missed her the last few days, he’d felt edgy and drunken and lonesome, but there would be time enough for them to make their peace. He sat at his coffee table, he extended his beer bottle out in front of him, drank it slowly. It was success, money, status, power, that’s what he was starting to experience — he was moving into a new phase of his life.