Open Water

The narrator visits the woman’s mother, and they have tea and cookies while watching the Winter Olympics. He is there because bad weather kept him and the woman from seeing each other before she left for Dublin, and he needs to pick up his hoodie. The woman’s mother makes fun of the sport of curling and asks the narrator about his day. He stayed at home in the cold and wrote a little but mostly reread his favorite writer Zadie Smith’s novel, NW. The mother is also a fan of Smith.

The narrator remembers meeting Zadie Smith at a summer event. She signed his copy of NW and asked him about his family, making connections from his answers to her own family. The protagonist was awkward, unable to share how important NW is to him or talk about the recognition that he felt reading an essay that she wrote about NW.

The woman’s mother asks the narrator what he’s writing. He is noncommittal, saying, “[I]t’s just to supplement my photography” (45), although he reads mostly fiction. She tells him that good books fall into one of two categories: someone new arrives in a place or someone embarks on some kind of journey. The narrator hugs the mother when he leaves, feeling like she smells almost like home. Once on the bus, he puts on his hoodie and smells the woman, a scent that he compares to flowers. He puts on an orchestral album and feels close to the woman in a way that is emphasized by her absence.

While the narrator is riding the London Overground, a more suburban rail system than the Underground, the woman calls to say that she’s back from Dublin. The man talks quietly, worried that a group of football (soccer) fans on the train will think that he’s discussing them. His not-yet-lover suggests that he get an Uber to her place and he agrees. He wonders how he will remember this moment in future, wishing that he had a witness for it.

At the woman’s house, they embrace and say that they missed each other. They discuss the beverage depicted on the woman’s shirt, Supermalt, a non-alcoholic malt beverage enriched with B vitamins. The narrator teases that he is offended by her dislike of the drink. They decide to order pizza, the narrator making fun of the woman for never finishing her food. They sit on the couch with the pizza and she takes the narrator’s hand. It is a meaningful moment until the woman unclasps her hand in order to eat. They watch the TV series based on Spike Lee’s 1980s film She’s Gotta Have It, and the narrator reflects that the sex onscreen is “too clean to reflect the intense mess of being intimate with another” (49).

The pair discuss their recent lack of sexual encounters, and the narrator mentions that the woman and Samuel broke up a month ago. He feels guilty about Samuel. Although the narrator reached out to Samuel after the breakup, Samuel no longer replies to his calls or messages. The narrator and his love interest fall asleep on the couch together, her head in his lap.

When they wake up after midnight, they both go upstairs to sleep more in the woman’s bed. Without speaking words that cannot capture the complexity of the situation, they hold each other and sleep. The narrator leaves at sunrise after kissing the woman on top of her head.

A day later, the narrator goes to the woman’s apartment for a photography session for her archive project. He wonders how the witness for which he wished would react to the evening of shared sleep. He and the woman decide that they don’t need to address that night because “nothing happened.” The protagonist takes photos of the woman’s friend, a poet who has a poem about things going unspoken. The poet senses that something is going on between the pair and tells them to “stay out of trouble” (53). During the photography session, the man and the woman make extended eye contact and it takes his breath away.

The narrator feels that his life is mingling with the woman’s. One example is their conversation about the play The Brothers Size by Tarell Alvin McCraney, which depicts the reunion of two brothers after incarceration. The protagonist tells the woman that he was responsible for his younger brother, almost like a parent. He cries, and she holds his hand but does not look at him.

Sitting with his friend, Isaac, in a theatre, the narrator compares his yearning for the woman to a fever dream. On the night of the session, they cuddled again before he had to return the photography equipment. He thinks of the scholar and curator Donatien Grau writing that ecstasy renders the mind incapable of examining itself. The narrator lists the things about which he’s making himself not think—mostly how it looks for him to be connected to his friend’s ex.

Isaac invites the narrator to a show, but he replies that he is supposed to hang out with his friend. Isaac identifies that the narrator is talking about a woman, explaining that he looks like he’s been struck by a bus and wants to do it again. As expected, the narrator leaves his friends when the woman invites him to come and drink with her and her own friends.

She is drunk and grabs the narrator’s hand when he appears. She introduces him to her two friends. The white man vocally assumes that the woman and the narrator are in a sexual relationship. The narrator thinks that this nasty man is not the right witness for the tender thing between the pair. The other friend contributes that Samuel introduced the protagonist and the woman, delighting the abrasive white man.

Walking to her house that night, the woman asks the narrator to “promise nothing will change” because he’s her closest friend (59). He tries to sidestep but ends up promising. They share her bed again. She drags the man’s arm around her and he feels like they fit. He is aware that something has changed, and it will be hard to deny their mutual desire moving forward—he is stuck in the fever dream.