What Am I to You?

The warmth is still there when Jacob says: “I won’t be around tomorrow. Dinner. Both families, a restaurant, a private room. My father. Pris. A tux.” And the warmth “suddenly ended up off to one side, like something set down in the wrong place.” An apartment you can drive over to — and a room you enter in front of your fathers, with her on your arm. “Two rooms. One for Saturday. The other for everything else.” — “Jacob. What am I to you?” The turn signal clicks louder than his voice. “What? Didn’t catch that.” “He really hadn’t caught it. That was worse than if he’d been pretending.” — “Nothing. Forget it.”

This is the hidden partner’s central question, and the book shows what happens to it most often: it gets no refusal — it gets no hearing. Jacob isn’t lying and isn’t dodging the answer; he is simply taking a turn. For Simon this is more precise than any “no”: a question that wasn’t even heard cannot be asked a second time. Note how quietly he gives up — “Forget it” — and how quickly the old skill finds words that require no answer. The two rooms will remain; in one of them a table will be laid for two families, and “in that arrangement there wasn’t a single place setting for the person he was thinking about.”