The Seat Opposite Me

The first thing Emma said to me was written on the back of a museum leaflet. Is this seat taken? Beneath the question she had drawn a chair with three legs, then added a fourth in a different place. I pointed to the real chair opposite and nodded. She sat down looking relieved that her architectural skills had not been assessed.

We were at a talk about old toys. My friend Lena had persuaded me to come, then cancelled because her daughter was ill. The museum provided captions for the talk, which was why I stayed. I liked old toys, but not enough to spend an evening guessing at a lecturer’s distant mouth.

I am Deaf. I use sign language, read and write English, and can catch some spoken conversation when the conditions suit me. By my thirties I had become quick at explaining what worked for me, if not always patient with the questions that followed. Most introductions become tiresome when people decide one fact must explain the whole person.

Emma did not ask me how much I could hear. She showed me a photograph of a wooden horse on the leaflet and wrote, My grandmother had this. It looked angrier in person. I laughed. Then the talk began, and she turned towards the screen without expecting me to entertain her through it.

Afterwards we stood beside a case of tin cars. She spoke facing me, slowly enough to be useful and then too slowly, because she grew nervous. I showed her my phone. Easier here, I typed. She nodded and answered on her own. We spent fifteen minutes discussing a toy kitchen that appeared better equipped than either of our actual kitchens.

She was thirty-one, restored old shop signs for a small company and owned a flat with a window that did not open properly. I was thirty-four, coordinated deliveries for an arts warehouse and had strong opinions about toy furniture. She asked whether I wanted coffee. I said yes, although the café was closing. We walked to another one and continued on our phones, occasionally laughing so suddenly that the barista looked over.

At home Lena asked whether the talk was good. I said I had met somebody. She sent a row of questions, followed by an apology for the questions. I answered the important one: yes, a date might be involved. I did not yet know. Sometimes people enjoyed an unusual conversation and mistook that enjoyment for an interest in the person having it.

Emma sent a message the next morning. It contained a photograph of a tiny cupboard she found in a second-hand shop and the words, For your eventual mansion. I replied that the mansion required a tiny dishwasher. She found a picture of one by lunchtime. The conversation developed with impressive commitment to an imaginary property neither could afford even at its small scale.

We met on Saturday at an outdoor market. I chose it because there was plenty to look at and no expectation that we should spend the whole time seated in perfect conversation. She chose a ridiculous hat from a stall and put it on without asking whether it suited her. It didn’t. I liked her more.

She knew a few signs from an evening course she attended years before. She told me this in a message, then demonstrated only after I asked. She remembered greetings, colours and a sentence about where the station was. I answered with a joke she didn’t understand. We used the phones again. Neither of us made the gap tragic.

At a food stall she asked what I wanted. I stepped forward and ordered for myself, pointing at the menu and writing one question when needed. Emma moved aside easily. I noticed, because I had dated a woman who gradually became my unofficial spokesperson. She believed she was making life easier. Eventually she answered questions about my own job while I stood beside her.

We sat on a wall to eat. Emma told me about restoring a sign from a closed sweet shop. I told her about a delivery driver who labelled every unfamiliar object sculpture and once applied the word to a vacuum cleaner. She laughed with her whole face. I found myself watching her between messages rather than the screen.

At the end of the afternoon she asked, plainly, whether this was a date. I typed, I hope so. She read it, looked up and reached for my hand. I have no especially elegant account of the kiss. It happened beside a stall selling onions, and a man carrying a sack waited patiently for us to notice he needed to pass.

For several weeks things were easy in the way new things sometimes are when everybody is paying attention. We wrote often. We met in places where we could see each other. Emma asked how I preferred to handle a situation instead of assuming the answer from the last one. I asked about her work, her sister and the fact that she seemed to own twelve nearly identical blue shirts.

One Saturday she visited the warehouse on an open day. I showed her the storage areas visitors were allowed to see and a display of materials we supplied. At work I was the person people asked about schedules, awkward deliveries and which form actually reached the right desk. Emma watched me answer questions and later wrote that she liked seeing me impatient with somebody besides her imaginary miniature kitchen contractor. I laughed. Until then, much of our conversation had concerned how we communicated. Here was another part of my life, full of things I knew and decisions I made without hesitation. We went for lunch afterwards and spent the whole meal discussing a project at work, not because it was especially fascinating but because I wanted to tell her how my week actually felt.

Then she invited me to a friend’s birthday dinner. Six people, she said. A restaurant near her flat. I agreed because I wanted to know the people who mattered to her, and because I disliked being so cautious that a relationship could only exist in arrangements I already controlled.

The table was round, which helped. The room was dim, which didn’t. Her friends were friendly and nervous. One wrote a greeting he learned earlier that day. Another asked me a question while looking down at the menu. Emma repeated it facing me. I answered. For ten minutes the effort was visible and everybody meant well.

Then the conversation gathered speed. People turned, spoke across each other, laughed at things I caught a moment too late or not at all. Emma tried to keep me involved. She began summarising, then speaking for longer stretches while I watched a version of the evening arrive after it had already happened. I had known this might be difficult. Knowing did not make me less lonely at the table.

Halfway through, I went outside. Emma followed after a minute. I told her I was tired and wanted to leave. She looked frightened. On her phone she wrote that everybody liked me. I almost laughed at how little that solved, then saw how hard she was trying to understand.

It isn’t about whether they like me, I wrote. I can’t join the conversation this way. I’m spending the evening being nice about missing it.

She read the message twice. Then she wrote, Do you want me to come with you? I said no. I wanted to go home alone. She accepted it, though her face showed the cost. I kissed her cheek before leaving because I did not want a difficult evening to become a verdict neither of us had reached.

The next morning she asked whether we could talk. We met in my kitchen. I made tea. She brought nothing that required me to forgive her before opening it. We used our phones when needed and took the conversation slowly.

She said she had imagined that being beside me would make the dinner workable. Then she had tried to keep up by passing everything through herself. I told her I recognised the trap. I also admitted I had agreed without asking enough about the restaurant because I wanted to seem easy to be with.

That confession embarrassed me. I spend plenty of time knowing what I need. Wanting somebody can still make me bargain with it. Emma wrote that she liked being with me, not a version of me who never complicated a booking. Then she looked worried the sentence sounded rehearsed. I told her it was a good sentence anyway.

We did not solve every future dinner. We discussed the next one. A small lunch with two friends, daylight, enough time for the actual conversation rather than a translation sprint. I wanted the friends to ask me questions directly. Emma wanted me to tell her when I was struggling before the effort became the only thing I remembered. Both requests were reasonable. Neither guaranteed a perfect afternoon.

She began learning more sign language through a class she chose herself. She asked whether I wanted to practise with her. Sometimes I did. Sometimes I wanted to eat dinner and flirt without becoming a teacher. She learned to accept both answers. I learned that her mistakes could be funny without every mistake requiring a lesson in somebody’s virtue.

One evening she tried to tell me a story using what she knew and accidentally gave her boss a rather unexpected occupation. I laughed so hard I had to put down my cup. She looked offended for two seconds, then demanded the correct version. Later she repeated the story with confidence entirely out of proportion to her accuracy. I loved watching her risk being foolish.

The smaller lunch happened in June. Her friends brought their own questions, phones and willingness to pause. There were awkward moments. There were also jokes I began, stories I finished and a disagreement about a film in which nobody appointed Emma the judge of what I meant. Afterwards I was tired in an ordinary social way, which felt like a luxury.

Lena met Emma the following month. They discussed the museum, then the toy mansion. Lena asked whether we had chosen curtains. Emma showed her a picture of a miniature chandelier she had bought for no defensible reason. I stared at it, delighted. We now owned one object for a house that did not exist.

In autumn Emma invited me to see a sign she finished restoring. We went after the shop closed, with permission, and stood on the pavement while its owner turned on the lights. The lettering glowed warmly above us. Emma watched my face, waiting for my opinion. I told her the curve of the last letter looked like it was about to dance.

She understood most of that without a phone. For the rest, I wrote it down. Then she kissed me beneath the sign while a bus went past, its passengers briefly turning us into part of their evening. Later, at her flat, she showed me a tiny dishwasher she found online. I told her to buy it. The mansion was becoming less imaginary one unnecessary piece at a time.