Vanessa Cuti
Associate Editor Molly Reid: In Vanessa Cuti’s “Your Future,” she provokes the reader to fill in the white space around the narrator’s dinner with a prior acquaintance. Familiar in its outline, vivid in its detail—”[The toothpicks] were bent and wet, and the wood fanned at the edges where he had jammed them between his teeth”—this story probes the messy core of consent: what it means to give it, what it means to imagine it, what it means to tell a story about it. Cuti asks us, “You want to know about the print on the duvet?” We do. No, wait, we don’t. What is relevant? What is admissible? At what point does our interest in the details become prurient?
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Your Future
I’ve never known when to take my napkin off the table. It was the type of place that offers black napkins, and I had already put it in my lap, and I sat there with my hands folded on the edge of the table, just in front of my plate. I waited for him to say something.
There was a twitching in him. I could sense it then while I watched the way he moved his fingers on his glass and rearranged his fork and knife. He shifted his plate. If he had had a moustache, he would have been twirling the ends. I imagined them shiny and pointed. Let’s just get this out of the way now, he started.
I could see people passing on the street. The couples who swung their arms—hands held in the middle—killed me. The waiters buzzed and smiled and bent in half at every table’s edge. Outside, I had seen a panhandler with his palms to the sky, and when I walked by, he said Five dollars and I’ll tell you your future.
It was too late to say This is a mistake because his hand was already on my knee. It’s nice to see you again after all these years, but I didn’t think this out; I have to get back home. By then it was on my thigh and then that dark spot between my thigh and the rest. I wondered why they had seated us on the same side.
It was too easy. Snails, in parsley and butter. Game hen. A pasta that I didn’t touch. Napoleon. His lips smacked when he ordered that.
You want to know about the print on the duvet? About the way the bed hardly moved. About the uneven seams in the wallpaper. The drip of the tap. The bald spot. I gave up. I said okay. At that point it was the same either way.
He had calluses; I’ll tell you that. The skin so rough in places I thought it inhuman.
Unreasonable. It was nothing I was used to.
I remember that he used two toothpicks. They were bent and wet, and the wood fanned at the edges where he had jammed them between his teeth. He cracked them over his knuckles. They sat in a small, polite pile on the side of his salad fork, which he had ignored when they brought the salad. Yes, that’s right. The salad. I failed to mention that. He’d also ordered us a salad.
