Rostam was brushing his teeth on the toilet in the Tango Suite of the Doubleday Manhattan hotel, when he heard sobs knocking on the door like the End coming for its due. He stood, spit out his toothpaste, and rinsed in the sink. He looked blankly into the mirror, and the mirror looked blankly into him, and Rostam considered how much he would rather stare at himself interminably than start the dreadful story that was brewing in the room on the other side of the door.
He stepped into the dark hotel room. It was late morning, but with the curtains drawn, it might as well have been midnight. The TV stand was almost bare, aside from a few placards waiting to inform and greet new guests. The TV itself was off, reflecting Rostam’s eerie silhouette back at him. On the single suitcase rack, Rostam’s bag lay closed. He had only unpacked his toiletries. The double bed by the windows was untouched, the duvet was taut and smooth, and the pillows at its head looked like an artistic rock pile.
On the bed closer to Rostam, Blanche lay face down, her hair splayed in a crazy explosion around her head. Her sobs shook the pillow and shimmied down the side of the bed, like extensions of her hair, running along the floor and up the walls, each decibel and note of sorrow making a beeline straight for Rostam. Of all the things he could do, the last one he wanted was to sit on the bed by her legs and talk. He took her sadness as an affront. He wanted to hurtle to the far bed and bivouac under the covers till the storm passed. Regardless of what else transpired, Rostam knew, their five years dating anniversary was ruined.
A more realistic option emerged. He started to walk to the window. Rostam thought if he opened the curtains, the sun might be an ally in the fight ahead. The darkness made everything worse. Maybe he would even open the window. The sounds of New York City living its life, honking its horns, and doing God knew what else would throw this foolish sadness into perspective. How could anyone cry in a brightly lit hotel room while a man below shouted about how fresh his kebabs and tzatziki were?
The dust motes floated excitedly in the little strands of light that had worked past the curtains, and Rostam felt them beckon to him. But before he had even reached the far bed, Blanche called out. “You’re jrrr gnng to wlk wy?”
She was speaking into the pillow.
“Sorry?” Rostam said, sounding as nonchalant as possible.
Blanche sat up and her thin, brown bangs swayed in front of her forehead like tendrils. Her eyes though, as large and full as they always seemed, were dry. Her pale face was still strained, the muscles in her cheek still tight, but the tears were gone.
“I said, ‘You’re just going to walk away?’”
“I was going to open the curtains,” Rostam replied, pointing at the window as if Blanche might be worried he was planning to investigate some faraway casement.
“Don’t you think you should ask me why I am weeping?” she demanded.
It was a ridiculous question, Rostam thought. It made him angry. In that question was the presumption that he did not care, that if she did not remind him of his boyfriendly duties, he might wander off and start a family with a strange woman or something. Every time there was an option between doing the “right thing” and the “wrong thing,” Blanche assumed Rostam was headed straight for desolation and needed to be corrected, steered like a horse with a bit in his mouth.
He looked at her and then back at the window. Not trying to hide his annoyance, he walked slowly to her and sat on the side of the bed. They both faced the wall. There was a reproduction of a Toulouse-Lautrec piece hanging in a black frame. They had once seen an exhibit featuring his work in Paris at the Musée d’Orsay. At every new piece, Rostam had turned to Blanche and said, “Oh this, this is the really famous one.”
After the tenth time, they both broke down laughing, admitting that all of Lautrec’s pieces had merged into a geometrical mass of soft reds and black cats in their minds. Rostam looked at the replica in the hotel room and thought “They must have picked the most famous one.”
Blanche was facing the painting, but her eyes were on the frame. It was dusty, so dusty. And if that was true, what other corner of the place had been neglected? Maids racing to finish work and hoping prying eyes didn’t look in just the wrong place.
Rostam turned to face Blanche. She turned to him. “Well?” she said.
He didn’t want to ask the question.
She laughed to herself, looking back in the direction of the painting. She laughed like she simply couldn’t believe what was happening. However, she said, “I know what you’re doing,” and that took Rostam by surprise, because he did not.
“You’re playing dumb,” she said. “You’re…” and she waved her arms around to indicate the gloomy hotel room around them.
Just like her tears, any semblance of sorrow had left her voice. She sounded angry and hounded Rostam. “You know. You see your lover, your girlfriend, your partner,” she really emphasized partner, “crying, in pain, and you walk right by.”
“You don’t give a shit,” she said with finality.
Blanche almost never swore. Rostam was frazzled. He cupped his hands in his lap and watched them. He asked them “Why are you weeping?”
As soon as those words were out of his mouth, Rostam regretted it. He knew he would receive no quarter nor would doing as she desired calm the situation. Reacting to her never worked out well for him. He was the pig being led to the slaughterhouse, confessing his sins along the way.
Rostam expected an answer but heard nothing. Silence. He looked to Blanche. She was still examining the painting, or the dust on the frame, or casting her vision straight through the wall into the bathroom, into another room and another couple’s life. Finally, she turned to Rostam. She folded her arms.
The last time he had seen her fold her arms was during the summer, seven months ago. It was a lazy Saturday, the kind that Rostam cherished and the sort that Blanche despised. She felt the hours running away into Sunday and watching the minutes pass was like watching a sandcastle slowly collapse on itself. She insisted Rostam find them something to do. “Google it. I did it last weekend.”
They found themselves at the Trichester Gardens and Arboretum outside of Boston. From the outside, all they could see was a long, uninterrupted line of towering hedgerows. No trees peeked over the tops. “Must only have short plants,” Rostam said. Blanche just looked at him.
They paid a bored teenager in a kiosk and were given tickets and a map. No one collected or checked their tickets. “What was the point of giving us the tickets?” Rostam asked. “Why not just have us pay?”
“Probably if we leave, we can come back,” Blanche said, and Rostam could tell she was annoyed.
The map was large, too large, Rostam thought. He stood outside the car in the parking lot and waited for Blanche to finish applying her sunscreen to every exposed, pale inch. “You should put some on, too,” she called from the car, squinting into the sun to see Rostam.
He was reading the map and didn’t look up. “I like to tan,” he said.
She was right, he knew, but he had made that same comment about tanning, first as a joke, then seriously, so many times that he felt obligated to suffer the inevitable sunburns.
The door opened and closed. “Ready?” she asked.
“Hold on. Hold on.”
Rostam was still engrossed in the map. The place was huge, and his enthusiasm was tepid, at best. He saw, on the map, long sinewy strands of walking paths. There were no marked monuments or bathrooms or cafes around them. Just trees, bushes, grasses, flowers, bushes, brambles, weeds, and more bushes. All of them with long forgettable names. He understood the finiteness of life when he considered that map. Rostam should have been home studying, or working on his dissertation, or thinking about working on his dissertation. “Ok,” he said. “Let’s go.” He held the map, glancing at it, as if a new, short path would emerge on the page.
They trudged along in the heat, at first pretending to care about the tiny metal placards nailed into the trunks of trees, infuriatingly far from the actual walkway.
“American Bladdernut” read Rostam out loud. They stepped back and looked up. It was definitely a tree. Rostam looked to Blanche to see if she was reacting in some way. She craned her neck, and he did the same. Nothing resolved. No mystery solved. Tree.
They approached the crest of a hill. They had stopped reading placards. They had given that up when Rostam had insisted they figure out what one particular tree was. Its huge trunk and sprawling canopy were the most impressive things he had seen all day. Blanche didn’t feel like wading through some E. milii to learn the name of the tree. She watched Rostam twist and turn among the thorns, stumble out of the thicket, and scrutinize the sign on the tree. He turned around and shouted back to her on the path, “It’s a maple. That’s it. A fucking maple.”
Even from a distance, Blanche could see the sweat on Rostam’s brow. The sun made his expanding bald spot more visible, the hairs limply emerging like dying plants from an arid pot. The tree towered over him and one long branch extended just above Rostam’s head, like a giant hovering arm. They made an odd pair, the tree and Rostam. The light cast a harsh yellow sepia over everything and together they looked like a strange old-time photograph or daguerreotype. Freaks from a 19th century circus: The world’s tallest man and his small, sweaty friend. Blanche frowned a tiny frown Rostam could not see, and he made his slow return to her.
They were rewarded at the top of the hill, and Blanche pointed limply, like she was deadly tired: “That’s nice.”
In front of them was a short hedge maze, the path through it covered in white gravel. Around it were planted gardens, Baroque statues and columns, and finally, on the other side of the maze was a large pond with a fountain shooting into the sky. To get to the pond, one had to walk down a set of long stone steps.
“Can you get a photo of me in front of the water?” Blanche said.
She lingered by some flowerbeds. She admired and examined some statues, but Rostam was still impatient. He glanced over Blanche’s shoulder at a bed of white roses and said, “hmm,” and made his way to the lilies. He spent more time with the statues than the plants. The carved eyes were either all sclera or all pupil. They were either staring right through him, mesmerized by him and watching his every move, or they had faded into a depth of total disillusionment. Nothing was worth watching anymore. He wondered aloud, to Blanche, who was rather far away, “How did they know what abs and fit bodies looked like?”
“Huh?” Blanche asked, either because she did not hear or because she could not believe how tedious Rostam had become.
“I mean, it takes a lot of concerted effort to get that ripped. Did they just accidentally get muscular and lean? Lugging around all the equipment as soldiers?”
He got no response. It must have been the second option. Blanche joined him at the maze entrance. “Should we go in?” she asked.
Rostam looked into the maze. He thought he could see the center. The hedges were not that high, anyway. He could look right over them, despite his short stature. “I mean, look.” He pointed.
“We go right there, then left, then straight, and skip a couple of false turns. Then, left. Center.”
She looked at him. He read her face. “She’s confused,” he thought.
“Look, you see that hedge with the extra branch they forgot to trim? That’s basically the center.”
“Ok,” she said.
She walked away around the side of the maze. Blanche did not look back or peer over the hedges to make sure Rostam was correct.
They were at the top of the steps that led to the pond. The fountain was comprised of stone ducks and frogs ejecting water from their mouths. Their eyes were just like those of the garden statues.
“Where do you want the photo? In front of the water?” Rostam asked, as he pulled out his phone.
“Sure,” said Blanche, and by the time she answered, she was already halfway down the steps, sending her words to the water and the petrified beasts.
“Is this a good spot?” she called up. “Make sure to get the top of the fountain in the photo.”
When she looked up at Rostam, she saw he was holding his phone in one hand and had the map up to his face again. He lowered the map. He saw Blanche with her arms folded, and she was looking up and away from everything. She was blinking hard and taking deep breaths.
“Ready?” he called.
She wiped something from her eyes, but Rostam could not see what. She nodded and he took her photograph.
That was the last time, and the only other time, Rostam had seen Blanche fold her arms. It wasn’t an exceptional movement or anything most people would consider worth remembering, but somehow the moment had registered with Rostam. He had noted it down like a clue. In the Tango Suite, Rostam finally and unhappily understood the hint.
Blanche didn’t have an answer for Rostam. “Why are you weeping?” he repeated, louder.
“I heard you,” she said, and her voice cracked.
She had grown used to not being asked. The tears she had just shed were some of the least interesting of the past seven months. She thought about tears by the fountain. Looking up at Rostam while he stood on the steps, sweat pouring down his forehead, his face buried in a map, desperate to escape.
She thought about the tears that flowed some weeks after the trip to the Gardens. Another Saturday. Rostam had won the day. They had taken a stroll around Back Bay. They had sat in the patio of Dillon’s and eaten. Rostam had a juicy burger and a huge beer. Blanche had picked at the yellowed leaves of romaine on a salad no one ever ordered. They put a new TV show on in the background while Rostam studied, or wrote, or read articles. She did not know. He did not say, even though she might have helped. She was in finance after all, the same field as his doctorate. Industry, yes, but she knew what she was doing. Rostam swore he did not hold non-academics in contempt, but she always felt a simmering condescension when it came to their work lives. She talked about hers. Rostam did not.
Sometime on the walk back from Dillon’s, when Rostam was looking for a special brand of beer in the musky cellar liquor store, Blanche received a text from Quim, her colleague.
“We are going out tonight. Team bonding. Liberty Hotel bar. Would love to see you there.”
There was an implied winky face, she felt. She thought, I don’t think Quim would have said “love to see you there” to Gerald, the acne riddled Oberlin College graduate, ostracized at school for being into finance, and ostracized at Timmons, Ramos, and Goojemon for thinking anyone who worked in the financial industry actually liked the subject.
Rostam emerged with two six packs of Corona, a meager prize after what had felt like a long time in the liquor store. “All set.”
When they were back in Rostam’s apartment, he immediately cracked a beer and asked if she wanted one. She said no. Blanche barely drank. Rostam took it as an affront even though he himself did not drink a lot by most people’s standards. He felt like she needed a better audience, a more inspiring instigator than he was to accept a drink.
They did not live together, yet. Rostam enjoyed his bachelor pad, an MIT funded graduate student housing studio, with rectangular furniture, exposed brick in the most perplexing of places, and a dreadful linoleum floor throughout. Blanche had a one bedroom in a distant corner of Somerville. She had no evidence that Rostam would be a messy living partner, but she was convinced their shared home would only be maintained by her, and so she preferred taking care of a smaller abode and decorating with unopened cookbooks and auspiciously placed yoga mats.
They were sitting on Rostam’s tiny red loveseat, which was identical to the loveseats in other graduate student apartments, watching the options on Netflix scroll by a small TV screen. Blanche cleared her throat. She felt nervous for some reason.
“So,” she started. “I have a work thing tonight.”
“Wow,” said Rostam, still looking at the TV. “On a weekend?”
“Well, it’s a team bonding thing. I don’t have to go, or anything,” she added the last part quickly. “But I think I want to go. It’s just drinks at the Liberty.”
Blanche waited for Rostam to ask if he could join or if she wanted him to come along. He said, “Are you coming back here tonight or am I going to see you tomorrow?”
Blanche sat in an Uber as it pulled away from Rostam’s building in Cambridge. It was nestled in a neighborhood that was neither residential nor commercial. The typical MIT architecture dominated: Buildings that looked like warehouses which probably stored secret laboratories were the only structures around. While it was lively and even inspiring during the bustling day, as soon as work ended, the neighborhood was desolate, sad, scary, and almost dystopian. She closed her eyes, and felt tears welling up.
Every quiet, dark building the Uber passed made Blanche want to turn around. She was leaving Rostam behind in some sort of warzone or wasteland. But then she thought of him, engrossed in whatever he was doing. He wouldn’t notice a thing. She was crying. She felt like a bad person, but why she could not say, and she felt angry at Rostam for making her that way.
As the car passed through Central Square, on to Kendall Square, and finally across the Longfellow Bridge, her mood brightened. The lights of the buildings, offices, bars, apartments, evoked possibilities, and she felt unburdened. By the time she was dropped off at the Liberty Hotel, she felt fantastic. Before entering the building, she looked up its stone façade and took in the towering Mass General Hospital Buildings which crowded around the hotel. She looked back over the river into Cambridge and saw small silhouettes of people walking, biking, embracing, and living along the bridge.
Blanche was late. Quim was already surrounded by the rest of the team, though he towered over them. He was laughing and holding a drink. Though his eyes were closed while he laughed, Blanche could swear she saw a sliver of eye between his lids, welcoming her privately before he did so publicly.
Joaquim Fontana was an Argentinean-American who had been at Timmons, Ramos, and Goojemon as long as Blanche. They started on the same day, though that was merely the pretext he used to become friendly with her. She had watched him from the beginning. Her desk was neat, her pencil skirt wrinkleless and she addressed her bosses with succinct professionalism. Quim walked and talked like he was one of the co-founders. She had despised that about him at first. Blanche had entered the firm, and the working world in general, with set ideals and images about what success and a career looked like. People like Quim did not fit in there. Her mind was populated with men from GQ catalogs and women from the back covers of self-help investing books.
However, she had to admit, whatever Quim was doing was working. He was always selected for special teams, for special projects, and the bosses slapped his back, literally and metaphorically. Blanche tried to emulate him. The first time she had made a joke to Gina Ramos, the daughter of the firm’s namesake, there had been an uncomfortable pause. Then Gina had laughed, and, following her cue, Hank Finnerty had laughed, too. Gerald, the Oberlin grad, laughed after Hank and Gina. Quim had only grinned. He folded his arms across his chest and directed the smile at Blanche. She felt hot and thought she was sweating. She went to fold her own arms, to hide some invisible sweat patches, but refrained from doing so. She just smiled at him and walked away from her audience. Rostam was happy for her when she told the story. He thought it was good she was making friends at work.
The little performances continued and multiplied. Sometimes Quim wasn’t there, but most of the time he was, and Blanche found herself relaying fewer and fewer of the stories to Rostam. They had become common enough, she told herself.
Somehow, she and Quim had exchanged numbers. Somehow, she had found herself closing the bar at the Liberty with Quim. Was she drunk? It had been so easy to stay, the words exchanged with Quim and the sips of beer, wine, and cocktails flowed together timelessly. She felt like the women, laughing, usually holding a highball glass, one sees in advertisements for cheap casino resorts.
They stood outside the hotel, at the entrance where taxis idled. Now that she was standing, she felt tipsier, but also in the evening air, she felt clear headed. Blanche took a deep breath. Quim had been checking his phone, but then plunged it into the pocket of his camel hair jacket, too heavy for the weather, and looked at Blanche. He wiggled his eyebrows in the universal gesture that indicated they shared an inside joke among that crowd of strangers.
She said, “That was a really fun date.”
Blanche couldn’t believe the words that had escaped her lips. Her other colleagues hadn’t even left that long ago. What had it been? An hour? Yet, they had seemed, from the beginning, merely a frame. They had decorated the central interaction of her painting. In some ways, they were essential. They weren’t her young and foolish college friends. They weren’t the unattractive, nerdy colleagues of Rostam. They were professionals, like Blanche, enjoying drinks at one of Boston’s most prestigious bars. A good frame enhances the painting but does not distract from the truth.
Quim didn’t noticeably react. He seemed to be mulling over what she had just said. Blanche, for her part, took out her phone and started looking at nothing, a word finding game, Uber, an old webpage she had been reading in the bathroom after lunch.
Quim said, “You mean the last hour? Yeah, that was fun.”
Blanche thought she saw him wink, but she wasn’t sure.
Blanche still hadn’t told Rostam why she was weeping. She looked like she was going to vomit. She rocked back and forth at the edge of the bed, her eyes were wide, she kept opening and closing her mouth, and Rostam even stood up to avoid the puke.
“Are you going to throw up?” he asked. “Can I get you anything?” he added from instinct.
She didn’t look at him but shook her head slowly. He believed her, and his relief was soon replaced by exasperation. Why had she told him to ask the question if she was going to act like this? Rostam finally went to the window as he had initially intended. He opened the curtains wide with a theatrical flourish, and the sun streaming in made Rostam shield his eyes. Blanche was still facing the other direction.
Rostam looked straight down the side of the hotel, out the window. There was a man selling kebabs, but his voice did not reach the room. Rostam had no appetite, but the view of the outside world and sun did fortify him as he had hoped. He leaned on the windowsill and faced the bed. When had Blanche become so distant, so inscrutable?
Rostam thought of a cool September weekend, the kind which brings unsteady relief to those complaining about the unending New England heat, awakening dark memories of winter in Massachusetts. He was outside on a patio in what appeared to be a backyard and garden supply store. In fact, The Gardener’s Table was one of the most prestigious and difficult lunch reservations in greater Boston. The restaurant had only one table that seated up to four people, and reservations had to be made a whole year in advance. Outside of the daily meal, the restaurant really did function as a gardening store. It was overpriced.
Rostam glanced from Blanche, seated on his left, to her colleague, Quim, whom she had invited and was sitting across from her. There was no chair across from Rostam. Blanche was leaning forward in her seat, tearing the hunk of baguette in her hands into smaller and smaller pieces, and occasionally passing one of those pieces into her mouth, which spent most of the time babbling and babbling to Quim, who seemed more than happy to do the same. Rostam had not heard Blanche speak that much in ages.
“Quim is an interesting name,” Rostam said, interrupting the pair’s easy flow.
“Yes,” said Quim slowly. “It is short for Joaquim. I am named for my grandfather.” Quim smiled at Rostam, daring him to go on. “Rostam is an interesting name, too.”
“It’s Iranian. Thanks,” replied Rostam, unsure if it was a compliment.
“I am Argentinean,” continued Quim in his slow, loud voice.
It seemed like he would say more, but he just stopped, looking from Rostam to Blanche, back and forth slowly, a calm, collected, pendulum.
“You’re not from Argentina, though? Right? I thought you were from DC?” asked Blanche.
Quim, for once, looked unprepared. “Well, yeah, that’s right. I am a first-generation immigrant. I still feel connected to Argentina.”
Sensing a follow up question, he added, “I don’t get to go back as often as I would like. Expensive, you know. Unstable economy.”
He returned to smiling.
“You must know what it’s like, Rostam.”
“Not at all.”
A woman appeared at their table. Presumably she was a waitress, but she was wearing a dirty apron, caked in mud from the collar to the bottom. Strands of sweaty hair had slipped out of her bun and dangled in front of her brow. She lifted her hands, which were ensconced in gardening gloves the size of her head and no less dirty than the rest of her. In each hand she held a bundle of white onions, gripping the stems so that it looked like she was toting the heads of her decapitated victims by the hair.
“Fresh from our humble garden. On the house. Shall I slice you some?” she spoke in belabored breaths.
“You mean, just raw onion?” Rostam said.
Before she could strike him down, Quim answered, “Well, I would love some. Just bring them out for all of us, and I’ll eat whatever is left over.”
Then, he laughed. The waitress laughed. Blanche watched the happy pair with pride, as if they were performing a play she had written. As the waitress walked to the kitchen, Quim leaned forward towards Blanche. In a stage whisper and exaggerating the words with his mouth, he said, “I love this place.”
Rostam watched. Blanche’s hand moved forward under the table, but then she pulled it back, with a sharp recoil. She looked at him out of the corner of her eyes, which were suddenly wide and fearful and ready to break. Rostam saw everything but pretended not to. He wasn’t sure what to make of it, and a little part of him wanted to believe he hadn’t seen anything at all.
Blanche started to speak. She was still examining the wall, the painting. She said, “I…” and trailed off. As she spoke, she turned her head slowly. She paused to look at the blank and silent TV, as if she hadn’t noticed it there or was shocked to find one in a hotel room.
Rostam lifted his hands with his palms facing up. He cocked his head, trying to make it clear that he was waiting, but staying silent, as if making any noise of his own would cause Blanche to retreat once more. The silence grew and grew.
He couldn’t stand it. He sighed, a loud attention seeking sigh, and finally Blanche turned her head just a few inches more to see him out of the corner of her eyes and Rostam saw again something large, sad, and breakable. And he knew.
So, he said it.
“I know who it is.”
“You do?” She sounded genuinely shocked. “You do.”
And it was over, the bridge was crossed. They both felt like crying, but neither felt sad. Their moods shifted, as if upon realizing they would not cry, they started to feel like laughing. Rostam was trying to suppress a smile. Blanche thought he had not looked so handsome in ages. She thought, with a shot of clarity, that Rostam telling her he knew might have been his last act as her boyfriend, lover, and partner. That was the last burden she wanted him to bear on her behalf, to end that horrible morning, confront the beast of their discontent.
All she said was “Thank you.”
“For what?” Rostam asked.
Another hard question, thought Blanche. She avoided it and said, “I guess I am glad we can still see far enough… into… each other, even here at the…” and she stopped. She wanted to say “The End,” but admitting that was too blunt for the moment.
He looked at Blanche. She smiled back. Their faces open to each other, appreciating the minute tinges of beauty amongst the rubble of a relationship, they would never again be so close. There would never be anything private between them again: all the inside jokes had been said, all the memories were getting one last look over before being stored away.
They felt warm and peaceful and everything they tried to communicate in that sunny silence between them was genuine. Rostam walked over to the suitcase rack and unclasped his bag. He went to the bathroom and brought out his toiletries and laid them on top of his clothes. Blanche looked on, still smiling, but with sadness emanating through the room again.
The light from the window was streaky and the beams extended between the erstwhile lovers like two long arms. Yesterday, Last Year, or just A Different Time lay across those arms panting quietly and weakly like a dying dog. Rostam shut his suitcase and the closing clasp rang out like a shot.
About the Author
Mazi Kazemi is an assistant professor of finance at Arizona State University. His poetry and prose have been published in Epiphany (2026 Pushcart Nominee), BoomerLitMag (despite being a Millennial), Canyon Voices, and other venues.
