Finally, one that I like…..I think. Maybe too many figures and jumps, but an “atmospheric” to borrow a term, that I think I want to build on.
Beth and I spent the summer in each other’s company, but it wasn’t obsessive. I moved out of Glover Park to a neighborhood in Northeast (“It’s fine, as long as you just stay alert,” I told my friends when they looked at me in horror). I gave up on Proust and enrolled in an arts class at the Corcoran, where I sat next to a 50-year-old divorcee named Janet, who had a daughter. I smiled and listened, and painted stupid landscapes of the National Mall and globbed on layers of acrylic paint that approximated, but never quite achieved, the grayness of the metro.
I cooked for my roommate on Wednesdays, exploring recipes that I found online.
Chicken Tikka Delight.
Tomato Bisque with Scallops.
Pork Chops with Plum Sauce and Wild Rice.
He cooked every other day of the week. His insistence. I think my shaky hands in the kitchen scared him.
Beth and I would sometimes get drinks after work and talk about Washington, secret plots of escape from our jobs, remedies for mosquito bites.
She introduced me to her friends: Lilly and Daphne, Walker and Carter. There were actually two Carters, one dude and one girl. The androgyny of names seemed indicative of something related to class, something to tradition, something to gin. They all went to the DC prep schools that I had heard of: Maret and Sidwell, Visitation and St. Albans. They talked politics with an ease and flippancy that accrues only to the children of politicians and lobbyists. I listened and bummed Marlboro Lights off of them, and nodded knowingly drinking improbably strong martinis that I couldn’t afford. Assessed with careless but almost rhythmic regularity the rate at which the glasses accumulated in front of me.
I would take the metro home and walk happily and drunk and sweating from Union Station, the relentless and long-lingering summer sun against my back. Mosquitoes at my neck. When I arrived home in the air conditioning I would chug a glass of lemonade and water some plants that I was growing in the front yard.
The summer days rolled like that. They passed with work and drinks and my hands on the sink at the end of the day, staring out into the waning heat of the afternoon.
And, of course, Wednesday nights cooking, but that seemed different.
“I don’t know what to do about it,” I said to Beth one afternoon while we ate our lunches on the Kennedy Center patio. I told her about all of the horrendous dates that had gone wrong. On this one, I had overplayed my hand and wound up in a cab on the way home by myself, pondering whether to call or not.
She leaned across the table and stared at me through her dark glasses.
“Wait, go like this,” she said, putting her index finger up to her front teeth, “You have something green caught in your teeth.”
“Oh, thanks. It’s probably spinach,” I said, and I stuck my nail straight into a monster wad of food.
“Let me see,” Beth said.
I ran my tongue over my teeth and smiled.
“Perfect.”
I finished my sandwich and crumpled up the aluminum foil. Turned my face into the hot wind. Beads of sweat were beginning to form on my forehead. I could feel more small streams starting to run down my back, and decided to change the subject.
“So did you decide whether you’re going to move?” I asked.
“Yes, definitely. And I’m looking for a new place somewhere else. Georgetown isn’t for me anymore. The people there aren’t really my friends.”
I couldn’t begin to guess what that meant.
“You know, you say these things to me, Beth and I don’t really know what they mean.”
Beth looked down into the plastic container and forked some greens into her mouth. She seemed to disregard whatever gravity I thought there was in her comment, and ignore whatever gravity I had attempted to put in mine.
“So I was thinking about either Dupont or Logan Circle,” she said.
I imagined her walking through Logan Circle, arcing purposefully around the drunken homeless men, or sitting on the fountain in Dupont in the declining reds and oranges of afternoon light. I felt sweat gathering at the top of my pants, pooling in a disgusting portent of future embarrassment. I’d have to walk with my hands behind my back, like some contemplative old man. The heat was annoying me, and not making the conversational situation any more enjoyable.
“I’m serious. We spend all this time together, I know essentially nothing about you. What the hell? I’m not trying to be creepy about this, I’m trying to be your friend,” I said. All of this had started to come out before I had a chance to consider—
“Whoa. Hold on,” she said, putting her right index finger into the air between us. There was an aching sophistication that underlay everything she did. A difference between pretension and Beth’s particular brand of class. She left it in her footprints, and it hung in the air after every easy gesture. I had caught it when she was showing me how to put in the department code on our copy machine; when I sat behind her at her desk as she tried to figure out a billing contact; and when she slicked cream cheese on her bagel in the morning.
“I’m waiting.”
“I forget what I was going to say.”
It went like this. We could talk about work and moving and drinking and my sporadic and quirky (was this the right word, I wondered, did this really capture the insanity of it) love life. But nothing about Beth’s family. Nothing about a mysterious year that transpired between her last job and our current gig. You withstand certain hitches in friendships that evolve so organically, so naturally. You withstand them because the force of lining up personalities becomes so compelling that, eventually, all you need is shared presence. Not understanding necessarily. Just proximity.
