thursday, october 17, 2013
a grey area
No, I wouldn’t say that Jack and I are friends.
We don’t even have friends in common, not any of the ones my husband and I go to dinner with or meet at a ballgame or invite to a party. Jack was never my client, just someone I worked with a random handful of times over the many decades of our rarely overlapping careers. His wife, whose name I don’t recall, is very nice, lovely, friendly.
But there is something. I recognize his voice in a crowded cocktail party. Our eyes catch and hold for a second before one of us looks away. In a group, chatting, I bite back finishing his sentence; he under-laughs at my funny story. But there are no steps across any lines. We greet like everyone else does — quickly pressed cheeks, my palm on his biceps, my elbow a spring, maintaining half a careful dancer’s frame.
Young people these days call that having a connection, I think. I have thought for a long time that we had a connection, a small secret, although I am insecure enough that I used to wonder if I had concocted it from weightless bits of movement and scraps of words. Could those moments be that exquisitely subtle? Logic would say to Foolish Vanity: you are imagining all of it, Happily Married But Missing Romance Woman. Then, at an event, Jack stopped at our table to say hello to everyone, and his hand slipped off the back of my chair and flattened against my spine, his warm palm on the bones barely covered with skin, and stayed there until he ran out of words.
I wanted it to stop, this thing that wasn't happening, and to never stop.
One winter after warm-palm night, several years ago now, my husband and I were at a charity thing. The men were in tuxes, the younger women in slither and bling and long stretches of polished tan skin. I had finally cut off my ash-blond-from-a-bottle hair; what was left was a bristle of silver and white. It was pretty in a novel sort of way, but I still looked my advancing age, dressed in a modest fold of black silk.
Between dinner and dessert people were mingling, moving between tables, hurrying to the bar or the bathroom, when we found ourselves trapped in a wall scrum by the MC’s demand for everyone’s attention. People backed into us and we backed into other people behind until all of us stood as packed and stiff and self-conscious as elevator riders. Body contact was unavoidable and awkward around the hips; all you could do was try not to squirm.
A tall young man stood close on my right and another in front of me. My husband was to my left and slightly ahead; I had gotten tucked in far behind his shoulder. Walled in by black jackets, I could only listen, so I dropped my chin, as if in prayer, and closed my eyes to wait it out. Moments passed, the MC’s electrified voice buzzed on; I smelled men and wool and began to wish I were taller and had a fan.
Then the man behind me tilted his head down and slightly forward in, to an uninterested observer, the most natural way. He breathed in and then out, almost a sigh, and I smelled the low smoke of Scotch. His lips not quite touched the tiny blonde hairs on a nubbin of skin near my right ear. He spoke quietly to me, Jack did, for a minute or so, or a lifetime, of longing and love and terrible luck. Gently, with a rumbling sureness, he fed me words like beautiful and incredible and impossible. Tears fell straight off my eyes onto the backs of my hands, clasped just below my heart.
When applause and cheering erupted and reached for the ceiling and the band played a ta-da for some grand announcement, a goal reached, a winner crowned, something, our hot knot of people came untied. My back was cool where Jack’s warm body had moved away from me. I raised my eyes and looked straight ahead.
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