My Heart Is a Drunken Compass (14 page)

I needed to be careful.

The interior of her Jeep looked like she lived in it half the time, and I felt uncomfortable clearing a space in the passenger seat but eventually managed to carve an area large enough for me to sit, in the middle of bills, old makeup compacts, cereal bar wrappers, and the discarded indications of a serious coffee habit. When I finally settled in, I navigated her downtown and near a sculpture park she was interested in seeing by the revitalized waterfront, and she found parking. She lived north of the city, and I lived right downtown, so I knew the confounding intricacies of the downtown streets better than she did. As I emerged from the truck, I noticed an old sock in the street and I was unsure whether it belonged there or if it had once lived in the Jeep—such was the nature of her backseat—and argued with myself as to whether I should mention it. Perhaps a second sock existed, inside, equally caked with dirt and soot and pebbles. Maybe I was creating a sock tragedy by not mentioning it. I just didn't know.

I decided it would go unmentioned, and as we walked away from the Jeep, she received a call on her cell phone, and in a few simple notes, I recognized her ringtone: “Miss Otis Regrets.” I stopped dead in my tracks and stared at her while she silenced the phone and plunged it back into her voluminous handbag, uncertain if that was her idea of a test, or a joke.

“That's ‘Miss Otis Regrets,' isn't it? You know that song? Cole Porter?” I asked her.

“Of course I know what it is,” she replied.

“You . . . you do know what that song is about, don't you?” I asked, hesitantly.

She gave me another of her big snaggletoothed smiles and thrust her arm through my crooked elbow, my hands deep in the pockets of my coat, and she pulled me along, laughing, with me unsure as to whether I was headed toward my execution, or just a friendly lunch with a bisexual second-wave feminist suffragette, like you sometimes did on the West Coast.

The sculpture park was relatively new at this point, and the groundskeeping reflected this, left quite a bit to be desired. Still, it was a waterfront installation, a part of the revitalization and renewal project for an area of downtown Seattle that had been previously left unused, a no-man's-land between a rail line and the Puget Sound shore, left derelict and un-touristed.

It was an easy walk from my neighborhood, but, being an ex-pat Texan, I hardly walked anywhere without reason, unless there was booze at the end of it. Certainly not for exercise. Today was no different, and we wandered about the place, which felt half-completed, partially abandoned, or simply badly designed as an urban project, and meandered about in full audition for the other.

She was a secret smoker, as she worked for a medical research firm and felt her boss, whom she held in the highest estimation, would be terribly disappointed in her if she found out her habit, so my smelling like a French gangster bothered her very little.

That afternoon, that audition, was very gentle, witty like a Noel Coward one-act, as we playfully teased each other and tried to sound out each other's definitions, boundaries, and issues, the usual kittenness of a first date, and something to which I wasn't much accustomed.

I'd never really “dated,” I began to realize about myself around this time.

My romantic intrusions were usually a result of drunken workplace fumblings, out for drinks with a group of people and hey, here's an empty room . . . why not? Terribly inelegant, sure, but lots of fun when you're twenty-five.

Otherwise, my long-term relationships had evolved out of preservation and planning: I like you, you're a poor artist/musician/craftsperson/painter like me, let's move in together and see how long we can stand each other. I think the term is
bohemian
, when the herpes stays within a certain element of the artsy part of a city. So to speak.

Anyhow, here, with Steph, was one of the first times in my life I was making a choice to “date” someone, to meet that person for a ritualized meal, one on one, and flirt and engage and see where it would lead, over coffee or drinks or the soup du jour, because I was finally independent, stable, and secure enough to make a choice, and not have the choice made for me by circumstance or poverty.

That first afternoon, we were both on our best behavior and we were both quite adorable if nervous, and we eventually strolled downtown and had lunch at a cliffside tavern (there are some steep embankments in Seattle), and then, again, in the middle of our conversation I had another indication that maybe things were not quite what they seemed, when I realized that Steph was checking out the waitress.

“Are you . . . are you checking out the waitress?” I asked her.

“What? No, of course not. But she looks great in that A-line skirt and peasant blouse.”

I thought she looked like a sack of blond potatoes, but maybe that spoke to her European root vegetable/famine genetics, the way a good salsa spoke to mine.

Things were quiet for a minute, and I heard Steph mutter, “pink and tan,” under her breath, and I thought she was going to order a drink.

“Great,” I said, “I'll have a black and tan. What's in a pink and tan?” I asked, a bit loudly, and Steph hid her face in her menu and I looked over her shoulder to see a tourist that had seen far too much of the inside of a tanning booth, looking leathery and hard-ridden, with Day-Glo pink lipstick to match her tube top, and she gave me a hard look. The man sitting next to her also gave me a hard stare, in case my comment stepped in the way of his possibility for sex because I'd inadvertently wandered into the minefield of his date's insecurities.

I hid behind my own menu and began giggling, and we had our first true bonding moment, over someone else's pain.

A minute later, I ordered that beer anyway, the black and tan, because it seemed to be a knock-off Irish public house that we were in, and I sensed the atmosphere chill considerably. Steph ordered a chai tea for herself, and I had my “beer cocktail,” named after the British occupation of Ireland, as goes one of its origin myths. While I calmed down a bit on the first date, she became quiet and uncomfortable, as the drink order somehow triggered something for her.

We continued to see each other. We developed an odd chemistry that could ignite only between two misanthropes, two outsiders.

We loved e-mailing and texting every bit of cleverness back and forth so that working became a distraction, and I think for a little while there, we were able to break free of the Craigslist curse, the sense of “You'll do,” and move into the “Wow, I'm really happy I met you” phase, though Steph was unusually secretive about some really strange things in her life.

She considered herself a writer, was rather impressed with my tenacity and dedication in that I kept writing on my own, quietly and in secret, while I continued working as a graphic designer. She ran a writers' group, she said, and asked if I would be interested in joining.

“Oh, no,” I said. “I tried that once. It's not for me.”

“Why not?” she asked, genuinely curious. “It helps a lot of people to have a deadline or a goal, some kind of obligation that keeps them writing.”

“I'm not on any kind of schedule, really,” I said. “And the writing is kind of compulsive for me. The stories are just there and I have to get them down in order to quiet the narrative in my head. That's why I do it at work, or at night. It's like a humming or a buzzing that doesn't go away until I ground it.”

“And you can't share it with others?”

“I don't really trust or take anyone else's critiques as useful. I mean, I listen to what they have to say about my writing, and then I read their own writing, and if it's inferior to mine, I don't feel they have the authority to comment. And the wounded egos are just tiresome.”

“You don't play well with other children,” she said, smiling.

“And I have to reserve my humiliation for these,” I said, and pulled open a drawer to show her a stack of rejection slips. I'd taken to sending a few, disjointed chapters and writing samples to agencies in New York, addresses culled from the Internet because that's what I had seen on television and in movies as the first step in publishing, but what I was sending out was irregular and haphazard: I deserved the rejection notices. Still, Steph was duly impressed that I had taken that step, had pushed it even that far.

And while she was a consistent journal writer, would spend an afternoon writing a thousand words about something she'd seen or experienced that day, she didn't have a single project she was working on, would do her monthly writing group as an exercise, rather than for productivity.

The more time we spent together, the more our differences began to emerge, and we tried valiantly to overcome them because we liked each other as much as we did.

For our third date, she picked me up at work one Friday afternoon and we drove to a ferry and sat in line in the rain, while she pulled out a plate with a pork chop and asparagus and some mashed potatoes from a dinner party she had thrown the evening before. It felt odd to sit there, in the Jeep, and pick at the food while her dog, a weird, sometimes quite stupid lab mix she called Cleopatra, or Cleo for short, stared over my shoulder and drooled. I made as if to eat, was politely grateful, but then said I wasn't very hungry.

“Not a problem,” Steph said, and then absentmindedly handed the plate over to Cleo, who clamped down on it like a prisoner of war, licking the plate clean in a matter of seconds.

We took the ferry over to the peninsula, drove into the old-growth forest, and rented a cabin for the weekend. On Saturday morning when I woke up, I couldn't find her, had a moment of extreme panic because I thought she'd left, but then discovered her asleep in the Jeep. She had spent the night in the back with Cleo because I had been snoring far too loudly for her taste.

I felt ashamed, but she was playful about it.

“I'm a loud sleeper,” I said.

“We'll have to get that fixed,” she said, as she took the dog out for the morning ritual.