Last nite I went to meet some old friends from boarding school at Diner. One of them was a girl I’d only met once before, because she came to the school right after I left it. I didn’t remember our one meeting so after I said
nice to meet you I was taken aback when she responded by standing up from her seat at the bar, so that her face was very very close to mine. She stood there for a moment without saying anything, but with a funny expression on her face, like she couldn't believe it. Finally she said, How tall are you? I don’t remember you being this tall.
Oh, well, I’m wearing heels, I said, but I am pretty tall. I’m sorry, I’d forgotten we’d met.
She didn’t say anything to that so stupidly I said, Well, how tall are
you?
I’m 167, she said.
Oh, I said. I had forgotten all my metric conversions. I started to ask Sara.
Don’t look at
me, she said.
So with this awkward beginning we all sat down to our drinks.
The girl I’d forgotten meeting was beautiful, but in a childlike way. It seemed to be deliberate; her bangs were a bit crooked & she had large white barrettes clipped on either side of her thin hair. She also had a bit of an overbite & a lot of the time she would exaggerate her English accent, which made her sound like a little girl playing tea. She kept calling Williamsburg “hipster sinister” & she would trill it loudly --
hipstah sinistah! -- cracking herself up every time.
She was sitting between Sara & me at the bar, & she would lean in close to us to tell us things, but one at a time, so that the conversations were intimate & excluded the other person.
There was something charming about the way she seemed to be purposefully blurring the physical differences between us. She insisted I had to be part Asian, like herself, tho she was hardly the first person to have done that. She wanted me to get fringe like hers. She put on my glasses & she gave me her lipstick to wear. After she handed me the tube she suddenly said
Hold on! I froze with the stuff about a millimeter from my lips. She was digging around in this enormous overflowing bag. I got this horrified feeling that she hadn’t expected me to use her lipstick at all & so was going to produce a napkin so she could wipe my germs away or something. But instead she finally came out with a little pocket mirror. The lipstick was a very bright melon-orange color. She cooed a lot over the results in that teatime voice.
We talked about old girlfriends we’d had; I don’t remember how it came up. We had both been in love affairs that ended poisonously. She spoke very sadly about an actress she once knew. How long ago was it? I asked her.
It was 2 years ago, she said, sighing.
& you said you’ve been with your boyfriend 5 years, right?
5 years, she confirmed.
The unasked question hung there.
Finally she said, My boyfriend is a very tolerant person.
You’re lucky, I said.
I love him so much, she said. If anyone will ever be the one for me, it’s him. But I have a
thirst, she said, giggling a little at the dramatic word, that I haven’t gotten rid of since I met her.
She was drunk by then & her eyes were very glassy in the candlelite. & then she leaned over to say something to Sara, leaving me to myself again.
Her brother came; he was East London, she was Notting Hill. He was very
innit this &
innit that, like a Zadie Smith novel. He told me about the West Indian & Turkish men’s clubs he went to & the Italian-poets-besides-Dante of the thirteenth century & we tried calling my weed guy but he was in Philly & I think somewhere in there he invited me to London.
& everybody had been drunk & ready to call it a nite by 1, so when I got home I was very surprised to see that it was 4.
