As everybody knows, being raised Catholic with half a brain means becoming an atheist. At one of our skeptics’ conventions (yes, our early years were actually spent doing things like driving to Philadelphia to watch Penn Jillette debate a rabbi! Oh, to be childless again… or not), Joe heard that Seattle was the least religious city in America. Seattle it was.
A Doctors Without Borders board member threw Joe and me a welcome-to-town party. I swanned into her Lake Washington mansion filled with modern art and future friends, mine for the taking. My whole life, I’ve been liked. Okay, I’ll say it: I’ve been adored. I don’t understand why, on account of my disgraceful personality, but somehow it works. Joe says it’s because I’m the most guy-like woman he’s ever met, but sexy and with no emotional membrane. (A compliment!) I went from room to room, being introduced to a series of women, interchangeable in their decency and warmth. It was that thing where you meet somebody who tells you they like camping and you say, “Oh! I was just talking to someone who’s going on a ten-day rafting trip down the Snake River, you should totally meet them,” and the person says, “That was me.”
What can I say? I’m terrible with faces. And names. And numbers. And times. And dates.
The whole party was a blur, with one woman eager to show me funky shops, another hidden hikes, another Mario Batali’s father’s Italian restaurant in Pioneer Square, another the best dentist in town who has a glitter painting on his ceiling of a parachuting tiger, yet another willing to share her housekeeper. One of them, Sydney Madsen, invited me to lunch the next day at the Tamarind Tree in the International District.
(Joe has a thing he calls the magazine test. It’s the reaction you have when you open the mailbox and pull out a magazine. Instantly, you know if you’re happy to see this magazine or bummed. Which is why I don’t subscribe to The New Yorker and do subscribe to Us Weekly. Put to the magazine test, Sydney Madsen is the human equivalent of Tinnitus Today.)
That first lunch: She was so careful with her words, so sincere in her gaze, noticed a small spot on her fork and was overly solicitous toward the waiter when asking for a new one, brought her own tea bag and asked for hot water, said she wasn’t very hungry so how about we split my green papaya salad, told me she’d never seen Looper Wash but would put a hold on the DVDs at the library.
Am I painting a clear enough picture of the tight-assed dreariness, the selfish cluelessness, the cheap creepiness? A water-stained fork never killed anybody! Buy the DVDs, how about? Eat the food at the restaurant, that’s how they stay in business! Worst of all, Sydney Madsen was steady, earnest, without a speck of humor, and talked… very… slowly… as… if… her… platitudes… were… little… gold… coins.
I was in shock. Living too long in New York does that to a girl, gives her the false sense that the world is full of interesting people. Or at least people who are crazy in an interesting way.
At one point I writhed so violently in my chair that Sydney actually asked, “Do you need to use the powder room?” (Powder room? Powder room? Kill her!) The worst part? All those women with whom I’d gladly agreed to go hiking and shopping? They weren’t a bunch of women. They were all Sydney Madsen! Damn that blur! It took everything I had to kink her fire hose of new invitations: a weekend at her beach house on Vashon Island, introducing me to the wife of someone for this, the playwright of something for that.
I ran home screaming to Joe.
Joe: You should have been suspicious of someone so eager to make friends, because it probably means she doesn’t have any.
Me: This is why I love you, Joe. You just boil it all down. (Joe the boiler. Don’t we just love him?)
Forgive me for long-hauling you on Sydney Madsen. My point is: for ten years I haven’t been able to shake her. She’s the friend I don’t like, the friend I don’t know what she does for a living because I was too stultified to ask the first time and it would be rude to ask now (because I’m not rude), the friend I can’t be mean enough to so she gets the message (because I’m not mean), the friend to whom I keep saying no, no, no, yet she still chases me. She’s like Parkinson’s, you can’t cure her, you can just manage the symptoms.
For today, the lunch bell tolls.
Please know I’m aware that lunch with a boring person is a boutique problem. When I say I have problems, I’m not talking about Sydney Madsen.
Yo-Yo trotting down the street, the prince of Belltown. Oh, Yo-Yo, you foolish creature with your pep and your blind devotion and your busted ear flapping with every prance. How poignant it is, the pride you take in being walked by me, your immortal beloved. If only you knew.