*
Days off I spend among flowers. When I first saw the dahlia grove at Golden Gate Park there was a moment of breathless recognition. How I had missed the flowers I grew up amongst! Those luscious crab claws and jacaranda of childhood. But here too are monster blossoms with wild faces. Not the same, because this soil, this air, yields different beauties, but likewise seductive. I gaped at them, worshiped their tumbled madness or precisely placed geometry. From the lightest champagne pink to the bloodiest midnight dark they turned their bold faces to the sun, and I wanted to kiss each one. So I cajoled and worked my way through the ranks of volunteers until I am here once a week. My fingers in the dirt, stripping away dead leaves, loving these flowers.
*
This is my life. A private undertaking. A place of refuge and solitary pleasures. And then, as always, everything changes.
Most evenings I am home curled up with a textbook. The human body doles out its secrets bit by bit, so there is always more to learn. But this night I am restless. A warm spell has fallen over the city. It is a rare enough thing to make people spill out into the open, everyone giddy at the thought of walking the streets without jackets, sweaters, scarves. There is the feel of a holiday. I feel a pounding restlessness in my blood, and soon the textbook is abandoned and I am pacing the apartment, not sure what to do with myself. My phone pings. It is Nadine, a nurse on my floor who has been after me to come out for ages. She has said, “You need to get out more. You’re alone too much.” Now she texts, My new dude is spinning. At the Elbow Room. Come?
I thumb back, Yes ?
What? Really?!? ? ? ? ?
I am already pulling on my shoes.
I walk down the long stretch of Twenty-fourth Street to the bar, where shimmering curls of silver ribbon hang from the ceiling and throw swirls of light around the dim interior. It’s packed and loud; it feels like we are all swimming underwater, moving through some green, lightning-streaked liquid. Nadine grabs my hand as I walk by, pulls me into a booth, pushes an icy bottle of beer into my hand. A man she knows crowds in next to me and suddenly I am at sea.
He doesn’t look at me. I don’t look at him. We don’t talk to each other. But I can feel his long thigh resting against mine, the heat of it almost too much to bear. He talks to the others squashed into the booth with us. I can’t tell who they are. Everything is loud and overwhelming. I sit mute. Nadine is already drunk. She points at me with her beer bottle and says, “This is…” But my name is swallowed up by the music and the voices.
I feel my face flare up. He turns to look at me, says, “What is your name?” And I lean into him and whisper it like a secret, and he looks at me and nods; some recognition sparks in both of us.
He says, “Let’s dance.” And I am shaking my head. “No, no, no. I don’t dance.” But he is laughing and saying, “I bet you do,” and he reaches out and our fingers interlock and we stand up and then he is pushing through the crowd, pulling me along.
On the floor, a crush of bodies, sweat spilling from skin to skin. I am shy, but then the music enters my bloodstream. It takes over my pulse and my feet. My fingers are undulating and I am unwinding and uncurling and expanding and laughing riotously with this man who has appeared like something mythical, something magnificent. We dance for hours, his body connected to mine by the music. We stomp and twirl and make faces. We are camp to Frankie Goes to Hollywood, melancholy to “True Colors,” singing at the tops of our voices along with the crowd, sweeping our arms in poetic gesture, then frenzied when the DJ reverts to drum and bass and the whole place is only bodies moving to rhythm.
Then the lights turn on and we are all blinking in the glare like beached fish and he turns to me. His eyes are startlingly blue in the sudden light, blue as deep water. He says, “Do you want to come and see my view from the roof?”
I’ve never done anything like this before. Later I will feel surprise and even shock that I agreed so quickly. I, who am so used to dodging love. But at this moment I know, with a sureness I’ve never felt about anything else in my life, that this man is magic.
*