There was a tentative knock at the door, and Lisa stuck her head into the room. "Hey Bob," she said quietly. "You doing okay?"
Bob closed his book and dropped in onto the nightstand. The nightstand was a tiny piece of furniture, and the book rested mainly upon the base of the gooseneck lamp that illuminated the room. Bob sat up straight, leaning against the brass rails at the head of the bed. "Yeah, I'm fine. Come in."
Lisa stepped into the room and looked around. The wallpaper was a white background against which frolicked a repeating sequence of hobby horses, which had somehow become animated and escaped into grassy fields without leaving behind their curved rails.
Bob followed her wandering gaze. "I just love the decor."
Lisa smiled. "Hey. I was eight when I picked out this wallpaper."
"But I bet it really impressed the guys when you were in high school, though."
"Oh, in high school I had this all covered up with posters. It was kind of cool-looking, actually. It's too bad they're gone now. My parents left them all up on the walls for like a decade. My beanbag chair, it was all still here. Preserved. But a few years ago my father went on a kick and cleaned it out and made it into a spare bedroom."
"Oh, that's a shame."
"So now the bed and the wallpaper are all that's left."
Bob shook his head with mock gravity. "Archaeologists across the centuries will curse your father's name for the irrepairable destruction of historical artifacts he has caused."
"The bed isn't too small for you, is it?"
"Are you kidding?" Bob spread his arms. "This is perfect."
Lisa permitted herself a wry smile. "Anyway, I'll probably be getting up pretty early. My room faces east. Do you want me to knock on your door and wake you up at a particular time?"
Bob shrugged. "No, not really. If it starts getting late, I guess. I don't want to keep everyone waiting."
"What time?"
"I don't know. Whenever you want me to wake up? Actually, don't worry about it. I'm sure I'll wake up on my own just fine."
The door swung open again, and Harvey walked in. "Hey folks."
Lisa turned around. "Hi, Harvey. You settled in okay?"
"Just as well as the last time you asked me."
"It's just that I thought you were already asleep by now."
Bob said, "If you're having trouble falling asleep on the couch, maybe we should trade."
Harvey waved him off. "No point. I told you, I prefer couches. I sleep on my own couch all the time. Practically the only time I sleep in my bed is when I've got company."
Lisa snorted. "And what about when you have 'company'?" She traced quote marks in the air between them.
Harvey scowled. "Well, yes, Lisa. That's what I was saying in the first place. The only time I sleep in my bed is when I've got: 'company'," he said, imitating her voice and finger-wiggling.
"Oh. Well then where do you sleep when you just have a friend over?"
"I don't have just friends over. I don't have any just friends, except for you two. What makes you think I have any other friends?"
"Oh, knock it off. I was being serious."
Harvey continued to look annoyed. "Why am I not being serious?"
Lisa made a small gesture with her hands. "All the guys you've slept with over the years and you didn't manage to salvage one single friendship from them?"
Harvey help up a single finger. "Okay. Number one: where do you get off with saying 'all those guys'? I have not slept with that many guys."
Bob decided to intervene. "So if you're so comfortable on the couch, Harvey, how come you're still awake?"
Lisa ignored the interruption. "What about all those stories from when you were in college?"
"We are not talking about my collegiate dalliances here; we're talking about since I moved into my current apartment, with my current couch." Harvey extended another finger. "Number two: You have tacitly assumed that I wanted to 'salvage' a friendship from my roster of prior boyfriends, and failed. When in actual fact in nearly every single case I wanted nothing more from them than what I got." Lisa opened her mouth to speak; Harvey quickly added, "And the feeling was mutual. So —" Harvey gave her a piercing look and pointed a finger at her, holding his fist close to his face.
Lisa folded her arms and stared back at him. "So ... what?"
"So ... there," Harvey finally finished, and threatened to poke her nose. Lisa jumped nimbly backwards, and then moved forwards with fingers out, threatening to try to tickle him. But Harvey deflected her by smoothly turning away as if he hadn't seen the mock threat and faced Bob.
"And the reason I'm still awake, Bob, to answer your question, is that actually I was asleep there for a little while. About an hour ago I woke up, and I haven't been able to get back to sleep. I keep hearing these creaking and moaning sounds. Can you hear them in here?" Harvey frowned. "It's rather creepy, actually.
Lisa, who had meanwhile affected a casual stance once more, arms folded, said, "It's nothing. It's just the house settling."
"Well," Harvey retorted. "I find it distinctly un-settling."
Lisa rolled her eyes. Bob gave an appreciative chuckle and said, "Well, you're welcome to hang out in here, and we can keep each other awake with ghost stories. Maybe Lisa will loan us a flashlight and we can take turns holding it underneath our chins."
Harvey curled his mouth. "Oh doesn't that sound like fun? All the same I think I should probably go back and give sleeping another try. I expect that in a scant few hours from now Lisa's dad is going to be in the kitchen making breakfast."
Lisa said, "Maybe. But you should try to get to sleep because the sooner we get up, the sooner we can be on the road."
Bob added, "And the sooner we can be in Portland and off the road."
Harvey nodded. "It's no big deal. If it turns out I can't get to sleep, I'll just nap in the car. I'm not the one who'll need to keep her eyes open."
"Oh, don't worry. I'll be away before all of you."
"Whatever." Harvey turned back to the door and opened it. "Good night all." He hesitated a bit, to see if Lisa was following him or not, and then left the room, leaving the door ajar. Harvey walked carefully on the balls of his feet, feeling overly conscious of the noise he made in the unfamiliar house. He eased himself down the stairs and returned to the living room. He lay down on the couch and, reaching around to the back of his head, blindly adjusted the pillow wedged against the armrest. He then grabbed the blanket off of the floor where he had left it in a heap, and with a flourish spread it out to cover himself. Having tucked himself in, Harvey then stared up at the ceiling and waited patiently for sleep to overtake him.
It took me forever to work my way up to the point where I could try to ask Lisa out on a date. And then she didn't even realize it was a date.
Lisa is a software tester at my company. I first noticed her because she struck me as being more knowledgeable about how computers work than the average person. Well, I suppose that kind of goes without saying, otherwise how would they manage to hold down a job as a tester? But even testers have a certain kind of understanding about computers. It's very different from the understanding that we programmers develop. In a lot of ways it's more useful, because it's all based on direct experience, accumulated from working with computers day after day after day. And not just from working with computers — from working with unfinished software. In the process of handling buggy software for months on end, they end up getting a lot more peeks behind the facade than most. They spend a lot of time poking around the plumbing, finding where the pipes are, and which ones are most likely to sprink leaks. Savvy is what they have.
Of course, the knowledge of a programmer is better in the long run, because it'll last a bit longer than theirs. Their knowledge is a little too centered on specifics that get changed with each new version of Windows, or when they dump their Windows box and try to use a Mac. Some of their understanding will transfer, but some of it just won't.
But it's good to have both kind of people around. One of the first times I chatted with Lisa at any length was when we were talking about a bug in one of my modules. (Big surprise, I know.) She had entered a bug report, and it had come to me. The program was supposed to be displaying a list of available files for the user to open, and some of the files that should have been hidden were visible. First the bug had gone to Tony, because he was in charge of the file dialog box. He had identified that the bad data was coming from a function in my module, and so he had assigned it to me. But when I tried to reproduce it, even before I had fired up the debugger, I got a completely different behavior. All of my hidden files were still hidden, but I was seeing several files displayed twice. So the behavior was still wrong, but it was nothing like what Lisa had described in the report. So I went over to her cubicle (only a handful of testers get their own offices) and asked her about it. I figured that maybe I had found a completely different bug, one that she already knew about. Or maybe she just hadn't looked closely when she filed the original report, and when she saw the extra files in her display she had assumed that they were hidden files when they were actually duplicates? In any case, I described what I had seen to her. She listened, and then without a word turned to her keyboard to reproduce the bug.
After a moment she rolled her chair back a foot and gestured at her screen. "See?" I leaned farther into the cubicle and craned my neck around to look at her screen. "I've selected compressed images only, so all these files," she pointed at the bottom of the file list, "shouldn't be here."
I looked carefully. There were no duplicates, but there were non-image files listed. "And all these files are in fact present on your hard drive, right?"
She nodded, eyes still on the screen. "Yeah, they're real. They're just not compressed images."
I straightened up and said, "See, when I do that, I get only compressed image files, but some of them are listed twice."
"Can you show me?"
When she said that, I thought she wanted me to reproduce the bug on her computer. I figured she was thinking that I wasn't going through the steps correctly, and running across some other bug. I was just on the tipping point of leaning over to her keyboard when she stood up from her chair, and I suddenly realized that she wanted to see me reproduce it on my own machine. If she had stood up a moment earlier, we very likely would have knocked heads together, and that would have been awkward. Trying to act like I had understood her all along I quickly stepped out of her way, and we walked over to my office.
I wasn't entirely accurate when I said that this was when I first noticed her. I had actually first noticed her about a month or so after she started working here. Well, technically speaking, even that isn't entirely true: I first noticed her right after she started, because, well, she's a woman, and when you work in the tech industry you don't see a lot of women around the office, and so every time a new one arrives, you notice. But the thing that I had noticed about her a month or so after she arrived, was that she always wore skirts. I never once saw her wearing pants of any kind. And it wasn't that she was dressing for a business environment. Like everyone else, she dressed casually, and these were casual skirts. I don't think she ever wore a dress, either, for that matter. Always a skirt. Occasionally I would see her in the halls, and spend a moment wondering why she never wore anything else. Now, as we walked to my office in silence, I felt the pressure to make small talk. If my office had been a little bit closer, we could have made it in silence comfortably, more or less, but as it was I thought I should say something. But the only thing I could think to say was, "So how come you always wear skirts?" And I couldn't say that. I just knew that it would come off sounding a little creepy, like I had been secretly watching her. It's what a potential stalker would say, I thought. I thought that if I had been another woman, I probably could have pulled it off, because not only would I not have any stalker potential, but women talk about clothes with each other all the time. Guys only talk to women about clothes when they're trying to pick them up. Something that didn't occur to me until much later was that maybe she felt too self-conscious to wear pants, because she was a little overweight, noticeably so. If that was the case, then my instincts were definitely right when they decided that the question wasn't appropriate. So we just walked to my office in uncomfortable silence. Uncomfortable to me, anyway. She probably didn't even think about it. She was probably thinking about the bug.
The file list with its duplicates was still on display. She looked at it carefully, then said, "So do you think that this is a different bug than the one on file? Or could they be related?"
I rolled my chair over so that I could sit down without obstructing her view of the screen. "I don't know, really. I just now started looking at it, and when I didn't get the results you got, I thought I should double-check. You know, in case you knew something I didn't about this."
She folded her arms and leaned a hip against my desk. "No, I never got the behavior you're seeing here. Although it kind of looks like a bug that Wayne filed." She squinted at my screen, and then looked back at me. "Do you think you could print me a screenshot?"
"Yeah, no problem." I saved an image of the screen to a file. "Should I just email this to you?"
"Could you print it out, actually, as in on the printer? Wayne always wants to have everything on paper." She shrugged apologetically. "He's kind of old-fashioned."
I winced inwardly. Even to a woman I barely knew, I regretted having to admit ignorance of a computer issue. "I can't print anything from here, actually."
She waved a hand. "Oh then yeah, just email it to me and I'll print it out." I turned back to the keyboard to compose the email. She watched over my shoulder for a moment, then said. "Why can't you print?"
"Oh," I improvised, trying to sound casual and dismissive. "Something's probably wrong with my setup. It was working at one time, but then they moved a bunch of cabling around, and now it can't find any of the printers."
"Did you check the server config?"
"Oh," I said, improvising again, but this time I drew a blank after the "oh", and just sat there silent for a moment. It occurred to me to wave my hand around dismissively, as if I had checked the server config thousands of times, but fortunately the rational half of my brain finally took back control of my body, and I turned around in my chair and said, "Probably not, because I have no idea what that is."
She smiled gently and reached out towards my keyboard. "May I?"
Her smile was understated, you almost wouldn't have noticed its arrival. I said, "Sure," and then sat there admiring her smile for a moment. She leaned over my keyboard, and I quickly stood up and offered her my chair. She sat down with a murmur of thanks and began nosing around in the network configuration dialogs. Her understated smile had seemed to imply so many different thoughts — humor at my sudden candor, and the understanding of someone who remembered when they too didn't know what a server config was (at least in the context of printing) — with so little muscle movement. A curiousity about this person who knew so much about facial communication was invading my thoughts. And so it was that when she said, "A-ha," I hadn't been paying attention to what she had been doing. On the screen was a dialog box labelled "Printer Server Config", and she had moved the mouse over to a checkbox labelled, "Search for Printers using DHCP". The box was checked, and she clicked on it to remove the check. She then clicked on a button marked "Find Printers". A few seconds passed, and then a window popped up showing all the printers on the network.
"Okay," I said in disbelief and she set the nearest printer to be my default printer. "How did you know to do that?" It had all seemed too perfect, like she had set this up in advance just to impress me.
She spun my chair lazily around to face me. She considered my question, mild surprise showing on her face, and then shrugged. "How did you learn to program computers?"
I said, a bit loudly, "I read a book!" To me, the two things were not comparable.
She laughed, and then got up and left. Just outside of my office she turned around and said, "Thanks for the info. If this turns out to be related to Wayne's bug, I'll email you the report." And then she walked off.
Over the next week or so, I decided that I wanted to get to know her better.
I wound up reading a bunch of Foucault in college. I really tried to get into it at the time, but in the end I finally decided I couldn't stand the stuff anymore. He's got some interesting ideas, and I'm sure that he has plenty more that I don't know about. But in the end, it's just not worth plowing through his writing in order to get to them. His stuff is opaque. Now, I have no problem with reading carefully, or even with authors being intentionally a bit obscure so as to force the reader to slow down and pay close attention. But there's also being obscure so as to appear to be saying more than you really are. Or being obscure so as to discourage being read by those who are not predisposed to laud you. Or even call you a genius in public. Obscurity is sort of a job hazard with postmodernists, it seems, and from what little I've seen of others, Foucault isn't even the worst of them. Something about postmoderism discourages clarity, and that should make people suspicious.
In the end, I decided that if Foucault's ideas were really all that important, then there simply had to be a clearer way to express it. I just couldn't believe that ideas which were truly that difficult to express were ready to be a subject of study. At least not by me.
And in the end, I couldn't be sure that I would have something to show for it if I actually got to the point where I understood Foucault. I mean, there were some paragraphs that even after reading over three or four times, carefully, I still wasn't convinced that he was actually saying anything, or at least not anything worth saying. One paragraph, composed of a handful of extended sentences, I still believe can be summarized as follows: "When one is crossing a boundary, it's hard to say exactly when one has completely left the starting territory, and likewise when one has completely entered the new territory." But you wouldn't know it to read it the first few times. If there is anything more there, in that particular paragraph, then it's not my fault for not seeing it.
But in another sense, I did get something out of reading Foucault, whether or not I understood him. Slogging through his essays gave me practice in trying to think about some really abstract questions, for example. And I think every person should know about postmodern thinking, if to no other end than to decide that they don't agree with it. In the final count, you're a better person for it. Like eating fiber, sort of. I wouldn't be so terrified of this country's growing streak of anti-intellectualism if it was actually a considered position, rather than an inherited prejudice.
There are probably a half dozen nerd prototypes, and Bob is one of them. He's average height and thin. Dark hair, slightly wavy. If he had come of age in the 1950s, he'd have been slicking his hair back, but today he just lets it lie limply across his head. When he smiles, or grimaces, he has these two prominent front teeth that I can't help staring at. His face looks like that of a younger man, down to the suggestions of acne banished not so long ago. I'm not sure about that — it could be that he's just clumsy with the razor. He must shave religiously. I've never seen him with a five-o'clock shadow.
His wardrobe typically consists of a white T-shirt and blue jeans. Even in cold weather he'll be wearing the same thing. To guard against rain he has a tan windbreaker which he could only have obtained from a used clothing store that specialized in 1970s retro. Unless it was a hand-me-down from his father. No doubt some kitsch collector would pay a few bucks for it, but then how would Bob keep dry?
Bob walks with a long stride that seems to belong to a more confident person than he. It's almost a swagger, although its illusory effect is undercut somewhat by the way he doesn't really watch where he's going. Instead he likes to look to one side, watching the path in front of him with peripheral vision.
Lisa's one of those women that you remember having seen. She looks like she's trying to blend in and look nondescript, only she planned for the wrong decade. Or the wrong part of the country. (Ever notice how certain parts of the country are like a decade or two behind other parts?) She's undersized and overweight, and she has a tendency to wear these little button-down sweaters that look like they were gifts from her grandmother. She habitually wears skirts that fall below the knee, usually made out of soft denim or some other heavy fabric, topped with a white blouse. Very little jewelry, very little makeup if any.
She has these horn-rimmed glasses with the small, rectangular lenses that were popular a few years ago. I like to think of them as our generation's answer to the cat's-eye glasses. They were very distinctive-looking and really made a statement when they first became popular, and in another few years they will date any photo or movie that they appear in. Well, except for people like Lisa, who will probably continue to wear hers until it breaks.
Her hair is a mousy brown and naturally messy. She doesn't put much effort into it, and it gets tangled easily. It doesn't pass for tousled, though; it just looks unkempt.
Don't get me wrong. I actually like Lisa's appearance. It's very distinctive, and it says something about her character. But I'm convinced that it's completely unintentional on her part. She's really just trying to fit in, but I have no idea with whom.
How do people go about working their way up from bare acquaintances to asking for a date? I had no idea. (In fact, I still don't know.) For a while all I did was pay attention while I was at the office, and every now and then I would get a chance to see her, or observe her, or be able to talk to her. But those opportunities were not frequent. A less patient person would have thrown in the towel. And all I really learned from doing that was that I was starting to feel attracted to her. I would have been better off not finding that out, at the rate I was going.
She was friendlier to me, now that we had actually talked. She would acknowledge me in the halls, or say hello when we were both in the elevator. I got the feeling she was open to the idea of getting to know me, but that may have just been wishful thinking on my part.
After a few weeks of this, thoughts about her cropping up every now and then in the back of my mind, and coming to the forefront whenever I ran into her, it dawned on me that I didn't know whether or not she already had a boyfriend. Or maybe she wasn't even straight, if it came to that. Or she might just not even be interested in having a boyfriend. Relationships are a lot of work, after all, and I'm not yet convinced that they're really for everybody, despite what everyone says. So I started looking for clues about her relationship status, but after checking that she wasn't wearing a ring, I wasn't sure what else I could do in this regard. How nice it would have been, if I could have just walked up to her and said, "Excuse me, but are you currently in the market for a boyfriend?" A simple yes-or-no question that covered all the bases. And hey: if she was single, but she wasn't interested in me personally, she could have just lied and said no, and that would be that. Life would be so much easier. For the first time in my life I wished I was back in the days when women all went by "Miss" or "Mrs."
I got something of a lucky break on this front, though. Or rather I had a stroke of inspiration. I was walking around the office floor. I do this sometime when I'm waiting for a compile to finish. Especially if I'm trying to fix a bug that just won't go away and this is my nth attempt to fix it and I'm pretty sure that it won't be fixed this time either but I'm trying it because I don't know what else to try. Walking through the halls is how I try to loosen up my inspiration. Anyway, I walked past this cubicle of a woman I didn't know — I think I was somewhere in the marketing department, or maybe recruiting — and I noticed that she had these wedding pictures set up on her desk. Which got me thinking, because you almost never see guys bring wedding pictures into the office. It seems to be almost universally a female phenomenon. And of course, yes, women are supposed to care about weddings a lot more than guys are, but then it hits me: of course! It's how she lets people know she's married. Or specifically guys, anyway. Everyone knows that women who work with nerds get hit on all the time, if they're at all attractive. So pictures of you at your wedding, prominently displayed on your desk, are the perfect way to deflect all that stuff.
Women aren't stupid. There are all kinds of socially subtle ways to indicate your relationship status, without having to change your name, or your title or whatever. So, if Lisa didn't have any of that, and she didn't, then she was probably at least single.
Or rather — and this was what I really felt was the important insight — she was probably not going to be offended by me asking her out on a date. Whether or not she was single. If that sort of thing would bother her, she would have made the effort to display some kind of ward. (The idea of calling these objects, like the wedding photos, "wards" came to me during one of my internal monologues, and it stuck. I liked the imagery that invoked — women setting up magical talismans to ward off hordes of single nerds.)
The other nice thing about this idea is that it gave me an excuse to continue not doing anything. I kept my eyes and ears open when opportunity presented, and looked for any signs that she was trying to ward off the guys. This way, I felt like I was making progress without having to take the step of approaching her, the thought of which still terrified me.
And I'm not convinced that this tendency of mine towards inaction is all bad. For a full week, I was doing nothing outwardly that I hadn't already been doing, but nonetheless I felt like I was making progress — I was in pursuit. Nothing external to me had changed, but I felt great, almost exhilarated. Almost anyone else would look at me and say, "Look at that poor pathetic nerd, so afraid to actually stick his neck out. Doesn't have the backbone to just stand up and do something." Well, that's fine for everyone else. But for a week there I was happy, and since I suspected I would be quickly rebuffed when I finally made an advance, I figured that this was probably as good as it was going to get. A more decisive person would have gone through this stage in five minute. I got to be enjoy it for a week.
But eventually I decided that the signs were as auspicious as they were likely to get. There were no blatant signs that she had a boyfriend. I hadn't seen any other guys at the office behaving flirtatiously around her. I hadn't seen her pulling out a cell phone and calling someone named "Biff" or "Roger". That by itself wasn't much to go on, but it was as much as I was likely to get. If I waited until I knew for sure, then I could easily be there waiting until she did happen to acquire a boyfriend, and what would be the point of that? In this fashion I managed to convince myself that the time for action was upon me.
Of course, what I meant by "action" was no more than attempting to strike up a conversation with her. By this point I had talked about this issue with Harvey. Harvey was sleeping on my couch at the time, being temporarily unemployed and unable to afford rent. I actually didn't see very much of him, since most evenings and nights he spent with his then-boyfriend Paul. But recently I had had occasion to confide in Harvey that I had developed a small interest in a woman at the office about whom I knew nearly nothing. By this point I had had a vague notion that at some point in the near but unspecified future, I would discern that the time was ripe, and I would walk up to her and ask her out for coffee, in a manner both friendly and confident so that she would understand that "coffee" meant "date". Harvey quickly pointed out that I was getting ahead of myself. Which was good because I doubt that I would have really successfully worked up enough nerve for that. Instead, he argued, I should just attempt to contrive circumstances that would allow for friendly chitchat. This would give me a chance to get to know her a little better, and it would give her a chance to get to know me, and it would permit a wider range of circumstances for us to interact, hopefully eventually allowing one to arise in which an offer to go have coffee together might be inserted in a casual and natural way. All of this was immediately obvious in hindsight once he pointed it out, which instantly got me worrying that I was perhaps a little more infatuated with Lisa than I had realized at first. I didn't like the thought that this might start turning into an obsession. I don't want to think that I have the potential to some day wind up as somebody's obsessive ex-boyfriend. I eventually rationalized to myself that at this point I was just reacting to the "thrill of the hunt", so to speak. I hardly knew Lisa still, after all. This was just excitement over possibilities. Once I got past this point I would start getting to know her, and if it didn't work out it would be for a reason.
I figured out that if I walked the long way around this one hallway that went in a loop, I would get a quick glimpse of part of her cubicle as I walked through where it intersected the other hallway. And in particular I could see the chair in one corner where she tended to leave her purse, and coat if she was wearing one that day. In this fashion I could check to see if she was in the office anytime I wanted, without actually checking up on her visibly, without doing anything that looked weird or unusual in any way, because she wouldn't actually see me. And if she did happen to be leaning out of her cubicle and looking over in that direction, so what? It was just me walking down the hall. I didn't even have to break stride. And then if her purse was there, I could go back to my office and figure out a likely excuse to talk to her, and then go over and say hi.
Except that it seemed that fate was contriving to rob me of any good reason to approach her. None of my open bugs were filed by her, and none had been for some time now. (The bug that had been the cause of my first conversation with her, I had isolated and fixed in only a few days. Had I but known where I was going to wind up, I might have set it aside to have now. Although probably somebody would have yelled at me if I had tried to leave such a simple bug unfixed for so many weeks.) I found myself walking down the long loop of hallway more often, partly just to check up on her, but also to loosen up my inspiration.
One day I got the idea into my head that I would have better luck if I tried to approach her near the end of the day, when the office would be less crowded, and maybe I would feel less self-conscious? I don't know. It seemed to make sense at the time. Maybe I just liked the idea becauase it gave me a reason to focus on my work for the rest of the day, which I found to be something of a relief. It occurred to me, after I had completed the most productive afternoon I had had in weeks, that maybe this whole infatuation thing was getting out of hand. It had started out as fun, in that way that an infusion of drama into one's life always is fun. But I was starting to obsess, and I didn't know her well enough to be obsessing. If this was just me looking for an excuse to turn up the drama knob because I was bored with my everyday life, then I needed to go find a hobby or something until I calmed down. I didn't need to be sharing my drama with a near-total stranger, in any case.
After mulling over these thoughts for a while, I realized the obvious. The thing to do was to go over there and take the next step. Go talk to her already. If it didn't work out, then this whole thing would be over with that much sooner, and I could get on with acting like a normal human being again. So I got up and hit my favorite hallway loop. But when I reached the intersection, her purse wasn't on the chair. I had waited too long for the office to empty out, and she had left.
For some reason, I walked over to her cubicle. I have no idea why. I don't know what I was thinking I was going to do. I didn't really think much of anything, I just walked over. And bang, there she was. She had her purse on her desk, but she hadn't gone anywhere. And it was too late to back away, or pretend that I was just walking by. We had already caught each others eyes and the angle of my approach made it obvious where I was headed. Trying to maintain a natural-looking walk and facial expression, I continued walking until I was standing next to her cubicle.
She looked up briefly, then turned back to her monitor. She continued typing all the while. "Hello, Bob," she said.
"Hi, Lisa," I responded. So far, so good. My brain was whirling, trying to come up with a reason for my being there. But nothing presented itself. As the moment of silence stretched out, she looked up at me again, eyebrows raised slightly in a politely querelous expression. I lost more precious seconds looking at her looking at me.
And then some god somewhere took pity upon me. A woman, a tester whose name I didn't know, walked up to us and said, "Excuse me a second. Lisa?" Somewhere in my stomach a muscle unknotted itself as I smiled politely to the woman to let her know that I didn't mind the interruption.
Lisa turned her chair to face the woman, arms loosely folded. "Hey, Anna. What's up?"
Anna looked at her wearily. "Did you take the thumb drive that I had plugged into my computer?"
Lisa blinked once and said, "Uh, yes. Yes I did."
In an instant Anna's expression went from weariness to anger. "Well then, give it back, dammit! That was my personal drive. What were you thinking taking it off my computer?"
Lisa was sitting as far back in her chair as she could. Her expression remained frozen for a moment, unchanged except for her eyes, which were slightly wider than usual. Finally she unfroze and said, "Anna, I was kidding. I didn't take your thumb drive."
Anna looked at Lisa warily, and then slowly deflated. Her expression drooped from anger back to weariness. "Oh."
"Honestly I swear."
"Oh. Then why did you say you did?"
Lisa shrugged briefly. "I was just making a joke."
Anna's expression was now sliding into embarrassment. She looked over at me, very briefly, then quickly looked away. I realized that I had been staring at her a bit and I quickly averted my gaze. Anna mumbled something about how she'd been walking around trying to find it for a while but everyone had gone home by now.
Meanwhile Lisa's posture had slowly relaxed. "Wow," she said brightly, "You were really mad there."
Anna delivered a brief apology in the same mumble and quickly walked off.
"That was odd," Lisa observed, and then turned her attention to me.
"Yeah, it was," I said. "Why did you tell her you had taken her drive if you hadn't?"
"I was just trying to make a joke. That's all," she replied.
So maybe she was impulsive. "Would you like to go get some coffee?"
My favorite E. M. Forster quote (at least in his nonfictional writing) is: "What the public really loathes in homosexuality is not the thing itself but having to think about it." There's a subtle distinction there that most of us have to learn to make at some point during our lives. Unfortunately to get from where we are now to a place of equal standing means that the public is going to have to think about homosexuality even more than they do already.
I'm convinced that if there were some magical way that we could go to the people and say, "Look, just give us equal protection under the law and everything, and then we'll get out of your hair, and you'll never have to think about us ever again unless you want to," they'd capitulate. All they really want is to just stop being asked to think about us. (The rabid anti-queer-rights people wouldn't agree, of course — they seem to need to think about us night and day — but they're hardly the majority.) Of course this idea doesn't really work, but it's an interesting perpsective to keep in mind.
Bob unlocked the front door to the apartment building. "It's a nice little place, really. The only thing is I don't like about it, is that there's no view, because it's on the second floor and there's all these tall buildings surrounding us." He held the glass door open for Lisa.
Lisa walked past him into the lobby. "Yeah, well, isn't that the way it goes? Someone wants a view, so they build a tall building, which blocks someone else's view, so they build an even taller building." Bob walked over to a heavy metal door, which he opened for her. She walked past him into the stairwell. "Next thing you know, you're living in a canyon."
They walked up a flight of stairs while Bob fiddled with his keys. "But other than that, it's just perfect. Lots of space. My friend and I hardly ever see each other, there's so much space."
"Wait. What's his name again?"
Bob once again held open the stairwell door for Lisa, then squeezed past her to lead her to his apartment door. "Harvey. But I'm not expecting him to be home. I think he's planning on spending the night at his boyfriend's place."
"Oh, okay." They walked past a door behind which could be heard voices shouting over a stereo. "Does it get pretty noisy in here?"
Bob wagged his head noncommittally. "Sometimes. The walls are actually pretty thick, though, so it isn't bad inside the apartments. I've only been annoyed by a neighbor once." He stopped in front of a door, adorned with the number 28, and began fiddling with his keys again. "Yeah, when I first moved in the guy next door to me would occasionally play his stereo, like ..." Bob suddenly trailed off. He had turned his key in the lock and was now looking at it suspiciously, as if it had spoken to him.
Lisa craned her neck to see what he was looking at. "Bob? Something wrong?"
"In a manner of speaking, maybe." Bob removed his key. "The door's unlocked." Bob pushed opened the door.
"Are you sure you locked it when you left?" Lisa asked. Then she saw that the light was on inside the apartment.
Bob didn't answer, but he had stopped frowning and was now wearing a blank expression. Putting his keys back in his pocket, he stepped forward into the apartment. He didn't look back at Lisa, and she followed him after a moment's pause.
Inside was a tiny vestibule. Bob stepped left into the living room and stopped. "Harvey," he said. Lisa followed Bob into the room.
The living room was indeed large for a one-bedroom apartment, and its size was accented by a minimal use of furniture. In one corner was a long couch, colored a dirty-looking grayish brown. In front of it was a coffee table. The table looked as if had been built with a much smaller couch in mind and was positioned off-center, favoring the far end of the couch. The tabletop was covered in piles of magazines, books, and papers. Atop one of the piles was an open bottle of scotch. Sitting in the far corner of the couch was Harvey, holding an squat glass and looking decidedly unmoved by the arrival of Bob and Lisa.
"'Lo, Bob," Harvey said in reply.
Bob continued to look blankly at Harvey for a while, then turned and looked blankly at Lisa. Lisa gave him a look that was both curious and patient. Bob seemed to come back to himself and made introductory gestures. "Lisa, Harvey. Harvey, Lisa."
Harvey waved roundly with his free hand. "Evening, Lisa."
Lisa smiled. "Hi there, Harvey."
Harvey nodded with a tight smile and then went back to staring at the books on the table.
Bob nodded to himself, apparently satisfied with his execution of the formalities. Turning back to Harvey, his tone of voice suddenly shifted, as if Lisa were no longer in the room. "So Harvey — is something up?"
Harvey didn't move except to raise a single eyebrow, giving him a view of Bob out of the corner of an eye. "No, nothing serious. It's just, Paul and I had a —" This was followed by a silence which Bob patiently waited out. "— a thing," Harvey finally finished.
Bob nodded to himself again, as if that explained everything. He turned to face Lisa again, who was still wearing the same expression. "I don't fully understand what's going on here," her expression said, "but whatever it is, I want you to know that I'm being cool about it." Bob moved as if to take off his coat, then stopped and exhaled. He took a step closer to Lisa.
"Hey Lisa, I think we're going to have to cut the evening short."
Lisa nodded immediately. "No, yeah that's fine, I understand."
"Sorry about that."
"No problem. I'll just show myself out."
"You sure? You going be able to get home okay?"
"Oh yeah. It's not far from here, really. And the walk's mostly downhill, so. Don't worry about it."
"Give me a call later on?"
"You bet. Good night."
And then she was out the door.
Bob took off his coat and threw it onto the wooden chair in front of the spindly desk in the opposite corner of the room. On the desk was a computer, surrounded by further piles of books and papers. Bob walked past Harvey into the kitchen, and then came back with a low glass identical to the one Harvey was holding. Bob took the bottle from its perch and sat down in the opposite corner of the couch. For a moment he faced Harvey with a mixed expression of pity and annoyance, until Harvey finally looked up at him. Then Bob looked down at his glass and poured himself a couple of fingers of scotch.
"So, Harvey. What happened?" Bob leaned over and set the bottle back on the table.
Harvey's mouth crumpled inward, as if tasting something sour. As if to give his mouth an excuse, Harvey threw back his head and drained the scotch in his glass. He reached out for the bottle Bob had just set down and carefully refilled his glass. "Paul and I had a fight."
Bob nodded, but Harvey wasn't looking at him. Bob balanced his glass on the arm of the couch, not quite ready to drink from it yet. "What kind of a fight?"
"A bad fight." Harvey exhaled, then shook his head. "I'm pretty sure we broke up."
"Pretty sure?"
Harvey shifted around in the couch, then finally seemed to come to terms with the idea of meeting Bob's gaze. "I give it a one percent chance that he was just blowing off some steam and tomorrow he'll say that he didn't mean any of it and he wants me to forgive him. Otherwise ..." He turned to face Bob more directly, pulling one leg up onto the couch, extended almost to the middle. "Otherwise, yeah, we broke up."
"Wow," Bob said. He looked around the room, then back at Harvey, but he seemed unable to think of anything else to say. "Wow."
"Yeah, tell me about it."
"That sucks, man," Bob said flatly.
"Yeah, you're telling me," Harvey shot back.
Bob faced forward and rocked gently back and forth for a moment. Harvey took a noisy sip from his glass. Bob turned to face Harvey again. "So," he ventured, "what was the fight about?"
Harvey took another sip from his glass. "I'm not even sure, really." Harvey leaned forward and thumped his glass down onto a pile of books. "I mean, it started out being about how he was always late for everything we did, and it was a fight but it was still under control and shit, you know, it was civil. It was a civil discourse. And then it starts jumping around to other topics and it's growing. I no longer have any control over it." Harvey stood up and moved towards the middle of the room, gesticulating. "And before I understand what's going on, he's attacking me on five different fronts. And I am feeling. Totally. Beleaguered. I've broached a subject that in a polite society ought to be broachable, you ought to be able to tell your boyfriend when we chronically late, and as a result I'm getting my ass chewed off by a goddamn hydra. He thinks I'm overly demanding, I'm always trying to force a romantic moment, which he thinks just kills any chance for him to feel romantic, he's annoyed because he wants me to deal with stuff like making reservations all the time instead of just half the time, he says I didn't communicate properly how much I care about him being on time, and I don't remember the other forty things that he hits me with." Harvey stared out the window at the evening. "News flash, Paul: That's not how you have an argument with your boyfriend. Getting someone feeling all defensive is not the way to work out two people's differences."
Harvey fell silent, and stared out the window. After a long pause Bob asked, "So? What happened?"
Harvey shrugged. "Well, I was feeling defensive. So I took his abuse for as long as I could, hoping he would run himself down, but he didn't. So finally I told him to get off my case. I wanted him to just give me some breathing room, you realize. I just wanted to not feel like he was trying to burn me at the stake."
Bob said, "Sure. Sure." Pause. "And I take it he reacted badly?"
Harvey looked up from the floor where his gaze had fallen. He turned back and picked up his glass and took another belt of scotch. "Well, in the process I called him an ungrateful cocksucker. So yeah, he reacted badly to that part more than anything, I think."
Bob nodded, but again Harvey wasn't looking at him. There was another pause, which Bob ventured to interrupt. "Well. I suppose it couldn't be helped."
That got a brief laugh out of Harvey, though it sounded more like a cough. "Yeah, I imagine not. I wasn't feeling precisely rational at the time. He's just lucky I didn't try to take a swing at him. I was seeing red by the end of it."
"Well, it's probably for the best that you didn't."
"Yeah, it's for the best. He would've kicked my ass if it came to that." Harvey took a cautious sip from his glass. "I don't really know the guy well enough to know what he's capable of. I thought I was getting to know him pretty well. It's been, what? Three, four months now."
"Three months," Bob said.
"Yeah. Three months of being together all the time, and then I see a side of him that I've never seen before." Still holding his glass, Harvey slowly walked around the coffee table and let himself slump into his corner of the couch. He opened his mouth to add something, then seemd to think better of it and threw back the last finger of scotch in his glass. His hand fell limply to his side, holding the glass loosely, and he stared out towards the window again.
Bob looked down at his glass, still balanced on the arm of the sofa. He picked it and experimentally took a sip from it. He held it in his mouth for a moment, then swallowed audibly. He aired his tongue briefly, and then put his glass back down. "So. Harvey."
Harvey turned his head and looked at Bob warily. "So," he replied. "Bob."
"So, did this thing, this whole fight-thing, did it really —" Bob made a circular motion with one hand. "— catch you off guard?"
Harvey looked at Bob critically for a moment, but made no reply other than to close his eyes briefly.
"I mean, looking back on it, with the benefit of hindsight, did you not have any suspicion that something like this might be coming?"
Harvey looked away towards the window again, and shook his head. "Not the time, Bob. This is not the time for that." His voice had hardened. "This place? Here? Now? Not the time."
Bob said, "Okay. That's fine. I was just ..." Bob finished his sentence with a shrug, but Harvey wasn't looking.
"You always do this kind of thing, I swear," Harvey said, his voice softening again. "I'm not in the mood for discussion. I just got dumped by my boyfriend, you moron."
"Okay, already. I'm sorry. I'm sorry."
Harvey looked up at a corner of the ceiling. "So," he finally said, in a clear voice that indicated a change of direction, "how was your date?"
Bob looked down at his glass for a moment. Then a slight chuckle escaped his mouth, and he fiddled with his glasses. "It wasn't a date, it turns out."
Harvey turned to face him. "What do you mean, it wasn't a date? Sure sounded like one."
"I thought it was. But then we're sitting there eating and talking about, like, exes and stuff. I'm trying to keep it light but at the same time I'm picking very carefully what details I'm telling her about my previous girlfriends. You know, everyone says that you shouldn't talk about your previous relationships on the first date, but everyone does it. You can't help thinking about the subject, and all the stuff you want to be different this time around."
Harvey looked doubtful. "I always say as little as possible about my old boyfriends on a first date. Unless I don't know if I like the guy yet."
Bob stared at Harvey for a long moment, who stared back without moving. Finally Bob said quietly, "Well, that's the not the point."
Harvey shrugged. "Right. Sorry to interrupt."
"Brother. Well anyway, she's telling me about her old boyfriends, and I assume she's doing the same thing I'm doing. But then she starts going into way too much detail."
"Women do that."
"Well, I don't mean it as in too-much-information sort of detail. It's just that she's not being guarded about the stuff she's telling me about herself. It's oh-here's-a-funny-story sort of detail. Like she would with a friend."
"No, I'm serious, Bob. Women do that. You shouldn't take that as a sign that she just wants to be friends."
"Oh, you weren't there. I'm not telling it right. Trust me. If you were there you'd agree. She didn't think of this as a date."
"Oh come on, Bob. A guy and a girl go have dinner together for the express purpose of getting to know each other? She knew what it was."
"You know what it was? I shouldn't have taken her directly from work. We should have both gone to our separate homes and then I should have picked her up at her place. Or we could have met at the restaurant. But with the working late, and then taking her to a restaurant, she just thought I wanted to hang out and bat the breeze, or whatever. She probably figured if she hadn't been working late I would have asked some other tester to go have dinner."
Harvey rolled his eyes and took another drink from his glass before he remembered it was already emtpy. "Bob, you're overreacting." Harvey set his glass down on his leg. "You're just upset because you had a date with a nice women and got her to come back to your place which you thought was empty but it turns out your stupid friend was sitting on your living room couch getting drunk. Perfectly understandable, but you're overreacting."
"Jesus, Harvey. That's not it at all. I swear we were just comparing our apartments. I was just hoping to try to get her to hang out with me for another few minutes. That was the extent of my greatest hopes."
The two of them remained silent for a time. "Well," Harvey finally said. "Don't we make a pathetic couple of assholes." He reached for the bottle, and then leaned back without picking it up. "And to top it off I'm sitting here drinking scotch. I've decided that I don't even like scotch."
Bob stared at his own glass. "Well, plus this isn't good scotch."
Harvey grimaced. "When then why the hell are we drinking it?"
"I don't know. You're the one who got it out."
"I got it out because there's nothing else in this place left to drink."
"Okay. There's your answer."
"No, what I'm asking is why is this stuff even in the apartment?"
"Because neither of us like scotch."
Harvey exhaled noisily. "Oh, that makes sense. I understand now."
"Seriously, though. This bottle has been in here for ages because who's gonna drink it?"
Harvey groaned. "Well then how did it get here in the first place?"
Bob shook his head slowly. "I think it was from when there was a party here, and people brought bottles of various things."
Harvey eyed Bob. "You hosted a party? I find that difficult to believe."
"Well, no. There was this work thing. A bunch of people from work were having a sort of party at this guy's place nearby. But it was really quiet for a party, and it ended pretty early. The guy who was hosting it wasn't the kind of guy who stayed up late. Cecil and a bunch of other people wanted to keep hanging out afterwards. People had brought booze to the party, but when they saw how early it was ending, a few of them took their bottles with them when they left. So I wound up walking down the street with them, because of Cecil, and these folks were wondering where they could go to drink all the booze they had with them. And we were really close to my place, so I said, what the heck, you know? It was a spur of the moment thing."
Harvey shook his head. "Wow. How unlike you, Bob."
Bob shrugged. "Well, you know. I had just moved in a few months ago, so I was enjoying the idea of having a place where I could just invite people over on a whim."
"Did your coworkers have a good time here?"
"Oh yeah, I'm sure they did. They would have had a good time regardless of where they went. It was just that kind of mood. But yeah, they left behind a few half-empty bottles afterwards. And the scotch is the only one I haven't been able to get rid of."
"Well, then. I'm glad to know that I'm finally performing a useful function by crashing here."
Bob gave a distracted laugh. "Oh, you don't have to be useful, Harvey. You just hang out until you're ready to get back on your feet."
A few weeks later I had to tactfully tell Harvey that he needed to get his own place again. He wound up staying in my apartment for nearly three months in the end. The first month or so was fine. He was hardly ever around when I was. And he had sold off nearly all of his possessions by then, so he didn't really take up much space. I kind of suspected that he wasn't really doing much in the way of looking for a new job, but his old job had been so obnoxious, I figured he deserved a little time off before starting a new one. But then he and Paul broke up, and all that changed. He never left the apartment for like two weeks. He started eating all the food, and he never once went to the store to get more. He didn't have any money, of course, but I didn't care about the money nearly as much as I did about taking the time to haul groceries around. If he'd ever volunteered to go to the store, I'd have gladly given him the money to buy the stuff.
And while he was hanging around, he was moody. I was really surprised how upset he was over Paul. I mean, sure he and Paul spent all their time together, but whenever I talked to Harvey about Paul he always seemed to believe that it wasn't going to last. Paul was too snobby, Harvey would say; he never wanted to go out drinking, he was always complaining about Harvey being unemployed, etcetera. So I was not expecting Harvey to be so upset when it finally ended. Maybe Harvey had been expecting that he would be the one to dump Paul, and the fact that Paul dumped him first bruised his ego. Whatever the reason, Harvey spent the next several weeks being depressed. With two or three occasions of getting angry at the world in general thrown in for good measure.
In the end I had to loan Harvey a bunch of money so he could find his own place. I just couldn't wait until he was emotionally stable enough to be hired somewhere before moving out. He was upset with me. I'm pretty sure he felt insulted that I couldn't stand to be around him. I mean, he was depressed enough to believe that nobody would want to be around him ever again for the rest of his life, but I was paying through the nose in order to not be around him anymore. But I didn't care at that point. I felt like if he continued to crash at my place, he was never going to get on with his life again. At least not before I finally lost my patience for good.
It took nearly a month to get him out. I had to set deadlines in order to motivate him to go find an apartment. Thankfully lots of places were available. I guess the rental market had taken another one of those downswings. When he finally managed to drag himself outside and go looking, he found a decent place right away. He may have still been depressed enough that he didn't really look at the place too carefully. Once they handed over the keys, we got him moved out in an afternoon, thanks to a friend with a car, and to Harvey for still having no possessions.
Within a couple of weeks, he was starting to act like his old self again, and less than two months later, he landed a new job. I don't know if moving out really was the thing that forced him to wake up from his little pity coma, or if he would have come to his senses by then anyway. I used to take the credit, at least privately; I figured that being out on his own, without anybody bringing him food, had given him the kick in the ass he'd needed to stop hibernating and move on. But since then I've heard that depression over getting dumped tends to just take a certain amount of time, and they can't really be rushed, any more than you can rush pregnancy. So maybe it was coincidental, and I just happened to throw him out right before his depression cycle was ending. On the other hand, for all we know, it may be that these depression cycles tend to take the certain amount of time that they do because that's how long it takes for people to wear out their friends' patience. Why not? I could see that being part of the pattern.
I saw a couple of people riding a bicycle for two this evening. I thought it was a really funny sight at first. I mean, you never see those things anymore, and certainly not in the city. They were a slightly older couple, but not like old enough to remember when everybody bicycled instead of driving cars. They were obviously coming back from a late-night trip to the store, as they had groceries in their saddle-bags. And there they were, bicycling down Fifteenth Street like it was no big deal. They really did look like they belonged in a different time. Well, except for the bike helmets. But that was just another aspect of the charm of the whole scene — those modern-looking bike helmets in contrast with their scruffy and decidedly unfashionable clothes.
And I don't know why, but it sort of broke my heart to watch them.
This sort of thing happens to me every now and then. Does it happen to other people too? It doesn't seem like it. But every once in a while, something everyday just seems too painfully sad for me to bear looking at. I think some part of my brain must have been put in backwards, or something, because I don't really understand why it makes me so incredibly sad.
Stuffed animals are the worst. I can't bear to even be around them. It's okay when they're being played with, when they belong to a child who appreciates them. But it's heartbreaking to look at a stuffed animal just sitting on the shelf. I imagine some poor creature trapped inside, unable to move, just sitting there day after day after day, and, worst of all, unable to stop smiling despite being painfully alone and neglected, so that nobody even knows how unhappy it is. It's hideous. Am I insane? Does anyone else feel this way?
I do sort of understand what's going on inside, underneath the emotion. Like people say about good fantasy novels, it's internally consistent. In the case of the cyclists, I believe what I'm reacting to is how these two people are trying to not lose certain things, routines and ways of life, that don't mesh real well with city living. Like riding a bicycle built for two down Fifteenth in the middle of the evening. People in a city are necessarily tolerant of a wide variety of unusual behavior, but slow-moving bicyclists are the except. Slow-moving, slow-turning bicycles built for two are one of those things that I expect are easier to utilize in rural environments.
And I'm sure that the bicycle is just one example of many ways in which that couple was out of step with the people around them. And I love it that people like that really do exist, people who don't just take the world as they find it but try to coax it into accommodating them. It's easy to forget that sometimes that your immediate world doesn't have to be the way it is, that a lot of how things work in the city is just because everybody does it that way, you included. And if you all chose to do things a different way, then that would become the way that people do things in the city. For a moment, I had a brief, burning desire to be that couple. Or rather one member of that couple.
But you know they won't last. They'll get ground down in the end, and probably sooner than later. They'll be driving a car to the grocery store before you know it. Or at least taking the bus. Bicycling down an arterial street in a tandem bicycle is just too much of a pain in the neck to being doing it every time you're out of groceries.
And the thing is, they were terribly picturesque. I mean literally, if I had had a camera with me I would have taken a picture, and it would have been a great little photo, capturing all the tension of the situation. And you could just tell that they were only vaguely conscious of how picturesque they were. And that's part of what makes it so sad. The unique and the fragile seem to go hand in hand.
And it just gets to me. I understand the internal logic that's going on. What I don't understand is why it hits me with such force. Here I am, I'm walking down the street, minding my own business, when this couple bicycles past me — and suddenly I'm on the verge of tears all the rest of the way home.
Moving in with Bob was definitely a mistake, in hindsight. That's such an empty statement, when you think about it. Every mistake is a mistake in hindsight. If it was a mistake in foresight then you wouldn't be talking about it, because you wouldn't have gone and done it.
Okay. Start over. I knew that moving in with Bob was potentially dangerous, but I thought I was covered. It's been years since we graduated from college. And it's been almost three years since the last time we tried living together. We both had our own lives by then, such as they were. I had a boyfriend, for crying out loud, a boyfriend I spent time with every day. And I really didn't expect there to be trouble, even if Paul and I broke up. Not that I saw the breakup coming; I didn't. But I figured that I would still be fine living with Bob even if I was single.
And I think I would have been, too, if the breakup hadn't been such a kick in the stomach. I don't really understand why I took it so personally — it's not like I was fooling myself into thinking that Paul and I had this deep, intimate connection. I just thought we had a good thing going. I guess when Paul dumped me I took that as a sign that I wasn't even worthy enough to be a good thing going for someone else. And that scared the piss out of me. And that made me angry, that someone as unimportant in the grand scheme of things as Paul could bring me to my knees like that, without even realizing that he was doing it. I think I was fearful that I was going to spend the rest of my life like that, with my emotional stability at the mercy of self-important pissants. As it turns out I was overreacting. As one is wont to do in such circumstances.
But so then being scared and upset like that, and doubting the likelihood of happiness in my future, that was just a little too similar to what I went through in college. And having Bob around all the time just reminded me of all that shit, and I swear I was reliving the whole Bob-infatuation cycle all over again every evening. I knew that I had to get out of there and away from him, but I was half convinced that Paul was going to be my last boyfriend ever, and so I kept putting off the moment when I would have to put myself out there again.
I do believe that I would have eventually picked myself up off the floor and I would have put myself out there. Bob just forced me to get started a few weeks earlier than I would have on my own. By kicking me out and forcing me to get my own place again, it sort of hastened the whole process of me getting involved in doing something that didn't involve wallowing in self-pity. And everything else kind of just followed.
In the end, paradoxically, drinking is what saved me. I just couldn't sit around the apartment and drink anymore. I mean, it's one thing to sit around at home alone and drink when you live with someone else who'll be coming home soon. It's a whole other thing to sit around at home alone and drink in your own apartment and you know nobody's going to come by and interrupt you. It's scary depressing. I did it once in ignorance, and decided never to do it again. After that, if I wanted to drink, I had to go out to a bar. And thus began my reintegration into society.
I still haven't ever told Bob how I felt about him. I figure that some part of him knows, by now, or at least strongly suspects, but I don't think he knows how bad it really was. I'm not sure why I still don't talk about it, other than the fact that it's not the sort of thing people generally bring up in everyday conversation. When Bob originally offered to let me crash at his place until I had a job again, I sort of had this idea in the back of my head that we'd be spending more time together, talking about serious stuff, and at some point I'd get an opportunity to bring it up, and actually tell him how I had felt back then, and how I worked so hard to keep it hidden, even while ... Well, anyway. It's kind of embarrassing to remember that idea, and compare it with what actually happened.
Harvey is tall, taller than I am at any rate. He's a bit lean, too, which makes him look taller than he really is.
His hair is dark blonde, and he keeps it trimmed to about an inch or so. Every once in a while he'll put some goop of some kind in it and make it all stand up in all directions, but typically he just keeps it perfectly combed.
He wears T-shirts and jeans, like me, only his clothes are tight. "You mean, they fit right," is what he says when I mention this. He has this expensive brown leather jacket, which lately is starting to show its age, which he wears everywhere. When he goes out for an evening, though, once in a while he'll put on a dress shirt, maybe even a tie. Looks uncomfortable if you're going to be dancing.
For all his grooming, though, he's always got an extra day of facial hair showing. It doesn't fit in with the rest of his look.
"So what's up, Lisa?"
"Joanna, I think I may have accidentally gone on a date."
Joanna and Lisa were having lunch in a sandwich shop near their offices. Joanna's office was in the middle of downtown, but the buses were frequent, and she liked getting out of the area around her building for lunch occasionally. Lisa preferred to stay close by her office when eating lunch. The shorter her lunch break, she reasoned, the sooner she could get in her eight hours and justify going home.
"How does that work?"
Joanna's lunch consisted of a plain croissant and today's soup, which was something like beef and barley. The soup was still too hot and so she was nibbling at the bread, a little at a time, and holding the plastic spoon at one end and try to twirl it on the formica countertop. Lisa had ordered half of a cheese sandwich, filled with sprouts and slices of tomato. Lisa had experimented with vegetarianism in early adulthood. She had ultimately decided it wasn't for her, as after only a few months she was experiencing serious cravings for meat, but she retained the practice of eating small, meatless lunches as a legacy. She was now working on an oversized bite from her sandwich, and she held up a finger to Joanna as she masticated.
Joanna, to fill the pause, said, "You know, you should just bring your lunch. If all you're going to get is those sprout sandwiches, you could make your own for so much cheaper."
Lisa swallowed. "It wouldn't be as good if I made it myself."
"So what about this accidental date? Did you trip and fall into a date or something?" Joanna tested her soup again and found it had cooled off enough to eat.
"Day before yesterday, Tuesday, I was working late. As usual. Bob is this cute engineer who I've talked to maybe five times max. He comes over to my desk to ask about some bug, I don't remember now which one it was. He's talking to me, and then this other tester comes over looking for her thumb drive."
"Wait. Do I need to know what a thumb drive is to follow this story?"
"It's just a little pocket-sized hard drive that you can stick in your computer. The company has a bunch they give to people so they can take work home with them. Anyway, you don't need to know what a thumb drive is. Just that it's small and sometimes people borrow them without asking. Or so I've heard."
"Whatever, Lisa."
"Right, so I tell Anna I have her drive, just to see what she'd say? And she flips out."
"Flips out?"
"She gets up close to me and yells 'Give it back dammit!' Her eyes are bugging out."
"Oops."
"Yeah. So I back off and tell her I never saw her drive. And so she takes off."
"Did she apologize for yelling at you?"
"Oh, she mumbled an apology as she left. So Bob is now just standing there at my desk, and neither of us can remember what we were talking about before that. And so he says 'Wanna go get coffee'? And I said yes."
"Aha, and so you went along thinking it was just a coffee run, but in reality he meant it like a first date. Is that the accidental part?"
Lisa had taken advantage of the interruption to eat another bite of her sandwich. She finished chewing, swallowed, and said, "Well, yes and no. It gets worse."
"Oh really?"
"Well, so we go to the Tully's, right over there, and there's a line, and he's talking about this and that. At first I'm thinking he's going to just talk at me and so I'll just let him bang on and then I won't have to say anything, but it turns out that he and I have both lived in the same apartment building. Though not at the same time."
"I suppose that's pretty unusual."
"Yes, although it sounds like he's lived in a number of different places. But so his coffee comes up first, and he takes it and goes and sits down at a table. I had assumed that we were just picking up coffee and going back. But he's clearly assumed that this is a sit-down sort of thing."
"I see why you called it an accident then."
"Yes. Sort of. It does gets worse, though."
"It does? Is he cute?"
"Kind of, yes. I already said he was cute, didn't I?"
"So it isn't necessarily a bad kind of accident then?"
"Is it?" Lisa stared at her sandwich thoughtfully. "Nerds can be obsessive, more so on average than other guys." She took another bite.
"Are you worried about winding up with a stalker?"
Lisa shrugged, unwilling to sound paranoid. "He's a coworker. I do sort of work with the guy. I don't need any bad weirdness in my working life. I attract enough of that as it is."
"You do? How so?"
"Oh you know. Like the thing with Anna and her thumb drive."
"She'll get over it."
"She's high strung. More so than I realized. That could cause problems between us in ways that would be hard to undo."
"But how was coffee with Bob?"
"Well, where was I?"
"You were sitting down with him."
"Right. I did sit down with him. It was late, near the end of the day, I was thinking why not sit down and chat with Bob. I didn't need to finish what I was working on that day anyway. I could just have coffee and then go home. So I sat down and talked with him. It turns out that he went to the same college as my sister. Though not at the same time. I think there was only one year that they overlapped."
"Another coincidence. Do they seem significant?"
"Significant how?"
"You know. Do they seem like a reason to get to know the guy?"
"No. Not really, not in and of themselves."
"Then why are you mentioning them?"
"I guess because they're the only reasons we had a successful conversation. You know? Usually when a coworker says let's go get coffee, they have something to chat about in mind. I don't think Bob had anything in mind. He was blue-skying it."
"Blue-sky-ing?"
"You know. He was making it up as he went along. If we hadn't had these little things in common I have no idea what we would have wound up talking about."
"So he was a bad conversationalist?"
"He tended to ramble and blather on a lot. Though to give him credit, he didn't dominate the conversation. If I let him go, he would talk indefinitely. If I had wanted to, I could have sat through the entire evening and not said a thing."
"Wait. What entire evening?"
"But whenever I spoke up, he would shut up. And he wouldn't try to interrupt me."
"You were just having coffee."
"He was a good listener, too. In that sense he wasn't awkward."
"What are you not telling me?"
"Well, we ended up taking the bus together."
"Oh, really?"
"Well, that's not so surprising. We both live in Capitol Hill. There's only a handful of buses that go there from our office."
"Okay, please tell me this doesn't wind up with you back at his place."
Lisa paused, and took a bite of sandwich.
Joanna put her spoon down in the now-empty bowl and leaned in toward the middle of table. "Lisa?" she said warily. "Just how did this accidental date end?"
Lisa shook her head. "No, not in the way you're thinking."
"But you did go back to his place? Is that what you're saying?"
"Well, see, we ended up having dinner together."
Joanna leaned back and eyed her carefully. "Go on. How did that happen?"
"Well, we were riding home together on the bus, we were talking about Capitol Hill. I had already mentioned that I was hungry, back when we were having coffee. He mentioned some of his favorite restaurants around the neighborhood, most of which I had never heard of. So he suggests we go to one. And I was starving, and food sounded like a good idea."
"Okay, but Lisa. By now you must have realized that as far as he's concerned you're on a full-fledged date."
"Well, sort of yeah. But the conversation wasn't like a first date conversation."
"How so?"
"It was more like conversation between potential friends. Like you would have with a girlfriend."
"What? Did you talk about shopping for bras?"
"No. I mean, there was just — I don't know. He didn't seem like he was trying to impress me, or even entertain me. He didn't seem like he was trying to do anything."
"Sure. No, I think I know what you mean."
"We wound up talking about work, after a while. Since that's the only thing we both knew we had in common from the start, I guess it was unavoidable. It was interesting hearing his point of view about the various projects. The projects look very different from his perspective. He doesn't see very much of the side that I work on, or the people that are involved. He spends all his time looking at the wiring, or the plumbing."
"Inside the walls."
"Yeah. The part that's inside the walls."
"So, dinner was fun?"
Lisa nodded slowly. "It was fun. I don't know if it would be fun a second time — we may have already exhausted everything we have in common to talk about."
"So not really boyfriend material?"
"I don't know. No?" Lisa scowled at the last piece of her sandwich. "It's been a long time since my last relationship, you know. Jim certainly seemed like boyfriend material when we were just dating. Look what that got me."
"Don't start with that defeatist stuff again."
"Okay, okay. All I'm saying is that it's too early to pass judgement on Bob. But just going on what I have so far, no."
"So how does this wind up with you going back to his place?"
Lisa sighed and ate the last of her sandwich while Joanna watched. "Well, his apartment was really close to the restaurant. And, I don't know, he was talking about the view from his place, because he can see the Sound from his window. And I'm thinking about the view that I have from my basement apartment and I said that sounded really nice, and he offered to show it to me, and I just said sure. He just seemed so guileless, it just didn't occur to me to think about it as a maneuver."
Joanna smirked. "Yes. He's just concerned for your view-starved soul, and wanted to share his bounty with those who are less fortunate."
"Maybe I'm a little slow. And you know, it occurred to me as we're walking back to his place that I'd probably given him the wrong idea. But I just couldn't think of a diplomatic way to back out of it. And I really did have the feeling that he was harmless. I figured I'd go along with it, see the view, and leave."
Joanna frowned as Lisa paused. "Yeah, so what happened already?"
"So we walk in, and his roommate is there on the couch, and he is drunk off his ass."
"What?"
"Bob had told me that he had a roommate, but that he was spending the night at his boyfriend's. But apparently while we were eating dinner, his roommate was busy getting dumped."
Joanna laughed. "Oh my. Oh how sad. Oh that's too funny."
"So Bob takes one look at the mess that it is his roommate on the couch, and he turns to me and says, 'I think we're going to have to cut the evening short.'"
"Short? So he did have something up his sleeve."
"So I said see ya round, and left."
"So. Have you spoken to this Bob guy since then?"
"Nope. He sent me a nice little email this morning, though. Thanks for coming to dinner, can we do it again sometime, sort of thing."
"What did you say?"
"I haven't responded yet."
"Well what are you going to say?"
"I have no idea."
"Well, you said that you're not sure how you feel about him yet."
"You're right, I'm not."
"Then I suppose you should give it another date and find out."
"I suppose. I don't know. It would probably be fun to get to know him. He seems like an interesting sort of guy. But I'm not really attracted to him." There was another pause while Lisa toyed with her sandwich wrapper. "I kind of wish I could have hung around that night, though. It would have been interesting to have been a fly on the wall."
When I first moved into my current apartment, it was the first time I had lived alone in my life. I had some misgivings about the prospect, naturally. I wasn't sure I would like living alone, even though I was eager to move out of my current situation. It seemed like I had spent the entirety of my adult life moving from one group of roommates to another, each time living there until I could no longer stand the people anymore, or they could no longer stand me. Or both, I suspect, in at least a few cases. And then moving on to the next group.
This last time I thought I was going to break out of the pattern. I was moving in with a bunch of strangers. I had been living with Harvey, which had been a mistake. Harvey and I went back far enough that I figured our friendship would get us past the inevitable initial problems. It always seemed to be that the first real difficulties would arise in the first year or so. I had this idea that if I could just get past that part, there would be this long-term period of smooth sailing. We would reach the crest of the nearby hills and look out onto a broad flat plain of comfortable friendship and camraderie.
Of course, I didn't really share this mental image with Harvey as such. I just told him that I thought that we were good enough friends that we wouldn't just chuck the whole thing at the first sign of trouble. Maybe even that was too much. It sounds like a rather pessimistic note to be starting out on. I'm sure I presented it in a more optimistic way than that, at the time.
In any case, Harvey never caught my optimism. Part of the problem was that he didn't have much of a choice. He was broke and working a lousy job as a bar-back in a tiny coffeeshop. It was a step up from working as a waiter, but he was barely scraping by. The wage was nothing; he existed solely on tips. And the place didn't attract enough business for tips to be good. Anyway, he had been living in a tiny little townhouse with two other gay men, and he wasn't getting along with either of them. When Harvey would tell me about life there, it sounded like a soap opera. I don't mean that idiomatically. To me it truly sounded like a stream of overdone melodramatics and subplots kicked off by sleeping with exes' exes. Anyway, he really needed to move out, and he was nowhere close to being able to afford a place of his own. I was looking for a roommate, I had the salary and credit that could get us a decent place, and I was gung-ho about this idea that the two of us would make great roommates.
Part of it was that Harvey had a hard time going from being part of a group of gay men that went out clubbing at least every weekend, to living with an socially-maladapted computer nerd like me. Harvey didn't expect me to go hit the gay bars with him, but he was surprised at first that I didn't really want to go out to any bars. But alcohol intoxication isn't particularly pleasant for me. It makes you confused and slow-witted, and why would I want that? Without my wits, I got nothing. Anyway, the point is that not only did he miss having some bar-hopping friends always at hand, and that he now had to call people up all the time. But also the fact that I didn't really go out at all meant that I was home all the time. Apparently Harvey had gotten used to occasionally having the apartment to himself when his friends were out and he felt like being alone. About the only time I was ever out of the apartment, besides when I was at my job, was when I was with Harvey, on those occasions when he was desperate enough to badger me to put aside my latest programming project, and get up from the keyboard and let myself be dragged somewhere. When we went out to bars it was usually somewhere smoky and loud and uncomfortable. People would be crammed tight into a small space. I can perfectly understand why cramped quarters would be a good thing in a bar, because it sort of forces people to get into each other's personal spaces, and then they have an excuse to introduce themselves to each other and all that. When Harvey and I would compromise and go to a coffeeshop (if I have to take a drug, caffeine is my choice) instead, it would be comfortable and clear-aired, and I would settle in and chat with him about whatever came to mind. And Harvey would have a nice time and all, but everybody was sitting just a few inches too far away. You could overhear everyone's conversations, but the distance was just enough that you couldn't butt in and make an overture to an introduction without seeming rude. By the end of those evenings you could see Harvey getting bored, or else lonely and despressed.
So eventually was happened there, I think, is that he started acting out. Acting out against me, and I know that sounds conceited, but I think it's true. Harvey's never been really obviously gay-appearing, at least not as far as I can tell, but after a few months of our living together, he started turning the queer knob up a notch. He traded in his white T-shirts for ones in bright pastel colors. He developed this fluttery hand gesture, and in general started flinging his hands around when he spoke. It was almost as if he were trying to make up for the absence of his prior roommates, and be three gay men in one body. Maybe he was trying to drown me out.
That by itself was just a little unnerving, nothing more. But he also became argumentative. He started looking for excuses to take offense. It was like having a proofreader going over everything I said, when I was in his presence, except with the difference that I couldn't fire him. And sometimes I think he intentionally read things into what I said that he knew perfectly well wasn't there to begin with. I was pretty meek about it at first, figuring that he was just helping me to understand something I didn't, but after a few weeks of this behavior I realized that I was starting to dread being around him. And I finally realized that what he was really looking for was a fight, and as his only roommate I had sort of become the default representative of the entire heterosexual population.
That's when I began to realize that my whole idea of living with a close friend being the way to get past the initial hilly spot had been completely backwards. In reality we already knew each other well enough, knew each other's shortcoming and weak spots, that it took no time to get on each other's nerves. There was no broad, flat plain up ahead. It was just going to get worse and worse.
And so I developed sort of the opposite theory, which is that all roommates eventually wound up wanting to kill each other. We as socialized humans just weren't made to live in such close quarters indefinitely, I thought. That worked when life was difficult and uncertain, sure, like when we were still living in caves, or even when you were poor and lacked much in the way of creature comforts. But for folks like us with these modern middle-class lives, we need more separation from each other than a shared apartment can permit. I'm sure this all sounds completely stupid now, but at the time these were my thoughts. Movies and TV are all full of people living together, particularly if they're very different and don't get along at first, and so maybe I grew up thinking that that's how it really is. But it isn't. That's just Hollywood using their artistic license because reality is so much less interesting. Odd couples don't learn to get along; they learn how to make each other miserable.
So, under this theory of mine, the trick was to move in with total strangers. This would maximize the amount of time you spent together before you knew each other well enough to not get along any more. So I told Harvey that I thought it was time for us to look for other accommodations. I spent most of a week working out a speech in my head, looking for a balance between politeness and honesty. I wanted to make it clear enough that I wanted to move out because we weren't getting along, but be distant and non-confrontational enough about it so that he wouldn't protest. He knew as well as I did that we weren't getting along and that things were getting worse, not better. But I figured that if I approached things the wrong way, he might very well take it as an invitation to start an argument. It turned out I had fretted for no reason. When I finally worked up the nerve to launch into my speech, he didn't even seem very surprised. He didn't even try to protest on financial grounds. He just took it in stride and the next day he started asking around for someone else to move in with.
For my part, I went straight to the classifieds and started calling people who were looking for roommates. But that turned out to be a mistake, as I soon discovered. I had always figured that I was pretty much an ideal roommate, as far as the basics went. I had an engineer's salary and a nerd's reliability. But the people I found advertising for roommates in the classifieds were, almost invariably, highly protective of their "household environment". They weren't just looking for someone to keep the stereo turned down and pay the rent on time. These people grill you like a job interview, only worse because instead of asking you what you know how to do, it's all about your personal life. Questions about politics, eating habits. I'm afraid I don't do well in such situations. I get defensive. Were these people going to turn me down if I admitted that I sometimes liked microwave pizza? (Well, "like" is a strong word. Who really likes microwave pizza? But still, I wanted to be able to make it in my own home without worrying about pissing off my roommates.)
I went through a handful of these interviews, and walked out of every one of them feeling like I had bungled the whole thing. And I suppose I had, because I never heard back from any of them. I started panicking. We had already committed to moving out of our current place, and I had nothing. Harvey and I had been expertly avoiding each other — finding excuses to stay out when the other person was around a lot — but now I sought him out and humbly asked if he knew of anyone who might be needing a roommate. Thankfully, Harvey didn't show any animosity towards me. I thought he might, seeing as how I was sort of the one that threw him out. But he didn't seem to think anything of my coming to him for help. A couple of days later he came home with a phone number. Two guys — one gay and one straight — looking for a third. They needed someone who would move in and start paying rent right away. Two days later I visited them and in an hour or so I had a place to live.
But, as you can probably guess without me telling you, I learned that my new theory wasn't really much more successful than my last one. I do think that the fact that we hardly knew each other did partly work in my favor, because we all remained sort of aloof and so we never really got on each other nerves the way that friends can. But the day-to-day annoyances were still there, and they weren't really any easier to solve than they ever had been. Jack (the gay guy) was neurotic about cleaning the bathroom, and Felix (the straight guy) would make up all sorts of excuses for not cleaning the bathroom when it was his turn. I was the only one who felt strongly about paying rent and bills before they were due, and so as a result it became my job to bug the other two. A couple of times I wound up covering them when they didn't have the money. A few months later Felix tried to convince me to cover his share of the rent, and I had to be a dick about it and say no, and he wound up having to call his parents and borrow money from them. I felt sorry for him, but I also really resented him putting me in that situation.
About the only time we all really got along with each other was when we were playing video games. Felix was always buying the latest game consoles, and spent whatever money he had left over on games. We spent some great times together, the three of us, in impromptu tournaments that on a couple of occasions lasted well into the night. But while video games are fun and all, they aren't my life. In some ways they're the most much fun as you can have by yourself, and I say that in all seriousness, but still and all in the final count they're not terribly important to me. Or to Jack. They were to Felix, but one out of three isn't a majority. Anyway, the point is that it wasn't enough to make up for all the other ways in which we didn't quite get along.
It did take longer for me to get fed up enough to want to move out, though, so I think that that part of my theory was sound. In the end I lived with them for almost two years. It ended when Jack moved out on us rather abruptly, giving us almost exactly one month's notice. (I actually wound up covering his share of the rent for an extra month, as I was distracted at work and didn't want to drop everything and start packing up. Felix stuck around, too, but naturally only wound up paying for his usual share.) That's when I finally decided it was time to try living alone. I had tried living together with people several different times, in several different ways. I had given it a fair shake. It was time to see how the other half lived.
Bob walked into the company's kitchen.
"Hello, Bob," said Lisa. Lisa was standing over by the sink, apparently making tea. She looked up briefly to acknowledge him, then returned her attention to her cup.
Bob ran his hand through his hair. "Hello, Lisa. I see you're a tea drinker."
"Yes, I suppose I am."
"I'm a coffee man myself. I guess I need the caffeine more than you do. I probably wouldn't be able to get any work done if I drank tea."
"That right."
Bob nodded, and found himself at a conversational cul-de-sac. "Yep." All he needed, he thought, was to swing his arms back and forth wildly to complete the picture of a pathetic loser. He forced himself to walk over to the coffee urn.
"Well, the nice thing about coffee is that you can go from being a coffee-drinker to — well, to not being a coffee-drinker. It's not a permanent lifestyle choice."
Bob said, trying to be whimsical, "Like heroin."
Lisa considered this and shrugged. "Yeah. Like heroin." She sipped at her steaming cup. "I was thinking more along the lines of like cigarettes myself."
"Yeah, that works too," Bob said, leaning against the sink counter in an attempt to appear casual. "I guess. I've never tried cigarettes, so I wouldn't know."
Lisa arched an eyebrow and cocked her head slightly.
Bob thought for a moment and then said, "Uh, yeah. I haven't tried heroin either, though. So, I guess that comment didn't really make any sense, did it?"
Lisa shook her head a fraction of an inch. "I understood what you meant." And then, to Bob's immense relief and regret, Lisa quietly excused herself and left the kitchen.
Bob looked down at the coffee urn. He then remembered that he hated the coffee the company made available these days, and walked out of the kitchen and back to his office. Another exciting day at work, he thought.
Bob is an introvert, I mean a real introvert. Before I got to know Bob I would think of myself as a semi-introvert. But I can't do that now that I know Bob. Because he's the real thing, and next to him I'm a party hound.
He's not a misanthrope, either. That's one of the things I like about him. Well, I mean, of course. A lack of misanthropy is always a plus, right? But that's not what I mean here. Sometimes people think introverts are just misanthropes who are well-bred enough to remove themselves from what they don't like. They're wrong. I knew that before Bob, I think, but not like I know it now. Bob likes people. A lot, I think — more than he'd be willing to admit. It's just that they exhaust him. Being around people just sort of takes it out of him, after a while, and then he needs to go be alone for a while. I sort of imagine him sitting around his little apartment, all by himself, reading a book or watching TV or yakking on some online forum, and all the while his battery levels are slowly creeping up. Eventually the indicators are out of the red section and showing green, and he's all ready to leave the apartment again.
I don't remember now where I got that image from — whether it was something I came up with or it was something that Bob suggested to me himself — but it's a cute image. And, I think it helps me not take it personally when Bob says that he doesn't want to hang out. He can be a bit rude about it sometimes. He doesn't do a good job of differentiating between not wanting to hang out, and not wanting to hang out with me in particular. I know he's not really thinking about nuaunces like that at the time, but it sure makes a difference to me. But then I remind myself that it's just because his batteries are nearly empty. I don't think I've seem him be rude when he's fully charged, so I just let those incidents pass.
Bob hunched over his keyboard and peered at the code on the screen. Tapping at the arrow keys, he moved the cursor to a line near the top of the window. Whispering to himself, he followed the logic downwards, moving the cursor down a line every few seconds. Halfway through he began miming shuffling imaginary little objects around, on his desk to the left of the keyboard, from pile to pile.
Finally, after more than a minute of this, Bob stopped muttering and removed his hands from the keyboard. He leaned back heavily in his chair and said aloud, "There is no way in hell that this thing doesn't work right."
"Isn't that a good thing?"
Bob jumped visibly and swung around in his chair. Lisa was standing just outside his office, leaning inward, hand on the door frame, her expression characteristically inscrutable. "Oh! Hi, Lisa."
"Hey, there's a little party going on in the kitchen to celebrate the Whitehead project being finished on time. Everyone's welcome. There's pizza and I think beer."
Bob stood up. "And you thought of me?"
"Well, sure. They're letting everyone know by word of mouth."
"Oh, okay. Thanks."
Bob followed Lisa over to the kitchen. He felt a little strange lagging and watching her from behind. The hallway was simply too narrow to permit them to walk side by side, but Bob felt that he was being somehow gauche by not walking in front of her. She might think he was checking her out from back there. Bob prayed she didn't think like that. Probably nobody really thought like that, not if you didn't give them reason to suspect you. Which he had, of course, not too long ago, when he had practically monitored her from a distance. He had stopped doing that after their date, since he was no longer just another anonymous engineer to her. Frankly, at this point he wasn't sure that he could do much of anything involving her. He had made the first overture, and in a big way. He had invited her out on a date completely out of the blue when they hardly knew each other, after all. Surely all he could do now was maintain a respectful distance and wait for her to indicate if she wanted a second date? If only Harvey hadn't been home that night, the topic of a second date would probably have come up naturally at the end of the evening. On the other hand, she had just now come over to tell him about something going on. It wasn't exactly personal, but it was something. It showed that she wasn't trying to avoid him, right? Maybe he should take this as encouragement. Maybe he should broach the subject of another date with her. Maybe he'd get a chance during this party, or whatever it was.
The kitchen was full of people, more than Bob would have thought were in the whole office. A number of people were standing in the hall outside the kitchen, and Lisa and Bob had to squeeze inbetween them to enter. Bob hated walking through people talking in a hallway. It seemed like a rude thing for him to be doing, walking inbetween two people while they were trying to have a conversation, even though it was the people in the hallway who were causing the problem in the first place. It also made him a little uncomfortable that he seemed to be the only person in the world who was actually bothered by this.
Conversations were buzzing around the room. Lisa and Bob made slow progress through the people until they emerged into a little bubble of open space around the table in the middle of the kitchen. On it were stacked several pizza boxes, as well as some two-liter bottles of soda and several six-packs of beer.
"Oooh. Fancy," Lisa said, gesturing at the alcohol.
"Is that even legal? I mean, we employ twenty-year-olds, don't we?"
Lisa shrugged. "I doubt they would be doing it if it's illegal, though."
Bob began opening the pizza boxes one by one, looking through the various options.
"Excuuuuse me," said a voice, and Bob felt someone behind him work their way past him. An unfamiliar man in a shirt and tie appeared to Bob's right, and leaned over a grabbed a bottle of beer. "Hey, Lisa," he said in a loud voice, noticing her on his other side. "How's it going?"
"Hello, Corwin," said Lisa. "Filed any good lawsuits lately?"
"Ha ha ha," he intoned loudly. "So, how's the bash? Were you working on Whitehead?"
Bob pulled a paper plate off the stack and began tearing off a slice of pepperoni and mushroom pizza.
"I was, but I got shuffled around after the beta was done. Now I'm working on Feynman."
"I haven't heard of Feynman. What's that about?"
Lisa leaned to one side and gestured over Corwin's shoulder. "Bob's working on Feynman."
Corwin turned around and presented Bob with a smile and a right hand. "Bob is it?"
Bob's smile failed to conceal his discomfort. "Hi there." He took the offered hand and got a firm handshake. The fingertips were cold and damp from the beer bottle.
In the cramped quarters Lisa was almost completely concealed behind Corwin. Her voice came, "Bob, this is Corwin. He works in the legal department."
"Oh, then maybe you know. What's the legality of making beer available to the employees like this? Don't you need to have a license of some kind, and check people's IDs?"
Corwin laughed loudly, a sincere laugh this time. "Oh, Bob. We don't worry about that. We're just a tiny little company. As long as we're discreet, nobody's going to care."
Bob looked astonished. "Nobody's going to care? But you're a lawyer. Don't you care about what the law says? Are you all really that ..." Bob paused, searching for an elusive word, and suddenly realized that the conversation around them was much quieter than he remembered. Corwin's expression had darkened and he was looking closely at Bob. The moment stretched out.
"So," Lisa suddenly said loudly. "Toilet paper! Do you hang it frontwards or backwards? Come on, let's see a show of hands."
I went through a phase in college when I suddenly started listening to classical music. On the baroque side I listened to Bach and Vivaldi. Then there was Telemann, Beethoven, Mozart, Ravel, Prokofiev, Rachmaninoff.
In retrospect I think I was experimenting with being a snob. I was surrounded by guys who listened to nothing but dance music and show tunes. Listening to classical music afforded me a sort of moral high ground from which I could look down upon many of my peers.
After a few years, though, I got sick of classical music. There something vaguely necrophilic about rejecting the new and venerating the old. I read Homer and Shakespeare in school, not to mention Plato and Descartes and a hundred other long-dead authors, but that doesn't stop me from reading books written this year. There is a time for appreciating things created outside your time and culture, and a time for appreciating things created by your peers. But appreciating classical music seems to be predicated on the idea that only the former is uplifting. It's hard to be a lover of classical music and Madonna at the same time.
I did try getting into modern classical music. I bought a couple of Philip Glass albums and listened to them. They were kind of cool, but after a while I figured I could just as well be listening to dance music as this stuff. And so eventually that's what I did.
"So something weird happened to me the other night," said Harvey.
Bob and Harvey were sitting on wooden chairs outside of the coffeeshop where Harvey currently worked. Bob had pulled an all-nighter at work last night, and so was taking the day off today, or as much of it was left after waking up. But, unmotivated to do anything productive like laundry or grocery shopping, he had wound up working on code for his job until it was six thirty. In an attempt to distract himself, he had walked over to see Harvey at his new job. They had chatted briefly over the espresso machine, and then Harvey had taken a fifteen-minute break.
Bob stretched out his legs and leaned back, looking up at the thick clouds feebly backlit by the sun. "Tell me."
Harvey leaned forward in his chair and folded his hands together. "I was walking home from work. It was pretty late." He looked forward at the parked cars lining the street. "It was dark at this one block where the street lights were out. I was walking along, not really watching the sidewalk, and then I nearly stepped on this cat."
"Ouch."
"Yeah, it was completely black. Didn't see it at all. I just barely realized in time that there was something under my foot. Of course it took off like a rocket when that happened. It ran on ahead down the sidewalk, and streaked across the road, out of sight."
"Okay," said Bob, in a tone of voice that indicated that he wasn't terribly impressed by the weirdness of the story.
"That's not the whole story."
"Well, good. Proceed."
"So I'm crossing the street onto the next block, and coming up on my left is this girl, this Asian woman, she's got her ear glued to a cell phone. She's walking really fast, and she walks in front of me, and just when she's passing me she says into the cell phone, "This can't be happening." And just the way she says it, and the way her voice sounds, you could just tell that she was on the verge of bursting into tears."
"Huh."
"Maybe she had even been crying earlier. And I watch her go off to my right, and part of me is thinking, wow, maybe she's in trouble, should I ask her if she needs any help?"
"Help?"
"Well, you know, like maybe she's just been robbed and needs to go to the police station."
"You don't have a car."
"Well, maybe she doesn't know where the police station is."
"Okay fine. Whatever."
"No, I know what you're saying. And that's just it. If the woman needed my help, like if she needed to know where the police station was, she would have asked me. I realize that probably she's getting bad news like her grandfather just had a stroke or something. It doesn't concern me. But it's kind of funny — you see a young woman on the street in tears, and you just naturally think, I should see if I can help her."
"I wouldn't. I can barely talk to strange women as it is."
"Going out on a date with Lisa doesn't count?"
"No, it counts. I'm trying to get better at talking to strange women. But look how hard it was."
"Asking for a first date is always tough."
"And I haven't been able to do anything with her since then."
"You still haven't asked on a second date?"
"No. I kind of made an ass of myself in front of her last week. I'm too embarrassed to go talk to her."
"Yeah? What happened?"
"Well, there was this big thing going on in the kitchen, and Lisa —"
"Wait a second, Bob." Harvey took out his cell phone. "What's Lisa's last name again?" He tapped at the buttons.
"Kindell."
"Kindell?" Harvey held the cell phone up to his ear. "Lisa Kindell?"
Bob lowered his eyes from sky and looked over at Harvey. "Yes. Why do you ask?"
Harvey's face assumed a blank expression. "No reason. Just wondering."
"Who are you calling?"
"Nobody. I'm checking my voice mail." Harvey lowered the phone to press a button, then held it up to his ear again.
Bob looked at him suspiciously. Harvey returned his gaze impassively. After another moment of this, Bob leaned his head back and looked up at the clouds again. "Okay. Well anyway, there was this big thing going on in the kitchen at work —"
"Hey Bob, shut the hell up," Harvey said in a low voice, and then speaking normally, "Hello, Lisa? Hi. This is Harvey. I'm a friend of Bob's. We met briefly when I was crashing at Bob's apartment."
Bob looked over in horror, but couldn't think of anything to say to Harvey that would both express what he was feeling and not be embarrassing for Lisa to overhear.
"Yeah, that's right. Thanks. Yeah, maybe we should get together sometime. But right now, what I'm wondering is if you might be willing to get together with Bob. You see, I told Bob I would go with him to see the new John Woo movie this Friday. But my schedule got moved around and I have to work that day. I haven't told Bob because he really wants to go and he hates going to movies alone. Yeah. Yeah, me too. So anyway, I was wondering if you might be a) available, and b) willing, to go in my place. I'd owe you a favor. Really? Yeah. That'd be great. Okay. So I'll tell him that he should offer to take you the next time I see him. Yeah. No, that's fine. Thanks, and sorry to call you up out of the blue like that, but I really didn't want to just leave him hanging without anyone to do backup. Right. Ha! Okay, I'll tell him. Thanks. Okay. Byebye." Harvey closed his cell phone. "Hey Bob, I bet if you called Lisa and invite her to the movies this Friday, she'd say yes."
Bob looked at Harvey disbelievingly. Finally he said, "I can't believe you just did that."
Harvey grinned. "Yeah, I kind of can't believe I did that either."
"What just got into you to make you do that?"
"Oh, well, I didn't finish my story. You see —" Harvey leaned back in his chair, confident now of his audience. "So after the girl crosses my path, I keep walking down the sidewalk there, and the next intersection is Twelfth, so I turn right." Harvey made little motions with his hands, tracing his route on an imaginary map. "So I'm walking down Twelfth, and as I'm coming up to the next intersection, what do I see but that very same black cat that I nearly stepped on. So it sees me, and it starts to move away from me. But right then, on my right, coming down the street towards the intersection, is that Asian girl with the cell phone. And she sees the cat and yells, 'Thomas!' And the cat sees her and runs right up to her, and she picks up the cat, and hugs it, sticking her face right into its fur, and she's still on the cell phone because I can hear her saying, 'I found him. He's alive, he's fine. I found him.' And she turns around and walks back up the street. She doesn't even see me there."
Bob considered this for a moment. "Okay, I admit that does qualify as a weird story."
"Yeah. And see, it left me kicking myself for not following my first instinct and offering to help the girl when I first saw her." Harvey looked up at the clouds. "So what I figure is, it's the universe's way of telling me that I need to meddle in other people's affairs more."
So I had had two dates with Lisa, and both of them were by my initiative. Well actually, one of them was Harvey's initiative. More to the point, neither of them were by Lisa's initiative. I figured it was time for me to step back and wait for her to make the next move. If she didn't, then it was time to drop it.
The second date went pretty well. The movie was boring, but she kind of enjoyed it, and that gave us something to debate afterwards. If we had both had the same reaction to the movie, it would have been easy for the conversation to sort of peter out afterwards, and then she'd probably have made her excuses and left. As it was, the conversation was just getting started by the time we got to where her car was parked, and then it was easy to suggest that we continue the conversation over some coffee. At least it felt easy. Hopefully it didn't come across as slimy or manipulative.
And so we wound up talking for another hour or two, about our interests and backgrounds. And again, the conversation didn't feel like date conversation to me. It still felt like friend conversation. Which was frustrating, but what could I do? I would have liked to have steered things towards date conversation, but I had only the haziest notion of what that was, anyway. And I'm not good at manipulating conversation anyway. I had already been five times more outgoing and presumtuous than is my usual demeanor in this whole affair. I had hardly the energy to try to push things around further. And even if I had, the idea of doing so was really starting to bother me. I mean, I was trying to get this woman Lisa to be interested in me. Me, Bob the introvert. Not me, Bob the guy who asks women out for dinner and coffee on a whim. In order to get her to know me in the first place, I was having to act like someone I'm really not.
In the movies you often see stories where some shy guy really has to screw his courage up in order to ask out this girl, and you, as the audience, are supposed to be rooting for him to do so. And so he does it, and she says yes, and you cheer for him because he's learned to stop being shy. The heady taste of success with girls causes him to blossom and come out of his shell, and look, now he's confident and outgoing. Well, that's fine I suppose if you're shy and you wish you weren't. But what if you're just introverted, and you're happy being that way? Then I guess you're just a freak, as far as the movies are concerned. (Well, no big deal there. I'd say ninety-nine per cent of the population are freaks as far as the movies are concerned.)
I'm not always happy that I'm an introvert. I'm not saying that. It does make some things harder. But the idea of wishing I wasn't an introvert any more is ridiculous. That would be like wishing I had been born a girl, or wishing that I had grown up in France. I wouldn't be me anymore, I'd be someone else. So much someone else that I wouldn't recognize me.
All the more reason to back off and wait for her to make the next move.
But that turned out to be harder than I had expected. It sucked, actually. Here's something I've learned from the experience of putting yourself out on the line like that: it's like being judged. It didn't start out feeling that way. We were just supposed to be trying to figure out if we were compatible. If we got along. If we would continue to get along if we started kissing each other. That's all. But then I asked her out on the first date, and then I asked her out on another date (or from her point of view I did), and so I had shown my hand and she hadn't really had to show hers. So by backing off and waiting I was basically forcing her to pass judgement on me, and not just form a judgement but then, through either action or inaction, communicate that judgement to me.
After five days of waiting with nothing from her, I made my second discovery: I was willing to risk appearing pathetic in order to delay a negative judgement. So I took to calling her every few days. I called her while at work, since she hadn't given me her home phone number yet and I hadn't figured out how to ask her for it. Calling her up at work seemed less presumptuous on my part anyway, and I needed that to counterbalance the presumptuousness of calling her at all. I still didn't feel comfortable checking her out at her cubicle, although once in a great while I did have a legitimate reason to walk past her cubicle, and on those occasions I would smile, wave briefly, and continue walking. I didn't want her to feel like I was cornering her in her own cubicle.
These phone conversations did little to move things along. She gave me the impression that she enjoyed talking on the phone, as long as she wasn't busy when I called, but at the same time she never picked up the phone and called me herself. When I would hint at the possibility of us getting together some time, she seemed open to the idea, occasionally even enthusiastic, but nothing concrete ever quite developed.
If there was going to be a third date, I really wanted her to initiate it. All she had to do was suggest a day and an activity, and I would take care of the rest. But if I made the original suggestion, and she agreed, I would never be sure that she wasn't just doing it to be polite.
This went on for a few weeks. Finally, in a moment of weakness, I decided I couldn't stand being strung along anymore. Or I couldn't stand stringing myself along anymore. I'm not sure really who was doing the stringing. I resolved to just go ahead and suggest we have a third date. If she turned me down, or if she agreed but without enthusiasm, I would take that as her final answer. I called her up at her cubicle. I asked if she had plans for the weekend. She told me she was going to be out of town, visiting her parents. I never even got as far as suggesting anything, and so at the end of the conversation I still didn't have my answer.
Lisa's mother died in the hours just before dawn, so Lisa and her father had been up all night. It started with a heart attack sometime after midnight. Her mother had been the only one in the house who was awake at the time. She had probably been unable to sleep. It looked like she had been pacing around the house for a while. By the time she had woken everyone up and they had summoned an ambulance, Lisa was already convinced that her mother wasn't going to make it. She described her mother's face afterwards as having collapsed inward, the wrinkles deepening into crevasses, and no makeup to hide the blueness of her lips. At the hospital they had got her stabilized after a long wait, but they doctors had been careful to hedge anything they said that might be heard as optimistic. An hour later her heart began to falter. After another hour of fighting she had given up. Lisa noticed that the doctor described her mother as having "slipped away" when he spoke to family, but to the other doctors he described her as "crashing". Lisa wound up preferring the latter term when she explained what happened.
Lisa had not been with her parents because she was concerned about her mother's health. That had just been a coincidence. Lisa was just visiting home at the tail end of a five-day vacation. Her plan had been to spend the night there, and then get up early and drive back to Seattle before work started.
The sun was beginning to come up by the time Lisa and her father returned to the house. Her father was exhausted and didn't seem to have a clear grasp on what had just happened. He finally got on the phone and called her sister Vivian and broke the news. This turned out to be the right first move. Vivian was devastated, but she had had a full night's sleep. When she realized that the two of them had been up since one, she took charge of the situation. She promised to contact the rest of the immediate family that morning, and to be on the next plane. She would be there by evening. With luck, Lisa's father could sleep between now and then, and then Vivian could be there to help with everything that needed to be done. Lisa was rather surprised that her father thought that he could fall asleep, but not long after he retired she could hear light snores coming from the bedroom.
Lisa couldn't sleep. She found herself drawn to the kitchen, where she alternated between pacing around the floor and sitting on a stool staring out the window. When Lisa was a girl the kitchen had been her mother's domain. Now,w the utensils and dirty dishes on the counters seemed to be arranged in an outline that described her mother's body. Even the scattering of crumbs on one part of the counter was significant. A team of forensic investigators could analyze this room, Lisa thought, and eventually produce a police sketch of her mother. As the sun moved above the trees and shone into the room, it occurred to Lisa that she should clean up the kitchen, as a gesture of support to her father. But she couldn't imagine wiping away this fragile evidence of her mother's existence so soon after her death.
This idea became so powerful in Lisa's mind that eventually she began to think that that she should clean the kitchen, lest her father break down in tears the moment he saw it, this snapshot that told so much of who she was, taken only a few hours ago.
At some point Lisa realized that today was the first of April. She came out of her introspection and began calling her friends. When they answered, she would say, "Hi. It's Lisa. Guess what? My mom died." She was hoping to catch people in a double whammy. She thought they would respond, "Yeah, April Fool's, right?" And then she could say, "Wrong! She really did die! Gotcha!"
It was exactly the sort of thing I've come to expect Lisa to do. You hear something like that and it actually sounds kind of funny, in a morbid sort of way. But it only sounds funny when you present it like that, as a terse, encapsulated anecdote. It's really all in the delivery. Actually doing it isn't very funny at all. More than anyone I know, Lisa would do things that weren't really very funny, but that would leave her with something funny to tell people afterwards. And I don't think she did it because she had this grand scheme to build up a collection of stories about her life, against some future day when she'd need to impress people at cocktail parties or anything. In fact, I think she did it because she had such a hard time seeing into the future. An idea would come to her in a certain form — "Wouldn't it be funny if I called people on April Fool's Day and told them my mom was dead, only it was true?" — and she just failed to see that bringing that idea to life would involve some really awkward and uncomfortable telephone conversations. And it was quite likely that the people that she called wouldn't find it funny at all.
Of course, the whole thing pretty much failed to work out the way she was expecting. I don't think it occurred to anybody that this might be a gag. It was too naked and artless. "My mom's dead! Just kidding!" — who the hell would think that was funny? Plus I think there was something in her voice that gave it all away. I don't know exactly what, but when I got her call and heard her blurt out that her mom was dead, all I could hear in her voice was fear barely concealed behind a front of bravery. The day's date was the last thing on my mind.
Of course, Lisa being Lisa, she didn't give up when the first phone calls didn't work out. Unable to abandon a sinking ship, she must have made a dozen calls before she ran out of phone numbers. Not a single person thought it was an April Fool's joke. By the end she must have sounded like a maniac.
Of course, back when that happened I was just getting to know her. I didn't know all these things about her nature. At the time I just thought that she was distraught. And of course she was. It was just that that didn't really have much to do with why she was calling me to tell me that her mom had just died.
The night I explained to Harvey about my Mom's dying was the night that I realized that I had a crush on him.
I had just returned to Seattle the previous week, after staying with my father and helping him take care of the business of having a dead wife. (There's really more of it than anyone in their right mind would think is necessary.) I had stayed with Dad for three weeks, far longer than I had intended to, but even so it was hard to leave. Dad was terrified at the prospect of being alone. Even after three weeks he wasn't ready for me to go, but it was impossible to pretend that there was anything more for me to do. I knew he'd be all right once he got over the fear and he found some kind of rhythm for his life again. He'd still be sad, sure. He'll always be sad to some degree.
Anyway, I was having dinner with Harvey, whom I didn't know all that well yet. But he had invited me out to dinner with such a look of concern, so I went. And by and by I figured out that I had really kind of scared him a bit with my April 1st phone call. So I explained to him how I hadn't been on the verge of a nervous breakdown or anything. I had just wanted to pull this little prank. A prank which, in hindsight, wasn't entirely the best idea I ever had in my life. But how I had wanted to do something other than sit around and feel sad. And the fact that it was April Fool's Day just seemed like a sign. Mom wasn't one of those people who are big on the cleansing power of tears or any crap like that. I think she would have appreciated the humor in what I had tried to do. Except of course it had backfired, and instead all of my friends were now worried that Mom's death had make me lose my grip. And not just my close friends but also friends like Harvey, whom I liked but was really still in the process of getting to know.
And in my effort to explain this to him, so he wouldn't worry about me or think that I was emotionally unstable, I wound up telling him about that morning in complete detail. Up until then I had avoided going into any kind of specifics about Mom's death. Nobody really wants to hear the nitty-gritty of someone else's grieving, and so I had kept all that under wraps — decorously draped with a white sheet, as it were. But because of my desire to show Harvey that I was mentally sound, I lifted one corner of the sheet, and then I had to pull it back a little farther, and then before I realized it I had thrown the sheet to one side and had told him all about that surreal morning I spent, alone in my parents' house. I told him everything I had been thinking, as best as I could. And when I was done, I sort of came up for air, and realized that the restaurant was about to close.
I apologized for talking the entire time, but he refused to hear of it. I shouldn't have to apologize for needing to express my feelings in such a situation, he said. And I thought that was really chivalrous, but he also seemed to genuinely appreciate that I had given him this confidence, like I had chosen him over my other friends. And then it occurred to me that I felt comfortable with having shared all that with him, in fact more so than I would have with most of my other friends. I hadn't chosen him — I could have unloaded all of this onto Juan, for example. And that wouldn't have been the end of the world, but I wouldn't have been completely at ease with it afterwards. On second thought, maybe I had chosen Harvey, just not consciously.
And so I thought about why I felt I could trust Harvey more when I didn't know him as well. And that's when I began to figure out that I was in danger of becoming infatuated. If I wasn't there already.
You know, it's really infuriating — but now, looking back, I honestly can't remember what I was feeling about the fact that he was gay. You'd think that this would make me frustrated, or worried that I was turning into a fag hag, or at least look like one to him. Or something. But I honestly can't remember really giving it much thought. I guess what that means is that I figured that it was something of a hopeless cause, and that it would still have been one even if he hadn't been gay.
There isn't a single aspect of social interaction that can avoid the corrosive effect of politics. Nothing is immune. Nothing is ... sacred. Case in point: When Harvey told me that Lisa had called and told him that her mom had died, my first reaction was to wonder why she had called him and not me.
Over time, I've actually spent some time thinking about this question. More than I ever should have, I'm sure you'll agree, but the thing is I do have something to show for it. Lisa was probably looking numbers up in her cell phone's list of recent callers. The fact is that I hadn't called her the entire time that she was on vacation. I didn't feel that I knew her well enough yet at that time to just call her while she was out of town, at least not without an invitation to do so. So it's quite possible that Harvey had called her cell phone more recently than I had.
Another possibility is that she was intentionally calling acquaintances. Later on Harvey told me how she had been trying to turn the call into a prank of sorts, so she may have been favoring people who didn't know her well enough. The prank wouldn't have worked as well on a close friend. Of course she hardly knew me better than she knew Harvey at that time, but maybe she was secretly hoping to get to know me better in the near future? I know, that explanation isn't very convincing.
And, of course, maybe it wasn't intentional at all. Maybe she just didn't think of me. Maybe she was picking numbers at random. Maybe she was scrolling backwards through the names in her cell phone. Maybe it was just chance.
Of course, the explanation that it was just chance is the least satisfying. The other explanations are more comforting. Even the one where Lisa didn't call me because she already hated my guts at that point. We human beings don't like to chalk things up to bad luck. I'm not sure why. Perhaps because it doesn't make for a good story. We like to have our chain of events, clearly foreshadowing in hindsight. Perhaps it's because we still want the universe to be fair. We want to be able to say, "I could have avoided it, had I only paid attention to the signs." Or maybe it's just because it doesn't leave us with anyone to be mad at. I could justifiably resent Lisa for disliking me when she hardly knew me, but not for scrolling backwards.
Anyway, despite all of that, in the end I found myself favoring this last explanation. It's the least satisfying, yes, but it's also the most plausible. Life has taught me that most things are governed by chance, and little events often wind up having far more influence on what happens next than they have any right to. Like this one. If she had called me that morning instead of Harvey, maybe I could have been the one that she suddenly brought into her inner circle of trust. And maybe a month later I could have been standing where Harvey stood.
There's this odd little trajectory in the life of gay men. We start out being raised as straight, and so we're encouraged to make friends with boys more than girls. Presumably so that by the time we hit puberty, girls and boys have become mysteries to each other, and therefore appealing. But of course as far as we're concerned girls still have cooties. In fact, their cootie situation turns out to be far worse than anything we had honestly considered.
So we make this natural transition from friends to lovers with each other, and girls never really seem particularly essential to the equation. Men make good friends and good lovers. Women aren't completely alien, of course, but there's just something a little off-kilter about the interaction. Their priorities have been shuffled around a bit, compared to you and your friends. Not by much, really — when you look at it closely it's a small thing — but it winds up coloring everything else. In the end, they seem almost like foreigners. Like the British — speaking more or less the same language, but with a completely different cultural upbringing. It's as if we had two different societies overlaid onto the same chunk of land. We're free to come and go between the two, but we don't really ever make it into each other's worlds. Even if you're gay.
Now, I know a bunch of my friends don't agree with me on this one. Their view of women is almost the opposite. They grew up preternaturally drawn to the other country and its culture. (Which of course meant that the other boys treated them mercilessly, which made them want to spend as much time as possible in the girl's world. They probably would have eventually emigrated, but then puberty hits and they discover one or two reasons to come visit our side.) And that's fine, but that's really not how it was for me.
What I'm getting at is that, we all like to make fun of fag hags, and indeed some of them are nothing but laughable. And it confused me at times to see how some of my friends would make no particular effort to avoid fag hags. What I didn't realize, until recently, is that some women can make really good friends even while they're being fag hags.
And, for a little while, that was Lisa.
There is something slightly corrosive to the human spirit, I have thought, when you spend all your time around computers. I know that sounds all hippy-dippy on the face of it, which is why I keep such thoughts to myself. I'm not one of those mush-brained girls who hide their incompetence behind a front of Ludditism wrapped in superficial spirituality, nor do I wish to be mistaken for one of them. I also don't think that computers are somehow soulless vacuums that will suck the souls out of the people who stand too close to them for too long. But I do think that computers are a bit of a crutch, and it's not good to come to depend on them for everything when you don't need to.
Overall, I think computers are a positive force for society. Orman, a coworker, likes to compare the invention of computers to the invention of writing. He thinks that writing was hugely disruptive on prehistoric culture, to a degree comparable to the ways that computers are disrupting our culture, but that in the end it was worth it. He likes to conjure up a mental image (I've heard this argument of his a couple of times at social gatherings) of walking into the New York Public Library and looking around yourself to see that ultimately not only are we better off for having embraced writing, but so are those disrupted prehistoric cultures. After all, their greatest literary works, Gilgamesh and Homer and the Bhagavad Gita, are still read and studied and have been for millenia. Without writing, their cultures would be like the Minoan culture, completely forgotten in all but name.
His analogy is a little arbitrary, but it's a pretty one. However, I suspect that one of the reasons that Orman likes his analogy so much is that it equates him and his colleagues with the ancient scribes — the team of elite mystics who understand how to manipulate the symbols of power. (If that part of his analogy was true, then of course his days would ultimately be numbered, and there would be a time in the future where real computer skills are part of everyone's childhood education. But until then, of course, Orman and others like him will continue to pull down the big bucks while behaving like prima donnas.)
All that aside, I do think that essentially he's right that computers will prove in the long run to be a positive force. But in the short term, our culture is the one that will have to bear the costs of radical change. We're the ones who will have to suffer the most warpage of how we live during our lifetimes.
And I do think it warps some of the people I see around me every day. One thing about focusing your attention all day long on what your computer is doing is that you start getting used to getting answers to everything. Which is a little intoxicating, in its own strange way. In most arenas of life, we don't get clear-cut answers, because most arenas in life concern other people. And there's blessedly little about people that admits of clear-cut answers. Are they alive or dead? That's about the only one I can think of. (And even there there's halfway states like brain-death, but maybe that shouldn't count since at that point there isn't really a person involved anymore, just a person's body.) With just about everything else that matters, answers are either not forthcoming, or else are provisional, dependent on unspoken conditionals, sometimes too many for one person to even be able to list.
With computers, you can almost always get a clear-cut answer, even if it wasn't the one you wanted. "Can it tell me this?" "Does it know how to do that?" "What would it take to make the other thing work?" About the only kinds of questions that you can't get an easy answer for is "why", as in: "Why did it just do that?" But even with "why", getting an answer is just a matter of time and effort. Sometimes the effort isn't worth it, but you believe that if you put them in, you'd eventually get an answer.
With people, not only are you not guaranteed to ever get an answer to some questions, you can't even be sure that an answer even exists. I mean, I suppose one does on the level of neurons, or brain modules, or whatever, but it's so far beyond our grasp that for all intents and purposes it doesn't exist. And then there's the philosophical questions, like where did the universe come from and why are we even here, and those don't even have answers on that level. Those kinds of question may be unanswerable in every possible sense of the word. And I'm not saying that that's good or bad, mind you, but it is a fact of life. And I think that a big part of growing up and learning how to make your way in the world is about figuring out how to get by without answers. Every once in a while I remember that I still don't know what makes my friends so difficult, or if I could justify my current ethical beliefs to God if I were called upon to do so, and I can't believe that I can just go about my life thinking that shopping for a new coat should take priority over finding resolutions to these issues. And yet, after a while, I get up and shake myself off, and proceed to the store.
I think everybody learns to do this, to pursue everyday life while not confronting the big questions. There just isn't enough time to figure out answers first, and then go and live your life. And anyway, I'm sure that one could argue that living life is how we go about trying to answer the big questions.
So, we may not be terribly proud about our ability to act without thinking things through, but I do believe that being able to do this is part of what it means to be human. And I think it's safe to say that some people are not as good at doing this as others. And sometimes those people wind up working with computers, because it gives them a break from having to constantly suppress their desire to get answers. And that's why I say it's something of a crutch. Of course, some people really need crutches, and for them having computers around to work on is probably a good thing. But surely a lot of other people use this crutch just because it's there. They spend all their time working with computers to avoid having to learn how to enjoy life without answers. Those people, I worry about sometimes.
That may be one of the reasons that I found Harvey to be so interesting. Perhaps I've been in the tech industry a little too long, and it was just refreshing to talk to somebody who was outside of that world and its thought patterns.
But, of course, that's really not a very convincing explanation. I mean, it's hardly as if every single person I know is an engineer. There are plenty of people in the testing department where I work who have no more affinity towards computers and the world of decisive answers than I have towards eggplant. (In fact it's a bit of mystery to me how some of them got hired in the first place.) Sure, Harvey was more of a tech outsider than they were, but it was a difference of degree, not of kind. In the end, what can I say, other than just, "Harvey and I clicked"?
Lisa grinned at Harvey over the rim of her coffee cup. "So, Harvey, it's Friday night."
Harvey sat on the edge of his chair, legs crossed, jiggling his right foot in double-time to the music. He scanned the sidewalk through the front window of the Tourmaline, and nodded without looking at Lisa. "Yes, it is. Yes indeed, it is. And it's looking like it's going to be a beautiful night at that."
Lisa put down her empty cup. "Do you want some more coffee? I'm buying."
Harvey grimaced briefly. "Heck no. I'm completely wired. Drinking more coffee at this point would just be perverse."
"I'm pretty wired, too. But I guess I'm feeling perverse."
Harvey smiled. "You pervert."
"Sure I can't talk you into being a pervert, too?"
Harvey shook his head quickly. "Sorry. I am impervious."
Lisa laughed briefly. She toyed with her empty cup some more. "Maybe what you need is beer instead of coffee."
Harvey nodded broadly. "That had occurred to me, yes."
"Thinking about going out somewhere?"
Harvey nodded again, "I think I might. I think I might. Maybe go check out the crowd at the Woofer."
"Yeah? Mind if I tag along?"
Harvey shook his head slowly, again in time to the music. "No, I don't mind. If that's what you want to do."
"Cool. Let's go then." Lisa stood up to bus their cups.
Harvey continued to stare out the window. When Lisa returned, standing next to the table, Harvey looked up and said, "Actually, Lisa, perhaps I should just go home."
Lisa frowned. "Is something wrong?" She sat back down. "Are you feeling okay?"
Harvey looked at her for a moment, and then shifted uneasily in his chair. "Yeah, I'm fine, Lisa. But actually, I guess I kind of do mind if you tag along tonight."
Lisa nodded slowly, seriously. "Oh. Okay." She waited for clarification.
Harvey picked at a spot on the tabletop. "You're a good friend, Lisa, and I don't want you to feel like I'm ditching you. But I want to go out to a gay bar tonight, and, you know, cruise. And I don't want to say that you cramp my style, but having you along does sort of —" He hunted around for the right words. "— limit my options."
Lisa said, "I understand, Harvey." She reached across the table and put her hand on his arm. "Really, I do, I'm not upset or anything."
Harvey smiled weakly back at her. Then he sat up straight and folded his arms. "And don't think that I didn't enjoy taking you out last week. It was fun for me, too. It's just not something I want to make a habit of."
"Sure," Lisa said quickly. "Sure. That makes sense."
"We're still friends and all," Harvey continued. "We can still hang out and all. But when the weekend rolls around, you know — I'm gay, you're straight. We have our individual pursuits to pursue and all." He gestured indistinctly and smiled unconvincingly.
Lisa watched him for a moment and then blinked once, slowly. "Point taken, Harvey." She smiled gently. "You go hit the Woofer." She stood up. "I'll see you sometime next week."
"Okay." Harvey stood up, too. "All right?"
"All right."
"Thanks, Lisa. Sorry about that. See ya next time." He gave her an awkward wave and sauntered out.
My infatuation with Harvey ended on a Friday night. We had made plans to have dinner together, but then I wound up stopping in at a bookstore while I was waiting for the bus home, and wound up reading several chapters of a trashy novel in the store. When I realized how late it was I called Harvey and apologized. He was too hungry to wait for me, so I suggested we meet for coffee afterwards instead. So I wound up eating a bagel with cream cheese for my dinner.
At the coffeeshop I found Harvey all wound up, antsy and distracted. I couldn't really draw him into the conversation for more than a few minutes at a time. It was almost as if he was waiting for someone to show up. Normally our conversations are the lightest things you could want. Either one of us kicks it off with whatever happens to be on the person's mind at the moment, and the ship is sailing. And it doesn't stop until one of us is in danger of being late for something. But this night he kept running aground on silence, and after picking up the conversational thread a few times, I began to notice that something was up. After an hour of this, I figured that maybe he was bored with coffee, so I suggested we go get a drink instead. And that's when he told me that he didn't want me to come along when he went to the gay bars.
It was a bit of a surprise for me, as we had only done that once before. I had had a fun time, mind you. The air was thick with smoke, and the place smelled of guy sweat and leather. It's fun watching guys really getting into being there for each other to see. You just don't see straight guys enjoying being looked over by someone else. Appreciatively or otherwise. At least I never have. Being there was like being in a different country. And of course everyone was very friendly. Nobody seemed to mind my being there. In fact, Harvey even seemed to get a bit of mileage out of me. I was sort of a conversation piece.
And Harvey had certainly acted like he had enjoyed having me along. Maybe he hadn't. I think he did, though. I think he was just afraid I was going to start expecting him to make a habit of doing that. I wasn't thinking that, though. I certainly wouldn't have minded going back a few more times, of course, but nothing more than that. I think, though, that Harvey got it into his head that he needed to nip this in the bud, just to be on the safe side. He was very apologetic about it, while at the same time he was very honest and direct. I could never be offended at Harvey; he was just too straightforward.
I touched him, briefly, to show him that I wasn't insulted and I understood, and of course I understood why he wouldn't necessarily want me tagging along. He's single gay man, he doesn't want to be worrying about chaperoning me. But when I touched him he gave me this half-formed, sickly sort of smile, and I realized then that for once Harvey wasn't saying everything that was on his mind.
I think what was really going on was that Harvey was trying to let me know that he wasn't in the market for a fag hag. And I guess he must have felt I was in danger in becoming one, or that he was beginning to view me as one. As I thought about this, there was a moment when I suddenly saw myself as he might have been seeing me. And I still say that I wasn't really in danger of becoming a fag hag: I knew where the line was and I fully intended never to cross it. But I did see that I might have been putting myself in danger of becoming pathetic. And that was probably the worse fate, of the two.
At that moment I pretty much lost all desire to indulge my feelings of infatuation towards Harvey. I figured we would be lucky if we could salvage a friendship out of what had just happened. Of course, later I calmed down a bit and decided that our friendship wasn't really in any danger. True, we probably wouldn't be hanging out nearly as much, but we would still be friends. He really wasn't trying to jettison me. In a way he was just trying to save me from myself.
And save himself, too, of course. I mean, it sounds all nice and literarily satisfying to describe the situation as if Harvey was acting entirely out of altruism. But in the final accounting, it has to be acknowledged that probably his main motivation in all this was to get me to stop touching him so often.
Harvey is such a goofy-sounding name. I can confidently say that I've never met another Harvey. Except in fiction, where Harvey is inevitably the name of a buffoon, or someone who is little more than comic relief.
You might say, "In this day and age, no parent would saddle their own child with a name like Harvey." And you know what? You'd be right. The joke is, Harvey's not his real name. He gave himself the name Harvey at some point in high school, and by now it might as well be his real name. He refuses to tell anyone the name he was actually born with.
I'm one of his few friends that know his original name. Admittedly, it's kind of a dumb name, too. But it's nothing like Harvey. It has a distinguished history, if nothing else, and you can imagine parents giving it to a kid with nothing but good intentions. But it's a bit geeky, and I can understand why he wanted to trade it in by the time he was in high school. But "Harvey"? That was hardly a step in the right direction.
I think at the time Harvey wanted to encourage people to think of him as comic relief. The guy who appears in a movie for some extra laughs, to punch up some of the slower bits, but doesn't really add anything to the plot. I think Harvey's adolescence was a bit rougher than he admitted at the time, and he was hoping that in this way he might be granted safe passage through the social sphere. People might laugh at him more than before, but ultimately they would consider him harmless, and eventually they would think nothing of having him hanging around all the time.
I don't actually know how clearly that strategy had formed itself in Harvey's mind at the time. I didn't really get to know Harvey that well until long after high school. My own high-school survival strategy was to project an image of being as uninteresting as possible, so that the bullies would eventually leave me alone out of sheer boredom. This got me through high school with very few incidents, but it also kept me isolated from my fellow geeks.
Of course, Lisa likes to say that Bob is just as silly-sounding a name as Harvey. And she's partly right — "Bob" does have its comedic potential. But it's much too popular and widespread to have the same impact as "Harvey". People only occasionally get it into their heads to joke around about my name to my face. (It's typically either some version of "What do you call a guy with no arms and no legs in the middle of the water?", or else they make some kind of infantile riff on the physical sound of my name: "Bawwwb".) But I can introduce Harvey to people at a party, and even the polite ones will be making an effort not to smirk. (Usually someone will make a crack like "Any relation to Paul Harvey?", and they are invariably put off when Harvey fails to laugh at their witticism.)
But Lisa says that I'm too harsh. She says she thinks the name Harvey is very distinguished-sounding. But I suspect that she feels that way mainly from knowing Harvey. If some pollster had asked her what she thought when she heard the name Harvey, back before she had met him or me, I bet she would have said it was a good name for a geek.
Bob and Harvey were once again sitting on wooden chairs outside of the coffeeshop where Harvey currently worked. The sun was out from the clouds for a change, and although it was too weak to noticeably warm up the winter air, Bob and Harvey could feel its heat on their faces when they faced it. A few feet away a customer was sitting with a latte in a cardboard cup, reading a newspaper and smoking a cigarette. There was very little wind, but it changed capriciously, and Bob could occasionally feel smoke in his eyes and nose.
"How's work today?" Bob asked.
Harvey examined a bottle cap he had picked up off the sidewalk. He turned it around in his fingers. "Kind of sucks. Real busy." Pause. "Customers are being jerks."
"How's Lisa?" Bob asked, in the same tone of voice but with a subtle inflection nonetheless.
"Don't know," Harvey said flatly. "I kind of gave her the brush-off a week ago. Haven't heard from her since."
"The brush-off?"
"Not really a brush-off. Just kind of gave her a little reminder."
"A reminder of what?"
Harvey held the bottle cap between the thumb and middle finger of his right hand and snapped. The bottle cap flew out into the street and bounced into the gutter on the far side. "I don't know. A reminder that I was gay, I guess. A reminder that she was barking up the wrong tree."
"So I'm confused. What exactly happened?"
Harvey leaned back in the chair. "Nothing really happened. Just, you know, we were hanging out, and I was like, I'm gonna go cruising. And she said, can I come along? I took to that gay bar a few weeks ago, remember?"
"Sort of."
"Apparently she really had a good time, and she wanted to do it again. Which is cool and all, and if I hadn't already been planning on cruising I might have said okay. But I can't chat up the guys and hold her hand at the same time. You know?"
"Not really, but okay."
"It's like, the other guys think it's interesting to have this woman hanging out for a little while, but they're not into like being on display like she's some kind of anthropologist. I mean, maybe some, yeah, but a little bit goes a long way. The guys came here to be with other guys."
"I can understand."
"I could have taken her somewhere else, of course. There are plenty of bars that are all mixed up, gay straight men women whatever. I probably should have taken her to someplace like that to begin with. But I had been planning to go to Woofer's, she asked to come along, I thought she'd stick around for like ten minutes and then bolt, and that would be the end of it. But it turns out she has a great time. We wound up staying for a couple of hours. And it's cool, I had a good time, too, but I didn't really get any cruising done. I was too busy being her chaperone, kind of holding her hand to make sure she doesn't wander off. Some guys thought she was totally cute and they made a fuss over her, but those guys hardly even glanced at me. And the other guys just kept a polite distance, and they were probably thinking, fag hag alert."
"Ugh. Don't say that about Lisa. I hate that term."
"Well," Harvey shrugged. "Fine. it's not really meant to be complimentary, you know. Anyway, the point is that we have a situation here where Lisa's having fun and being the center of attention, but I'm stuck being her chaperone. The other guys aren't talking to me. And secondly, if I start making a habit out of this, the guys are going to think there may be something wrong with me."
"Something wrong with you?" Bob asked incredulously. "Like gay men never make friends with straight girls?"
"Making friends is one thing. Taking them out when you're cruising is another."
Bob rolled his eyes and looked away. "All right, whatever. I don't care about this anymore. What about what happened with Lisa?"
Harvey sighed thoughtfully. "Well, nothing much really. I told her I wanted to go out cruising, and I couldn't do that too well when I had her with me."
"And so?"
"And so, if I wanted to get laid again this century, I needed to go out alone."
"No. I mean and so what did she say to that?"
"She was cool about it. She told me to have a good time and she left."
Bob was silent for a moment. He faced the sun, eyes closed for a moment. Then he looked down at Harvey and squinted his eyes open. Bob asked in a cautious tone, "Do you really think that was the main reason she was hanging out with you all the time? Because she was attracted to you?"
"I know it was. Basically."
"So — she somehow forgot that you were gay?"
"No but." Harvey scratched the hair on his right jawline. "You know how it is, Bob. Women go through this phase, some of them. They get sick of all of the weirdness you straight guys put them through, and so they come bug us for a while thinking it'll help them figure you out."
"You're saying it's like Andrea in college?"
Harvey looked over at Bob briefly and considered. "Yeah. Probably a lot like Andrea."
Bob looked over at the smoker, then back up at the sky. "You know, junk like this makes it really hard to be your friend sometimes."
Harvey frowned to himself. "Well, sorry," he said unconvincingly. Then, "But I'm not going to apologize for what women do."
"I'm not asking you to apologize."
"Then what are you asking me to do?"
"I don't know. Tell me what it is you do that we don't."
"Screw guys," said Harvey without missing a beat.
"Fine." Bob stood up. "Thanks for the coffee, Harvey. I'll see you around."
Harvey looked up at Bob. "Stop moping, you jerk. You should be happy. I basically told Lisa to stop chasing me. And she has. She's free to focus on you again."
Bob shook his head. "Yeah, but she hasn't been, has she?"
"Look, she isn't going to come after you all by herself. Get used to it and just ask her out again."
Bob remained standing. "I can't do that. I put myself on the line enough already. She's not interested, or else she'd call me."
"She's had other things on her mind, Bob. Her mom just died. Pull you head out of your ass."
"I realize all that, okay?" Bob said, raising his voice. "Thank you for pointing out the obvious. But that doesn't change the fact that I've already maxed out my ability to chase after her without encouragement. I can't do it anymore, Harvey. She's given me nothing."
"Okay, fine. Don't mind me. I'm not involved." Harvey stared at the sidewalk, as if looking for another bottle cap.
Bob stared at the street for a while. Finally he said, without looking at Harvey, "I'm not actually mad at you, Harvey. Okay? I'm just mad at the universe, and you're like in the audience. You're just an innocent bystander, and I'm sorry if you're getting some of my shrapnel."
"Yeah, all right." Harvey said. After a moment's consideration, he added, "Sorry you're feeling that way."
"Thanks," Bob said neutrally. "Okay, I'm gonna go now."
"Thanks for stopping by. Sort of."
A short cough of a laugh escaped from Bob's mouth. "You're welcome. Later."
"Later."
Lisa was sitting in the Tourmaline, a small coffee shop close to where she lived. Lisa liked the ambience there, which was friendly and peaceful. Perhaps the shelves of old books along the walls reminded people of libraries and caused them to naturally lower their voices. In any case, Lisa liked that you could sit inside the Tourmaline and still hear noises from the street. It allowed her to not feel cut off from what was going on outside, and that seemed somehow important. She wasn't just hiding in a coffeeshop; she was participating in the activity of the city.
But the coffee wasn't particularly good at the Tourmaline, so Lisa usually ordered tea. This afternoon she had slept in until noon, so she was now drinking Earl Gray, a tea which Lisa associated with morningtime and waking up.
Lisa sat back in her chosen seat and looked out across the coffeeshop. The place was busy, and there was a murmur of voices that threatened to drown out the slow, quiet music playing. Lisa had overheard the barista describe it to another customer as "tribal-ambient". Or maybe he had said "cyber-ambient". Either description sounded equally unlikely to Lisa.
It was autumn, and the weather was finally catching up with the calendar. The afternoon was starting to get windy. It wasn't raining, but the air was damp and there were dark clouds overhead, so that could change at any time.
A perfect day to be sitting indoors looking out, Lisa thought. She had a paperback romance novel laying on the green-slate table, but she found she was enjoying just staring out the windows too much to read her book. After all, she could make tea and read a book in her little apartment just as well as she could here. The one thing she couldn't do there was enjoy staring out through the large windows, at the sunlight filtering through the heavy clouds, and the people and cars passing by.
Lisa suddenly noticed that one of the people passing by was Bob. He looked briefly in through the windows as he walked. Lisa raised a hand and waved, catching his eye. Bob abruptly halted and waved, then walked back to the door of the Tourmaline and came over to Lisa's table.
"Hi, Lisa. What's up? What a surprise bumping into you." Bob appeared energetic, almost bouncy. Lisa had been ready to offer him a seat but it almost looked as if it would be an act of will for him to remain still. But then Bob pulled out the chair opposite her and sat down.
"Yeah, well no actually, I live just a block or two over that way. I come here a lot, and just read and relax or whatever. What are you doing here?"
"Well, I'm on my way to Harvey's place. His modem died last week, so I'm giving him mine as an indefinite loan." Bob unzipped his backpack and pulled out a small white box. "External modem. Only way to go. Unless you have DSL, of course. Which I do, which is why I have a modem to spare."
Lisa arched an eyebrow as one side of her mouth curled slightly upwards. "So does Harvey live near here?"
"No. Well, sort of, but not as close as you do. I was on the bus, you see, but the traffic is just ridiculous. I think there must be a game at the stadium today or something. Whatever it was, it was taking forever to get anywhere, so finally I got fed up, and I got off at the next bus stop, and started walking. I was following the bus line for a long time, because traffic was so bad I thought I might catch up with the previous bus, but that didn't happen."
"Well, at least it's a nice day to be out walking."
"Oh yeah, the weather is great today. It's warm, but it's just cool enough that I'm not all sweating from the exercise." Bob looked around, as if he had just realized that he was in a coffeeshop. "I could use something to drink, though. Hey," he said, suddenly loud. The barista and a couple of patrons looked up at him. Bob continued in a quieter voice, "Do you mind if I join you? I could call Harvey and ask him to come meet me here. And I could get some coffee while we're waiting for him to show up?"
Lisa nodded, "No, I wouldn't mind. Just do me a favor and go outside when you call Harvey. They're kind of particular about cell phones here."
Bob looked around the coffeeshop again, as if worried that someone might jump out and confiscate his phone. "Oh, okay. No problem. I'll just give Harvey a call, and presuming he doesn't mind meeting me here, we can hang out." Bob stood up and began fishing in his backpack's main pocket. "Oh and I need to go outside anyway. So I can see the address of this place when I tell Harvey where to find us." Bob flashed a grin and walked out the front door.
I was trapped in my own apartment. Bob was supposed to be coming by to loan me his modem. My ancient piece of junk had finally done us both a favor and burned out. I had talked to Bob on the phone that morning and he had told me that he would arrive at two-thirty. And now here it was, after three already, and no Bob. Meanwhile the outside beckoned, mocked me even, with its warm weather. I wanted nothing so much as to get out of my dingy little apartment and be out in the sunlight. My apartment was nice enough in the nighttime, but in the bright daylight you could see all the dirt and dust, and the whole place just looked squalid and depressing. I should have done a better job of cleaning it, I know, but it's easier to just not sit around inside on sunny days.
Finally Bob called me on his cell phone. It turned out the buses were stuck in some kind of sports traffic, and so he'd been walking. Fair enough, but here's the thing. Bob had been off the bus and walking for quite some time. He only called me now because he bumped into Lisa in a coffeeshop, and wanted me to come meet him there and be social. Why the hell couldn't he have called me once it became obvious that he wasn't going to be on time? Why did the idiot even bother to carry a cell phone around in the first place if he wasn't going to use it to let me know when he's running late.
I suppose I should have called him instead of just grousing about it.
In any case, he was doing me a favor, so I needed to retain a modicum of politeness. I grabbed my keys and headed out into the sunlight.
When I arrived at the coffeeshop, Bob and Lisa were studies in opposites. Bob was chatty and outgoing, and Lisa was quiet and reserved, if not altogether silent. I figured Lisa was still feeling a bit unsure about where we stood with each other. Or really, where she stood with me. So I sort of put on a show of being glad to see her. I couldn't just come out and say anything directly in front of Bob, so I just did my best to let her see that I didn't mind hanging out with her.
It was hard getting control of the conversation. Bob can be like that sometimes, when he's in a good mood. He has a tendency to dominate, continually bringing the topic back round to any of his pet subjects. It's like his naturally introverted state means that he never gets to drain his small-talk reservoir, so every once in a while it just overflows and he becomes uncontrollably chatty. And the experience of being talkative is still novel for him, so he just wallows in it.
Of course, the more prosaic explanation is that his naturally introverted state means that he still hasn't learned how to converse politely. But if I think about it like that, I lose patience with him a lot faster. And it often just makes matters worse if you lose patience with him. If he senses that you're trying to change the subject out from under him, he'll get defensive, as if you're passing judgement on him.
He and I have ruined at least one party by letting this dynamic get out of control. It was just after we had moved to Seattle. I was working as a busboy and had been invited to an after-work party. Since I didn't have a boyfriend at the time, and Bob knew even fewer people in Seattle than I did, I brought him along. It was one of those parties where everyone was young and nobody really knew anybody else, so there wasn't a lot of mingling, and people had trouble breaking off from the group at large and forming their own conversations, which in my opinion is essential to a good party. I was trying to push the party in that direction, as well as one person could anyway, and so I perhaps overreacted when Bob started going on loudly about contemporary art. What had happened was that someone had spilled wine on someone else's shirt, and someone else had said, "Now it's a Jackson Pollack shirt." And Bob laughed and said, "Except that took more effort than Jackson Pollack puts into his stuff." Surprise surprise: the guy who made the comment was an art history major and a Pollack fan. The two of them began arguing, and it started out as an interesting, and maybe even friendly, conversation about modern art. But Bob was too gung-ho on airing his opinion that modern artists are all either mush-headed or scamming the public. Bob wouldn't know diplomacy if it was banging his mom. He hadn't even had anything to drink — he was drinking cola that night. Before long the art history major had decided that he and Bob have zero common ground on which to hold a useful conversation and had lost interest, but Bob kept running on, oblivious. Nobody else was talking, everyone was listening to Bob pontificate. I tried to wait for a pause in his diatribe where I could jump in and try to change the subject, but none was forthcoming, and I couldn't stand it anymore. I had to nearly shout in order for him to hear me over his own voice. "Bob! How about giving the damn thing a rest? Let's talk about something else for a while." I think the yelling was what did it. He really took the interruption as a personal slap in the face, delivered publicly. He looked at me for a moment, and as soon as he stopped talking the room was almost quiet. It was eerily dramatic. Finally he said quietly, "Well fuck you Harvey," and lapsed into total silence. If he had stormed out, the party might have been salvageable. His ill manners could have been the topic that finally got the conversation off the ground. As it was, the room was electric with discomfort, and after a few minutes I did the honorable thing and made our excuses, and the two of us left. On the way home we both offered apologies to the other we didn't feel we should have had to make. We never spoke of the matter again.
So I've learned not to try to force Bob to change subjects when he gets going. Sometimes it's better to strike a compromise, and just nudge him into one of his less esoteric pet topics.
Anyway, that afternoon I managed with some effort to pull the conversation away from Anecdotes Involving Modems, and asked Lisa how she was doing — how was work, had she had talked to her father recently, that sort of thing. Eventually she started to warm up to me and come out of her shell. I like to think that I managed to serve two purposes here. Not only was I reassuring Lisa that I really did want to remain friends with her, but I was showing Bob through example how to hold a civilized conversation. In hindsight, though, I don't think I actually accomplished the second objective, given what transpired next.
I wasn't sure if Lisa had realized, or had guessed, that Bob was indirectly responsible for the timing of my throwing cold water all over her party. I don't know what she told Bob, if anything. But then I didn't really care. If I ever did need to know, Bob would tell me all about it, I expected.
"So, like, did you know that there are multiple levels of infinity?" asked Bob.
Harvey knitted his eyebrows. "What is this apropos of?"
Lisa sipped at her coffee. "What do you mean by levels, exactly?"
"I mean there is more than one infinite ... value. For lack of a better term. I was going to say there was more than one infinite number, but they aren't really numbers."
Harvey said, "Wait. I'm serious. What does this have to do with anything?"
Lisa said, "It's not like we were talking about anything in particular."
Bob said, "It's just something I read about recently, Harvey. It's really interesting, though. Seriously. Check this out."
"All right. I was just asking, is all. It seemed a weird tangent."
Lisa shrugged. "Well, to be fair, I was just talking about something I read."
"Exactly. Thank you, Lisa. Now come on. Listen to this. You'll love it, I promise."
"Oh yeah? What will give me if I don't?"
Lisa smiled. "He'll give you a dirty look."
"Come on, you guys."
Harvey held up a hand. "Okay. I'm listening. Go ahead already."
Lisa twiddled her hand to indicate that Bob should proceed.
"Okay. So there was this guy named Cantor in the nineteenth century. And like a lot of other mathematicians at the time he was trying to figure out how to deal with infinite values. It turns out they come up all the time in calculus and places like that, and mathematicians had techniquess for dealing with them, but they didn't have like a solid understanding of them. They knew what techniques worked, most of the time, but they didn't really understand why they worked. Or why they didn't work when they didn't."
Harvey interrupted, "If this is about calculus, I don't know the first thing about it."
Lisa added, "And please don't offer to give us a crash course in calculus just so we can understand what you want to tell us."
Bob waved off their objections. "This has nothing to do with calculus. It's just about infinite values. So Cantor was trying to find a way to even talk about infinite values that made sense. Like, what's infinity plus one?"
Harvey immediately responded, "Infinity."
Lisa squinted. "What?"
Bob said, "That's basically true. Except that infinity isn't a number, so you see my question doesn't really make sense as it stands."
Harvey shifted in his chair. "Okay, so if infinity plus one still equals infinity, then how can there be more than one value for infinity? Because once you reach infinity, it seems like you wouldn't be able to get off of it. No matter what you add to it, it's still infinity."
Lisa shook her head. "I agree with Bob's later statement. I don't think the question makes any sense. Infinity isn't really a number, so you can't add anything to it."
Bob pointed at Lisa. "Right. So, you need to come up with a way to approximate the idea."
Harvey raised a finger. "Look. It may not be proper arithmetic the way they teach it in school, but I think it makes perfect sense. Think about it. Say you've got an infinite number of marbles. Okay?"
Lisa shrugged. "If you say so."
Bob, who had looked as if he was going to interrupt, sat back and smiled. "Sure."
"Okay, so you then take another marble and add it to your pile. Do you now have a finite number of marbles? Of course not. It's still infinite. It's bigger, if anything. So, infinity plus one equals infinity."
Lisa wrinkled her nose. "But you can never have an infinite number of actual things. If you're even going to talk about infinity in the first place, you've already tacitly accepted the fact that it isn't really real, so drawing analogies with real-world objects isn't necessarily going to give you the right answer."
Bob lightly slapped the tabletop. "A good point, Lisa, and one that occurred to Cantor. So allow me to show how they did it using only mathematical ideas."
Harvey frowned. "Hey, I don't accept her rejection of my analogy. Maybe you can never have an infinity of marbles, but there's no way you can go from infinity to a, a finite number, by adding. Right?"
Lisa shrugged. "But you can't have an infinity of marbles in the first place. You'd run out of atoms."
Bob held up placating hands, pointed at the table in general. "Guys, guys. I can show you how Harvey's analogy can be translated into the world of mathematics, where infinite amounts can be dealt with properly."
Harvey muttered, "Fine."
Lisa continued, "And if you could have an infinite number of marbles, they'd collapse into a black hole and destroy you."
Bob ignored this. "In math, you can have sets that are infinite in size. And so Cantor says, consider the set of counting numbers. One, two, three, and so on. It's infinite in size. So there's our infinite number of marbles."
Harvey said. "Okay. Exactly. If you add another number to it, the set's still infinite. Right? Do you understand me this time, Lisa?"
Lisa rolled her eyes. "I understood you the first time, Harvey."
Bob quickly plowed ahead. "Right. You add the number zero, say, and your new set is still infinite in size. Only Cantor was asking, is the infinity of this new set really the same as the infinity of the first set?"
Harvey said, "Yes."
Lisa said, "This is where the 'more than one level of infinity' comes in, right?"
Bob cocked his head. "Let's not jump ahead just yet. Everyone thinks that these two infinities are the same, but Cantor's looking for a way to actually prove that they are. And in order to do that, he's got to have some way of actually testing them. He needs a method of comparing two infinitely large sets with each other."
Harvey said, "That's easy. Just ask yourself: If I were to start naming off all the numbers in this set, would I ever finish? If the answer is no, it's infinite."
Lisa looked at Harvey and pointed at Bob. "Yes, but that doesn't address the question of whether all infinities are really the same or not. Right? If there are multiple infinities, they're all still going to take forever to count."
Bob said, "Basically, yeah. What she said. But so this is what Cantor decides to come up with. He says, okay. If I can come up with a rule to pair off every member of the two sets with each other, then that proves that the two sets are really and truly the same size."
Harvey scowled. "Wait."
Lisa sat up straighter. "Yeah. Back up a bit."
Bob said, "Okay, look. I have two sets, right? One is all the counting numbers except zero, one is all the counting numbers including zero. Right?"
Harvey's scowl remained motionless. "Okay."
Lisa nodded, and her expression began to clear. "Right."
"If I can describe a plan for pairing off the members of each set — so I take a number from the first set and a number from the second set, and make a pair, okay? And if my plan uses up all the numbers in both sets — every single number gets put into a pair, and nothing gets left out, okay? If I can come up with a rule for making pairs like that, then the sets are the same size."
Harvey shook his head. "This makes no sense at all."
Lisa said, "No, I think I get it now."
Bob turned to Harvey. "What part of it makes no sense?"
"Look, Bob. Give me two sets of numbers and I can pair them up every which way, every time. What's going to stop me from using up all of the numbers? By that logic, every set is automatically the same size as every other set."
Lisa shook her head. "No, see Harvey, the point of making pairs is that, like, once you make a pair, those two numbers are used up."
Bob's confused expression suddenly turned to understanding. "Right. Each number can only be paired off once. I guess I didn't make that clear. Every number must be paired off, but only one time. Every number must appear in exactly one pair, to put it simply."
Harvey's scowling expression had slowly softened to one of concentration. "Okay okay. I see what you're getting at."
Lisa said, "But then if that's the situation, then those two sets you came up with don't pair off. So that would make them not equal, right?"
"Why do you say that they don't pair off?"
Harvey laughed drily. "Because one of them's got zero, and the other one doesn't."
Lisa nodded. "Right. Once you pair off all the other numbers, one set is empty and the second set has the zero left over. So they're not equal."
Bob chuckled. "Well, no. You see, the deal is that you just have to come up with one pairing rule that works. It doesn't have to be the most obvious one."
Harvey's look of concentration returned. "So you're saying that Lisa's pairing rule doesn't have to be the only one?"
"No, hang on. My rule proves that one set is bigger than the other. If you replace it with a different rule, you're still going to have one left over."
Bob grinned. "No, not necessarily. That's what makes this interesting. Check this out. Instead of pairing each number with itself, I'm going to pair each number with the next one. So I'm going to pair one with two, and then two with three, three with four, and so on." Bob's hands waved about on either side to show how he was taking one number from each set to make his pairs. "By using this plan, you wind up pairing zero with one."
Harvey looked at Bob's hands. "Wait. Zero's not in that set. It's in the other one, remember?"
Lisa gestured at the space directly underneath Bob's left hand. "Harvey's right. Zero's not in that one. It's over there."
"All right." Bob pretended to pick up the two sets and switched their places.
Harvey said, "That's too confusing if you start moving them around."
Lisa laughed. "It's bad enough already that we can't see them."
Bob rolled his eyes. "Okay, never mind. The point is that I make my pairs by taking the lower number from the set that includes zero, and the higher number from the other set."
Harvey nodded. "Okay."
Lisa said, "But don't stop making the gestures. They help me visualize them."
Bob continued to pretend to pick out number and put them into pairs. "Anyway, you can see with this rule, every number winds up in a pair. Nothing gets left out."
Harvey muttered, "And nothing gets used twice? Don't forget that part."
Lisa frowned. "But that's not right. The set with zero really is bigger. Something has to get left over after you've made all the pairs."
Bob grinned broadly "Are you sure?" he asked, with heavy significance.
Harvey leaned forward. "Okay, stop. I need some more coffee before we go any further. I've been waiting for a good stopping spot to interrupt, but this will have to do. Do either of you want any?"
Lisa said, "Actually, I'm starving. Maybe we could continue this next door, where there's a really nice Thai restaurant?"
Bob shrugged. "I could go for that."
Harvey nodded. "As long as I can get a Thai iced coffee there, I can eat dinner now just as well as later."
One of the reasons I really like the Tourmaline, even though their coffee isn't very good, is that the Blue Pearl is right next door to it. They aren't quite the best Thai restaurant in Seattle, but they're good enough. And having the two of them right next to each other is just perfect. I don't know if the owners of the two places ever talk to each other, but I like to think they do. I imagine that the owner of the Blue Pearl goes over to visit, and sits down with the owner of the Tourmaline over a cup of coffee, and ask each other, "How you doing? Business still okay? Remember, we both swore never to leave without consulting the other, because we got such a good thing going here." I actually think that may not be far from the truth, because of the coincidence with their names both being gemstones. (Although I don't think there is such a thing as a blue pearl.)
One of the advantages of having the two right there, I've recently discovered, is that you can just go out without having to decide ahead of time which one you're going to. Normally, when you're leaving your house, you decide ahead of time where you're going. Am I hungry? Or do I just want to hang out with a hot drink? But if you change your mind while you're walking there, then you've got to turn around and walk all the way back. Or, perhaps a better example, you'll be sitting there having drank half of your coffee when you realize that your stomach is emptier than you first thought, maybe because lunch was more filling than it was nutritious, and now you're going to get the shakes from drinking all that coffee on an empty stomach. Why, in that case, you can just pop on over next door and getty a yummy meal of noodles and rice.
Of course, there's stuff like that all over the place if you go to Fifteenth Street or Broadway or whatever. But the Tourmaline and the Blue Pearl are just a block and a half from where I live. I love having this little collection of businesses right in the middle of a residential area. Even though I have a car, I love it when I can go about my daily routines without having to use it. I don't mind driving to the mall or the movies, but for stuff like eating out and relaxing in a coffee shop, it's so much better to have something in walking distance. Plus, it's far away from all the noise and the Starbuckses and chain stores.
When I'm hanging out with friends I enjoy taking them to one place or another, or better yet both. First one and then the other. I almost feel like I'm showing off, even though it really has nothing to do with me, like the fact that my neighborhood has this cool little knot of places to go reflects upon me and everyone else who lives here. Is that conceited of me? To think like that? But I think everyone thinks like that. It's patriotism, just on a really small scale. "The fact that I happen to live in this cool place proves that I myself am cool."
Bob took off his jacket and hung it on the back of his seat. "Were either of you able to understand what the waitress said?"
Harvey opened his menu. "Time to clean out the earwax, friend."
Lisa set her menu on the edge of their table. "I've never had a problem understanding her, either. Her accent is pretty light."
"Okay, I guess it's just me." Bob picked up his menu and set it atop Lisa's.
Harvey looked at the menu stack. "Wait a minute. Do both of you know what you're getting already?"
Lisa nodded. "I'm getting the garlic and basil chicken. It's so good. I don't know what they do to the chicken, but it's like it's not even meat anymore. Instead it's this, this perfect substance that just happens to come from a bird."
Bob shrugged. "I'm getting phad thai, like I always do."
Harvey returned to his menu. "Well, if you're both getting chicken, then I guess we won't be sharing."
Lisa said, "Sorry, Harvey, but I have to order the garlic and basil chicken. I'm absolutely craving it right now."
Bob said, "Actually, we will be sharing. Just not with you."
Harvey gave Bob a disgusted look. "I need to get me some vegetarian friends, specifically for the purpose of going to restaurants with."
Lisa gave him a sad smile. "Oh, Harvey. Don't be like that."
Bob waved her off. "He's always like that. Don't mind him."
Harvey continued to browse the menu and pointedly declined to defend himself.
Lisa said, "Harvey, you should try the swimming rama with tofu. It's good, I've had it before."
Bob said, "Sounds good. Harvey, close your menu so the waitress will come take our order."
Harvey did as requested, but with an annoyed expression. "Like she's going to be magically summoned the moment all three menus are on the table."
Lisa smiled and said, "I'll have the garlic and basil chicken," for the waitress had in fact come up behind Harvey while he was talking. The busboy came over with water and silverware while Harvey and Bob gave the waitress their orders. Bob didn't see him at first, and nearly knocked the pitcher of water out of his hand when he picked up the menus to hand to the waitress.
After the bustling was done and the three of them were alone again, Bob immediately picked up the suspended thread of his explanation. "Okay. So we now have this rule for pairing up all the numbers in both sets, with no numbers left over."
Harvey closed his eyes for a moment, thinking. "Hang on — okay, yeah, right."
Lisa said, "Except no. I don't see how your pairing rule gets around the problem that one set is bigger than the other."
Bob shook his head. "That's just it. My pairing rule shows that it isn't bigger. They're really both the same size. Or rather that they're both equally infinite in size."
Harvey interjected, "Infinity plus one equals infinity. Like I said in the beginning."
Lisa said, "But all your pairing does is make it so that zero isn't the number that's left over. That doesn't change the fact that one number does get left over."
Bob stared up at the ceiling. "Okay. But the difference is, there is no number that gets left over. In my pairing, every number gets used."
"Exactly once," Harvey said.
Lisa pouted. "Saying it's so doesn't make it so."
Bob looked back down at Lisa. "No, but ... Okay. Look at it this way. If there really is a number that's unpaired, then tell me what it is."
Harvey wiggled his eyebrows. "Ooh. Check and mate."
"Oh, come on, Bob, that can't be fair. Just because the number doesn't have a name doesn't mean that it doesn't exist."
"Then show me how to find it. Seriously. Any number that you can point to in the first set, I can point to the number in the second set it's paired with. And vice versa. Give me any number in the second set, and I can tell you which number it's paired with. You can't name the leftover number because it doesn't exist."
Harvey nodded. "Yeah. I can see how that can work." The waitress reappeared with Harvey's Thai iced coffee. "Ah, thank you very much."
Lisa said nothing for a while, but continued to stare at the middle of the table, as if she were shuffling invisible numbers around on its surface with her mind. Finally she said, without looking up. "Okay, I'm not entirely comfortable with the idea, but I'm willing to accept it for now. For the sake of argument."
Bob said, "Sure. That's fine. It doesn't have to make perfect sense. Dealing with infinity often winds up going against the grain of our intuition. Cantor got made fun of by lots of mathematicians when he first published this stuff."
Harvey said, "Okay. But from what I can tell, all you've done is strengthened the case for arguing that there is just the one infinity."
Lisa put in, "Or rather you should say, that all infinite sets are the same size."
Bob tapped the table with an index finger. "Well put, Lisa."
Harvey continued, "Whatever. Your illustration shows how two infinite sets can be paired off, even when one of them is actually a subset of the other. Right? So yeah. Every infinite set is the same size as every other infinite set. Like take a more extreme example. One set is every number including zero, and the other set is every number greater than fifty billion trillion."
Lisa laughed briefly. "Fifty billion trillion? Why not just say a zillion?"
Bob waved a hand around. "Oh, but zillion is just a synonym for I-don't-know-how-big."
Harvey ignored the interruption. "So here's the magic pairing rule. Take a number from the first set, add fifty billion trillion, and that's the number to take from the second set. Bang. All the numbers are paired, just like that. Therefore, ipso facto, by your own logic both sets are the same size."
Lisa said, "It's your logic, too, Harvey. I thought. At least you were agreeing with it a moment ago."
Bob nodded. "No, Harvey, that's perfect. See, you're doing the same thing Cantor was doing at the time. He was like, okay see, now that I have a way to compare two infinite sets, compare their sizes, let's try it out and see if all infinite sets really are the same size or not. If they are all the same size, then probably it's safe to say that there's only one level of infinity. But if we find out that there's a couple of sets that aren't the same size, then we'd know that there's more than one kind of infinity."
Harvey said, "And so I suppose you're now going to say that he found two sets that didn't pair off?"
Lisa shook her head. "But how could you tell? You said that you only need to find one pairing rule that works. So just because the numbers didn't pair off the first million times you tried it or whatever, that doesn't prove that a pairing rule that works isn't out there somewhere."
Bob nodded. "Well, that's true. What you have to do is actually prove that it's impossible for a pairing rule to exist, for the two sets that you've picked out."
I think I did a pretty good job of keeping up with Bob that day. I think I can take a certain amount of pride in that. I think it's safe to say that that wasn't something I could do just any day of the week.
Now, I don't want to imply here that I'm one of those people who can't handle math stuff. I did pretty well in school. I wasn't one of those girls whose school counselor encouraged to drop out of math classes early on in high school in order to get a better GPA. (I did meet several girls in college who had done that, though. It's not just a myth; there really are counsellors who do that. I don't know if they do it to the boys, too, though.) I even got a little bit of calculus during the short time I was in college.
Okay, having said all that? That was all a long time ago. And I hadn't made use of any of that stuff since then. Despite what some people think, computers are not really very math oriented. I mean, they are for some people of course. But for those of us who just use them to get our jobs done every day, there's no math involved.
Of course, as a software tester, I use them a little bit differently than the average person, I suppose. And also I have to deal with engineers pretty often, and you can see from talking to them how there's a lot of math behind it all. I mean, don't get me wrong. In a lot of ways engineers talk about computers the way the rest of us do — as contrary-minded, inhuman trickster spirits who they'd like to smack around sometimes if only they could get their hands around something solid. The only real difference between them and us, I've decided, is that they're just a little more successful at finding the magic incantations that make computers give up their evil ways and behave like well-trained animals.
As a tester, I get to pass the final judgement on whether or not a bug is truly and finally fixed, and so I occasionally get to see engineers at their wildest and most jubilant, as I confirm for them that their program is "not guilty". Sometimes they just smirk and act cool, like "I totally don't need validation from you". But sometimes they go wild, running around and bouncing off the walls. That's when I'm convinced that their mastery over these machines is only slightly above the rest of us. They have the edge of us, no doubt, but it's paper-thin.
Anyway, I'm getting off the subject here. All I really meant to point out with all this stuff about my job is that there is a lot of math-like thinking floating around in the air there, and maybe I do pick up on a little bit of it, even if I didn't realize it. Maybe my math skills hadn't just sitting in the back of my brain, slowly rusting away with each passing year. Maybe my subconscious brain was taking them out and bringing them online while I talked with engineers about how to isolate this or that bug. And so when Bob dived into all this stuff about levels of infinity, and I had to follow along, I actually pulled out a limber set of skills, instead of a bunch of creaky, crumbling machinery that I was expecting to find. And that's why I really had no problem following him.
The alternative, and more prosaic explanation, was simply that I was fueled by motivation. I wanted to understand this stuff, and look intelligent in front of these two guys, enough so that I simply willed myself into a higher level of ability than I would have been capable of if I had been, say, doing my taxes. To be honest, I would have to admit that there was certainly some of that going on as well. But I think that kind of motivation will really only get you so far. It can give you energy, and stamina, and stuff, but it can't give you skills you don't already have. That was stuff that I think I can be justifiably proud of.
Don't get me wrong here. I don't mean to overemphasize this. It wasn't like the stuff that Bob was talking about actually required serious chops. I mean, part of the whole reason that he thought this was so interesting was that it was a really unusual and strange-sounding idea, but the proof required no deep math knowledge. Usually it's the other way around, isn't it? You hear about these little math nuggets every once in a while, simple-sounding ideas like Fermat's Last Theorem, or that you can color any map with only four colors. And the proofs turn out to be record-breaking long, big enough to fill a book. This time it was the other way around, when you think about it. We really spent most of the time trying to understand the idea, that is what it would even mean for there to be more than one level of infinity. The time spent on the actual proof that there were was relatively brief, and it didn't even involve doing any arithmetic.
So I didn't have to demonstrate serious math skills in the process, true. But it was challenging, because it was a whole lot of stuff to take in over a pretty short time period. I mean, Harvey and I were giving Bob a hard time over how long it was taking, but that was more because we could. I was actually having a fun time. But it did feel like I was stretching myself. It did feel like being back in math class, when the teacher introduces you to a new concept, and you understand it all, but the whole time you feel like you're just barely keeping up. Part of you wants to go somewhere quiet and give your brain a rest before getting any more new information, for fear that what you learn next is going to squeeze out what you just got, and by this time tomorrow you won't remember anything except what happened just before the bell rang. But then you do your homework in the evening, and it turns out that it's all still there.
I knew that most of what Bob was describing to us was going to fade over the next few days. Because, there wasn't any homework. I wasn't going to use this information in my personal or professional life. After a week, my memory of the whole sequence of steps, from the counting numbers to the real numbers, would be full of holes, and then the whole thing would fall apart. What would survive into the coming years would just be the conclusion, and a few scraps here and there. And the feeling that ran through the rest of that whole evening — the feeling that I was smarter than even I gave myself credit for, and that the world could be a pretty interesting place if such a funny-sounding conclusion in math could be a) true; and b) explained to me.
Harvey made slurping noises with his straw. "You know, this has been a very intellectual evening, and it sounds like the academic part is not quite over yet, so I would just like to interrupt here and say that I totally freaking love Thai iced coffee. Just to help balance the evening out a tiny bit. It's just so good. I don't know why they don't serve this stuff in coffeeshops."
Lisa said, "Huh. I should get one of those, too. I hardly ever drink coffee these days. I kind of miss it, now that I think about it."
Bob looked at Harvey's empty glass. "What's so great about them? It's just coffee and cream, right?"
Harvey turned around in his chair and attempted to get the waitress's attention. "You have no idea, Bob, do you? 'Just coffee and cream.' I need a replacement since I've already finished this one and the food hasn't arrived, and Lisa's getting one, so you can get one too and see what you're missing."
Lisa grinned. "Thai iced coffees all round, then."
Bob said, "Okay, fine. I'll have one too. But then let's get back to Cantor."
The waitress arrived. Harvey lifted his glass and said, "Can we have three more of these? One for each of us? Thanks."
Lisa smiled as the waitress departed. "You know, Bob, this whole explanation is drawing out into a classroom lecture, practically."
Bob sulked, "Well, it would go faster if we didn't keep interrupting."
Harvey threw up his hands in mock exasperation. "Well excuse us for giving three percent of our attention to things like ordering food."
Lisa laughed, "Okay, you guys. Bob, don't be upset. I didn't meant it as a complaint. Just pointing out that it would be nice to have time to talk about other things as well tonight."
Bob nodded and shrugged. "Yeah, okay. Point taken. So let's get back to this and get to the good stuff." Bob ran his hands through his hair. "Where were we? Oh yeah. Harvey made up a pairing rule that showed that his two sets were the same size."
Harvey nodded. "So infinity plus fifty billion equals infinity."
Lisa said quietly, "Fifty billion trillion you mean."
Bob said, "That too. Okay. So now Cantor starting trying out other infinite sets, whatever ones he could think of, to see if he could find a pairing rule that would make them the same size. Actually, what he did was try out various sets against the counting numbers. And if an infinite set turns out to be the same size as the set of counting numbers, then we say that that the set is 'countable'."
Harvey rolled his eyes. "Who's 'we'?"
Lisa smiled. "The cool kids."
Harvey flapped a hand in no particular direction. "Cantor and other mathematicians."
Harvey looked dubious. "So Cantor spoke English, did he? I had sort of figured he mostly spoke German, given his name and the time period and all."
Lisa said, "Actually what Cantor called those sets was 'counten-heilen-schlussen-fahrvergnugen'."
Bob frowned. "Okay, come on. You guys say that this is taking too long and then you spend time asking me questions about who said what that I can't answer. I'm sure that Cantor's original explanation of this stuff was like twenty-five pages of equations with another five pages of footnotes. Accept that this is just the simplified version and let's move on."
Harvey inclined his head. "Fine. If you promise to stop saying Cantor did this or that, then I promise not to quibble over historical details. We can just focus on the math and get to the point already."
Lisa said, "Indeed. And I promise not to sidetrack the discussion with any more German terminology."
"Okay then. So. Pick an infinite set, compare it with the counting numbers, see if a rule can be found to make them pair up. First we'll try the set of all integers. The counting numbers, the negative numbers, and zero. Is there a pairing rule?"
At once Harvey said, "Yes."
Lisa said, "Oh yeah, I remember the integers from math class. My teacher called them the whole numbers."
Bob turned to Harvey. "Yes? Okay, what's the pairing rule?"
Harvey shrugged. "I dunno. But I'm sure that there is one."
Lisa said, "The trick here is that the whole numbers go on forever in both directions. To the right and to the left. The counting numbers are just infinite to the right."
Bob said. "Sure. So what you do is start in the middle, and then go out in both directions at the same time."
Harvey said, "Wait wait, don't tell me. Let me guess. Start at zero, right? And then go, one, minus one, two, minus two — right, left, right, left."
Lisa began picking out points on an imaginary number line on the table. "So, pair one with zero, two with one, three with negative one, four with two, and so on? Like that?"
Bob said, "You guys got it right the first time. Or, another way to look at it is to pair the even counting numbers with the positive integers, and the odd counting numbers with the negative integers. Divide by two, ignore the remainder for the odd numbers. Whatever. That level of detail isn't important here. The important thing is that we defined a pairing rule that works. So the set of all integers is countable."
Harvey nodded. "I told you I knew that it existed."
Lisa said, "So I guess you would say that infinity plus infinity equals infinity."
Bob said, "Yeah, as long as you remember that we're really talking about set sizes. You can't actually add infinity to itself. But yes. Okay. So the next infinite set to consider is the set of all rational numbers. The set of all fractions. Which includes the integers, since a whole number can also be written as a fraction."
Harvey said, "That's really all numbers, then, isn't it?"
Lisa shook her head. "What about irrational numbers? They wouldn't be included, right? Otherwise they wouldn't be called the rational numbers."
Bob nodded. "Like pi. Pi can't be written as a fraction. Or square roots. Those numbers."
Harvey waved a hand. "Oh yeah. Okay. That all sounds vaguely familiar."
"So Bob, tell us: how about the rationals?"
"Well, that's the question. Is there a pairing rule for the set of counting numbers and the set of rational numbers?"
Harvey nodded. "Yes."
Lisa shook her head. "No."
Bob turned to Harvey. "Okay, Harvey. What's the pairing rule?"
Harvey shrugged, "Once again, I don't know, but I'll bet that there is one."
Lisa said, "No, the rationals are different. They don't just go on forever, they go down forever. I mean, to like the infinitesimals. Right? There's not just an infinite number of fractions, there's even an infinite number of fractions between zero and one."
Bob nodded. "Even worse: There are an infinity of rational numbers between any two rational numbers. The rational numbers are 'infinitely dense'."
Harvey thought about that for a moment. "Okay, that may be so. But still, every rational number can be written as a single fraction, right? Which is just two numbers. One on top and one on bottom. So that's just infinity twice, and we've already found a way to do infinity-times-two."
"I don't think this is just infinity times two. It's more like infinity squared."
Bob waved a finger at Lisa. "It's exactly like infinity squared, Lisa. In fact, you can put them in a square. An infinite square. Well, call it a table, to be less confusing."
Harvey said, "If you can make a table that has all the rationals, then I know there's a pairing rule. There can't not be. Oh boy, here come our Thai iced coffees. It's about time."
Lisa said, "So how would you go about putting them in a table, seeing as they're infinitely dense and all that?"
Bob paused for a moment while the waitress gave them their drinks, and then took an experimental sip of his. "Man, this stuff is incredibly sweet."
Harvey shook his head. "You gotta mix it up. You're just getting cream without the coffee with your straw at the bottom like that. Mix it all up and then try it."
Lisa hummed. "Oh, that is good."
Bob followed Harvey's instructions, and after a few more tastes said, "Okay, I can see why you like them so much."
"Hell, yeah. This stuff is the freaking nectar of the gods."
Lisa chuckled. "Look at him. It's like he's about to pass out from enjoyment."
Bob put down his glass. "Okay, I agree, it's good. But let's stay on track here. We're going to put all the rational numbers into a single table, and Harvey's going to show us the pairing rule that will prove that the rationals are countable. Making the table is the easy part, actually. Look." Bob took out a pen and started drawing on his napkin.
"Hey, I just said I knew there was a pairing rule. I never said I knew what it was."
Lisa craned her neck around to see what Bob was writing. "I think I can see how this is going to go."
After a moment Bob put his napkin in the middle of the table. On it he had sketched the following table:
1 2 3 4 ...
------------------------
1 | 1/1 1/2 1/3 1/4 ...
|
2 | 2/1 2/2 2/3 2/4 ...
|
3 | 3/1 3/2 3/3 3/4 ...
|
4 | 4/1 4/2 4/3 4/4 ...
|
: | : : : :
"You see, it's just like coordinates on a graph. But instead of x- and y-coordinates, we have numerators and denominators."
Harvey said, "Or like a map of a city. The top number is the street and the bottom number is the avenue."
Lisa said, "A map of the most boring city ever built."
"Which just happens to be infinitely large in two directions," Bob added. "Okay, Harvey. You said you could come up with the pairing rule if I showed you how to make the table. Whaddaya got?"
Harvey continued to stare at the napkin. "Okay, maybe I was a bit hasty. I didn't really consider the ramifications of it going on forever in both directions."
Lisa said, "Plus does this table really work, even? I mean, you've got entries for one-over-one and two-over-two and three-over-three and so on. But those are really just the same number, right? So if you actually made a pairing based on this table, you'd be counting a bunch of rational numbers twice. Or more than twice. An infinite number of times, really."
Bob nodded. "Yes, but that's okay. If Harvey gives me a pairing rule based on this table, I can change it into a proper pairing rule, just by skipping over the repeated values."
Harvey muttered, "You also forgot to include zero. And the negative numbers. This is just the positive fractions."
Lisa said, "What do you mean, 'skipping over the repeated values'? Wouldn't that just leave out a bunch of numbers on the other side?"
Bob squinted, "Uh, yes it would if I actually did that, but no, you can do it work so it comes out right. It'll be easier to explain when I have an actual pairing. Come on Harvey, the pressure's on."
"But what about zero and the negative numbers?"
Lisa said, "First try to get these to work. Then worry about extending it."
Bob said, "What Lisa said, kind of. If you can find a pairing rule for just this table, then I can change it by doubling, so the counting numbers are all even. Then I can assign the odd counting numbers to the table of negative fractions."
Harvey's face cleared. "Oh right. I see. Any time we've only covered half of the set, we can use the doubling trick and cover the second half with the odd numbers. You can even use it multiple times, and it'll still work."
Lisa said, "You forgot to include zero still."
Bob nodded to Lisa. "Okay, so assign one to zero and then shift all the odd numbers up one place."
Harvey said, "Okay. I think I got a rule that'll work. Ha. I'm a genius."
Lisa said, "I'll be the judge of that."
Bob handed the pen to Harvey. "Okay, show me what you're thinking."
Harvey said, "The key is to cut the table in half, along the diagonal line here, where the top and bottom are the same number. These values are all the same number because they're all equal to one, just written differently, so we can throw all of them out anyway, and just put one back in later as a special case, like we're doing with zero. Right? So that cuts the table into two equal halves, in the shape of a triangle. So I just need to cover one triangle, and then use the doubling trick to cover the other triangle."
Lisa scrutinzed the table with the diagonal line drawn cutting the table in half, like two lopsided pie slices. "Okay, I follow you so far."
Bob said, "I think I see where you're going, and it's different from the pairing rule that was in the book I read."
Harvey ignored this and continued. "See with this triangular shape, the rows no longer go out to infinity. The first row has one number, the second row has two numbers, and the third row has three numbers. So you can just go down the rows like that."
Lisa furrowed her brow, then said, "That sounds like it would work. I think."
Bob added, "Of course when it comes to the other triangle, the rows are still infinite there, but the columns aren't. So you need to run down the columns instead of the rows, and it'll still work." Bob traced the columns in the upper triangle to illustrate.
Harvey watched this and nodded. "Right. Right. Those are where the odd numbers get paired."
Lisa said, "The first time you double, that is. Then you have to double again to get the negative numbers. Then you have to shift everything up to put zero back in. And one."
Bob said, "And negative one."
Harvey shrugged. "Okay, it isn't a nice pretty rule. But it's still a valid pairing rule, isn't it?"
Lisa tilted her head slightly. "I think so. It's kind of hard to be sure with all these extra steps in the definition. And Bob still has to explain how to skip over the duplicates without actually leaving out any numbers."
Bob nodded. "Right. Well, see, I now have Harvey's rule, which pairs all the numbers in my table with the counting numbers. So in effect Harvey has put these numbers in order. Or what I should say is that he's put these numbers into an order. Okay? So now what I do is I take the numbers in order, by following the pairing rule with the counting numbers. I write down the fractions in a line, in the order that they're paired off with the counting numbers. Except for one difference, which is that if the number I'm about to write down is equal to a number that's I've already written, then I leave it out. I don't write it down. And the order I write down numbers gives me the new pairing. A new rule that pairs off all the rational numbers, without duplicating any values."
Harvey crossed his eyes briefly. "I think I follow all of that, but it's kind of complicated to keep straight."
Lisa shook her head. "I think it would be simpler to say, just cross off the duplicate values off from the table that you started with." She pointed at the napkin. "Then when Harvey cuts his triangles and pairs off the fractions, he just skips over the crossed-off ones."
Bob nodded his head slowly. "You're right. That would have been simpler. The book I read should have explained it that way, instead of having to go back and remove them all later as an extra step in the pairing-off process."
Harvey smiled and held the pen out to Bob. "I told you. I'm a genius. Everybody worship me."
Lisa held out her palms briefly and muttered, "Hail Harvey, whatever."
Bob retrieved his pen. "Okay. So we've found a pairing for the rationals."
Harvey nodded. "A rule that pairs the rationals with the counting numbers."
Lisa finished, "And so the rationals are countable. And also we can say that infinity squared equals infinity. Speaking informally, as always."
"Exactly. Okay. We have one last set to consider."
Harvey said, "Let's hear it. I'm ready."
Lisa took a deep breath. "This would be the irrationals?"
Bob nodded. "For the final challenge, we add in the irrational numbers. So the rationals plus the irrationals: the set of real numbers. Can the real numbers be paired off with the counting numbers?"
Harvey immediately said, "Yes."
Lisa shook her head. "No."
Bob laughed. "Harvey, why do you say yes?"
"Because I've said yes every other time, and every other time I've been right."
"I say no because you admitted that this is the last one. This all began with you saying that there's more than one infinity, so this must be the one that can't be paired."
Bob pretended to consider. "Both of you make convincing arguments."
Harvey sat back. "I'm not yet ready to climb on board with this multiple-infinities deal just yet. It sounds too wonky for me to just embrace."
Lisa shrugged and then turned to Bob. "So how do you show what's in the real numbers in the first place? I mean it's full of weird numbers like pi, except most of them don't even have names, right?"
Bob said, "Well, you can always represent a real number as a decimal. Except of course irrational numbers always have an infinity of digits after the decimal point. Like with pi. You can never represent an irrational number exactly."
Harvey scowled. "That's pretty vague. It doesn't give me much to work with, as far as finding a good pairing rule goes."
Lisa said, "Of course not. Because this is the one with no pairing rule. I'm telling you, Harvey."
Bob smiled. "Yeah, I guess I sort of did give it away when you think about it."
Harvey broke in. "Wait a second. How about this for a start. We already have a pairing rule that works for the rationals. So that covers half of the real numbers. We then use the doubling trick to cover the irrationals."
Lisa frowned. "I'm not sure the reals divide evenly like that."
Bob said, "Well, that's okay for a start. But you still need to show how to pair off the irrationals. I think removing the rationals first doesn't really buy you very much in that regard."
Harvey shrugged. "Well, it's a start at least."
Lisa shook her head. "Bob, just get to the part where you show us why it won't work. That's what all this has been leading up to, right?"
Bob shrugged, then half-nodded. "Well, yeah. Not to give anything away that I already have. Yeah. But, you know, if Harvey wants to keep chipping away at it, I don't want to spoil his fun."
Harvey thought for a while, then said. "No. You haven't given me enough material to work with this time, and I can't do it all by myself."
"So come on. Tell us why the reals are special already."
Bob nodded. "Okay. Let's assume that we've spent some time trying to pair the real numbers with the counting numbers, and failed. So we now decide that maybe the real numbers and the counting numbers are not sets of the same size. If so, then we should be able to find a proof of that fact, proof that the real numbers and the counting numbers can never be paired off." Bob paused for dramatic effect, but then feared he would be trying his friends' patience and hurried on. "Not only does such a proof exist, it's simple, and it requires no higher math skills. Almost anyone can understand it."
Harvey rolled his eyes. "Well then, I guess even little ol' me should be able to follow along."
Lisa laughed. "Just cut to the chase and show us already."
"Okay. So we start by assuming that we have a rule for pairing just the real numbers between zero and one. This is called a proof by contradiction. We assume that something is true, and then show that the assumption leads to a contradiction. Since you can't have contradictions in math, you've just shown that the assumption can never be true.
Harvey nodded. "I see. So you start by assuming the opposite of what you're actually trying to prove."
Lisa said, "I've heard of that before. It's called reductio ad absurdum. Which is just too funny-sounding a name to ever forget."
Bob turned his napkin over. "So we assume we can pair off the real numbers, or in this case just a subset of the real numbers. If we can't even do that much, then we certainly can't do all of them. Right? So since we've assumed that this pairing exists, then we can write these numbers down as a list, in the order that they're paired with the counting numbers." Bob began to write on the napkin as he talked. When he put the napkin back in the middle of the table for the others to see, it read:
1: 0 . 1 4 1 5 9 2 6 5 3 ...
2: 0 . 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 ...
3: 0 . 1 4 2 8 5 7 1 4 2 ...
4: 0 . 1 2 3 5 7 1 1 1 3 ...
: : : : : : : : : : : :
Harvey looked at it for a moment and said, "I see why you wanted to just use numbers between zero and one. You're making another table, that only extends down and right."
Lisa said, "But I don't get it. Where did these numbers come from?"
Bob shook his head quickly. "Nowhere. I just made them up for an example. The point is, we're assuming that we can write down all these real numbers in some kind of order. It doesn't matter what order they actually would be in, if the assumption were true. The proof works regardless."
Harvey said, "But it seems to me that you're setting yourself up to make a pairing rule the same way that we did with the fractions, once we got them arranged in a table."
Lisa seemed not to hear Harvey. "Okay, sure. It's just an example pairing. I can live with that."
Bob said, "Remember, Harvey, the only reason I could make this table was by assuming that we already had a pairing rule to begin with. If we don't assume a pairing rule exists, we got no table."
Harvey conceded the point with a shrug. "Yeah, all right."
Lisa looked up. "So now what?"
Bob said, "Now, we are going to write down another real number by taking one digit from every number on this table. We're going to take the first digit from the first real number, the second digit from the second real number, the third digit from the third real number, and so on. In this example, our new number is zero point one three two five, dot dot dot. Okay?"
Harvey nodded. "Okay."
Lisa shrugged. "Why?"
"Gimme a second and you'll see. First, I just want to point out that this number we've just written down is between zero and one, and is obviously a real number, so it must already be somewhere in our list. Okay? Now, we're going to replace this number with a completely different number. What we're going to is to increase each digit by one. Except for nine digits, which will wrap around to zero. So, our example number gets changed to zero point two four three six, dot dot dot." Bob wrote this number on the napkin, under the list, as he spoke. "Are you guys with me so far?"
Harvey nodded curtly. "I'm with you."
Lisa looked thoughtful. "Oh, I think I see where this is going."
Bob grinned momentarily. "This new number is still between zero and one, so it still must be on our list, right? But you'll notice that, because of the way we constructed this number, it has to have at least one digit different from every number on the list. You see? This new number can't be the first one on our list because the first digit differs by one. It can't be the second one on our list because the second digit differs by one. It can't be the third one because the third digit differs by one. And so on, all the way down the list. An infinity of numbers, and it can't match any of them."
Harvey stared at the napkin. "Cute," he said after a pause.
Lisa scowled. "But isn't it possible that by chance the new number will happen to be the same as a completely unrelated number somewhere else on the list?"
Bob shook his head. "No, because that completely unrelated number still donated a digit to make our new number." Bob laughed briefly and said, "If the completely unrelated number is the fifty-billion-trillionth number on our list, then the fifty-billion-trillionth digit will be different by one."
"Cute," repeated Harvey. "But then I could just make my own list that includes your list and the new number. Why can't my list be the one that covers all of them."
Lisa answered, "No, because don't you see? You can just make another number by adding two to each digit, and that won't be on your list either. Or like you could roll a die to decide how much to add to each digit and make as many of these numbers as you wanted to, and you won't have any of them."
Bob said, "She's right. And even if you did make a whole bunch of new numbers, once you added them to the list, I can start from the beginning again and make a new number, guaranteed to not be on the list."
Harvey nodded. "Right. I see now."
Lisa elaborated, "There's nothing special about another list that'll stop you from doing this over and over again."
Bob nodded. "You got it. See, we assumed that we had a complete pairing and then we found a number that was missing. That is our contradiction. So the assumption is false."
Harvey shook his head slowly. "So this is supposed to prove there are more real numbers than can be counted, or countable or whatever."
Lisa put in, "And therefore more than one level of infinity?"
"Yep. Cantor gave the set of counting numbers the name aleph-null. Or rather the size of the set is aleph-null. He thought that the set of real numbers had the next size up, aleph-one. But that turned out to be wrong."
Harvey said, "So what is it then? Aleph-two? How can they even tell? I guess they must have found a set of numbers that were bigger than the counting numbers but smaller than the reals? What was it?"
Lisa looked up. "Oh look, the food's finally here."
Bob picked up his napkin to make room for the dishes. "I don't know, Harvey. That part got really confusing, actually, and the book didn't go into much detail. I think I may have to find another book on the subject to really find out the answers to those questions."
Harvey looked disgusted. "That's an unsatisfying way to finish up this huge long lecture. You go for days taking us on this wild trip to show us a new infinity, and then you can't even tell us what it's called."
Lisa shook her head. "I think it's a perfectly fine way to finish this up, because the food's here. I can't think about this levels-of-infinity kind of abstract stuff any more because all I can think of right now is how yummy this food smells. I don't know, maybe you guys can. If so, then I pity you, because your food obviously isn't as good as mine."
Bob chuckled. "Remember you promised to share some of that with me."
Harvey said, "You're right, Lisa. And I for one am more than ready to stop focusing on all this math stuff, and eat food and talk about something completely not intellectual. Like everything else about my life, for example."
"But Bob, I do want to say that it actually was pretty interesting, even if it did take forever." Lisa popped a chunk of chicken into her mouth and grinned at the others, saying indistinctly. "Oh, this is perfect."
I don't know if I was starting to be attracted to Bob that day. Maybe there was a latent attraction to him brewing earlier on that I've completely forgotten about now. Maybe I felt nothing for him then or before, and the attraction was actually later, after I had had time to get to know both him and Harvey better. Or maybe it really did start that evening.
The reason I say that I don't know is not because I think my memory is untrustworthy. That's not it at all. But one thing I've learned over the years (which people sort of hint at, but hardly ever come out and say directly) is that attraction is a subterranean phenomenon. It starts somewhere else in your brain, somewhere not directly visible to you. Somwhere other than wherever it is that "you" are. It takes root, and starts to grow, until finally it gets too big to remain hidden. Something happens in your life, you look at the person and feel this strange tug, and you look down into yourself and see a few leaves poking out of the ground. "Oh, look at that," you think to yourself. "I really like him."
When a relationship is in full swing, it's often fun to think back and speculate just how far back the attraction might have started. You don't really know. Like a lot of relationship stuff, it's an activity that's simultaneously generous and narcissistic. You tell each other your earliest impressions of each other, what you remember thinking, and speculate as to whether attraction was already brewing within you at that point or not. It's somehow a compliment to the other person to tell that you were attracted to them long before you realized it, so it's sort of natural to push it back as early as you can. And who's to say, really? Nobody knows how this stuff really works. For all you or anybody else knows, it might have started the first time you saw each other.
(For all you know, it might have started before you met. In fact, at this point in my life, I'm pretty sure that all of my earlier infatuations began like that. Attraction was something my brain just decided that we needed to have more of, so it threw something together, and then just waited for a likely guy to attach it to. But of course, I've never shared that idea with a boyfriend. It may be romantic and complimentary to antedate the start of your attraction, but not past the point where you first met. Nobody wants to hear that.)
In any case, with Bob I like the idea that it started that day, over the unlikely combination of dinner and mathematics. And so in my mind, I mark that as the starting point.
"Do you attend science fiction conventions?"
"Come again?"
Bob frowned at the receiver, but Lisa's voice merely repeated, "Do you attend science fiction conventions?"
Pause. "I can see why you called me up to ask me that."
Lisa's voice registered mild surprise. "Really?"
"Yes. I mean, a question that frivolous, you wouldn't want to get up out of your chair and walk all the way over to my office to ask." Bob smiled to himself. It wasn't every day he thought of a funny remark in time to use it in the conversation.
But Lisa didn't laugh; she just said. "That's true. So do you?"
"As a regular thing, you mean?"
"Yeah."
"No, I don't."
"Well then, have you ever attended one?"
"I have, Lisa," Bob said in a matter-of-fact voice. "I have attended two, in fact."
"So you stopped after that? Didn't like them?"
"Well, I wouldn't go that far. I just went to two, they were fun and all, but not so much that I feel the need to organize my life around them."
"So you did like them."
"What are you getting at?"
"I'm getting at your feelings towards science fiction conventions."
Bob sighed, guessing correctly that Lisa wasn't going to explain further until she was satisfied with his answer. Lisa seemed to think that explaining her motives was akin to leading a witness, and she would get more, and more interesting, answers this way. And in general this was the case with Bob, who would typically get annoyed by her evasiveness and proceed to give her a "brain dump" so as to get this part of the conversation over with as soon as possible. "Science fiction conventions are full of nerds, like me but not entirely so. They have slightly different foci of interests than I do. The fans of the fiction medium proper do tend to be interesting folks, although I find their politics occasionally bizarre. But the conventions are typically geared more towards the comic book and movie fans, where the money is to be made, and these nerds tend to be less technically savvy, which is hardly surprising when you consider what passes for science in a science fiction movie, less technically savvy and therefore less of my particular flavor of nerd and therefore less interesting to me, at least as far as hanging out and talking with goes. There is also the spectacle aspect of it, watching a very large number of nerds act like nerds en masse. But if you've seen it once already, then — meh."
Pause. "So nerds come in flavors?"
"Of course nerds come in flavors. You think we're all alike?"
"So what flavor are you? Rocky road?"
Bob considered for a moment, but quickly decided that it would be impossible to answer that question completely seriously, and so settled for replying, "I guess I would have to say that I am a computer nerd."
Pause. "Is that because computers are more to your taste? Is that why you call it a flavor?"
"No, for Pete's sake. Call it a subcategory if the word bothers you that much. Flavor's just easier to say."
"I've just never heard the word flavor used to mean subcategory."
"Well, it's a computer nerd usage. A not-uncommon usage, in fact."
"Does it imply that taste is involved? Because that would make sense to me."
"Lisa, why did you call me? Why do you want to know how I feel about science fiction conventions?"
"Because I'm going to a science fiction convention in Portland next month, and I wanted to know if you and Harvey wanted to come along."
Bob's voice betrayed his surprise. "Really?"
"Yeah."
Bob sat back in his chair. "Okay. My turn to ask you: do you attend science fiction conventions."
"As a regular thing, you mean?" Bob could hear her smiling.
"Either way."
"No. This will be my first."
"Okay." Bob wasn't sure if he was disappointed or not. It hadn't seemed to be in Lisa's character, after all. "So why are you going to this one?"
"Well, I kind of promised a friend that I would. She's going to be working at the convention, and she convinced to come down and see her. But I just found out that this thing is like three days long, it starts Friday morning, so she's driving down Thursday. I thought I was going to be going down with her, see. I don't want to drive down to Portland by myself. So I thought maybe it was the sort of thing you might want to go down to anyway."
For a moment, Bob considered doing it. It would be impulsive, and he'd get to spend a lot of time alone with Lisa. But the more he thought about the supposed reason for the trip, the less enthusiasm he could feel for the journey. Plus it would be a lot of time spent stuck in a car.... "Well, Lisa, I am flattered that you would think of me in such a situation. But while I am not adverse to attending another science fiction convention at some point in my life, it's not compelling enough reason to travel to Portland." Pause. "Sorry."
"How about Harvey?"
Bob managed not to laugh aloud. "Harvey would be very unlikely to be interested in attending a science fiction convention at all, much less one in Portland."
"Really? I thought he sort of had a thing for nerdy guys."
"I really can't speak to that, myself," Bob said, wondering if this conversation were in danger of veering into a personal area that Harvey might not be comfortable with Lisa sharing. "The guys that Harvey's dated that I've actually met, none of them struck me as the geeky types. And in any case the two conventions I attended didn't seem to attract a lot of visibly queer attendees."
"Huh."
"Closeted, maybe, might be another issue, but again Harvey wouldn't be interested in such guys anyway."
"No, probably not."
Bob cradled the receiver on his shoulder and corrected a typo in the email he had been composing. Part of him wanted to wind the phone conversation up and get back to work, and part of him wanted to know just how long Lisa would willingly stay on the phone and talk with him. "Sorry we couldn't be of more help. Maybe you should tell your friend that you can't come after all."
"That wouldn't be very friendly of me."
"What is she doing at the convention, anyway?"
"She's working as a character."
"A character?"
"Yeah. She dresses up as a character from some anime thingy and hangs out at a booth. Or maybe she mingles with the rest of the convention goers. In any case she gets paid to chat up the fans."
"Seriously?" Bob considered this. He had seen such a girl before at one of the cons he attended, from a distance. He had figured that she wasn't just a fan in costume because she looked nothing like a female science fiction fan. A girl like her didn't need a costume to attract attention at a con. She could just go as herself. And anyway, her costume had been too perfect, clearly something that was professionally made. But it hadn't occurred to him that the woman might have actually been getting paid to talk to fanboys. That that was her job. He could have gone up to her and talked to her, and she wouldn't have minded, because that was what she was getting paid to do. Would he have, had he known? Maybe. After all, it wasn't every day you got to have a conversation with a pretty girl. Of course, just because a girl was getting paid to chat with him didn't mean that she wouldn't still find his conversation boring. In fact, it was probably guaranteed, given that she'd be talking to nerds nonstop for three days in a row. "That must be a pretty tedious job," Bob finally said aloud.
"Maybe. I expect it's no more tedious than most of her other jobs, though."
"Does she do this sort of thing a lot then?"
"Come to think of it, I'm not sure it'd be that much more tedious than my job, right now. We haven't got a new build of the software in days. I keep running up against all the same bugs."
"Is she a full-time anime character?"
"No, she's a model."
"Oh." Bob couldn't help thinking that he had never met an actual model before, at least not that he was aware of.
"I think this is the first time she's got a convention job."
"Does she get paid pretty well?"
"Two hundred dollars an hour, she says."
Bob nearly fumbled the phone off of his shoulder. "Two hundred dollars an hour?"
"That's what she told me. Apparently, it's the best-paying job that exists for amateur models."
Bob looked up at the ceiling, and found himself involuntarily thinking about the sort of market forces that had to exist to make it worth a company's time to pay someone that much money to go talk to nerds. He felt a little queasy. Finally he said, for lack of anything better to say, "I guess that's nice work if you can get it."
"So you think you might change your mind about coming?"
Bob leaned his elbows onto his desk. "Sorry, Lisa. That's all very interesting, but it's just too long of a drive."
"Oh, well I wasn't planning on driving all the way at once, you know. The plan is to leave Seattle on Friday evening and stop at my Dad's. Crash there, get a free meal, spend the night. Then head down to Portland in the morning on Saturday. Hang out, and come back. Depending on how we feel we can either drive back to Seattle late Saturday night, or sleep over at my Dad's and get back Sunday."
Bob chuckled. "You're very persuasive." Actually, Bob had no desire to spend two nights sleeping on a friend's parent's couch, but it seemed the polite thing to say.
"You see, it's all very civilized."
"I'm sorry, Lisa, but it's still just a lot of, well, effort. I'm the kind of guy who prefers to spend my weekends reading a book."
Pause. "You ever been to Powell's used bookstore in Portland?"
Bob frowned. "Well, no."
"You know, they have an entire city block devoted to just their technical books."
Unlike Bob, I had not only heard of Powell's, I had actually been there before. In college I and three friends had driven down to San Francisco for spring break. We ended up not having that great of a time, because none of us knew anybody there, or where were the interesting places to go. We had had this idea that we would just show up and look around until we saw some fags, and then we would just follow them to figure out where to go. It was all very last-minute and disorganized. We got a late start, and so we drove all the way to San Francisco without stopping. By the time we got there, we were absolute wrecks. We got a room in the first hotel we saw, which turned out to be a real dive. The bed was uncomfortable, and it was noisy all night long. We didn't have much money, so there was just the single king-size bed. Sleeping arrangements turned out to be a surprisingly uncomfortable process to negotiate. We were all supposed to be open-minded young men, all comfortably out of the closet. But as we discussed our options, there was a distinctly uncomfortableness in the air. I suspect that one or more of our number may have been harboring a secret crush. In the end I wound up volunteering to sleep on the floor, because I couldn't take it anymore. I used my backpack as a pillow and I probably was about as comfortable as they were on the bed.
By the time we got up the next day, we were pretty sore and it was already Tuesday afternoon. We had a nice time during the day wandering around the Castro district, and we had high hopes for the evening. But we discovered that not every gay bar in the Castro district is fabulous. At least a couple of them are distinctly squalid, in fact. Unfortunately as we continued to search for a place we felt comfortable in, we ran into another issue. We had walked into a serious leather bar, and after hanging out for a few minutes three of us had decided that it wasn't really our scene. Charles, however, didn't want to leave. Because we had only two hotel room keys among the four of us, we were hesitant to split up just yet, so we wound up staying there for nearly an hour. While we were there I started getting hit on really heavily by a bear who had to have been at least twice my age. I started feeling trapped — I couldn't leave without the others, I didn't have my own key to the hotel room, and I didn't know anybody else in San Francisco. And I had no idea how to let this huge guy know that I wasn't interested in him without seeming rude. Suddenly the whole trip seemed utterly insane.
After a while — it seemed like a long time but it probably wasn't more than five or ten minutes — some guy came over and made the bear leave me alone. I must have looked even more scared than I felt for him to pick up on me from over by the bar. He was real nice to me, but he was also about twice my age, so I didn't feel like throwing myself at him in gratitude or anything. He did his best to calm me down and make me feel welcome. He even tried to introduce me to some guys closer to my age. But the evening was essentially ruined for me by that point. I had spent several years since puberty convincing myself that gay men weren't scary, and I had done a pretty good job. (I had some help.) This was the first time I had been scared by a real live gay man, as opposed to just the idea of one, and it felt like I had been magically stuffed back into the closet again. I wasn't scared by this point anymore, but I was morose, and not a little bit angry. I finally convinced Charles and the others that we had to leave the bar. I walked out without even saying goodbye to my rescuer (I no longer remember his name). Out on the sidewalk I insisted that they give me one of the hotel keys so I could just go to bed and wait for tomorrow. They relented, but Charles got angry at me for being such a wet blanket and making him feel guilty for enjoying himself, and I called him a narcissist, which at the time I considered a grave insult. And all in all we had a bit of a scene there, in front of the bar, for several minutes, before we stalked off our separate ways.
Wednesday wound up being a little better. After forging a reluctant truce over brunch, we managed to split up into two groups so that Charles and I could go window-shopping while Eric and Samuel stayed at the hotel room and took naps, and then later in the afternoon we traded off. Having learned a little from last night's mistake, we got some recommendations of good places to go from some of the friendlier people we met during the day. Unfortunately, these places turned out to have a bit of the opposite problem. They were nice places, and friendly, but they were surprisingly tame. But we weren't quite ready to try places at random again, just yet, so we ended up staying at the best of the tame bars all night. We had some cool conversations with others, but at the end of the night we all wound up back at the hotel with no company but ourselves.
The tension hung around in the air between us for the rest of the trip. We were all caught a little off guard by each other's behavior. We had all been imagining our San Francisco visit as trip to some reconstituted Eden, a gay-man-made paradise on Earth. Which in some ways it was, and it was really fun to walk the streets of a city and know that you were completely surrounded by queers. It was encouraging, and even a little inspiring, to see what a city of queers might look like. But somewhere in the back of my head I had this idea that being queer in a straight society was responsible for not just one or two difficulties in life, but many of them. Most, perhaps even all of them. And so it stood to reason that living in a society of gay men would solve those problems. That weekend taught me that life wasn't that simple. There are plenty of problems in life that cannot be blamed on society's attitudes towards homosexuality. Many — maybe even most! — of the problems in my life, especially at that time, are universal, at least in this society.
Even this idea that finding your subculture will solve all of life's thorny problems is pretty common. I'm pretty sure Bob went through much the same thing I did, only with nerd culture. In his last year in college, he really started making a point of hanging out with other nerds, almost exclusively. No doubt he discovered what I did — that paradise is a dream and no one group of people can make you happy for the rest of your life.
Living at college, it had been easy to feel that we gay men, particularly those of us who had come out of the closet in college, were tightly bound by our shared experiences of growing up in secret, and having to deal with being seen by society as paraiahs, and therefore we could rely on each of us watching out for each other's welfare. Now, at the end of our San Francisco visit, we all felt that each of us had, in some way or another, betrayed the group a little in favor of our own self-interests. I suppose in a way this too was a rite of passage, but at the time it was just depressing.
We wound up leaving San Francisco early Thursday afternoon. Our money was almost gone. If we had paid for another day in the hotel, we wouldn't have been able to afford dinner. In other circumstances we might well have stuck around anyway, and trusted to our luck to find us a place to sleep. We certainly had had other ideas about how that might work out when we first left. As it was, we were vaguely depressed and ready to be on familiar ground again.
The only thing that saved that whole week was Powell's. As we were drove into Portland, Eric pulled off the interstate and said, "We're going to make it back in plenty of time; let's make a stop at Powell's." We walked in there and forgot all about our stiffness. We were sore from sleeping in two-hour bursts while sitting in car seats, but we wound up standing around or sitting on the concrete floor looking through all the books. I wound up spending half of my time perusing the huge philosophy section. Just being there, embedded between those bookshelves that reached up past where anyone could reach, felt so right. In the end I bought a small stack of dog-eared and marked-up philosophy books (including one Foucalt) for less than twenty bucks total. I also got a book of knitting patterns for my grandmother, whose birthday was coming up, and a couple of queer-themed novels with promising covers. We were stiffer than ever by the time we decided it was time to go, but even so none of us really wanted to leave. The tension and animosity were largely dispelled after that, and on the remainder of the drive we managed to convince each other that our friendships were still worth hanging onto. We may have been a carful of young, horny gay men, but we were all college students, too.
It was more than a little embarrassing to come back to college and have to admit that the highlight of our San Francisco roadtrip had been a used bookstore in Portland, visited as an afterthought. Over the ensuing weeks, as we told various versions of what had happened, we got to hear several versions of: "You visited the Moby Dick, right? That is the place to go in the Castro." Or: "Did you go to the BOC? No? Why not? Everyone says it's the best bar in all of San Francisco!" It soon became clear that the best source of information of where to go in San Francisco had been our friends and acquaintances back at college.
Occasionally, during the spring quarter, the four of us would talk about getting together again and going back to San Francisco, only doing it right this time. It sounded like a good idea, but nothing ever came of it. I think perhaps we were a little hesitant to tempt the fates a second time. Probably rightly so, looking back on it now. I mean, we did so many things wrong, besides just not knowing where to go.
Anyway.
So, Bob called me up and told me that he and Lisa were going to Portland next month. She was going to show him Powell's. Instantly I remembered being there before, and I could smell the smell of thousands of books mixed with the staleness of the clothes I had been wearing. And I remembered taking down worn-out old paperbacks, spine glue loosened and flaking away, and carefully turning page after page after page. And how it felt to just stand between two long, towering bookshelves and just contemplate all of the words that surrounded me, all of them aimed at finding serious answers to all the important questions of existence. And without thinking twice I said, "Oh, can I come along?"
There was this one time I remember when I was walking down the street with my mom. I remember that she was telling me about Gramma. I don't remember what were talking about before, but somehow she came up, and Mom said, "Your grandmother was so distant. Especially to me, but I think to everyone. She didn't open up if she could help it." Mom always said "your grandmother" instead of "Mom" when she wanted to rag on her. "She always played her cards close to the chest, Lisa. I think that was a mistake on her part."
"A mistake?" Mom was walking on my left. I was on the street side, which meant that I had to squeeze around the occasional parking meter and tree. My father had cajoled me into coming down for a weekend visit, ostensibly to help him with some computer problems. I think he had tried to upgrade his copy of Eudora and now he couldn't read his email.
"I think your grandmother bet on the wrong horse, basically. She thought that opening herself up to her daughters too much would make us all codependent."
"'Codependent'? Did you folks even have that word back then?"
"Well, you know what I mean, Lisa. She wanted us to be able to take care of ourselves. Maybe she thought that we wouldn't learn how to if she didn't force us."
"Or, maybe that was just the way she was."
"Or maybe she was afraid that she would scare us off. Maybe she thought that if there were no secrets between us all, we wouldn't stick around once we grew up."
"Would you?"
"No, of course not."
"Then why would she think that?"
"Well, people think things like that all the time, honey. Look at your father. God knows the reasons for half of what he thinks."
I didn't enjoy it when Mom started complaining about Dad. Gramma I could handle; I hadn't gotten to know Gramma very well before she died. But it was hard for me to listen to Mom ragging on Dad without getting defensive and wanting to stick up for him. But doing that never leads anywhere good. I had half a mind to interrupt and change the subject. But then, fate intervened and provided an interruption in the form of a strange man. He walked up, waving hesitantly at us.
"Hi there — I'm kinda lost. I'm looking for Hemlock Street?"
I smiled encouragingly and pointed over my shoulder. "You're heading in the right direction. Just a few more blocks that way."
"Okay, great." But he made no move to continue on his way, and after a pause he said, "Thanks, listen, do you think you could help me out with some spare change?"
Without looking I could sense Mom beside me, frowning and stiffening her posture. She never gave out spare change. Either she couldn't tell the junkies from the honest ones, or she didn't believe any of them were honest. I didn't give out spare change much myself these days. There are just too many panhandlers in Seattle, and after a while you just have to tune them out or give away all your money. But being in my home town felt different. Plus I didn't approve of the way Mom always reacted, almost like it was an affront. So I fished a few coins out and handed them over.
The man accepted them with a "Thank you, God bless you." I smiled blandly, and we separated.
"So do you do this a lot, mom?" I said, before she could comment on the guy. "Think about why Gramma was the way she was, I mean?"
She shrugged. "I don't do it a lot. But I do think about it every now and then."
"Are you angry with her for being distant?"
She stared up at the clouds. It was late in the evening, but the days were getting long, and the sky was still a pretty blue. "Maybe. I don't know. I was when I was your age. But somewhere along the line I got used to it. Or more than that, really. I think I started to understand her better."
I didn't say anything. I had long been of the opinion that Mom didn't really understand Gramma very well, or at least not certain aspects of her. I remained silent, wanting to hear what shape this understanding of hers took.
"It helped me to understand her when I started to see myself doing the same thing, only with you."
That surprised me. I wasn't sure what to say. Mom had stopped talking, and was looking at me with a quite serious expression, clearly waiting to see how I would react. I sort of wish there had been a mirror there, because I honestly don't know what my face was showing. I wondered if I already knew what she referring to, or if she had in mind some incident that had passed by me without concern. I knew that parents sometimes get all worked up for years over something they did that the kid doesn't even notice. Mom and I, we get along pretty well, as mothers and daughters go, but I don't mind saying that there are one or two things that I wouldn't mind hearing had given her long-term guilt feelings.
All these thoughts went through my head pretty fast, but not instantaneously. There was a heavy silence between us which was starting to stretch out ominously, and I figured I should say something before she started to read too much into my silence. I was about to ask her to elaborate, when another voice intruded.
"Hello, Lisa."
I turned to face forward. Standing in front of me was Isabel, a vague high school acquaintance. I remember being annoyed at the interruption, but only vaguely. After all, I thought, it wasn't her fault that I was having this serious discussion on a public sidewalk. I put on a polite smile and, thunk, just like that I was running on autopilot. "Isabel. What a nice surprise, bumping into you here."
"Yeah, likewise. I'm just on my way to the mall to do a little shopping."
"That's nice. I'm just out — running a bunch of errands, you know."
"Yeah, uh huh." Then Isabel's face got unexpectedly serious, and she moved a step closer. "Hey, I heard, I'm so sorry."
For a moment I was confused, but something about the situation told me not to show it. I waved a hand dismissively and fumbled out a reply. "Oh well, you know ... yeah."
"Listen: How are you doing?" The intonation of those four words was unmistakable, especially after having heard it so many times in recent months, and in an instant the little bubble I had been inside was gone, and I knew that if I looked to my left no one would be standing there. And I can't help but be angry at Isabel, even though I already said that it wasn't her fault, because I honestly have no idea what my mother was going to say next, and now I probably never will.
Nerds like Bob don't appreciate libraries. I've actually discussed this with Bob once or twice. There was this one time in college, I was visiting him in his dorm room, and he was telling me about not having any money left for the next month, and so he was subsisting on whatever groceries he had on hand. I was broke all the time, so I didn't have a lot of patience for his whining. I was sitting at the dining table, which was half covered in books and printouts and notebook paper covered in homework problems. I reached over and grabbed a technical book about email or something, it was a really thick paperback and probably cost about thirty dollars, which was a heck of a lot back then, and said, "Well, if you used the damned library instead of buying all these expensive books, maybe you wouldn't be starving now." I meant for it to shut him up, at least for a little while, but it did no such thing. He explained to me how libraries never have much in the way of technical books, even college libraries, and the ones they do have are invariably older and therefore dated, and a guy like him needed to have information that was absolutely current, or else it was useless. It sounded like a bit of an excuse to me, but I've since noticed this with other guys. Actually, Bob seems to be a bit of a throwback, from what I've observed: Most other computer nerds don't want to look at books at all. They want to be reading everything on a computer. Which I suppose would be an advantage if their information has to change as frequently as they seem to think.
But it's kind of ironic, in my eyes. We have one of the best damn national library systems on the whole planet, and these guys whose careers are centered around dealing with information go their whole lives without stepping foot inside a library.
Well, it's their loss. That's what I was thinking as I stood inside of Powell's bookstore. Of course, Powell's isn't a library, but in some parts it's more reminescent of a library that a real library is. The building it's in is kind of old, and the shelves on the main floor are all old wood, and the floors are wooden and creaky. And the smell of old books isn't strong, but it is omnipresent. I walked into the philosophy section and at once I remembered everything about that awful spring break, and, as a side effect, how I felt all the time when I was in college. I could have done without most of those memories, actually, but it was impressive to me that those few hours I had spent here had left such a lasting impression.
The other way that Powell's was like a library was how I was approaching it. Since I didn't really have much money that I could spend, I decided not to buy any philosophy books this time. So I spent a lot of time sitting on the floor, reading bits and pieces.
Lisa lay on the hotel bed, on top of the bed cover, with the pillows propped up behind her back, reading the local newspaper. She had brought a book with her to Portland, a popular science book about molecular biology, but after reading the first few chapters she found it a little dry, and much too light on detail, and so was unable to stay focused on it.
There was a knock at the door. Lisa set aside the paper. "Hello?" she called.
"Hi Lisa. It's me Bob." came the reply.
Lisa stood up, brushed down her skirt, and walked over to the door.
Bob stood in the hallway with a Powell's bag. "Hey there. Just got back from the bookstore, and I just thought I'd check in, see how you're doing."
"You just got back from the bookstore? Didn't they close already?"
"Yeah, I wound up picking out too many books at first, so I was kind of stuck there trying to choose which ones to keep and which ones to leave behind. I wound up almost reading half of one book before it was closing time and I had to put it back."
One corner of Lisa's mouth curled up. "They must have loved you."
"Oh, I don't think they really noticed me. The place is huge, you know."
"So were you there all day long?"
"No. Harvey and I went out together and had an early dinner. Then I sort of took a nap in my hotel room, and lounged around before going back to the bookstore. How about you? Did you get to meet with your friend?"
Lisa leaned up against the doorframe and crossed her arms. "Oh yes. She even showed me a little of the convention."
"So now you can say that you've been to a science fiction convention, too."
"I guess I could say that. Mostly she and I just went out for dinner and chatted."
"You had a good time, I trust?"
"Yeah, hey, did you want to come in?" Lisa gestured over her shoulder with her thumb.
"Oh, well, I still have to go to my room." Bob shifted the bag of books from one hand to the other. "I didn't mean to intrude on you or anything, I just thought I'd see if you were here and how you were doing."
"I just didn't want to make you stand out here in the hallway is all."
Bob looked momentarily distracted. "Well, thanks, but I should probably just go to my room. It's late. We should get up early so we can get on the road and get back to Seattle."
"It's only a three-, four-hour drive, Bob. We don't need to rush ourselves."
"Yeah, but I should probably go." Bob shifted the book bag back to the other hand again. "Thanks for bringing me here, though."
"Sure." Lisa shrugged. "I should thank you for coming along and keeping me company during the drive."
"Don't mention it. I probably put you to sleep with all my talking."
"No, it was fun."
"Thanks. So anyway, I'll see you in the morning."
Lisa smiled and nodded. "In the morning," she confirmed.
"Okay. Good night." And then, improbably, Bob leaned forward and put his face very close to Lisa's. Just for a moment, just long enough to see if Lisa would move away. And when she didn't, he kissed her.
The moment when Bob kissed me, it felt great. And I wasn't expecting that, but it did. At that moment I forgot about everything about him that I didn't like or wasn't sure about. And it just felt really good to be kissed by someone I liked, again. It had been a long time since I had kissed someone, and it doesn't hurt to be reassured that you're still a good kisser.
But so I was putting my hands on his back, and pulling him in, just allowing myself to move into the moment, and something wasn't working the way it should. My brain should have been forgetting about the outside world at that point, or really about anything other than the here and now. That's part of what makes romance so enjoyable, I guess. You can hardly think straight about anything other than the moment you're currently in, and it doesn't matter because everything seems to just take care of itself. But that wasn't happening this time. My brain was racing ahead, thinking about what was going to happen next, and decision trees, and chains of cause and effect. Was that because I wasn't really attracted to him? Or is this just a side effect of being older and more experienced? I honestly don't know. I guess I'll have to wait and see if it happens again next time, whenever that may be.
But all this was what was happening inside one part of my brain. Meanwhile the rest of my brain was practically running on autopilot. This part figured it knew what to do when I get kissed by somebody I like, and it wasn't bothering to ask the rest of me for clearance.
When I realized that there was this rather substantial discrepancy between what these two parts of me were thinking and doing, I sort of panicked. I figured I better take control of the situation fast, as I felt that at any moment, I could wind up doing something that would be very, very difficult to undo later. And so I pulled myself out of the embrace, but because I panicked, I actually sort of shoved Bob away, and he went up against the wall kind of hard and looking like I had just knocked the wind out of him. So in the end I still wound up doing something that was going to be difficult to undo. What a mess.
What with no longer being in the embrace, and the extra complication I had just introduced by throwing him against a wall, my brain was now completely focused on actions and consequences. It was like I was standing at a great nexus of possible futures, and I had like ten seconds to pick the one I wanted to live the rest of my life in. I don't know, now, how true that really was, but at the time I felt quite sure of it.
Bob looked at me terrified, and said, "You okay, Lisa?" I noticed that he wasn't jumping to the conclusion that I was pushing him away because I was upset at him for kissing me like that. From that fact I sort of deduced that I had been kissing back for long enough to remove his doubts on that subject.
I felt that it was time for me to clarify how I felt about Bob, for myself at least. I liked him, but beyond that? The day of reckoning had arrived and I need to produce some kind of concrete position statement before I could decide what I should do next.
I really liked Bob. I mean, of course, but it was even more than that. I was really starting to like just being around him. In a way the very fact of his existence made me happy. I was happy to know that I lived in a world that allowed for people like Bob. Because Bob didn't quite fit into the world, but what they don't tell you is that you can be a square peg in a round hole, and you will eventually figure out how to live with like that. And part of me even wanted to nurture Bob, to make sure he never gave up on being his own self. I wanted to be sure that Bob would continue to find his way in the world without having to whittle off his corners. Because then maybe there was hope for people like me.
And so what this adds up to is that I've got all these feelings swirling around inside me about Bob, half of which I had hardly guessed were there before. And each one by itself isn't terribly strong, but when you put them all together — I mean, what does all of this add up to? Because they do add up. They're already added up, really. These various feelings aren't sitting in little glass jars on a shelf somewhere. They're all running through me right now, and they're mixed together quite thoroughly already.
At what point do you stop trying to identify all these feelings separately, and just lump them all together into one big feeling and call it "love"?
So here it is. Maybe I have, in my own way, learned to love Bob.
But there's something else going on in my head as well, and I can't quite put my finger on it, except that it feels like doubt. Some part of my brain suspects that my chain of reasoning is missing a link, but it's not sure yet, so as a result it's nothing more than a nagging doubt. It's almost indistinguishable from stage fright, which surely must be a perfectly normal feeling in this kind of situation anyway. But I still have this hyperconscious feeling of standing at a nexus of possible futures, so I just stand there and wait for a moment, to see if anything concrete percolates from that hidden place.
Bob is standing in front of me, confused and staring at me. He's fearful of saying anything because I still haven't answered his question, so he's trying to read my thoughts in my face. I'm standing half-poised, like in the next moment I could either tackle him or make a run for the window. But I have no idea what I look like I'm thinking right now.
And my patience is rewarded, for eventually something pokes out of the dirt in my brain. I straighten up and try to put on a serious face, because it's bad news for poor Bob. Because I'm realizing, without really knowing why I'm realizing this just now, that you can like someone, you can trust them, respect them, want to care for them, and even love them — but that still doesn't mean that the two of you belong together. I wanted to have Bob in my life, and to be in his. But turning in our friendship for a relationship would not make us any happier. Well, Bob probably would, for a while anyway. Kissing a person usually means that. But we wouldn't be happy for very long. Wanting someone in your life is not the same as wanting to pattern your life around someone.
And, perhaps even more strongly, I didn't want Bob to try to pattern his life around me. I wanted to be an influence on him, yes, and hopefully a positive one. But not to the point it would take for him to have room for me.
So, it didn't really matter all that much if everything I was feeling added up to love or not, because it wasn't going to be something to build a relationship on. As far as I could tell, anyway. I mean, you never really know, do you? But not knowing doesn't let you off the hook from having to make a choice.
Kissing Lisa was one of the most amazing things I've ever done. Not amazing in the sense of, I saw stars and fireworks go off, but rather amazing in the sense of, I can't believe I had the nerve to actually do that. I kissed a woman with no clear guarantee that she was okay with it. You could look at it one way and say, well that was awfully presumptuous of you Bob. But you could also look at it and say, Bob is finally starting to learn how to read people.
Since I was basically right in the end, in that it turned out that Lisa didn't mind being kissed like that, I'm going with the latter. If it later turns out that I'm still hopeless when it comes to reading people, then I'll revisit the first explanation. Otherwise, I'm calling it a good thing.
Another reason why I like to think that I had read her correctly is that I have no other explanation for why I decided to do that. Something in my head just decided that now was a good time. You take a step back and look at the situation, though, and nothing about it says, this would be a good time to let Lisa know how you feel about her by kissing her unexpectedly.
Of course, Lisa still left me pretty confused about how to feel about the whole thing. On the one hand she pretty much said that she liked me and valued our friendship and was even attracted to me. On the other hand she said that she didn't want to be in a relationship with me. How do you score on all three of those counts and still not get the girl in the end? It seems that as I get older, getting a girlfriend involves more and more conditions that must be satisfied. In high school a girl just had to be attracted to you to become your girlfriend, and I struck out there. By the time I was in college and figured out how to be attractive to girls without undergoing a personality transplant, they had to like you and be attracted to you. I was able to do one or the other, but I never got both in the same girl at the same time. By the time I managed to figure out how to juggle both of those, college was over and I was a full-fledged adult, and now suddenly you also had to be able to be a friend before you could get a girlfriend. A less resolutely rational man would have concluded that the fates had it in for the human race. At least with the first two down, I finally managed to lose my virginity. But still no girlfriend. Now, here I am, in my thirties. Lo and behold: I've managed to become a friend to Lisa, and somehow, without my really knowing how, I've managed to inspire like and attraction in her. And I still don't have a girlfriend on my hands.
And the worst part of it is, I don't know what the next ingredient is that I'm now missing. Lisa tried to explain it to me, in that awkward conversation we had after I kissed and she pushed me into a wall. But I didn't really understand it. Part of the problem may have been that at that point my brain was practically singing with adrenaline. She may have shoved me away from her, but that didn't change the fact that when I kissed her, she had kissed me back. She's a good kisser. At least in the limited set I have available for comparison. (Of course, people say that about almost everybody. Practically everyone is a good kisser, it seems.)
But yes. Hopefully I can be excused for being a little distracted during our discussion, and for not being in the most focused state for having a deep conversation. Good grief, I had the worst erection at the time. It doesn't take much to get my body's attention, I'm afraid.
But what I did understand from what she said was that she wanted to remain my friend, because she could tell that she wouldn't be a good girlfriend for me. That being in a relationship would require us to change too much in order to make room for each other. I had enough presence of mind to argue that point, to ask how she could be sure of that? And anyway, given the choice I'd rather find out for myself, because you can never know for sure. But then she told me that she also believed that I wouldn't be a good boyfriend for her, and even though she couldn't quite explain why, she felt sure enough to not want to find out the hard way. And well, what can you do to argue against that? That one's a unilateral decision. You don't get a vote in how someone else feels. You can try to reason with someone, but it's pretty rare that you can talk someone out of how they feel about you. So I pretty much had to just accept that argument. I did it with bad grace at first, but then I realized that despite everything I didn't want to look like childish in front of Lisa. She was right about one thing: if the choice came down to being between us being friends and us being exes, I'd choose to keep her friendship. Having had a relationship, even a really unsuccessful one, would be better in some ways, but I'm hardly to the point where I think that Lisa was my last chance for a relationship.
So after a while we went from her being friendly but relieved and me pretending to be okay with our decision because I didn't really have an alternative, to both of us being friendly and more or less happy.
I do feel grateful to Lisa, however irrational it may be, that I could kiss her out of the blue like that and not have it ruin our friendship. It does seem that with a different woman, or even if I had done something like that with Lisa but earlier in our friendship, I could easily have wound up with neither friend nor girlfriend.
The sky was gray as they drove north along the interstate. Tacoma was still up ahead so the speed limit was seventy, and the highway was surrounded by hills and grasslands and groves of huge trees and fields with cows. It was early afternoon, but the light was softened by the clouds.
Harvey was lounging in the back seat of the car. Lisa and Bob were sitting up in front. One of Lisa's CDs had been playing when they left Portland, but it had ended several minutes ago, so it was quiet inside the car.
"Hey, is everyone still awake up there?" Harvey asked.
Lisa waved a hand at him without taking her eyes off the road. Bob said nothing but looked out of the side window as they passed a barn. He was surprised to find that he was having to suppress a grin. He wasn't sure where this feeling had come from.
Harvey leaned forward slightly. "I got a couple of CDs with me, Lisa, if you're tired of listening to your own."
Lisa said. "I'm easy. How do you feel, Bob?"
Bob said, "Actually, I'm kind of enjoying the atmosphere as it is."
Harvey looked at Bob. "What atmosphere? It's silent."
There were only two lanes in this part of the interstate, but nevertheless traffic was light. Lisa remained in the right lane. It was still early in the day and they would be arriving in Seattle before it got late. There would be plenty of time, and so Lisa drove leisurely, letting a caravan of cars pass her on the left.
Bob said, "Yeah. It's quiet. Kinda nice."
Lisa said, "Maybe something classical would fit the atmosphere. You got any Bach CDs, Harvey?"
"No," said Harvey, with a trace of annoyance.
Bob gestured as if to say, well, so much for that, and went back to looking out the window.
Harvey leaned back into the seat and stretched out his arms. He stared forward at the backs of two heads. "You two are awfully quiet for a change." Pause. "Did something happen between you guys?"
Another pause. Finally Lisa, still not taking her eyes from the road, shrugged broadly. Bob looked resolutely foward at the road ahead and allowed himself the grin.