Overlap
.
It’s late and I’m a trope of modern life. Hunched over my mom’s cherry wood desk in an attic bedroom, I scroll past a stack of images on Match.com, past guys straddling motorcycles, gripping bulky fish on charter boats. I scroll past guys leaping across finish lines. It’s late and I scroll along with millions of lonelyhearts and lotharios.
It’s been eight months since my ex’s amicable departure. The full-throttled dating spree that began in the spring hasn’t led to any second dates. Middle-aged and panicked about my prospects, I keep a diligent record of encounters on the back page of my journal. I want to meet one more man before 2018 vanishes. One more man means I’ll reach a self-imposed quota of 30 for the year.
It’s a numbers game, or so I’ve heard.
I land on a closeup of Ben, silver-haired with a sweet smile, stuffed bookshelves behind him. He’s 55, a year older than me. He’s labeled himself “very liberal” (me too!) and writes poetry (so do I!), but when I see he’s a bike commuter and won’t fly due to climate change I lean hard toward my screen. I message Ben to tell him I like his profile. Soon enough he asks if I’d like to meet for a drink.
Several days later and an hour before our date, I re-read his profile and see something I didn’t catch the first time: Ben’s separated, not divorced. I’m not keen on dating men whose lives might be littered with emotional conflict, but tell myself every breakup is different. Undeterred, I sally forth on my bicycle.
Ben had asked where I wanted to meet and I suggested a place about a mile from my house. The Spare Room’s a former bowling alley that’s now a cavernous dive bar, bingo every Monday, karaoke every Thursday. No one can hear your conversation from the next turquoise booth over. I wait at a table under flattering bordello lights and sip a Gin Rickey, a blue wool hat on my head as I adjust to the cozy indoor temperature. A little past seven a tall man I recognize from my computer walks over to me, pint glass in hand. He looks at me through Buddy Holly horn rims.
I introduce myself.
“I’m sorry I’m late,” he says with a quaver. “I took the bus.” Swoon.
He sits across from me and shifts around in his seat. He says this is only his third online date, ever. He’s been separated since the summer and recently moved into a small studio space behind the house where his wife still lives. They awkwardly share the kitchen. I imagine two tense bodies pussyfooting across linoleum, careful not to touch. Not ideal, but my mind’s open.
Compared to Ben, I’m a pro at looking for love on my laptop. Although this round’s only six months old, I internet-dated vigorously ten years earlier, before I met my most recent ex. I share my hard-earned wisdom with Ben.
“The weirdest thing about online dating is that there’s almost never any context.” I say. It’s not exactly encouraging but it’s true. I typically spend an hour trying and failing to find more than a few square feet of common ground, then don’t see the person again.
It’s possible Ben might be an exception. His hunched shoulders have relaxed and he smiles a bit as we talk. There’s a trace of Midwest in his cadence and his face is pleasant, with brown eyes, slightly ruddy cheeks, a strong chin. Besides being a bike commuter, Ben’s a German professor. I’m an English as a Second Language teacher. He happens to live just a few blocks from the Japanese immersion school where I work. We discuss restaurants and bars in his neighborhood, the Uralic origins of Finnish and Hungarian and the complexities of tonal languages. My heart races, my brain swells.
Somehow he veers back to his wife again, who initiated the divorce. “We had all these routines,” he sighs. “We went out for beers every Tuesday night.” His head rolls forward into his chest, as if the weight of these thoughts is too much to carry.
“Maybe it’s time for new traditions,” I say, rapidly deciding I could meet him for drinks on Tuesdays, since I work in his neighborhood.
The Portland Trail Blazers play Utah on a ginormous TV screen across the room. I watch Damian Lillard sail a three-pointer through the basket and swirl a slender straw around my cocktail. Ben’s still somewhat stiff, maybe from the shock of dating again. But I like that he’s smart, gainfully employed and that we have a rapport. This feels more promising than any other date I’ve had this year.
Just past the hour mark we shoot the breeze about places we’ve lived. He mentions Madison, Wisconsin.
“I lived in Madison in 1988,” I say, “but only for six months.” The bitter cold nearly drove me out sooner.
I mention the name of the French restaurant where I’d found a job tending bar.
Ben scrunches his brow. “I worked there too back then, in the bakery.”
I stare at him. A face without glasses emerges, along with a full head of dark hair. My hand flies over my mouth. I can barely launch the words through my laughter.
“Oh my God, we slept together.”
He squints at me. “No we didn’t. I would’ve been too shy to ask you out.”
“I asked you out.”
He shakes his head.
“Didn’t you study music in college?” I say, and of course he did, his specialty being trumpet. I tell Ben that after I left Wisconsin he sent a letter to my parents’ house in New Jersey. I read it to my mom, her eyes aglitter, having had musical aspirations for herself and her five kids.
“Keep in touch with that one,” she said. I didn’t. I was moving forward, not back.
“We saw the Manchurian Candidate then went to your place and had sex.” I continue. “You and me Ben.” I point at him, laughing again at this coincidence. “What are the odds of meeting on a Match.com date thirty years later? One in a billion?”
Ben’s confused and dimly recalls the experience: “I remember seeing the Manchurian Candidate, but I don’t remember who I saw it with.”
Maybe I’m not as memorable as I’d like to think I am.
“It was me,” I assert, quaffing my second Gin Rickey to bury the slight. “And your name was Ben!”
“It still is,” he says dryly.
He may harbor doubts but I know what I know. The Carpenters’ “We’ve Only Just Begun” gushes through the loudspeakers. God, I love The Spare Room.
We leave the bar and he escorts me to my bike, tethered to a parking sign and I swear through my juniper haze that I’ll find his letter, as definitive proof of our amorous evening. I say goodbye and pedal into the darkness, still laughing.
***
At home, I open a hall closet and pull out three large boxes that contain a lifetime’s cache of correspondence. I look and look some more. I don’t find Ben’s letter. Instead I find mounds of envelopes addressed to me from my family, boyfriends and friends.
In another box I find scores of letters I sent my parents. Mom saved them all, saved the story of my life, stapling each envelope to the pages and arranging them chronologically. She’s been gone three years and this is too much. My fingers glide over the letters but I don’t read any of them. I wipe my cheeks with the back of my hand and close the lid.
I wake up at three in the morning. My head’s spinning, as if I’ve had six drinks instead of two, as if I just got off the Gravitron at the Wisconsin state fair. Is it because I miss my mom? Or is it because of the cosmic serendipity of my encounter with Ben?
It seems the gods are toying with me and I don’t know what to make of it.
***
The next day Ben emails a picture of himself from 1988, a dark-haired young man in a Milwaukee Brewers t-shirt who once donned a baker’s apron. The years collapse between then and now as nostalgia jolts my stomach. I smile back at the photo then email Ben and tell him I couldn’t find his letter. He writes back within ten minutes and doesn’t seem to need more proof of our thirty-year-old tryst. He wants to meet again, “to continue the conversation.”
I snap my laptop shut and dash upstairs to rummage through a bedroom dresser. I find a Peace Corps-issued passport from 1988. Inside the navy blue cover I’m surprised by the sight of an impossibly young me: Permy waves of chestnut hair, skin as smooth as eggshell, an enigmatic smile, and knowing hazel eyes that look like they held secrets, although I was chock-full of self-doubt. In the mirror above the dresser I see my face now, washed with time. In my naturally straight hair a few grays are poised to colonize my scalp and the hazel eyes are now shielded by purple-rimmed glasses.
I take a picture of the passport photo and send it to Ben, along with a link I found online to the Wisconsin State Journal, dated May 21, 1988. On page 13 was a promotional piece for the Manchurian Candidate, slated to play that week at the Majestic Theater.
The photo jogs his memory. He emails back, “I remember being flattered that such a funny and attractive coworker asked me out.”
Ah, sweet validation. Faith percolates within.
***
I moved to Madison just after returning from a post-college trip to Europe. I’d met fellow travelers abroad who knew a lot more about politics than I did and who made me want to fill my head with something more than boys and booze.
I settled in with Haley, a former New Jersey roommate who’d recently birthed twins. Her boyfriend hightailed it and she was back in Wisconsin with her mom. I offered to help with the newborns.
As a child Haley lived in Chile during the 1973 military coup. I’d heard her analyze U.S. intervention abroad. Now that I had a clear self-improvement goal, I started to appreciate her intellect.
Although I babysat for Haley when her regular sitter couldn’t, I needed more money. Soon I landed a job at a much-lauded downtown restaurant known for its quiches, crepes, and famous Morning Buns, hefty cinnamon rolls sculpted from croissant dough. I worked days behind the bar, which meant mostly serving wine, mimosas or Bloody Marys, and one or two stealth shots of Drambuie that a blond waitress from Michigan needed to get through her shifts.
I liked the waitstaff and the bakers, who toiled just past the bar in a small room with two large brick ovens. As far as I could tell it was the toastiest spot in snow-encrusted Madison, the restaurant’s womb where Morning Buns and other yeasty pleasures incubated. I shared most shifts with flour-dusted Ben and Richard, who rolled and sliced dough on a thick wooden table.
Ben was about to launch a career as a public school music teacher. Tall and quiet, he hailed from a teensy Minnesota town. “How are your buns today Ben?” I asked on more than one occasion, chortling at my own cleverness.
“Just fine,” he’d reply with a faint smile. He pushed a pin back and forth, barely looking up. I liked shy men. They made me bold.
Bearded and rotund Richard had about a decade on me and had been a Peace Corps volunteer in Togo. I told him I’d thought about applying.
“So many people say they’re going to and don’t. You won’t regret it if you get in,” he said in a voice tinged with North Carolina. I looked forward to making decisions I wouldn’t regret but wasn’t quite ready to give up my comfortable American existence.
My younger sister had applied to the Peace Corps and pressured me to get moving. “I don’t know,” I said, “maybe when I’m older.”
“So what exactly do you have going on right now that you can’t leave behind?” she asked from New Jersey.
It was true I was in no hurry to use the business degree I obtained in the slats of time I wasn’t waiting tables or holding down a bar stool. The Peace Corps held the promise of postponing adulthood another two years and would look better on my resume than restaurant work. It might make me more worldly. And yes, I’d also be changing lives, or so I heard. I labored over the lengthy application and managed to scrape together the required recommendations.
Jesse Jackson made a presidential bid in 1988. I stood in the front row at UW to see him, part of my mission to engage in current events. He spoke with fervor about equality for women, about the Rainbow Coalition. I cheered with my fist in the air, then skittered home across the frozen landscape and burst through the door in search of Haley and a heating vent. Breathlessly I announced Jackson would be our next national leader.
Haley looked up from a double-breasted feeding session and said through bangs she hadn’t had time to cut, “I dunno. Might be a long shot.”
Madison’s ice cap began to thaw. My sister got accepted to serve in Zaire and in April I also received an invitation from the Peace Corps. I was going to Honduras.
During my next restaurant shift, I followed the aroma of baking bread to tell Richard and Ben the news. Richard congratulated me. “That’s awesome! I wish I could’ve gone to Central America instead of Africa. You’re gonna learn so much because that’s where everything’s happening.”
“Yeah, right!” I said and wondered if he was talking about the Contra War. I wasn’t sure why anyone would find that alluring.
Ben shut a cast iron oven door and said, “Ah, yes, now you’re one of Ronnie’s kids.” I wasn’t a Reagan fan, although if pressed I probably couldn’t explain why with any conviction. But Ben’s tone was both confident and sarcastic, as if he knew things the way critical thinkers know. Like Haley, like the Europeans I’d met.“I’m not a Republican, if that’s what you mean,” I said, affirming my developing political self. Ben offered a crooked smile.
I’d be leaving Madison soon, stopping in New Jersey for a month before heading to Tegucigalpa. During those last weeks in Wisconsin I read the State Journal each morning, attempting to bone up on the Nicaraguan Sandinistas before yielding to the distractions of advice columnists and my horoscope.
After skimming the pages of World News one day my eyes wandered to the Living section of the paper, where I saw an article about a Manchurian Candidate revival. Made in 1962, the movie was billed as “a Cold War political thriller.”
While in Europe, West German security checkpointed me through the Wall to grim and gray East Berlin, where roads buzzed with dinky Trabant cars and grocery shelves stood nearly vacant. I had a grasp on how the Soviets operated. Seeing this film would expand my foreign affairs knowledge, nudge me closer to cerebral liberation.
Up until then I hadn’t thought of Ben as a romantic possibility but since he appeared to be single, was kind of cute and in close proximity, it made sense to ask him. Why not go with someone who was likely familiar with the complexities of communism?
During my last restaurant shift I kept a lookout for Richard to take his break, then slipped into the bakery to talk to Ben. “Hey, The Manchurian Candidate is playing at the Majestic Theater this week. You wanna go?”
Ben’s hands paused in the dough he’d been kneading. He looked up at me. “Sure. I’d like to see that.” This time his smile wasn’t crooked.
I imagined us after the movie, sitting at a marble-topped table in some artsy, amber-toned cafe, jazz standards meandering in the background. My fingertips traced the delicate rim of a wine glass, two-thirds full of a good pinot noir. Soon enough we’d tilt toward one another, engrossed in critiquing the film, in analyzing the Cold War in hushed tones.
During our date at the Majestic, I watched Angela Lansbury and Frank Sinatra and a bunch of actors I didn’t know move around on black and white sets, lips forming words I couldn’t follow within the context of a story I couldn’t penetrate. I glanced at Ben next to me, still and focused, elbows and ulnas resting within the confines of his armrests. I prayed he wouldn’t talk about the film afterwards.
We sat in silence as the credits rolled. We stood up.
“How about that,” I said.
“How about that,” he repeated.
We walked onto the darkened street, where the capitol dome shone like the moon. Ben lived near the theater and invited me in. We drank Old Milwaukees out of cans and, mercifully, chatted about music. It occurred to me that maybe Ben hadn’t understood the movie either since he hadn’t brought it up. We sat at the keyboard in his room and pounded out a few tunes. We sat on his mattress on the floor and kissed. Soon enough my intellectual aspirations succumbed to matters of the flesh.
The next morning I opened his front door and stepped out under a vast cerulean sky. It was one of the rare mild days I’d experienced in Madison, a day that made me forget the ghastly chill of winter, the need to keep faucets dripping overnight, to plug in cars to keep engines warm, and to triple-layer my goosebumped body before I dared exit Haley’s house. Doused in sunshine, I reached the sidewalk when Ben called from the doorstep.
“Wait. Can I get your parents’ address?” He joined me with a notepad and pen. I thanked him again for the evening and headed to the bus stop.
***
Due to holiday schedule conflicts, ten days pass before Ben and I reconvene in Portland. During this interminable period I demolish two important dating rules.
The first one: Don’t Talk About It. At least not until standing on the brink of Date Four, in order to prevent jinxing. Instead I tell many friends the backstory with Ben and watch their eyebrows arch, their mouths form Os. I tell a few confidantes that encountering him again “transcends coincidence,” and they laugh and agree. I laugh too, despite feeling uneasy with the concept of fate. What game is the universe playing with me? Who’s up there moving Ben and me around the country like chess pieces? Maybe my mother’s puppeteering from above, announcing to other dead relatives, “I told her to keep in touch with him!”
The second rule sounds so simple: Have No Expectations. When it comes to dating, nothing could be harder.
***
On a cool dry Portland evening two nights before I’d break out a new calendar, I walk to what I consider our third date. It’s about three miles to The Moon and Sixpence. I bring Ben a poem, “Like You,” penned by Salvadoran revolutionary Roque Dalton. I’m thrilled to have another chance with someone I believe is a comrade. And my blood boils up and I laugh through eyes that have known the buds of tears, wrote Dalton. I’m sensitive to Ben’s marital anguish and want to offer this gift of emotional solidarity. But I don’t want to scare him away. I definitely won’t tell Ben I’d been writing his full name, over and over, in my journal, channeling teenaged me, a girl who found deep meaning in Olivia Newton-John’s oeuvre and was nutso for the boy down the street.
Ben Barton Ben Barton Ben Barton Ben Barton
As I head south on foot I’m alone with my thoughts, which start optimistically. I ponder how many dates we should have before announcing exclusivity to one another, and how we’ll describe our complicated “How We Met” story to our soon-to-be shared acquaintances. I imagine passionate conversations in the wee hours, discussing syntax and pragmatics. I’m halfway to the pub when doubt creeps in. I freeze and look up to a sliver of moon.
“What if he rejects me?” I whisper to my mother. “What if I don’t like him?” I know what she’d say. She’d been saying it since I was a teenager.
“Stop worrying for heaven’s sake. You’re going to be okay no matter what.”
Even if I don’t end up with a musician, Mom’s on my side.
I reach the pub’s wooden doors and take a deep breath. “If this doesn’t go well, I’m keeping the poem,” Fair enough.
There will be no hitting the gin tonight. I will need clarity. I will need my wits.
Ben warned me he’d be a little late since he was across the river playing with his jazz quartet. Trumpet! Now there’s a hot instrument. I sit at the bar and stir my club soda, the wedge of lime cavorting with bubbles and ice. I chat with bartenders who tell me they dread New Year’s Eve and its drunken reverie. Then I turn and there’s Ben next to me, trumpet case in hand, asking if we could move to a table. I follow him to a corner booth.
We’re quiet. We look at each other. We look down at a menu that distresses me with its limited offerings. I land on a house salad and Smoked Winter Vegetable Soup. Ben orders steak pie without hesitation. But what about the methane emissions and resource-hogging associated with red meat production? What about climate change? Whatever, no one’s perfect, not even poetry-writing musicians who know how to make Morning Buns.
The lights in this shabby pub are brighter than The Spare Room’s and tonight I see Ben more clearly. He’s wearing a baggy beige cardigan that reminds me of my grandfather, in his later years. Worn out and worn down, perhaps due to the collapse of his marriage, he slides around on his bench, leaning sideways, back, and forward, as if trapped in a mistake. As if he doesn’t want to be here. With me.
Or maybe he’s thunderstruck by the intriguing path kismet has laid before us. I ask about his quartet, about growing up in Minnesota.
He asks why I never married. I’m not in the mood to rehash past relationships, the first one shattering at age 15 when the boy I was nutso for moved to St. Louis and the last one collapsing at the onset of my ex’s transition to female. And I don’t want to spark talk about Ben’s wife.
“I didn’t see the point,” I say.
My laconic answer doesn’t deter him. He tells me how his wife “just decided one day” she wanted to try something new.
“You mean sleep with women?” It’s been known to happen.
He looks up from his pint of Old Speckled Hen. “Well, yes, there’s that,” he admits. His head double-slumps into his chest.
The waitress delivers our plates and the Smoked Winter Vegetable Soup appears to have been plucked from a weak summer harvest: anemic peas, mushy corn, scraps of tomato, with a few tiny cubes of carrot thrown in, just to prove they know what “winter” means. I can’t detect the “smoked” part and the whole mess tastes like canned Campbell’s. I admit to myself Ben’s meal is more tantalizing.
We speak of baking. He no longer does it. We speak of gardening. His yard’s too shady so why bother? We speak of neighbors. After a decade he doesn’t know his, although his wife’s more friendly, which brings us back to Point A. Ben tells me he’s been married twelve years, that they met at a poetry reading. He stabs a fork into his steak pie with startling force. At least he’ll get the house as part of the settlement, he says. They’re also divvying up the dogs and Ben’s getting the one he likes, thank goodness.
As if he suddenly remembers he’s out with me, he reveals he mentioned our situation to his therapist, who thought it was hilarious.
I wonder if his therapist had suggested Ben was ready to date.
“You know I thought about this coincidence and realized there are a lot of people who’ve lived in Madison who now live in Portland. I don’t think us meeting again is that big of a deal,” Ben says.
I can nearly hear the whine of air leaking out of my magical mystery balloon.
To hell with German professors. Maybe I should be dating a mathematician, someone who could appreciate the statistical improbability of two people having slept together thirty years prior to an online date, in an icy college town one of them drifted through on her way to someplace balmy because she wanted to help an overwhelmed friend, who happened to get pregnant with identical twins (.45% chance) when a condom broke (4% failure rate), and then said drifter got a job at the same restaurant and worked the same shifts as a certain baker and three decades later they both happened to be single in the same city and occupied space on the same lame dating site at the same exact time.
Divorce, on the other hand, is rather common.
I stare at him, this man who’s determined to beat my hope of not dying alone into submission. This man who I’d decided had more potential than the other 29 men I’d slurped Gin Rickeys with in 2018.
“Hmm,” is the only response I can muster.
This small utterance fades into an uncomfortable silence, for us anyway. The boisterous group in the next booth has got a head start on New Year’s Eve, and their noisy guffaws highlight just how un-fun my table is.
Ben finally tells me that when he saw my passport photo he remembered playing around at the keyboard during the night in question, curiously not recollecting the more carnal aspects of the evening.
He goes on. “I’ve had a few one-night stands,” he says, proving he hasn’t forgotten everyone he’s slept with. “A couple of times the women actually told me they were disappointed.” He sounds bitter.
Perhaps Ben best remembers women who expect enlightenment from boozy, fleeting sexual encounters. In any case, it’s clear he’s not trying to impress me.
Maybe I wasn’t very discerning at age 23. “You didn’t disappoint me,” I say. Until now, that is.
We dip into other topics, each one doomed to drown in the currents of Ben’s misery: Our respective large families, his decision to study German in college, my recent visit to a Zen Buddhist retreat center, genderless pronouns in Turkish and Farsi. Even the last topic fails to excite me. Every bit of enthusiasm has been yanked into Ben’s suckhole of woe.
He’s drained me, morphed me into a withered fly dangling in a spider’s web. I want to extricate myself from this man, this pub, this night. I want to go home and read a novel, scribble in my journal, vacuum. I want to be alone. I ask for the check.
We pay the waitress and walk out to the sidewalk. I turn toward the bus stop when Ben says, “Let me drive you,” as if this date needs a postscript. I’m surprised he’s offered but give in to the lure of not waiting for the bus. I pause my commitment to alternative transportation and hop in the car.
The glove compartment of his Nissan Versa is falling off its hinges and bangs my knees. Ben tells me that when his wife moves out in a month she’ll take the car with her, followed by a long sigh. I remind him he gets to keep the house, followed by a long sigh. Post-marital asset distribution is only interesting to those whose assets are at stake.
The three-mile drive feels like thirty. Between the smell of dog and Ben’s palpable grief, I’m suffocating. Together we speak five languages–most are his–yet we have no more words other than the directions I give.
He finally pulls up to my house, a Tudor cottage that easily elicits compliments, like the younger version of me did. Ben notices the elegant curves of the rounded windows. “What a pretty house,” he says.
In the flat sexless voice of a parochial school nun I say, “Would you like to see what it looks like inside?” and instantly regret the suggestion. I’m starving and would rather plunder my cupboards than lead a pity home tour. Thankfully Ben declines. I lean over to side-hug his body, shrouded in steely sorrow, then blurt out of the Versa.
Before I shut the car door I tell him, “Maybe I’ll see you in 2019,” because it’s nicer than saying, “If I see you again it won’t be on purpose. And I will hide.”
Ben peers glumly at me through his bifocals and says with stoney finality, “Goodbye.”
The Dalton poem stays in my pocket.
Inside my pretty house I stand over the kitchen sink and gobble up a peanut butter sandwich then flop on the couch. It’s my own heart, I know, that needs attention, and it’s not about quotas or timelines. It’s about trusting love will find me again. I smooth a quilt over my lap. A quilt with colors of spring leaves and sun. A quilt Mom stitched for me years ago. I hear her now, telling me It’ll be okay, you’re going to be okay no matter what.
Tess Kelly‘s essays have appeared in Passages North, Sweet Lit, BULL, Cleaver Magazine and Dorothy Parker’s Ashes, among other publications. She lives, writes, and teaches in the public schools in Portland, Oregon. rainy-day-writer.com
←previous ••• next→
