Day 18

January 17
10 pm


One of the side effects of having a full and vibrant love life is that sometimes, when you’re entirely unprepared, the heart takes a tumble. Tonight I’ve got some wounds to nurse, and Anne’s still hoarse and congested, and we shamble up to the bar and order our whiskeys like a couple of oldish men who’ve finally made it out of the mines.

I’m coming from a potluck at Alex’s, where we all curled up with each other and told stories and ate steamed pork buns from the Hong Kong Market while our friend John performed spellbinding magic tricks. It was cuddly and perfect and hard to leave, but now I’m happy to be here with Anne: this nightly drinking ritual has begun to feel like a gritty natural order for me. It’s gonna be hard when it’s over.

Maybe it’s the gray in my heart, or maybe I got it wrong the first time, but even the enthusiastic bartender looks subdued tonight. “Evening, ladies,” he says. “It must be Sunday again.” I wish it was the kind of night where I’d lean over and say, “Guess what! I’ve been here eighteen days in a row!” but I think we’re all a little too sluggish tonight to be exuberant, so I just smile and say “Must be,” and touch Anne’s glass with mine.

“We have to text Elizabeth,” I’m reminding myself out loud. A few nights ago she lost a favorite earring here and didn’t realize it until she was already home. We all looked around for it and no one saw it, and then all of us except Meenakshi left, and when Meenakshi was here alone, someone came up to her with the earring and said, “Is this yours?” Meenakshi took it and gave it to me a few days later to give to Elizabeth, neither of us aware that this whole time Elizabeth’s been retracing her steps all through the Bywater, hopefully mining the curbs for any glint of gold, not knowing that we had it, safe, all along.

Finally tonight, before we came here, Anne and I called Elizabeth to see if we could go find her anywhere in the city and give it to her, but she didn’t answer, and since Rahn’s just moved here we didn’t really want to go surprising her at home in case we’d be Interrupting Something, so finally we decided to stealthily sneak it into her mailbox under the cover of darkness. Which we did, tiptoeing through the creaky green gate like a couple of glorious bandidas.

Now I’m sending Elizabeth a message that says “Nothing’s ever lost in divine time. Go check your mailbox.” And then Anne and I feel victorious and jubilant, even if just for a moment, and I’m thinking about all of us and the things we’ve already lost and then found again, in these brilliant heady beginning days of 2010.

The door’s been opening and closing all night, spitting out adorable people in cozy-looking clothes who are coming in to play pool, socialize with the bartenders, and snuggle up in the corner and read the Gambit together. One time the door opens and through it walks a short-haired girl in an amazing coat, and I think Yep, there’s another one, but then I do a double-take and I realize it’s my old roommate Alison, stunningly beautiful as always, and I jump off my chair, and she jumps up and down a little bit too, and we give each other long, woolly hugs.

“Yay!” I say.
“Yay!” Alison says.

She’s meeting a friend who’s been waiting upstairs, but for about five minutes we tell rapid-fire stories about work, roommates, the general angst and brilliance of life, and before she heads upstairs Alison says, “You doing good?”
“Rough and tumble,” I say, “but beautiful; yeah.”
She grins and squeezes me again and says “Yeah. Me too,” and heads upstairs.
“Alison’s like a ray of light,” I tell Anne, as we watch her weave her shining glorious way to the doorway.

We’re getting tattoos tomorrow, and while we slowly sip our whiskey we also strategize about words and language, the geographies of our bodies. The enthusiastic bartender pulls his jacket on and hoists a bag over his shoulder, and when he walks past us on the way out we tell him goodbye and he says, “Have a beautiful evening, ladies,” and I drain my whiskey and answer, “Indeed.”

As I settle my tab I feel my phone vibrating on my hip, and my little heart creaks, just slightly, with both hope and dread. It’s a message, not from the person I was expecting, but it says, simply, “By the way, I adore you,” and my heart swells with sad gratefulness, and this, for now, is enough to get me out of my chair and out into the world again. Our options for the rest of the night are limitless and could include a poetry extravaganza, a roving musical birthday party, a Haiti relief housewarming dance party, or maybe none of the above. When we step out into the strange dark night I don’t know where we will end up, but that’s all right. There are stars out, along with the multicolored holiday lights that are morphing, with all the rest of us, from Christmas to Mardi Gras, and somehow, at some slow fumbling time not too far off, I bet we'll find our way.