let all the other people who were stranded in Korea get home first.
It was a testament to my respect for Peter that I actually found a clean shirt and a relatively clean pair of jeans to wear for our night out. The truth was, I wasn’t remembering much of what he looked like or what we’d talked about at Mitchell’s. I remembered thinking he was cute, if a little young. But that was enough. I also sensed that he was as trapped in his house as I was trapped in mine, because I would get emails from him like
jasper—
only 8 more hours! i will be the guy in the brown tshirt and the levis. also, i will be the one ringing your doorbell. if that is not enough to recognize me, i could also have a tulip between my teeth. or behind my ear, if you would find that more aesthetically pleasing. i have both a florist and a dresser on standby, awaiting your answer.
see you soon (say, seven hours and fifty-five minutes?)
peter
Seven hours and fifty-five minutes later, he was at my front door. His T-shirt really fit him well, and he was boyish in a Ewan McGregor kind of way, albeit without the brogue.
I took him to Olive Vine—I knew there was a chance of bumping into some of the people I’d been dodging, but I figured that would be a risk anywhere. It’s not like anyone was leaving the neighborhood. Flags were starting to pop up everywhere, along with the MISSING signs. It was like we’d cleared away all the papers that had blown over and were replacing them with our own.
I was relieved, because clearly Peter wasn’t a closet case, and he seemed to know what some of the dating rules were. Not that I was seeing it as a date—more as a diversion. It’s not like I was going to put him in my pocket and take him up to college with me. And he didn’t seem like the random-hookup type. (A shame. Or maybe not.) I asked him all the things I felt I should ask, like where he’d been when everything happened. He told me he was waiting to buy a Bob Dylan record, which I thoughtwas pretty funny. “The times, they did a-change?” I said, but his laugh was more polite than anything else. I chalked it up to the fact that you had to be twisted like me to find the humor in the situation.
Usually I treated dates like they were chess matches, trying to plan my moves a little bit ahead, carefully deciding which conversational pieces to deploy, willing to sacrifice pawns of small talk if it would get my opponent to fall in love with my king. But this was a different kind of board, a different set of rules—almost like all the pieces had been knocked off, and we were both trying to agree on where they’d been before. I wasn’t having any fun with it, which wasn’t his fault. Fun was included in the piece of me that had disappeared.
He talked about seeing things happen, about being near, and while he expressed a momentary jealousy that I hadn’t had to go through that, I think we both knew that it was better to be an unharmed witness than the guy who slept through it and still had to deal with the aftermath. One of the things the terrorist attack has done was to send us all into these Sliding Doors scenarios—all these what ifs. What if I’d gotten up earlier that morning? What if I’d decided to go to Battery Park for a run? I’d done that once … in 1998, before the SATs. What if, along the way, I’d taken the spot on a crowded subway car that some guy who worked at the World Trade Center was supposed to take, so the doors slid closed on him and he ended up getting to work late enough to be saved? Bullshit—all of it complete bullshit. And you couldn’t help but wonder why your mind went thereanyway—was it to exert control or to find comfort in the fact that there wasn’t really all that much control, after all?
By the time I tuned back in, Peter was talking about crying because people at Starbucks were being extra nice. The fact that he could be so moved only reinforced my own emptiness. When he asked me how I felt, I didn’t
It was a testament to my respect for Peter that I actually found a clean shirt and a relatively clean pair of jeans to wear for our night out. The truth was, I wasn’t remembering much of what he looked like or what we’d talked about at Mitchell’s. I remembered thinking he was cute, if a little young. But that was enough. I also sensed that he was as trapped in his house as I was trapped in mine, because I would get emails from him like
jasper—
only 8 more hours! i will be the guy in the brown tshirt and the levis. also, i will be the one ringing your doorbell. if that is not enough to recognize me, i could also have a tulip between my teeth. or behind my ear, if you would find that more aesthetically pleasing. i have both a florist and a dresser on standby, awaiting your answer.
see you soon (say, seven hours and fifty-five minutes?)
peter
Seven hours and fifty-five minutes later, he was at my front door. His T-shirt really fit him well, and he was boyish in a Ewan McGregor kind of way, albeit without the brogue.
I took him to Olive Vine—I knew there was a chance of bumping into some of the people I’d been dodging, but I figured that would be a risk anywhere. It’s not like anyone was leaving the neighborhood. Flags were starting to pop up everywhere, along with the MISSING signs. It was like we’d cleared away all the papers that had blown over and were replacing them with our own.
I was relieved, because clearly Peter wasn’t a closet case, and he seemed to know what some of the dating rules were. Not that I was seeing it as a date—more as a diversion. It’s not like I was going to put him in my pocket and take him up to college with me. And he didn’t seem like the random-hookup type. (A shame. Or maybe not.) I asked him all the things I felt I should ask, like where he’d been when everything happened. He told me he was waiting to buy a Bob Dylan record, which I thoughtwas pretty funny. “The times, they did a-change?” I said, but his laugh was more polite than anything else. I chalked it up to the fact that you had to be twisted like me to find the humor in the situation.
Usually I treated dates like they were chess matches, trying to plan my moves a little bit ahead, carefully deciding which conversational pieces to deploy, willing to sacrifice pawns of small talk if it would get my opponent to fall in love with my king. But this was a different kind of board, a different set of rules—almost like all the pieces had been knocked off, and we were both trying to agree on where they’d been before. I wasn’t having any fun with it, which wasn’t his fault. Fun was included in the piece of me that had disappeared.
He talked about seeing things happen, about being near, and while he expressed a momentary jealousy that I hadn’t had to go through that, I think we both knew that it was better to be an unharmed witness than the guy who slept through it and still had to deal with the aftermath. One of the things the terrorist attack has done was to send us all into these Sliding Doors scenarios—all these what ifs. What if I’d gotten up earlier that morning? What if I’d decided to go to Battery Park for a run? I’d done that once … in 1998, before the SATs. What if, along the way, I’d taken the spot on a crowded subway car that some guy who worked at the World Trade Center was supposed to take, so the doors slid closed on him and he ended up getting to work late enough to be saved? Bullshit—all of it complete bullshit. And you couldn’t help but wonder why your mind went thereanyway—was it to exert control or to find comfort in the fact that there wasn’t really all that much control, after all?
By the time I tuned back in, Peter was talking about crying because people at Starbucks were being extra nice. The fact that he could be so moved only reinforced my own emptiness. When he asked me how I felt, I didn’t
Similar Books
