suffered and died there.”
Her unfinished dissertation was titled One City, One Love: Endless Becoming in the Work of Dawn Powell. Its three-hundred-plus pages awaited completion behind a closed door in a sewing room she called Limbo in the apartment she rented over a dry cleaner in Hyde Park. To pay the rent, Lise augmented a small trust fund by teaching freshman comp at a couple of community colleges in the Chicago area. One was near Arlington, and sometimes, when I’d drive in from Michigan to see her, we’d meet at the Thoroughbred track there. Our first time at the races we won big—for us, anyway—$687 on a horse we couldn’t not bet on named Epiphany. The following night at a French restaurant overlooking an illuminated Lake Shore Drive, we blew our winnings on a four-course meal washed down with a magnum of a champagne from a village fittingly called Bouzy. After the waiter had ceremoniously buried the empty bottle neck-down in the ice bucket, Lise said, “You have to promise we’ll run away to Bouzy together.” She pronounced it boozy.
“Tonight?” I asked, checking my watch.
“Tonight’s too late, Jack. It’s already tomorrow in France,” she said, and then, leaning in to be kissed, knocked over the flute with the last of her wine.
Lise was a self-described “promiscuous kisser,” though that didn’t keep her from regarding a kiss as deeply intimate—especially, she added, if it’s my tits being kissed. After a few drinks, she had a way of releasing from a kiss with her mouth still open, shaped as if the kiss continued, a facial expression that her good looks allowed her to get away with, as they allowed her to get away with sounding a little breathless on the subject of sex. The restaurant was closing, the chefs, sans toques, leaned in the doorway of the kitchen, drinking red wine and watching what Lise called our PDAs. We joked that night about calling it quits as high rollers while we were ahead, but over the racing season we returned to the track in Arlington hoping for another score. This time we’d invest in tickets to Bouzy.
We’d been drinking the night we first met, too, though it was pitchers of Rolling Rock, not champagne. I’d driven into Chicago for a reading and book signing by a friend who’d been a teacher of mine when I was in a graduate program in American studies there. After his reading, a small group, Lise among them, adjourned to a Hyde Park neighborhood pub. I’d noticed her in the audience at the bookstore. It was bitterly cold, and I’d taken a chance driving in but thought I could make it back to Michigan before the predicted lake-effect snow. She was wearing a furry Russian hat à la Doctor Zhivago that accentuated her cheekbones and the green of her eyes. There should be a word for a flair for looking stylish in hats. For Lise that included baseball caps, bathing caps, rain hoods, bicycle helmets, headbands, and probably tiaras and babushkas—anything that swept her hair up and bared her delicate face. Tendrils of auburn hair kept straggling out from under the fur hat and she’d tuck them back with the unconscious self-consciousness of a girl tugging up her swimsuit.
Later, when we’d tell each other the story of how we met, the word we’d use was effortless . We found ourselves seated directly across the table from each other in the pub and discussing our mutual friend’s new book. Then, looking for things in common, we went on to talking about books that had changed us, movies that had swept us away, music we loved, food, travel, all the while refilling each other’s beer steins, until inevitably we reached the subject of our personal lives.
Lise brought it up in the spirit of recounting what changed her, what had swept her away. I hadn’t drunk anywhere near enough to tell her about the ill-advised relationship I’d had after I’d quit my job as a city caseworker, with a woman named Felice, who had once been on my caseload. She’d managed to
Her unfinished dissertation was titled One City, One Love: Endless Becoming in the Work of Dawn Powell. Its three-hundred-plus pages awaited completion behind a closed door in a sewing room she called Limbo in the apartment she rented over a dry cleaner in Hyde Park. To pay the rent, Lise augmented a small trust fund by teaching freshman comp at a couple of community colleges in the Chicago area. One was near Arlington, and sometimes, when I’d drive in from Michigan to see her, we’d meet at the Thoroughbred track there. Our first time at the races we won big—for us, anyway—$687 on a horse we couldn’t not bet on named Epiphany. The following night at a French restaurant overlooking an illuminated Lake Shore Drive, we blew our winnings on a four-course meal washed down with a magnum of a champagne from a village fittingly called Bouzy. After the waiter had ceremoniously buried the empty bottle neck-down in the ice bucket, Lise said, “You have to promise we’ll run away to Bouzy together.” She pronounced it boozy.
“Tonight?” I asked, checking my watch.
“Tonight’s too late, Jack. It’s already tomorrow in France,” she said, and then, leaning in to be kissed, knocked over the flute with the last of her wine.
Lise was a self-described “promiscuous kisser,” though that didn’t keep her from regarding a kiss as deeply intimate—especially, she added, if it’s my tits being kissed. After a few drinks, she had a way of releasing from a kiss with her mouth still open, shaped as if the kiss continued, a facial expression that her good looks allowed her to get away with, as they allowed her to get away with sounding a little breathless on the subject of sex. The restaurant was closing, the chefs, sans toques, leaned in the doorway of the kitchen, drinking red wine and watching what Lise called our PDAs. We joked that night about calling it quits as high rollers while we were ahead, but over the racing season we returned to the track in Arlington hoping for another score. This time we’d invest in tickets to Bouzy.
We’d been drinking the night we first met, too, though it was pitchers of Rolling Rock, not champagne. I’d driven into Chicago for a reading and book signing by a friend who’d been a teacher of mine when I was in a graduate program in American studies there. After his reading, a small group, Lise among them, adjourned to a Hyde Park neighborhood pub. I’d noticed her in the audience at the bookstore. It was bitterly cold, and I’d taken a chance driving in but thought I could make it back to Michigan before the predicted lake-effect snow. She was wearing a furry Russian hat à la Doctor Zhivago that accentuated her cheekbones and the green of her eyes. There should be a word for a flair for looking stylish in hats. For Lise that included baseball caps, bathing caps, rain hoods, bicycle helmets, headbands, and probably tiaras and babushkas—anything that swept her hair up and bared her delicate face. Tendrils of auburn hair kept straggling out from under the fur hat and she’d tuck them back with the unconscious self-consciousness of a girl tugging up her swimsuit.
Later, when we’d tell each other the story of how we met, the word we’d use was effortless . We found ourselves seated directly across the table from each other in the pub and discussing our mutual friend’s new book. Then, looking for things in common, we went on to talking about books that had changed us, movies that had swept us away, music we loved, food, travel, all the while refilling each other’s beer steins, until inevitably we reached the subject of our personal lives.
Lise brought it up in the spirit of recounting what changed her, what had swept her away. I hadn’t drunk anywhere near enough to tell her about the ill-advised relationship I’d had after I’d quit my job as a city caseworker, with a woman named Felice, who had once been on my caseload. She’d managed to
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