We rode our bikes down through the city in the humid night. The streets were empty and welcoming, as if the world had opened a bubble just for us to be in and I remember gliding alongside her in the warm mercury street lights and feeling my skin cool as we moved through the air. We got down in the Loop and under the El and swerved our way to the plaza where the Chagall stood as it had for 10 years already as a great tiled celebration of living. We looked at it together, bikes pulled close. She had a militant straight bang cut that gave her an Amanda Blank look before there was an Amanda Blank look. Then we kissed a long summer kiss and everything went away except for us and the figures that loosened from the wondrous block of art behind us to float free in the night among the stars. She tasted like sweet grass to me, smoky and alive and soft. I wanted to lay in that kiss forever. But then the figures floated back to their places in the seasons of Chagall and we were back in the valley of steel and glass and it was over. We rode back to her mom’s house off Rush Street and I went home, content and full.
15 years later I would meet her for a drink in New York and she would look at me over the table, still wearing her Amanda Blank hair, now an art teacher in Bed-Sty, and me a poor playwright moonlighting ad copy to pay for my dinners. She would say to me that I didn’t like fruit when she knew me then and that I was not an open thinker and that I was a closed person. That was not how I remembered any of it at all and so I was unfazed by her remarks and instead was just curious about what she recalled and what it was in her that needed to give it that shape.
And now I live 2,000 miles from that place where we had dinner and she lives not less than 20 minutes away, still teaching art to kids but now in the nickel dime area code. She has a kid and a bald blue eyed good looking husband who would be right at home with loafers and pipe. Or found, frozen and still, in the frame of a painting by a Dutch master.
We are “friends” on Instagram but I have no compulsion to reach out and through that window to her. No need to touch that place beyond remembering. It’s just all mildly funny to me now, for some reason. And that is fine.
