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: : : FLETCHER AND CASSANDRA ARE AT the end of their first date. In the subway station entryway Fletcher says —I had a nice time. Fletcher's not going home on the subway; once Cassandra goes through the turnstile he plans to walk back outside and hail a cab. He will sit in the back and think about her, replaying bits from the date and inspecting them for minor nuances, and when he gets home he will put on an album of ecstatic jazz, probably Ayler, and he will drink a beer and then a second one and he'll keep thinking about her, wondering how she feels about him, wondering how he feels about her, sifting the torrent of his own thoughts for any solid grams of certainty. He will fall asleep with his arms around his pillow, having forgotten to work out the details of his lesson plan, so that tomorrow he'll find himself standing up in front of the chalkboard explaining metonymy in the fuzziest possible way. But now he is standing here, while she delves into her purse for her farecard, and he is wanting very badly to kiss her, and wondering if he should try to, even though that would mean leaping through the forcefield of all the reasons why he shouldn't.
She looks down into her purse and he watches her thick black curls. Her hair awakens some craving in him for more sense. During the entire date he kept thinking about plunging his hands into it. Later, when he's being debriefed by Freya, he'll say she was more good-looking than I expected; that threw off my whole game. The scene: he's sitting there at the café, sipping ice water, flipping over the menu to read the back for the second time, and she comes in, and she's tall—he couldn't tell that she was tall from the photo she'd sent him—and she's wearing this enormous thick scarf and there's this mass of curls and he's like whoa and she says —You must be Fletcher, and he says —Um, yup, and nods like a moron and then he stands up and shakes her hand, feeling totally awkward, and he has to fight the urge to remark upon his own awkwardness because he's at least smart enough to know that that won't make him seem any less awkward. Dr. Awkward is a palindrome.
Things got better after they started talking. He decided to talk to her about Leander, her son—this was an easy way for him to seem bold, showing that her status as a mother doesn't make him feel apprehensive (although secretly it does, sometimes; before bed he will spend a lot of time trying to puzzle out how exactly he feels about it. The process will work exactly as well as if he were trying to see the inside of something opaque by holding it up to the light and squinting). She talked about Leander for a little bit, showing Fletcher the requisite photograph, which he praised, somewhat automatically, although the kid did look cute, sort of. He asked about a sitter and she shook her head no and explained that she can usually get a friend to watch him. —Most of them are women in their thirties, academics, you know?, who don't have kids of their own; they've got these like reserves of maternal energy that they're actually thrilled to use. The kid is growing up with like five surrogate aunts. And no dad, Fletcher thought, but he kept that to himself.
As soon as she mentioned academics he felt like he was on more stable ground, and he asked her about her work—she talked about the relationships between Zen and modern art, particularly Fluxus; he made a joke about John Cage; she laughed, a beautiful kind of laugh that later he thinks of as coltish. She asked him about his poetry and he gave her a modest sketch of Everything. —I'd like to hear some of it sometime, she said. —Maybe when I know you a little better, he said.
And they finished up and paid (they split the bill) and now she has her farecard out. —Well, she says. —It was nice to finally meet you.
—Yeah, Fletcher says. —Maybe we can get together again sometime.
—I'd like that, she says.
And she gives him a quick hug and they do not kiss. And as he rides home in the cab he thinks about what that means, a date with no kiss, he does not know whether it matters or not, but he stays up too late thinking about it, and not doing his work. Eventually he collapses into bed in the darkness, with an aching body and a mind made mossy by beer. But in the morning, his alarm goes off, and he finds that it is already light outside, for the first time in weeks. The radio says that the day will reach a high of 45 degrees, which is warmer than it's been for a long time. Spring, he will think, is coming.
: : :
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Further Reading:
Recent input in the Narrative Technologies weblog:
:: Gangs of New York, World-Building by Dan Hill
[fresh as of 1/21/03]
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