Queen Takes A Pot – Chapter 2 – Almost Mine

I met Jamie on a Wednesday.

This is a detail I find faintly amusing  – Wednesday being the least glamorous day of the week, the day with no particular associations, the day that exists purely to be gotten through rather than arrived at. Nothing that matters is supposed to happen on a Wednesday. It is a holding day, a maintenance day, the middle of the week in every sense.

It was a small gathering at a friend’s apartment – Cleo, who had the good apartment and the good wine and the specific talent for filling a room with people who were actually interesting rather than just available. Cleo’s parties, or gatherings, or whatever she called them when she texted at 6pm to say “come over, there’s wine”, had a quality I had come to rely on: the people there were genuinely varied, which meant the conversations were genuinely varied, which meant the evenings were worth having even when nothing in particular happened.

Tasha was not there.

She had other plans. She had texted me earlier that afternoon – “can’t make Cleo’s, save me something interesting” –  and I had replied with a thumbs up and had then, without particularly planning to, allowed myself to feel the specific quality of an evening in which the field was simply mine. Not competitive. Not managed. Just – present, without the accompanying awareness of a social force that redirected everything.

I noticed this feeling and I noticed what it said about the other evenings.

I arrived at seven-thirty. Cleo’s apartment was warm and smelled of something being cooked in the oven that turned out to be cheese bread, which is either an inspired or a desperate party food depending on your perspective and was, that evening, inspired. Eight or nine people in various configurations around the living room, the comfortable noise of multiple conversations.

I got wine. I talked to a woman called Sol who I had met once before and who was funny and direct and spent most of our conversation making pointed observations about the book everyone had apparently been reading that month, which I had not read and which she was making me relieved about.

And then Cleo appeared at my elbow with the specific energy of someone who wants to introduce you to someone and says, “come here, I want you to meet someone” with enough certainty that you go without asking why.

Jamie was standing near the window.

I want to describe this accurately because I have a tendency toward retrospective inflation – the backward application of significance to moments that did not yet contain it – and I do not want to do that here. He was not extraordinary in his appearance. Reasonably tall, the kind of face that is more interesting than conventionally handsome, dark hair that had been cut recently enough to be neat without looking like the neatness was maintained anxiously. He was wearing a plain grey shirt and he was holding a glass of wine and he was in the middle of saying something to the person beside him when Cleo interrupted.

“Jamie, this is Ann. Ann, Jamie.”

“Hi,” I said.

“Hi,” he said. And then –  and this was the first specific thing, the first detail that snagged on something – he turned fully. Not the polite partial-turn of someone being briefly interrupted in another conversation. The full turn, the body following the attention, the universal physical language of someone who has decided that the new thing is the current thing.

“What do you do?” he asked.

I told him. He listened in the way I had learned to distinguish from performed listening – the eyes tracking rather than waiting, the follow-up question coming from the content rather than from a script.

“How did you end up in that?” he said.

Most people asked what I did. Almost no one asked how I had ended up there. The distinction seems small. It is not small. What do you do asks for a fact. How did you end up there asks for a person.

I told him the actual answer, which took slightly longer than the polished professional version and was probably more interesting. He was looking at me while I talked in the way that I had felt from Declan years ago in a birthday party apartment, that specific quality of attention that has a physical weight to it, a presence that you feel against your skin.

“That’s a good story,” he said, when I finished.

“It’s just what happened.”

“Good stories usually are,” he said.

We talked for a long time.

I am going to try to give you the texture of it without reconstructing every exchange, because the texture is the thing rather than the specific content. He was funny in an understated way –  the kind of humor that doesn’t perform itself, that lands quietly rather than demanding a reaction. He was interested in things. Not specifically impressive things, not the curated-interest set of a person building an image, but genuinely and variously interested in the world in a way that produced a conversation that went in directions I had not anticipated.

At one point Cleo came past and said something to both of us and drifted on, and I registered the fact that she had done this – checked in, not interrupted – and registered what it meant, which was that from across the room we looked like two people who were in the middle of something.

“Do you know her well?” Jamie asked, watching Cleo move across the room.

“A few years. She’s one of those people who makes rooms work.”

“She is,” he said. Then: “She was quite deliberate about introducing us.”

“Was she.”

“She gave me specific instructions beforehand.” He said this with the mild amusement of a man reporting a thing without particularly loading it.

“What instructions?”

“She said: there’s someone here you should talk to. Don’t spend the whole evening with the people you already know.”

I looked at him.

“And?”

“And here I am,” he said, simply. “Following instructions.”

I laughed. He smiled. The room continued around us.

Later – this was maybe two hours in, the party having thinned slightly, the late-evening configuration of people who were staying rather than people who had somewhere to be – we ended up on the small balcony with the cold air and the city sound. Not alone, there were two other people at the railing talking to each other, but separately alone in the way you can be in proximity to others when your conversation has its own gravity.

“Can I ask you something?” he said.

“Yes.”

“You’ve been looking at the door.”

I had not realized I was looking at the door. This was the specific, self-revealing humiliation of a person being accurately observed by someone they have just met.

“Have I,” I said.

“Couple of times. Like you’re expecting someone.”

I thought about Tasha, who was not coming. I thought about the texture of evenings when she was there, the slight readjustment of my own behavior that happened automatically, the low-grade management that I ran in the background without acknowledging it as management.

“A friend who isn’t coming,” I said.

He nodded, not pushing.

“Good not-coming or complicated not-coming?”

I looked at him.

“Complicated not-coming,” I said.

“Okay,” he said. And then: “She doesn’t need to be here for this to be good.”

The specificity of she – he had inferred the gender, had read something in how I said it, and had simply moved past it without making it a thing. I looked at the city over the railing and I thought: this one is different.

I did not know what to do with that.

Not yet.

The evening ended with the usual social dispersal – coats retrieved, goodbyes made, Cleo hugging everyone with the warmth of a woman who is genuinely pleased when her evenings work out. Jamie and I walked out together not by design but by the coincidence of leaving at the same time, and on the pavement outside Cleo’s building he stopped and looked at me and said, directly and without performance: “Can I have your number?”

“Yes,” I said.

He put it in his phone. He looked up.

“Good,” he said. “Wednesday was better than I expected.”

He walked one direction. I walked the other.

I got half a block and I did something I do not usually do – I allowed myself, without immediately managing it, to feel the warm, uncomplicated fact of a good evening. Not wondering what it would become. Not assessing the risk. Just – feeling it, briefly, in the cold Wednesday night air.

It felt like something that was mine.

Before anyone else arrived to claim it.