Page 30

A CHANCE ENCOUNTER , or Lessons I Have Learned

I left plenty of time to get to Touchstone’s play. Too much time. A year and a half in New York, and I still didn’t know when to leave, how to budget enough time for trains and buses and walks. Because I disliked being late, it meant that I frequently arrived to places half an hour early, and on this particular occasion—Touchstone’s fall show—I’d forgotten to bring a book, which meant that after texting Oliver to wish him good luck on his new pilot and then Phoebe, promising that I’d pick up milk on the way home, I was left staring around the theater, half-aimlessly listening to people’s conversations and half stressing out about all the work that I had due in the next week.

While Touchstone and Phoebe had carried on in theater, I was majoring in linguistics. I’d always liked languages—the rules, the peculiarities, the curiosities. I was finally around people who wanted to talk about eggcorns as much as I did, who wanted to chew on technicalities and minutia and talk about the absence of certain letters from the French alphabet. Who loved breaking down words in phonemes. Who thought it was fascinating to learn the origin of the cat’s out of the bag 25 and other idiomatic expressions.

About ten minutes before curtain, two men came in and sat down in front of me, one a handsome Southeast Asian man in a thick wool sweater I immediately wanted to steal, the other a white man in a brightly patterned green shirt. They flipped through their programs excitedly, looked around the theater. The white man had sandy hair and a kind of jumbled, cubist nose that looked like it had been broken many times, and now gave his face character and warmth.

“Are we meeting him after?” said the man with the gorgeous sweater.

“I hope so,” said the other. He spoke with a British accent.

His shirt—which I had taken for an abstract design—was actually frogs, their bodies stretched out end to end.

Before I even knew what I was doing—before I could think it through, and I tried to think things through these days—I’d tapped him on the shoulder. He didn’t seem upset that I’d bothered him; on the contrary, he looked a little amused.

“I’m sorry, but are you Andrew’s uncle?” I said.

“I am ,” he said. He turned to get a better look at me and smiled. His eyes were a sort of piercing green blue of the Lovesick Falls spring, and they gave the whole of him a magical quality, like maybe I was talking to an apparition—a sprite, or a faerie, spelled the British way, like Spenser’s The Faerie Queene , which I’d just had to read. In that way, he reminded me of Ros.

“I’m Celia,” I said. “Gilbert. I um—I stayed in your cabin a couple summers ago. I’m the one—the one who—well. I broke your window. Sir.”

“Oh, Celia , yes!” he said, and turned excitedly to his husband. “Vish—Vish—this is the girl who broke the window at the Playhouse!”

Vish seemed nowhere near as charmed by this revelation as Henry did.

“I’m still so sorry,” I said.

Henry waved a hand at me.

“Please. It’s been grand, actually. It’s a little bigger. Better insulation. A shower that actually works. All sorts of room.”

“I loved it there,” I said. “Even… before.”

“It’s a special place,” Henry said. “You’ll have to come see it.”

“Board up the windows first,” quipped Vish, mostly to Henry. “And hide the plants.”

“I’m so glad you and Andrew have each other in this city. It’s a big place to know no one. There was a third of you, wasn’t there?”

He looked around, as though they might be in the theater. Sometimes I caught myself doing the same thing: searching for them out of the corner of my eye.

“Ros,” I said. “They’re still in Lovesick, actually.”

After we graduated, they’d taken a year off and moved up there, to make things work with Jess Orlando before they went off to college. I’d tried to see them when I was last home for Christmas break, and even though we’d had two weeks, we never could find the time. We were still friends, though Ros was right: It was different than it had been before—not as tight or as grasping as we’d been before going up to Lovesick. I’d even made some new friends senior year, good friends, people who had come out of the woodwork, people from swim team, people who I thought I’d known because I’d played tennis with them in middle school, but of course, I hadn’t known at all. People who felt like my people—who felt like friends—but who didn’t feel like a part of me.

“That place has a way of getting under your skin,” Henry said.

I nodded, feeling suddenly like I wanted Henry to know every detail of what had happened that summer: of us counting the frogs and swimming in the river and rearranging the furniture so we could stare out the window that no longer existed. How that first night we stayed outside long enough that we experienced the onset of night, felt the temperature change on our skin as we lost the sun.

“In some ways—” I said.

The lights dimmed, saving me from myself.

“Talk later,” Henry whispered.

In the darkness, there were sounds—coats being shuffled off, throats being cleared, peppermints being unwrapped. Melodic jingles of phones being powered down. How long had we spent in Lovesick Falls—eleven weeks? Still, what I would have said, if the show hadn’t started, if I’d had the chance to tell everything to Henry, to pour my heart out to this stranger-who-was-not-a-stranger, what I would have said was this: I hadn’t been there long, and there was still so much about my time there, about the world, that I didn’t understand or know, and I didn’t know if I would ever go back, though I hoped I would, one day—when I was older, maybe, under my own steam. I would have told Henry that I grew up there. I would have meant it.

I settled back in my seat. The actors stepped onstage, and the show began.

Footnote

25 I’ll spare you. You can look it up if you’re interested.