Oh, dear.
Angela
The Witherspoon Grill faced onto the Albert E. Hinds Plaza, a small square with the library on one side and some retail spots on the other. A few people, bundled up in sweaters and scarves and jackets, sat at the scattered metal tables and chairs, drinking coffee and eating their lunches. The weather had been rainy, icy and cold that winter, and people were starving for any bit of sunshine.
Angela had parked behind the library. She’d arrived a few minutes early but sat in the car reading Facebook posts about cats and loudmouth politicians until twelve thirty-five. She checked her face in the rear-view mirror. Hair softly gamine, with the short curls in the right place along her cheekbones. Red on lips and not on teeth. Liner accentuating almond-shaped brown eyes. As planned, she wore a black turtleneck, leather jacket just battered enough to be chic without trying too hard; jeans with the small, precisely placed and delicately shredded hole just above the knee; boots with just-high-enough heels. A silver heart on a long chain rested on her breasts. Her nails were shiny, painted a burgundy shade called Embarca Dare Ya! She’d dabbed a little Coco behind her ears, on her wrists, and throat.
A young woman smiled at her from behind the reception podium. She wore a black-and-white gingham blouse, had long, dark hair, blood-red lips, and an alarming number of teeth. “Table for one?” she asked.
“I’m meeting someone. He’s probably already here.” Angela scanned the room but didn’t see Carsten. A tall, upholstered divider separated the bar from the restaurant proper. It was possible he was sitting on the other side, where she couldn’t see him, or perhaps in one of the booths. She glanced at her watch. Twelve-forty.
“Do you have a reservation?”
“I don’t know. Maybe. Under Pilgaard?”
A cold draft behind her. “Oh, so sorry. There was car accident and I was stuck behind. You have not been waiting long, I hope.”
Blue cashmere scarf around his neck, knotted in that European way that looked as though he wasn’t trying at all. It made his eyes look like glacier water. He, too, wore a leather jacket, although Angela suspected the distress showing on his was authentic wear and tear. He had a roll of paper tucked under his arm.
“No, it’s fine. I was a bit late myself.”
“So, you have a nice booth for us?” he asked over her head to the hostess. “I need a little space to show off my drawings, okay?”
He smiled at the woman and Angela noted its effect. If the hostess had to move people around to make a place for him, she was likely to do so.
They followed her to a booth at the end of the row, nearest the window. Angela felt Carsten’s hand gently on her elbow.
“Is this all right?” the hostess asked him.
“Thank you very much.”
She placed menus before them as they settled. She walked off and Carsten picked up a small card in a silver holder on which the oyster menu was written. “I very much like oysters. It is much of why I come here. Do you like oysters?”
“What’s not to like?”
Angela remembered Carol, one of the popular girls in her high school, holding court in the bathroom while sneaking a cigarette. Curvy and full-lipped, Carol was an expert on sex, or so everyone believed. She told her acolytes that a man who likes oysters also likes women, since there were certain similarities in taste and texture. She had wiggled her eyebrows and Angela hadn’t understood, for a moment, what she meant … and then she did and was mortified by the flaming red that flashed on her cheeks and caused everyone to point and laugh.
Carsten put the menu card down. “But perhaps oysters are inappropriate for a business lunch, do you think?”
“Inappropriate?”
“I knew a woman once who would not order spaghetti for a first meal with someone. She said it was very difficult to eat pasta and one might make the wrong impression.” He looked terribly serious. “How does one eat oysters without the occasional slurp? Is this, we must ask ourselves, professional?”
“I see your point. Also, a little indulgent, I would think, especially juxtaposed against the cause we’re here to discuss.”
“So, you see the dilemma.” He folded his arms and leaned forward, looking from side to side as though they were spies.
“Of course.” She mirrored his posture. “And yet, oysters are brain food …”
“And we are going to be thinking hard.”
“Exactly.”
“Well then,” Carsten leaned back and spread his arms wide, “we should treat ourselves and have them, yes?”
“Why not?”
“And perhaps a bottle of something crisp and white to celebrate this new and wonderful endeavour?”
“At lunch? How naughty.”
“Only in America, you will forgive me for saying. In Denmark you cannot have oysters without wine, or akvavit, but you don’t get that here.” He waved to the waiter.
“You’re Danish?”
“Oh, yes, from Skagen, way at the top of Denmark. The place of the meeting of the seas. Very beautiful. I still have a small cottage there. I go back when I can.”
“How long have you been here?
“Eleven years. I like it. America is a very alive place.”
The waiter came and they ordered. Oysters and salad. He insisted on a dozen each. They are just mouthfuls, he said. And wine. While they waited for the food, she learned Carsten came to America after he married a woman named Nancy from Hoboken. They met while she was vacationing in Skagen. She was a cyclist, he said, and had thighs like polished wood. He laughed when he said that, a big round sound that made a woman at a table behind him turn around and smile.
“Do you have children?” Angela asked.
“Ah, no.”
His “no” was a long, nasal word, as though he were mimicking an animal noise. Angela found it endearing.
“And you?” He glanced down at the wedding ring on her finger. “You have children?”
“I do. A boy. Connor. He’s off to university in a few months.”
“It is impossible!” He flung his arms up. “You cannot be old enough to have a grown son.”
Neither of them, she noticed, had mentioned the husband that went along with rings and sons. She said, “Do you regret not having children?”
He shrugged. “The marriage did not last. This happens, I think. Someone looks very romantic in a distant country, and many impressions come from books or television.”
Misapprehensions on his part or hers? Angela couldn’t tell.
The waiter arrived with the carafe of Chablis and filled their glasses. The wine smelled richly of minerals. He said that the slight iodine finish would be perfect with the oysters. Angela thought how desire was such a marriage of flesh and imagination.
“I’m sorry it didn’t work out,” she said, referring to his broken marriage.
He puckered his lips and raised his eyebrows. A kind of facial shrug. She noted how animated his face was, the expressions slightly exaggerated, although he didn’t open his mouth as wide as Americans did when speaking. She wondered if all Scandinavians did this, or if it was just a trait of people using a language not their mother tongue, relying on expression in case their words weren’t exact enough.
“One does not see clearly,” Carsten said. “In Denmark, she saw me as something that perhaps I am not, and …” he shrugged again, “… she was a girl from Hoboken. What did I know of Hoboken?”
“What does anyone?”
That laugh again. Angela laughed, too. It felt good to laugh. Oysters arrived in their bed of ice, with lemons, dill, and a raspberry mignonette.
Carsten clapped his hands. “Vindunderlig!”
The oysters, two dozen, lay there, shiny, grey and bluish, slick and fleshy. This was a bad choice, thought Angela. The game had hardly begun and yet she felt as though she had somehow lost control of it. He was grinning, reaching for an oyster, smelling it first, squeezing a little lemon, tipping the wide end of the shell to his lips, letting th
e flesh slide into his mouth, closing his eyes, rolling the oyster on his tongue, and finally swallowing.
Angela chose one, dribbled mignonette on it, and put it to her mouth. It was everything an oyster ought to be, briny, then creamy, with sweetness at the end. The sea on a shell.
“The oyster leads a dreadful but exciting life,” said Carsten.
Angela started. “Did you just quote M.F.K. Fisher?”
He drank, savouring the wine the way he did the oyster, then wagged his head, meaning, she assumed, that it was passable. “You know Fisher? Unfortunate. I thought I could impress you with my originality.” He chuckled.
Angela sipped her wine. A splash of red beyond the window caught her attention. Janet, a woman she knew from PTA meetings, walked past in her signature crimson coat. Angela prayed she wouldn’t come in. Carsten was flirting — she couldn’t deny that’s what it was — and this lunch, and the way she looked, with her red lipstick and perfume; Angela realized that whatever was happening was quickly moving into territory at once exciting and disquieting. She watched Janet walk past the restaurant toward the parking garage and her shoulders returned from where they had hovered around her ears.
She glanced at Carsten, downing another oyster. She considered whether she was reading too much into the shellfish and the twinkle in his eyes. Was she projecting her own yearning on to him? It was just a game, after all, and she was out of practice. He clearly wasn’t. She decided this was merely his way, that he would relish those oysters with the same delight were he sitting at the table with any woman. Okay, maybe not Sister Eileen, but …
“I’m still impressed,” she said. “I don’t know many men who read Fisher.”
“I am a bit of a gourmand, you see, and I like to read. The nights in a small town on the northernmost tip of Denmark are very long in the winter. We Danes have something we call hygge. It is the comfort of the cold, with coffee and books and thick socks and a roaring fire and good friends. Here, you hide from bad weather. Where I am from, we make an art of it.”
“Do you eat a lot of oysters in Denmark?” Her turn for another. This one required a little nudge with the small silver fork to detach. Her fingertips were gritty from the shell.
“Mostly we eat pork, a lot of liver paste, when we are not eating herring. Oysters we hardly eat, even though oysters from Limfjorden are maybe the best in the world. I know this is ridiculous. We are a ridiculous people, maybe. There is no word for ‘please’ in Danish. We leave babies outside in carriages to get sun and do not think they will be stolen. People say we sound like Germans if Germans held a potato in their mouths, and maybe we do because we eat potato with everything, even sandwich — smørrebrød — and then we forget the top piece of bread. We have picnics in cemeteries — Danes ponder death a good deal, plus, we like to lie on grass. We never walk across the street unless we see the little green light man, even if no one is driving.”
“Well, now I know everything there is to know about Danes, I suppose.”
“Ah, no. We are a complex people. Much lies beneath the surface. Danes are like the dark waters of the North Sea. Very mysterious. Very deep.”
“Very cold, too?”
“One gets used to it. Good for the health. But one must dive in quickly. No daddle-daddling.”
“You mean shilly-shallying? Or dawdling?”
“I mean no messing about. Quick dive.” In went another oyster.
“That sounds like a challenge.”
Carsten smacked his lips and then winked. “What is life without a challenge?”
The image of water, of diving, must have been in Angela’s head, because as she looked across the table at this man she hardly knew, she felt it surge in her chest, in her lungs, in the way the very air entered her, as though she had broken through an icy surface under which she’d been swimming, looking for an escape. Life without challenge? She couldn’t imagine. She couldn’t, in fact, imagine what she’d been doing with her life up until just then. Where had the challenge been for her, Princeton wife and mother, gardening hobbyist? Everything seemed as though it had been preparation for something, for the next thing, the next big thing.
And after that initial gulp of air came the understanding she had broken free of some restraint. Carsten looked different to her, or rather, the way she saw him was different. He was revealed, no longer hiding behind a scrim, a veil. She could see the golden hairs on his forearms and noticed that although his upper lip was considerably thinner than his lower lip, it was curved, well-formed. He tilted his head down and three lines marked his brow. A half-smile made his cheekbones stand out.
Angela knew then what she had known before but hadn’t wanted to admit. Regardless of what would or would not happen between them, she had been arranging her life — all those volunteer opportunities she sucked up like a vacuum cleaner — sorting books for the annual Bryn Mawr sale, putting meals together for the people who lived in the welfare motels on Route 1, sorting donations for the homeless at HomeFront, helping out with the reading series at the library — in the hopes of one day finding herself sitting across the table from an attractive man, just as she was now. She might have told herself she volunteered at the Pantry, at the land trust, as a gardener at the governor’s mansion, because she was giving back to the community … but … but she couldn’t deny any longer that there had always been a part of her hoping to meet someone interesting, someone who would lead her out of the life of fundraising galas, dinner parties with Philip’s business associates, school meetings, grocery shopping, and hair salon appointments.
Angela was attracted to the glimmer at the end of the alley. Adventure, mystery, a little danger. The beige of her life strangled her. Some people were made for the quiet, she thought, meant for a contemplative, civic life. She was not. In that moment, right there, with her mouth full of sea and salt and flesh, she gave herself permission to explore the life she thought was made for her.
“Yes. Yes,” she said.
It was like the feeling she’d had as a girl, waiting for the bus to take her to school. Out in the cold, wet wind for what felt like hours, and sure she’d freeze to death, and then, at last, it came around the corner, and although she wasn’t warm and dry yet, she soon would be, and her body responded in anticipation and all the world was brighter and she thought she might just make it after all. In her imagination, she read the name of the bus … or a streetcar now … of course, of course, a streetcar named …
What relief. Having recognized her destination, it was easy to take control of the game again.
“And our next challenge,” she patted her lips with the napkin, “is a spectacular garden in Trenton.”
Carsten nodded. “I see it as one of many, yes? It cannot be too difficult to get permission to turn more empty lots into gardens. The city does not like empty lots, we do not like empty lots, the neighbourhoods are not good for having them. Too many kids with too little to do. We will build an army of gardeners in the city. I have been talking to someone in Detroit. They have had success. And the Trenton soup kitchen, too, they are also working with urban farming.”
They finished the oysters, the salad, and the bottle of wine. They talked about the principles of urban farming, toxicity remediation, and Carsten’s vision for several urban farms that could be used to train young people, to educate about food, to improve neighbourhoods …
The table cleared of plates, they ordered coffee and Carsten unrolled his plans. Raised boxes of vegetables, an irrigation system, a sitting area with a pretty fountain and a shade tree. He said they must have food not only for the body, but for the soul. Angela suggested they might even have one of those little library booths where people could leave books and take books, sit for a moment under the tree and read. He whacked the table with his hand and the cups shook. He said it was a brilliant idea and what a team they were going to be.
Angela pictured herself with her hair tied up in a scarf, wearing a T-shirt and shorts. Her legs were still good. The shorts
could be quite short. She could wear a tank top with a linen pinafore over it, to give the air of casual chic. A tendril would escape the scarf. It would curl against her sun-kissed cheek. She would need no makeup. She would be laughing, with a sheen of perspiration across her clavicle.
They planned to meet in two days at the site, with Sister Eileen, and Angela would spend the next week rounding up volunteers to clean the ground, begin building the boxes, hauling in earth.
And so they began.
Angela
Angela knew Philip to be the sort of man who believed if he managed every aspect of life in the correct way, nothing bad would happen, or, if the unthinkable did occur, that he would be exempt from the embarrassing pain and consequences. Five years earlier, when his father Douglas died, for example, he thought because he had paid for the best care, had visited the old man’s bedside often enough, and told him he loved him, and had ensured his mother, Evelyn, would be taken care of, that he — Philip — would avoid all the ragged and ambivalent feelings death engenders. At eighty-three, Douglas, who had retired with Evelyn to Florida, was diagnosed with colon cancer and had undergone surgery in a Tampa hospital. Philip had been by his side. His sister, Lesley, who had moved to Florida when her marriage ended ten years earlier, had held their father’s hands, while Evelyn caressed his brow, and the three reassured Douglas of their respect and affection. Philp then left the hospital, confident his father would recover to enjoy a few more good years — after all, Philip had paid for the best doctors — but even if his father passed, there was nothing to be more than moderately sad about. Angela was the one Lesley called when Douglas died two days later. A complication of the surgery. Quick. He wasn’t in pain. Angela called Philip at his office in the city, told him the bad news, and suggested he come home.
“Ah. Well. Not unexpected,” he mumbled. “I have some things to finish up. I’ll be home.” And then he gave instructions for lawyers and funeral homes and people who needed to be notified.
“I think Lesley has most of that in hand.”
Even So Page 9
