measuring angles

We were going to be late, we were already late, we were going to miss the ferry, but I wasn’t driving and I didn’t care. The traffic was all but stopped and I was staring out the window when I saw him, the white shirt like the ones he used to wear, improbably unwrinkled the way his shirts always were.

My first thought was that, for all these years, I’d been flinching at the wrong kind of car. And, in fact, his car looked new, brand-new, with two empty booster seats in the back. There was no-one with him and I remembered that someone from work had told me that his oldest daughter, the one from his long-ago first marriage, was getting married this weekend in a little town south of the city and next to the sea.

I told myself what I always tell myself: There was absolutely nothing special about him except for the way he made me feel. And I thought about that day, that unseasonably warm day at the very beginning of a unseasonably warm September, when I was standing in someone’s backyard, holding a plastic cup full of soda water and wondering if it was too early for me to leave.

This is Steve, someone said and I said hello. He had one of those receding Scandinavian chins and was much too old to be wearing a baseball cap. He was younger then than I am now.

Nice to meet you, Niobe, he said and, because he always had good manners, he probably looked me straight in the eye when he said it and he probably reached out to shake my hand. I can't remember if I smiled or not, but I’d already lost. I just didn’t know it yet.