Baltimore
[last edited: 1 November 2007]
Anne has her biscotti on a napkin. I have paper, scissors, and a map of the city. “Where do you want the downtown?”
She responds while checking faces of the people nearby. “Oh, somewhere near water.”
“You always start near water. Don’t you want to start somewhere else?”
“Coffee’s up. I’ll get it.” She steps away while I continue cutting and cutting. The table is round. The sheet of construction paper is rectangular. The tube of glue is a sticky cylinder. The map is now a riot of triangles scattered over everything.
“I brought you some sugar. You take sugar, sugar?”
Anne gives me a sly wink as I gather the sugar packets and tamp them on the table, near a major highway. A stranger looks over from the next table and shakes his head. There’s a short line queued for the register. A Tuesday evening crowd is shaping up.
“I’ve never been to Baltimore. How is it?”
I think it’s tough and too complicated for explanation. I say, “It’s a bit dangerous.”
She gives me long, measured “Oh” and picks up a few of the triangles. “You never talk about Baltimore.” We used to talk forever, in the past, when we both had the time, but she’s right. When we’ve spoken recently, by telephone, I always avoided talking about Baltimore. “So what’s with this geometry. This trigonometry.”
“No. This is archeology, sociology. And there’s nothing ‘with’ it. I just thought it’d be fun. A good way to keep our fingers busy while we catch up a bit.”
She scrutinizes a few of the map triangles between her fingers and flips them to the table upside down. “Why not use some luck?” She starts to flip everything on her side of the table upside down. But there’s another map, a detail map of the same city on the obverse, and the situation is getting complicated. It is clear that this will be a confusion of roads and city blocks.
“I want children and a yard and a play-set out back. Not in the suburbs, but not too urban. Close to shopping and restaurants.” This is her conversation starter.
“Yeah? I don’t want kids.”
“You want to pursue your career. Live in the heart of the city. Buy groceries around the corner on the walk home from work.”
I laugh, acknowledging her play. She knows me better than that. Her joke is a feint for information, a tease to see what I want. What I want to share. She wants to know what happened and why I called her again. “Yeah. You know me so well. I’m only an enigma to myself.”
We stop testing each other for a moment and I look at the map on the table. It’s completely confused. My coffee still steams, but it’s almost cool enough to drink. The scissors lie akimbo on one undeveloped side of the table and there’s a loose aggregate of main roads into the downtown, but little else.
Another customer, a woman, walks near and pauses to investigate, her brushed-steel mug casually held in a palm.
“Hi, mind if I ask what you’re doing?”
We both speak at once. “Building a city.” “Playing memory.”
The woman’s eyes flit from Anne to me, lingering a moment too long before she smiles thinly and walks away.
“You know her, don’t you?”
Of course I know her, a little. “Never seen her before.” I met her one weekend at a play. I had just moved back and she was sitting between her mother and me. She wore no wedding band, and we exchanged phone numbers. Her name is Beth and she lives only about three blocks from the house I grew up in. We planned to have dinner one night, but I cancelled.
“So what’s her name”
“Heather.” It’s no use explaining some things. Anne knows I go for the librarian type and Beth’s hair is pulled into a pile, held in place by chopsticks. Brown plastic oval glasses over green eyes and high cheekbones.
Anne turns away from me and says “Heather? Can I ask you something?” Beth keeps walking toward the exit. Anne looks at me before lowering her eyes and her voice, “You’re such a cop sometimes.”
“Protecting sources? Okay, Detective, you got me. I’m crooked. She goes by Liz.”
Anne’s sleeve knocks a few small triangles to the floor as she reaches for her mug. I think she’s buying time, preparing a big question.
“Can I ask you something?”
I thought so. “It’s a free country. So it depends.” I never answer personal questions in public, but Anne is always asking them. I think our conversations are better when they aren’t personal. She knows how little I surrender in public. That’s why I invited her here.
“Do you prefer parks or parkways?”
“Coffeehouse. A home with lots of kids running amok.”
Her laugh disarms me a bit. “You’re impossible.”
“Improbable. But I’m here nonetheless.” I arch one eyebrow. “Ask me something else, ask me my age. My biggest wish.”
We now have the outlines of the city. The roads are smaller, there, and they meet at interesting angles, over here. Inventing a map is like a calculus of directions. Always changing. Some roads start nowhere and lead nowhere. Others seem to stretch forever but are splintered by strange joins and sudden diversions. She knows roads, she knows I get lost.
Anne moves a few of the triangles around and makes up a small suburb. “Soccer-Mom Estates. Very clean.” She smiles. I like her smile almost as much as I like the vanilla shampoo she uses. Her hair smelled delicious when we hugged on meeting here this afternoon.
“Nice. So where do we put the artist ghetto and the real-estate speculators.”
She catches a stray hair and tucks it back behind her ear. Her earrings are silver drops, like icicles melting a little at a time. She crosses her legs and I hear the slight sigh of her trousers as her legs settle into place. Long legs. I could walk with her for hours.
“What are you doing later?” She’s bored with our crafts, playing with the scissors. “I don’t know. I need a haircut”
“I’ll do it. I can cut hair.”
“You’ve never cut someone’s hair.”
“I have.” I used to cut my ex-wife’s hair, every so often. Usually the night before she went to the salon. It was practically a ritual for us, even when things were bad. But as long as I’ve known Anne, I’ve never told her this. I’ve never told anyone.
I love the smell of fresh cut hair still slick from shampoo. Thinking of it conjures memories of Baltimore. I forget them.
“Okay, but first, cut some triangles into circles. Let’s see other shapes on this table.”
She’s good at directing situations before they get too intimate, she always has been. I know that now is not the time for it, but I reach into new territory. “You engaged yet?
There must be something in my voice. She picks up the circle and holds it between her fingers for a moment, staring at the smooth edges. Or at her ringless fingers. “I don’t answer personal questions.” She looks back at me and holds my stare. “And why should you care, anyway. You have a whole city left to design here.”
She’s right. The map pieces are coming together pretty slowly. There’s a lot left to put together. Most of the middle part of town.
“I’m doing this map thing like I work jigsaw puzzles. Part of the inside, and the outline. The rest comes after that. Can you be patient?”
“Ha! Patience!” Her laugh is just a breath too loud. “I’ve had enough of patience.” As if in illustration, she takes several bites of her biscotti in a row. Her jaw muscles tense and relax, tense and relax. I finger the shapes around the table as I watch her eat. I keep silent until she wraps half of the biscotti in a napkin and looks up at me. “Baltimore, remember?”
I remember even when I don’t.
“Let’s get out of here. This is ridiculous. Grown-ups playing with maps over coffee.” I don’t think I want to be here anymore.
My face must be comically stoic. She laughs. A sound like bees moving their wings. There’s a slight twist to the skin of her neck and she studies at me from the corners of her eyes. “Yeah, let’s go. I’m ready for a haircut. I don’t have to be anywhere for a few hours. I told my boss that I was taking a long lunch. I didn’t want to rush our coffee date.”
She uncrosses her legs and stands, those long legs. I sweep the pieces of our map into my palm and stand with her. I extend my other hand toward the door, “After you.”
“After me? What then?” She smiles and reaches over to squeeze my shoulder as we walk apace to the exit. “Just don’t leave me like you left your map, okay?”
“I still have it.” For now the corners of the pieces dig at my hands. “Are you sure you want a haircut? From me, I mean.”
“It’s better than putting Baltimore back together all wrong. Better than redoing it completely. And it’s a little bit more real.”
I pitch the map pieces into the wastebasket by the door. They flutter as they fall. A few miss the target, but I like they way they look on the tile floor. I imagine that they are trimmings from Anne’s vanilla hair. “Better than Baltimore?”
“You were making our city all wrong. It’s not like cutting hair, you know. You have to start from the center. It’s not a puzzle, you can’t think of it like that.”
She doesn’t usually talk like this. And she always has somewhere to be. For years now I’ve been watching her leave early from our meetings. “From the center? What center? It was in pieces on the table.”
“From whatever center you come up with. You act like you’ve never done anything like this before. Oh, right.” Her tone is light as she draws out the ‘right’ as though remembering something. But there is a mature liquidity to her walk that I’ve never noticed before. Her arms move a little more relaxed than usual. Her shoulders are back and the sweep of her clavicle catches the shine of the afternoon sun.
“You want to walk?”
I want to walk forever, for right now. “Let’s walk.”