You’d spooned me until 5 am, both of us dozing off until you woke up with a start and said “Shit, I gotta get my mom’s car back.”
The sun was rising and I didn’t want to let you go. You grabbed your jacket and hugged me goodbye, said: “What are you doing later? I’ll call you!”
If falling for someone is a journey, this is the part where I’m barreling down a mountain highway at midnight, blizzard be damned. Wild and reckless, engine at full tilt, headlights forming a hypnotic tunnel of snowflakes twisting in the light. And all I want to do is plow into that sparkling diamond dust. Everything peripheral becomes unimportant, blackened out.
From your mom’s landline to my dad’s landline, we reconnect around 4 pm:
You: “Hey”
Me: “Hey”
You: Wanna hang out?
Me: Yes, sure. Where do you want to meet?
You: I dunno. Probably in the burbs because I’m going to have to borrow my mom’s car again and she doesn’t like me driving very far.
Me: How ‘bout Casa Orinda?
You: Where’s that - in Orinda I’m guessing?
Me: You got it. It’s across from the theater. Parking lot is between it and that gas station on the side of the 24 on-ramp.
You: Oh, I think I know where you mean. Alright. Sounds good. What time?
Me: 6?
You: Cool. See you there.
I wondered why you didn’t offer me a ride, but would later get used to your straightforward ways. If the most logical and efficient route is each of us making a beeline to the restaurant that lies between our homes, then why would you drive past the bar and all the way to my house in a pointless circle just to be chivalrous? I’d personally drive in illogical spirals all the way to the moon in the name of romance, so we’ll be tugging at odd ends of this rope for years to come.
Orinda is a single-exit off Hwy 24 just after it runs through the Oakland mountains via the Caldecott Tunnel. It’s a woodsy rural suburbia with hardly a downtown. On one side of the highway there’s a section with a library, a park, and a strip mall with a post office, bagel shop, and a Chinese restaurant. On the other side of the highway - the side I live on, there was a vintage Art Deco movie theater whose neon marquee stood tall on the side of the thoroughfare, the most visible marker of the city’s existence. In high school, I worked at the Theatre concession stand for a year, vending bags of buttered popcorn and candy and sweeping the aisles. The employee perk was that we were allowed to eat as much popcorn as we wanted - and I did. But I got so used to eating it that one evening while ringing up a customer, my arm went on autopilot and grabbed a fistful from their bag and shoved it in my mouth. I then became the infamous kid who got fired for eating a customer’s popcorn.
Orinda is predominantly inhabited by affluent white people who seem to be over the age of 50, and besides a smattering of a liberal hippie element leftover from the 60s, it’s pretty conservative and sleepy. It’s not exactly where a liberal, starving artist 24-year-old typically sets up home base. But here I am, squatting in my dad’s divorcee rental.
Scattered around the epicenter of the theater on one tiny block was a frozen yogurt shop where I’d also once been fired, a bank, a coffee shop where my dad and I picked up coffee on mornings we carpooled, a German buffet-style diner-deli, and one old-school restaurant bar: Casa Orinda.
Always one to choose ambience over all other factors, I’d suggested we meet there.
Casa Orinda was always dark, and felt like entering the belly of a wooden whale, all polished and gleaming. Velvet ropes and brass, dark patterned carpet on the floors.
You enter through a narrow and dimly lit foyer like a cave tunnel ending with a wooden podium and a dish of 1950’s after-dinner mints, the kind that dissolve like chalk in your mouth.
With limited seating, a reservation was almost always needed for a table, and because we didn’t have one, we sit at the bar.
You beat me there, so when I hit the podium, I look left and see you waiting on the center stool. My heart skips a beat.
I look around at the other patrons. There they are, unknowingly participating in something beautiful. They are the backdrop to our love story. The silver haired pair in the stuffed leather armchairs by the fireplace, the suits to either side of us at the bar, the middle aged men, slightly puffed by years of overindulgence.
I think, maybe one day we’d be these patrons, middle aged and stuffed into cashmere. Or maybe we’d become the even older residents, retired and delicate, spindly arms no longer filling out their gingham dress shirts, chests beginning to cave beneath the sweater vests.
I saddle up to the bar, sitting to your right on the leather-top stool. I hang my garish vinyl Paul Madden monkey purse on the copper hook by my right knee, turning my legs towards you like an invitation, my wide-legged Osh Kosh’s brushing against the stiff cotton of your black Dockers.
Here we are, both 24 years old, 30 years younger than the next youngest patron, enjoying the wooden belly of the whale not ironically. It felt aspirational, wise. Like we were sitting at the edge of a ship with a bartender captain.
This place smelled homey and foundational to me. Smelled like love, like whiskey and carpet, like the firewood crackling in the fireplace at the back of the main dining room. Just behind the gleaming lip of the oak bar are prepped garnishes in divided containers: wedges of lemons, limes, pickled onions, green martini olives, and the glowing artificial red maraschino cherries and their waxy stems.
Opened in 1932 at the now long-gone original Orinda Crossroads - a four way intersection surrounded by open prairie, it still feels like a cowboy love letter, a 1930s time capsule.
67 years and hardly a thing had changed. Large oil paintings and black and white photographs hang behind the hand-carved bar commemorating deceased bartenders and regular patrons. An historic collection of guns is mounted behind glass on the walls.
I had the adrenaline rush of someone perched at the top of a roller coaster before it clicks into gear. I was giddy, thrilled to have unearthed you like a gem from the mud of suburban doldrums.
We both order a Manhattan.
Having previously covered the basics (what happened since 7th grade, where you’d disappeared to junior year of high school), we dove into the present tense - aka how you ended squatting at your mom’s house in your childhood bedroom, single and carless.
I am vibrating on my bar stool, drinking in the exquisite profile of your pale moon cheekbone, the black wisps of hair tucked behind your right ear. My eyes are dancing from the corner of your wide mouth and full lips, along your angular jaw bone and down your long silky neck. You were built longer and more delicately than anyone I’d dated. Your skin was soft and supple, young, This was not Frank’s neck, wide and leathery, dry and scaly. This was not American Oscar’s thick jock pitcher neck.
Conversation flowed at full tilt, crashing and roaring with the fury of a Spring melt. Highwater. It had its own unstoppable momentum. And we rode the rapids - stomachs in our throats over every plummeting waterfall of relatable synchronicity.
Your full circle story of returning to your mom sounds depressing but also cathartic. You’d moved out at 17 after giving her a pleading ultimatum to choose you or your abusive drunken stepdad. And now that he’d died unexpectedly of an aneurysm behind the wheel of his car, she’d asked you to please come home.
And because you’d given up your apartment before touring Europe with your girlfriend - with whom you’d just broken up, the timing of the invitation was oddly perfect. You fly in from Sweden via London feeling lost and dejected,and awkwardly couch surf from your sister’s apartment in Concord to a pullout in Sam's mom’s living room, wearing your welcome thin at both locations. And then, seven years after breaking your heart, your lonely, grieving mom summons you. And you knew she was selfishly requesting your company as her own bandage, but you still craved her love and approval enough to say yes.
We hide nothing from each other because there is some undeniable familiarity and alignment. Spilling secrets feels as natural as singing alone in the shower.
We explain our past loves easily and without censorship - as if every move leading us to this moment was nothing but perfectly crafted destiny.
I tell you about how I stalked Frank in the old brass-rimmed elevators of the ancient bank building, and how I signed up for a full 10-part series of expert-level Excel classes just because he taught them. What once felt painful and dramatic now feels like distant comedy. We laugh at me driving the toaster to Santa Cruz. We giggle at the fact that he said he was a sex addict. We laugh at the fact that his Lithium meds made him gassy and how he’d sometimes rip long loud farts in the middle of passionate makeout sessions.
I want to hear everything about your last serious girlfriend. I’m dying to know what kind of woman releases a creature like you back into the wild.
You have nothing but glowing admiration for her and aren’t able to fully articulate why it didn’t work out other than saying, “She was an alien of perfection - too perfect for this planet.” You explain that she was beautiful, lovely, magical, musical and talented, but that you couldn’t get on board. You couldn’t operate in her universe and were dragging her down with your base level needs and constraints.
This makes me even more intrigued - and maybe a little intimidated - to discover your last girlfriend was apparently a magical anomaly - too exquisite and unique for you to hang onto.
You explain how she lives in an otherworldly place called Paradise, an artist compound around a towering multi-story house of redwood and windows built by her architect father, with a flowing creek through its center and a communal organic garden. You say she’s a singer, songwriter, and a classically trained harpist. I hear that she is a bi-lingual Swedish-American, taller than I, with long flowing dark hair. I picture a wood nymph - a fairy - with delicate bone structure and long fingers tenderly stroking the strings of a harp. I’ve never even seen someone play a harp in real life. You say that she plays a rare custom-built Celtic harp and never lets it leave her side. I love the idea of a woman who’s passionate about her instrument and am just eating this all up.
The last thing you did together was travel to Europe. From my time living in Dusseldorf, Germany, I relate to the stories of trains and backpacks, the coffeeshops and cobblestone. I am intrigued by your time in Sweden, still on my bucket list. Intrigued that she has family in Sweden, France, two magical sister siblings with long flowing hair and a younger brother.
You describe a woman untethered by norms or expectations, a Waldorf-educated, independent free-thinker who travels the world, singing along to the tinkling of her harp strings.
After the mysterious disintegration of your lover status that can apparently only be explained by your own ineptitude in getting with the program, you say there are no hard feelings between the two of you. It sounds as though she felt indifferent about the breakup, which is fascinating. How could that be? It’s like I can almost feel the future pain of losing you. Though being impervious to heartache does fit with the notion of her alien perfection. You say we should visit her on the Summer solstice when she hosts her annual gathering in Paradise. I’m so on board.
After releasing your magical harp-playing wood nymph back into her alternate dimension, you immediately go out with two women back to back. The first sounds fierce, powerful, and a little threatening. Tammi. You say she wore the pants in every way and was the one who asked you out. You were ambivalent but saying no seemed like more work than saying yes. After two dates, she was fiery and obsessed with you - possessive, controlling, jealous. I relate to this woman. I feel that hunger, that obsession, that desire to hold onto you. I immediately imagine her pain of watching you slip through her hands within a month. And while you pondered how to end it, you simultaneously went out with Hillary,......feminine, high-drama, needy. I don’t relate to this woman, but feel threatened by the foreignness. I’ve never known how to be one of those women - women with hairspray, hairdryers, perfume and lace bras.
You paint blurry and mysterious images of these last two women. I can’t quite picture them. The abbreviated descriptions create caricatures in my mind. Oh well, I think. They are but skips in the record, ricochets of your ball before you rolled smoothly into my corner pocket.
These stories are a relief. Hearing that you’ve engaged in earthly relations with other humans makes me relieved that you’re flesh and bone and not a figment of my imagination. I finally understand the phrase “head over heels” because I’m upside down. Anyone capable of stepping back objectively might have considered it a red flag that you were at the nadir of your life, or that you seemed to be a serial monogamist who secretly stagger-overlays women like tiles on a roof, never to be without the shelter of their adoration. Too needy, weak and desperate to release the bird in the hand. I might have also wondered if you’d already dared to cut off Hillary before securing me.
By the second Manhattan, I want to know more about the magical wood nymph. The other two don’t seem to matter. But this was a serious long-term love.
“What was her name?” I ask.
“Zara,” you say, looking a little wistful.
We end up discussing how Zara is actually the Swedish equivalent of Sadie, since they both mean ‘princess’. Is that a sign of some kind? I decide it means I’m meant to be your next girlfriend.
Even her name sounds magical. I am suddenly feeling flawed and having a hard time imagining anyone I’d ever dated saying anything remotely similar to “Sadie was simply too perfect to date; I was dragging her down with my base human limitations.” Right. I’m unable to imagine any of them doing anything other than making a face if asked about what happened. I feel myself wishing that any lover of mine might sit at a bar waxing rhapsodic about me to his next fling.
And that makes me sting a little. I’m not threatened by any romance between you - that definitely seems to be dead, but I’m jealous of the way you praise and admire her and wondered if anyone I’d ever loved thought so highly of me.
No, but really, I ask you. If she was so wonderful, why break up? Why not try harder? Did you guys have a fight? Did it happen in Europe? Did you fly back together? Was she upset?
None of your answers are satisfying. I’m calling bullshit but I’m also impressed. You’re sticking to the story so stubbornly.
She’s too perfect, you say, that’s it.
No one’s perfect! I say. That’s bullshit.
She is, you say.
You seem to be getting off on getting under my skin. It’s like an odd flirtation. This button pushing, igniting my frustration like kindling, because that jealousy makes you feel sought after, wanted. You’re grinning a flirty evil grin. I kind of want to punch you and fuck you at the same time.
You can meet her at the Summer solstice and judge for yourself, you say.
Fine. Sounds good, I say, feeling a little hurt, a little sharp and annoyed for a third date. We’re silent on the way out to our cars and I’m glad to have a little space while we drive separately back to my place to make out.