danceislove

After off-the-chain Pita Pit, Taj drives us to the beach. We stand on a stretch of boardwalk, watching the sunbathers and the running children on the sand below, the swimmers in the waves. It is extremely humid, and drizzling. We haven’t been to the beach all weekend, but I don’t think either of us regrets this, because it left time for other things.

“Do you see that thing out there?” Taj points. “What is that? Do you see what I’m looking at?”

“Yeah,” I answer enthusiastically, following the direction of his finger out to the horizon, where a huge, crescent shaped boat rocks gently. It has a white tower, with red rods sticking horizontally out of it. The bars along the side of the craft look ragged and craggy, as though supporting clotheslines with someone’s wash hung out and flapping in the wind. Involuntarily I think of immigrants coming by boat to America, or to Israel.

“I’ll bet it has something to do with that,” Taj says, pointing to a rusty pipe, about the same diameter as a wheel on my car, running up out of the waves and extending perpendicularly onto the beach.

“Hmm, yeah,” I say, thinking he must be right because he always is, but I don’t really know what he’s talking about. A weird boat and a huge pipe? Well, they are both strange. My head is foggy. I look farther out to the Atlantic again. “Hey, there’s another one, exactly like it!”

“Another what?”

“Another boat like that. I can see the shadow of it, on the horizon. It has exactly the same shape.”

“Are you looking at what I’m looking at?” Taj asks. He sounds a touch impatient. “That black thing, with the yellow stripe.”

“Oh.” A big cylinder, made perhaps of vinyl, undulates with the waves about a third of the way to the horizon. Now it makes sense. Is someone pumping the ocean? “Oh, I see,” I say dumbly.

This morning, gallantly, Taj called the front desk as I directed him to ask for a late check-out of 1:00. It was granted. So after our shower, he tells me it’s 12:30, meaning we still have time for something before finishing to pack and leaving for the airport.

We are practically to the terminal when I suddenly say, “You’re coming in with me, right?”

“Um, I wasn’t thinking about it. I have to find parking. Oh, there it is.” He drives to the left toward the garage. Nervousness rises in my lungs and throat. I try not to say anything but know I must. He finds a spot and determines the path to the terminal door: over a bridge spanning the drop-off road below.

“Did you not want to come in with me?” I quaver.

“I was ready to drop you off and go,” he says.

“Wow.” The wheels of my mini-suitcase seem to scrape unnaturally loud against the cement of the walkway. I keep my head down.

“Liz. I have a two-hour ride home. And you don’t really have time. When I go to the airport, I get in there and go to my flight and that’s it. Your flight’s at three o’clock.”

“Three thirty-five,” I correct him. “I thought we could have a coffee or something. You know I like you to come in with me. It’s not even two.”

“OK, so I’m coming in with you.” The temperature drops about thirty degrees when we enter the building. We walk past a guy singing “I Believe I Can Fly” with a karaoke machine. He’s wearing a horrible patchwork vest, a black shirt and sunglasses, and he’s singing to three or four people seated in a dark green wooden rocking chairs. The other rockers are empty. “Starbucks?” Taj says.

We sit down with his double espresso and my tea. “I’m so embarrassed now I asked you to come in,” I persist.

“Well, I’m here so don’t dwell on it. I mean, I have a headache and I really want to go home and lie down.”

“I’m sorry, baby. I guess I just see it differently. I always want to spend as much time with you as I can. We have so little time together.” I’m trying hard not to cry. “But I didn’t know you didn’t feel well.”

“It’s OK.” I try to forget it, ask him questions about the wedding he’s supposed to go to next week. Apparently, he’d tried like hell to get his friend to let him bring me as his date, but this request was refused. “I never get to bring a date,” Taj explains. “Not even to my cousin’s wedding. I don’t know why.”

So many things seem to come between us. Yet we’re still together, even though maybe he’s annoyed with me right now, even though maybe I wish he could be a little more sensitive sometimes.

As human beings we come as a package. That’s what people tell me anyway, in particular Willow. If you’re the type of guy who knows how to kill a wild boar when you’re in the woods and hungry, maybe you do have to be specifically asked to come into the airport with your gf. Maybe being in a relationship means honoring all the different parts of someone that make them whole, the ones that are easy for me and the ones that are not. It all comes down to love.

At Starbucks, Taj suggests visiting Willow and her guy in Asheville on Labor Day weekend. This delights me. “She’ll be ecstatic,” I say, drinking the last of my tea. “OK baby, I’ll let you go. Where’s my gate?”

“That way,” he says, pointing; the security line is practically on top of us. Mr. Karaoke is singing “On The Wings of Love” as Taj walks me to it. “I’ll probably be driving through the woods when you get to Charlotte, but call me when you are about to take off from there.”

“OK.”

He hugs me tight, kisses me sweetly. “Bye, baby.”

Last night, the first thing Dale said when he saw me was that his company was transferring him to D.C., September 1^st. I was so happy for him that he’d be with Danielle finally. He gave me a big bear hug outside that Jacksonville Beach bar. I remembered Taj protesting to me, after he’d moved back to Florida, that if he got a job somewhere in that state things would still be better, we’d visit each other more often. “We’ll be like Dale and Danielle,” he’d said, which had lifted my mood considerably. Taj never says how solid he thinks we are, that we’ll be together a long time. He just says things every once in a while that indicate he feels that way. It has been hard to learn it, to know it in my heart, so tenacious has he been in his own personal male quest that excludes me.

His frat brothers: why were they all so tall? Maybe it was just my drunken perception coupled with my choice of shoes. Taj thought I looked good in my ballet flats and a black one-shoulder dress that did not leave much to the imagination. “Anyway, it used to be,” I said, just before we left the hotel room, “one would never wear a short dress with heels. It pretty much meant you were a hooker. These days things are different. I saw these girls on U Street the other night, all in little tight dresses and huge platform heels.”

“How old were they?” Taj asked.

“Oh well, barely of age, I guess. And they were pretty. But they looked so, I don’t know, uninteresting to me. All the same.”

The frat brothers – I don’t remember any of their names, except for Dale – all shook hands with me, and some even hugged me, and screamed over the bar noise at me. “That Taj,” one of them said, “he’s a sexy bitch.”

“I know,” I giggled.

“And he’s hung too. I know these things.”

They asked very specific, very inappropriate questions about what I planned to do with Taj later that night. I confirmed their suspicions. It was exhilarating; I think I took their comments as acceptance of me, as love of Taj. Everybody loves Taj. He is wary, though, of my political leanings when it comes to his friends. He thinks I’m too sensitive and will get hurt. He could be right about this.

Earlier, over a seafood dinner and second drinks (fancy beer for him, Cabarnet for me), I asked him what he thought about the space program ending. He let loose a rant of anti-Obama-ism that I am by now used to hearing from him. I have to tell all of you honestly that I pretty much distrust politicians no matter what their stripe – who doesn’t – but also like many of us, I have a few cherished positions from which no one can dissuade me. The space program is not one of them.

But since we were talking about politics, I ventured that the Republicans would probably have to mount someone with more appeal and savvy than Romney, who at the moment seemed to be the frontrunner, to beat Obama. Taj agreed, and allowed – as he usually does – that Obama is a hell of a speaker.

“When is somebody going to come along,” I lamented, “who is fiscally conservative and socially liberal?”

Taj looked up from a bite of mahi-mahi (it was delectable: perfectly sauteed and tomato-glazed), regarded me with those lovely hazel eyes framed by curly lashes, and dared to raise his hand.

I sat back in my chair. “Darling, I love you. But you are not socially liberal. What do you think about gay marriage?”

Looking back, I might have to amend my stance. He was fine with everything except actually calling it “marriage.” Maybe that still counts as liberal. But my second glass in – and having finished the bottle of Alidis with our afternoon tapas, following Jack and Coke Zero in the hot tub – it didn’t pass my everyone-should-be-able-to-do-whatever-the-fuck-they-want litmus test. Not to mention I am a champion of love.

“Just don’t talk about gay marriage with my frat brothers,” he said equably.

“I definitely won’t. I’m not 23 anymore.”

“I’m glad you’re not 23,” he said, with more than a little force – as if he knew me all those years ago.

“I saw Lady Gaga on TV the other day,” Taj announces. It’s eleven thirty on Sunday morning, and we are having breakfast. “She’s not very attractive.”

“No, she’s not,” I agree.  ”But even though she copied a lot of her stuff from Madonna, some of it is good. This is the best song, that’s playing now.”

On the loudspeakers, piped in, Lady Gaga’s telling us that she’s caught in a bad romance. I reflect momentarily on how ingeniously those two melodies are woven together, I think about how it is she can pull off singing a few words in French, about how I especially like her holler, “I don’t wanna be friends!” On the other hand, that line about someone’s “leather-studded kiss in the sand” just doesn’t work. It’s supposed to mean something but means absolutely nothing.

I continue, “She’s like, ridiculously skinny, right?” I scarf the last bites of my breakfast pita, grilled tomatoes with scrambled eggs and no cheese, extra artichoke hearts and spinach. Need to be careful. Don’t want to get sick, after last night.

“Actually,” Taj says, “I thought she was a little overweight.” He’s already finished his chicken Caesar, with bacon, and my side of hashbrowns.

“Oh. Well, what do I know.” We are both babies when it comes to current pop culture. I’ve heard a few more songs than he has, because I listen to bad radio stations in my little 2000 VW bug back in Virginia. His Jeep Grand Cherokee lacks an antenna, but he’s ripped Brad’s entire music collection onto his iTouch and while he drives me around various Florida towns we always listen to his mix of blues, reggae, techno, and southern rock. “Katie Perry, on the other hand, is horrible,” I continue. “She can’t sing and her songs suck.” I say this despite the fact that I have, on more than one occasion, slid open the sunroof and shouted along, “Baby you’re a firework! Come on let your colors burst!” It’s still a bad song.

I realize Taj hasn’t heard of Katie Perry and does not care about her, cares even less about my explanation that her face is on the cover of half the music and fashion magazines and looks even more airbrushed than recent shots of Diane Sawyer. I stop talking.

We get up from our fast food table, crumpling our waxy pita wrappers and pitching them in the trash next to the soda dispensing machine. The place pretty much looks like a pizza joint, except for the array of pita fixings and sauces behind a glassed-in counter. In that way it’s a little bit like a Subway. A small army of teenagers stands over the hot grill and before the various tubs of veggies and condiments, asking the patrons what they want in their pitas. In front of the register sits a gallon-size plastic jar bearing the homemade label, “What’s PITA backwards?… A TIP.”

Taj and I make our way past the substantial line that has formed, populated with many people in shorts and tanktops revealing all manner of ink. “Did you notice that a lot of people here have tattoos?” he asked earlier, as we were eating.

“I guess so,” I said. “I mean, the places where I used to hang out, in Boston … a lot of people had them. I had a waxer once who was getting a whole landscape done on one arm, with flocks of birds.”

I probably think too much about our differences, where we are from, when we were born. While we were driving along Jacksonville Beach Boulevard, I said, “Hey, there’s the Pita Pit. I hear it’s ‘off the chain.’” He’d said that very thing yesterday, and I was ribbing him. In the next moment I wondered if I sounded like Courteney Cox trying to say “chillax” and “Rihanna,” convincingly. Well, who cares really. And Rihanna is way better than Katie Perry.

Engulfed by the Florida heat again, headed toward his car, I focus on any proprioreceptive messages from my stomach. Are we OK? The answer is a sort of numbness, pretty good on the scale of things.

“You were right, you’re always right,” I said, late that morning in bed. “I did drink way too much. But I had so much fun. I really did.”

“Good, me too,” he said.

“I liked meeting your frat brothers. They were hilarious,” I pictured them at the last bar we were at in Jacksonville Beach. I think it was the last bar. Taj and I walked up to the big glass door, strings of lights, music pounding and girls chattering . His friends were spilling onto the sidewalk, I don’t know how many, their white faces looming over me, like a forest.

“I’m sure they won’t remember you,” Taj says. “They were pretty hammered.”

“I know. Dale was.” About a year and a half ago, Taj’s frat brother Dale was entertaining some of his consulting clients at a horse race near D.C. when he fell in love at first sight with the whipsmart Danielle, leggy blonde Chicago native and D.C. denizen. So when Taj and I were both living in that area he’d sometimes say, “Dale’s in town,” and we’d go over to Danielle’s shared apartment in Dupont Circle, watch football, eat hummus and drink.

September in Düsseldorf is chilly and gray, but determined Germans sit at copious outdoor tables lining this extensive network of cobblestoned pedestrian walkways. Banners above proclaim the city’s quadricentennial.  I’ve seen American-town mimicry of these quaint, carless avenues but to me it always appears as nothing more than plaster landscaping around hum-drum strip malls.  Much better these already old, bricked walks built up with Mango, Skecher, H&M and the like, a Starbucks and its German cousin Woyton on every corner, and seemingly countless more streets specializing in pizza and falafel, or fragrance and leather boots, or deep lounges with dark glass storefronts behind ample patios sporting surprisingly tempting fuzzy shots of a Jack Daniels or Jim Beam label as if under water.

I feel much more comfortable on this side of the Heinrich Heine Allee than on the other, where almost no one walked among the towering gleam of Prada, Gucci, Louis Vuitton, and other spacious stores empty of people.  However, I reasoned, it must be nice when one is rich enough to buy such merchandise: all the staff present in the store would be at one’s service.

I’ve finished my soy cappuccino and light blueberry muffin at one of the many Starbuckses.  Lately I feel as if all coffee does for me is annoyingly increase my heart rate without removing the basic sensation of lethargy.  No matter: I have nothing I must do this afternoon.  Eventually I will find the lindy hop classes held a bit north and east of my current central Düsseldorfian location.  At the classes I will meet up with Olivier and his friend Rick, the latter of whom will be hosting me and Olivier for the night.  In the morning they will begin the 7-hour journey to someplace in Switzerland and on Saturday they will run a race there, an uphill marathon.  As for me, I don’t imagine I’ll sleep much tonight since I want to start for the airport at 4am.  Too bad the boys need to rest up for their marathon because otherwise we could just party and not sleep.  On second thought, as I keep reminding myself, I’m not in Madrid anymore.  The bars here probably close at 2 at the latest.  I saw a bar advertising Karaoke - “20h Till Late.”  It can’t be that late.  20h you are just having your post-work or post-siesta Coca Cola with maybe a little tapa because dinner is still two hours off.  If you live in Madrid, that is.  Which I don’t, anymore.

“The only thing wrong with Europe,” I told Nadine and Olivier this morning, “is that my boyfriend is not here.”  It’s basically true.  How long would Taj and I have stayed together in Madrid had he not had to go back to the States?  A rather moot question, isn’t it?  Our three-month separation has proved both a rigorous test of, and an astonishingly strengthening influence on, our relationship.  Now all that stands between us is a few more hours and the Atlantic Ocean.

Although I have never lived in the Washington, D.C. area before I know that I am coming home.  I’ll be bathed in the familiarities of my home country.  Fast customer service in my native language.  Blueberries.  Slang without having to explain slang or have it explained to me.  Stores open on Sundays.  Even the landscaped stripmalls might not be so bad.  I can still go to Starbucks.  Oh yeah and I can lindy hop, in the land of lindy hop.  Jam Cellar, LaB, Fram.  Maybe even a Blues Cafe once more.

I’m getting a bit ahead of myself though.  First I have to land.  Then Taj and I have some serious catching up to do.  I’m very grateful for Skype but it has major limitations.

In D.C. I plan to look for a job in public relations, advocating for the arts, education, mental health, and/ or the environment since I have experience in all those spheres and I am determined to WRITE for a living.  Actually I’ve already begun applying.  Love the internet.  Of course I am also continuing to apply to literary agents who might be interested in selling Dance Is Love to a publisher.

Either the cappuccino has just started to work or I am getting a natural high thinking about my new life.