29. Cream Filling
Alexander sat down on Porter’s right. “You know what’s so funny, Porter and I keep running into each other on the street,” I giggled theatrically, to shift the topic of conversation.
“I know! It’s so weird!” Porter helped me out.
To Alexander I said, “You were there the first time, in Sol. Then the other night I was walking back from class in Opera.” Switching my gaze to Porter’s lovely face I said, “I wouldn’t have even seen you if you hadn’t said anything.”
“Right, because you were in your element, just la-la-la!”
“Well, I was looking up at the sky, taking in how beautiful everything is. I was in Plaza del Angel, near the Hotel ME, you know the one that’s all lit up in blue.”
Alexander mimicked my gestures, swiveling his wrists in front of his face, fingers spread out, one hand going up and then down again. As he did this he said, “Oh, you mean the one that’s all lit up in blue?” He grinned and stared at me.
It’s a powerful thing, having one’s body movement mirrored back. It’s like penetrating to a person’s soul. Only Alexander does that to me.
Porter kept talking. “Yeah. You would have walked right by me.”
I added, “You were under your umbrella and wearing glasses. I wouldn’t have seen you at all if you had not said, ‘You’ve gotta be freaking kidding me.’”
“Then,” Porter continued, “we walked through Sol and saw the fountains because it’s open now.”
“Sol is open?” Alexander said.
“Mostly,” I answered. “A few of the barriers are still up. But it’s so nice to stroll through the center of the plaza, rather than skirting around it while looking at the big construction pit in the middle.”
When it was time for dessert there weren’t enough clean plates so people shared. Alexander’s colleague Christina, a sweet blonde with a Spanish boyfriend, dished out two squares of her improvised cheese dessert and announced, “This one is for Liz and Alexander.”
I furrowed my brow and glanced at Alexander as if he were my kid brother. Fortunately he had a small empty bowl, and using my fork I pushed the crispy sweet cheese square down into it.
Then I looked at Cesar, sitting on my left. “Oh, Cesar, you didn’t get any yet. And you don’t have a plate.” I asked Christina to serve me another helping and grabbed a clean fork from the table.
Skipping the unnecessary polite protest, Cesar took the fork from me and dug into the square closer to him on my plate. He had paused in his conversation with the South American couple and so in my mind I searched for something to say. I came up empty. He cheerfully ate his square plus the half of mine that I left.
“OK, trivia question,” Jonathan announced.
“Tell us,” said Isabella, Xavier’s lovely bride/ girlfriend (can’t remember which).
“Does a tiger have a striped penis?”
“What kind of tiger?” Ayala stalled.
As discussion ensued, Jonathan delivered his dessert contribution from its bakery box: a multilayered chocolate and cream log.
“Oh Liz,” Porter breathed, “you have to have some of that.” Porter is dairy-sensitive.
“That,” I said flatly, “will kill me.”
She began arguing with me, as most people do, thinking I am afraid to gain weight. Well, I am. The sugar will set me up on an energetic and emotional rollercoaster, from which I will have to wean myself. I didn’t even realize just how inopportune such an inconvenience would have been, on top of illness, fatigue, recent decline in my frequency of running and dancing, mild insomnia, and vulnerable heart, a heart that was filling, a heart that insisted on rebelling and on keeping my mind in the dark.
Worse still, Alexander was at that moment holding a cream-and-crumb-covered finger tip out toward me. In front of my mouth. He waited for me to comply. I finally licked off the cream, like a little animal.
He resumed cutting the cake and I said in a low voice to Porter, “Sometimes I find myself thinking, is my life really happening?”
For the past several weeks, it had been a particular kind of life. Take the previous Friday for example. I’d had a boring date at Artebar, scheduled for 8:30, early in the evening; easy to get away if need be. My preference had been to see Robert but his gf was in town and I didn’t want to bother them.
Had I called or texted Robert he would have gone out of his way to meet me. I hoped instead for word from him but received none, and I had to shake my boring, skinny, nasally-voiced companion in a way preferably less boring than going home. I could have met up with Willow under almost any circumstance except the current one: she was on her way to a date as well. In fact, my soon-to-be-non-date and I ran into her outside the La Latina metro.
I couldn’t think of anyone else I’d both want to hang out with and could reasonably expect to see on short notice. There remained therefore one option.