Longing

IT was 6:40 (mdt) in Denver, September 18, and Tim Jackson was sitting on his girlfriend’s porch swing with a glass of Cabernet—half-full, half-empty, his second glass—and a novel half-read. Gwen wasn’t back yet from work. The corporate fraud case she’d been assigned had been scheduled for trial, finally, after four years, and her work load had been ramped up. Tim had known this two weeks before coming in from Wisconsin, but his vacation days had already been set aside. He was a water systems manager in Madison, and he’d let his employees have the summer days they wanted, leaving him with a delayed vacation. It was still warm in Denver, though, even in the evenings. Seventy, maybe. This was his fourth day.

He was comfortable with the ordinary meanderings on Cook Street—the neighborhood kids playing two houses down to the right, the couples who walked their dogs, the white woman who, with her Siamese cat on a leash, sauntered past right at 6:15. He’d met the gay guys next door who had matching Priuses, the woman one over from them, who drove a Dodge Ram diesel, and the Lithuanian couple on the other side with two-year-old fraternal twins. He knew the way the late sun pierced the high maple behind the house directly across, the flocks of pigeons and starlings that cruised the neighborhood, the way the gay guys’ Russian olive scratched on Gwen’s roof. He knew which people—not by name—grew what flowers. Flowers were big in Denver, and in Madison too. People felt empowered growing something pretty—roses, hydrangeas, sunflowers, geraniums in window boxes, dusty miller and lobelia in hanging baskets lined with sphagnum moss.

Tim sipped his wine and opened his novel, The Street Without Numbers by Tara Jibouti, about Desai, a street thief in Khartoum, Sudan, who insinuated herself into crowds of locals and tourists in order to calculate the perfect moment when she might, by stealth and charm, make someone a victim. Gwen had recommended the book, and the story was good, but Tim objected to the author’s use of “would” to characterize actions in the past, and the author had no idea how irritating it was to a serious reader to encounter the words “just” and “that” when they weren’t needed. “When harried, Desai would go to the market and just lose herself. …” Or, “If she saw that the stalls were closed, but she would just search out Rajib. …” Tim closed the book, pushed the swing back and forth with his foot, and picked up his wine glass.

He knew he was unusually critical, but criticism, he figured, was the highest form of caring, while others like his ex-wife saw it as evidence of trying to make up for his own deficiencies. But why shouldn’t he want people to improve themselves, to be better water engineers or writers or lawyers? Not that Gwen wasn’t good. He knew some people attributed his penchant for criticism to his being black, but what did that have to do with anything? Of course being black wasn’t easy no matter how you looked at it. At every meeting he was on trial, and he had to oppose or deal with other people’s prejudices and fears, and, in so doing, lost something of himself—spontaneity, maybe, or the vulnerability he might have felt but could not allow himself to show.

Gwen was a case in point. She’d been a dabbler on eHarmony, and he was separated from his wife but not ready to go public. He’d responded to her profile because he liked her looks and her bio—a lawyer, dark hair, average body, good teeth. As a preference for race, she’d put down “any,” by which he understood to mean she was curious about how she’d react to an Asian, a Latino, or an African American.

For a couple of months they’d chatted back and forth—he’d explained about his impending divorce, his work, his paddling trips to the Boundary Waters...