Too Much Luck

Every time I go abroad, I have a missed connection (part 2)

It was my last day in Cologne, and I was at a gallery which my first cousin twice removed, Marcel, had brought me to. I felt like an interloper, everyone was speaking German and looking at me coldly over their glasses of 11am champagne as I looked at the art and assumed the face of gentle concentration that I usually do when looking at art that either doesn’t interest me or that I don’t understand.

I walked around the corner from the main room in hopes of escaping. The piece I stood in front of was a large canvas sprayed with blues and yellows, mottled like the desert floor. The artist had cut holes in the canvas and affixed a large tree branch across the front, which had been painted red. Nailed to the end of the branch was the end of a broom. I didn’t know what to think of the piece and I didn’t want to go and stand with the Germans and smile placidly as if I understood, which they all knew I didn’t; even if I didn’t understand and they knew it, it felt intrusive and I had already spent too many days feeling too intrusive. In my peripheral vision, I could feel that a man was looking at me with the kind of intense and apparent stare that is the German specialty. I stared at the art and felt his stare on me and re-affirmed my commitment to looking interested and thoughtful. There is something about knowing you are being watched that gives a little thrill, and I was too afraid to look at him, it felt presumptive, or accusatory.

Finally, he moved closer, and said something to me in German. I turned to him.

“What?” I said, in my stupid, ineloquent, American way.

He switched to English. “What do you think?” He asked. “Of the art.”

“Oh,” I said. “I like it. It’s really interesting.”

“Yes,” he said. He began to analyze the piece, as I could have probably done when I was younger and closer to school age and still practiced in the art of intellectual thought. I now could only look at this piece literally, as canvas and paint and the incomprehensible tree branch broom fixture, but he wondered whether it signified abandonment, or if the tree branch broom could be the broomstick of a witch who had landed in this landscape and disappeared without explanation. That last idea seemed rather foolish to me, but I didn’t have any better ideas, at least he had something to say, and he had a lively attitude, a clear desire to engage and analyze. I never seem to have many ideas these days, or much capability for analysis.

He asked me what I was doing in Cologne. I’d come to visit family, learn more about the history of my maternal side, I’d spent the week with exclusively older relatives who spoke English to varying degrees of fluency and who took me to cemeteries and museums and dinner and the house where my great grandmother “made suicide.”

It was nice to talk to someone my own age, and I was realizing that he wasn’t at all bad looking. He told me that he was getting his PhD in literature and teaching at a nearby university. He really wasn’t bad looking, and I was acutely aware that it was finally happening, it being that I had just met a possible romantic prospect in person, maybe it is unfortunately true about what they say about it happening when you least expect, although the logistics were quite inconvenient, it being my last day in a country 5,000 miles from home and all.

He asked me about myself, and I told him that I’d studied literature too, but had been more interested in writing.

“Oh,” he said. “So you’re a writer!”

No, I thought.

“I guess,” I said. “Mostly short stories.” I told him about how I had wanted to write for TV but wasn’t sure I was cut out for it. Even now, retelling this story, I am reminded of how terribly I dislike writing plot.

As we talked, he got me properly back to my pretentious college ways, I was going on about literature as a useful lens through which to analyze one’s life, I was using the word synthesis, I was acutely aware of the fact that I was talking about writing but hadn’t written anything since November. I was thinking that I should quit my job and move abroad and maybe my brain would become alive and useful once again.

He looked at me piercingly as he shook my hand goodbye. His face had dropped when I told him that this was my last day in the city. Before he left, he rifled in his wallet and gave me his card. “It’s very ugly, and in very small font. But it has my personal number. You’ll have to send me your writing sometime.”

Fuck, I thought. Now I have to write something.

On the walk back from the gallery, Marcel said, “That man had a crush on you.”

“Maybe,” I said.

“Yes,” he affirmed. “He wanted to marry and have babies with you.”

I was not sure that that was true of anyone I’ve ever dated, much less this man.

Later that afternoon, I was two beers deep with a friend and I had his card in my pocket and I wanted to ask him to take the train back into the city and get a drink.

“What do I say to him?” I asked.

Our initial draft said, It’s my last night in the city and I’d like nothing more than to spend it with you.

Too desperate, we (I) decided.

Hey, I typed breezily. It was so nice meeting you today. It’s my last night, if you’re free, we should grab a beer.

I shoved my phone into my pocket and feared his response. I walked through the park and stared at the ducks and feared his response. I looked at the river, looked at all of the people quietly making their way home, and feared his response. We found a bar with a patio on the water and I ordered another drink and I feared his response. An hour later, it came.

Yes, he said.

A little thrill shot through me. I began to revel in the beauty of my life. It was dusk and quite cold and the patio of the bar was empty but for one other table. But the sun was setting over the Rhine, and the blue and red tour boat was looking so handsome as it sailed under the bridge, and there was a man who wanted to go out with me. A man who read literature and went to galleries by himself on Sundays just for the pure joy of it. I rushed home and ate a hurried dinner and got ready to see him. I texted all of my friends about it.

I got off the train a stop early and walked over the bridge back toward the city center. The streetlights lit everything up so that it glowed orange, and the water was black and sparkling. The fence running along the bridge had thousands of locks on it, so many that new ones could no longer be affixed to the bridge, only to pre-existing locks, and the lock-chains sprawled out in tendrils. I took my time walking, he’d texted that his train was delayed: Bad luck! It was properly cold now.

I sat on the museum steps and waited. At least it was beautiful; the cathedral loomed above me, it looked brighter than usual, almost white and stark against the dark sky. The chilly breeze blew along the river and I stared at my phone. 30 minutes passed.

We’re still not moving, he messaged.

My first instinct was to say, it’s okay, you can turn around if you don’t want to wait. But I hesitated, I didn’t want to give up that quickly, to call things too early as I always do, for fear of inconveniencing anyone.

Before I could send it, he called me. In the nervous, technical way I’d learned was typical of the Germans, he told me that he was in the middle of a field somewhere between his city and Cologne, that the train hadn’t moved for 45 minutes. I felt as though I could not ask him to fight tooth and nail just to get a beer with me so I told him to do whatever he needed to do. I was walking in circles around the cathedral to stay warm, not ready to go home yet.

“I’ll let you know what happens,” he said. He still wanted to try.

I walked along the river, in this beautiful old city on my last night, acutely aware of how sad it was that I was spending it staring at my phone screen waiting for a man to text me. It felt stupid that this is how I was spending my night and it felt even stupider that this was being derailed by pure, unfortunate logistics. That nothing was going wrong due to a mismatch in interest, or priorities, but by the simple dysfunctionality of the Deutschebahn.

He called me again. They had made it to the next station, and were stopped again; the train would not be continuing. He told me he was walking down a dirt road towards the nearest town. All the cabs nearby were booked up. It was decided.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “It would have been really nice to meet up again, to talk more.”

To talk more. That was that, there was nothing that ever even spilled over into the explicitly romantic, but I would have liked the chance to find out, to see what it would have been like. Even if it had been awful, and if he’d been a creep and a terrible kisser, I wanted more of a story than this.

“Yes,” I said. “It would have been.”

I felt like the unluckiest girl in the world, because who goes to Germany and can’t even manage to have a one night stand?

“It was such luck that we met today at the gallery,” He said. “Maybe meeting a second time would have been too much luck.”

I thought that maybe I deserved too much luck. Just this once.