He Was Not Exactly Unnoticed

I flew home on Saturday, the nineteenth of December. By the twenty-second, I was in the eye of the storm. Me! The same person who had been so definite about not wanting any sort of romance in her life for a long, long while. I was so sure I was done with dating and guys and all the rest of it. Irritated and frustrated and tired of being distracted. Ready to move on with my education and learn to be a teacher and forget about getting married. Enough already.

But he was waiting for me. He was at church on Sunday. He had called before that. I could almost have wished to be a bit deaf to the human voice - because I couldn't help it. I still can't help it. I hear those tiny little subterranean shifts. I know when a voice is telling me what it cannot say. This time, the "touch of a certain softness in his voice" was like the assault of armies on my fortress. He had begun to overwhelm my walls. And damn it, he knew it, too! I could see it in his eyes. He knew exactly what he was doing. It was as if someone had given him a map of all the passageways that would get him inside the walls. But he didn't need the map. He had the key.

Before he went back home on Sunday night, he stopped by our house. I had already said goodbye to him, but he came back. His large, long hand was holding something. Five somethings. He had brought us five wrapped chocolates. Liquor filled chocolates. For Christmas. They were from France. He just wanted to stop by and give them to us before he left town. We didn't even sit down to talk or anything. He just stood next to the door, and offered them to us. Me and my mom - we were there to speak to him. He was a little embarrassed. A little awkward. He told us he wouldn't "drop by unnoticed" again, and that was the moment that sealed my fate.

I laughed at him. With him. At the situation. I was standing in the front hall of that enormous house, with the 12-foot-tall Christmas tree behind me, nestled into the bend of the wide front stairs, the lights reflecting off the glass at the front door. My mother and I were standing in that hallway, looking up - way up - at the tall curly-haired man holding out his open hand, offering us the wrapped candies he had brought. This intellectual. This educated man who had completed the university certificate in France and learned to love all things French while he was there. This man who was in grad school, studying a multilingual, multi-disciplinary, comparative literature. And he was telling us that he wouldn't drop by unnoticed? It was too delicious!

"Well," I said, "you weren't exactly 'unnoticed.'"

He blushed a little, and searched in his head for the word he'd meant to say. But he looked at me at the same time, and then he couldn't find the word. He gave up and laughed.

"And it's okay if you show up unannounced," I said.

My mother may have been standing there, witness to the situation and slightly aghast at her cheeky daughter, but in that instant, Brainy David and I looked each other in the eye as equals. Peers. Partners. Word Sharks, we. Irony was on our menu then, and it still is. Word play and the glories of the dictionary - the magic of articulated language and the nuance of poetry and the power of perfect prose - ah, yes. In that moment we recognized each other, and it did not matter who else was in the room.

With a man who loved me, I could have been safe. Tenderness, and understanding, and even adoration ... all of these things I wanted. But finding them in other guys was everything from vaguely dissatisfying to impossibly smothering. It wasn't enough. Not for me.

As I said goodnight to the man who had not exactly been "unnoticed," my life was far from safe. It was real.