Chapter 30 An American In Paris 2

• We sit down at the small wooden table, across from one another She offers me a Eucalyptus cigarette, she seems calm, she leans over to light the small, tightly rolled cigarette for me. She sits very straight, she holds her arm close to her chest, hand raised, holding the cigarette to her lips, head tipped to the side, slightly. “It is three and a half years,” I say. “I hardly recognize you,” she answers, “you have become a different person.” Whatever this is, the conversation building itself from the first moment between us, creating this series of tunnels leading to new vistas, from which we tum back into the chambers and rooms of our shared preoccupations, always in step, reaching out to take one another by the hand or arm at exactly the right moment—it is already a way of being lovers.
• We have stood up from the table and gone into the little kitchen to make dinner. I wash the lettuce once only, she doesn’t approve. “Just be glad I don't send you back to wash it three times,’ she says. We are eating rice-and-ginger soup, she dresses the salad. We are telling each other about our sisters who have died. Both of us are crying. We do not ask how we have come to be so intimate.
• My hands have stopped shaking. | have my elbows on the table, leaning toward her. We have spoken about her writing and mine, women we have loved, a psychic who told her she had lived many lives before and always as a man, we tell each other about our favorite books, her childhood in Germany, mine in the Bronx. By the time she has driven me back to my hotel we have a history together, the kiss on one cheek, the lettuce I washed once only, the way she showed me to tie a scarf when I asked her: patiently, very precisely. In bed with my eyes open I see her growing out over the earlier memories and I ask myself, Will it be only friendship? She has a lover who lives in Germany. What do I bring that could make her want me?