Chapter Fourteen The Storm
Chapter Fourteen
The Storm
My favorite thing about D.C. is that skyscrapers are illegal. Our skyline is low and blocky by order of Congress, thanks to what is known as—and people often do not believe this the first time they hear it—the Height of Buildings Act, the current version of which dates to 1910. Lest you think Congress has perhaps forgotten about the Height of Buildings Act and wouldn’t care anymore, note that in 1973, when the D.C. city government was finally granted some degree of local control, Congress made a special note that while the city council could control some things, there would be no messing with the Height of Buildings Act. A building has been granted an exemption now and then—a hospital, a church, the National Press Club, the Masonic Lodge.
It’s this low skyline that makes D.C. a special place to observe the weather. If you can get up even moderately high, you can watch angry-looking clouds advancing, or grab magazine-quality photos of a devastatingly pretty sunset. A story circulated among my friends that once at the big NPR building on North Capitol, everybody went out on their fourth-floor terrace, watched the sunset, and then applauded. I’d also heard that they announced the presence of rainbows over the PA system. Neither of those stories seemed likely to be true, even there, but they could have been true.
None of this excuses the weather itself, which can be icy and bitter in the winter and is sweltering in the summer, even if the idea that the place was built on a literal swamp is an urban legend—another falsehood that feels like a simple truth. Throughout July and August, the city, trapped in a kind of slo-mo misery, just sweats. It’s as if we’re all sealed inside a junior high locker room together, inhaling one another’s bodily secretions and sponging salt slicks off our skin when we make the mistake of venturing outside long enough to walk more than a block. Thunderstorms and warnings thereof seem to disrupt as many early evenings as not, with Nats games under constant threat and spectacular photos of lightning strikes over that heavily regulated skyline. This does not break until perhaps sometime in September, when things begin to get more humane. And the rest of the year, it pours down rain a little less—usually.
All of this is to explain why, when I took a walk in the middle of the workday two weeks before Christmas, I was not as attentive to the possibility of heavy rain as I might have been at some other time. I just grabbed the Beast and my coat and took off out the front doors. I should have noticed there weren’t a lot of other fools out there strolling around. Apparently, they had checked the weather.
I wasn’t far from the office when I felt the first drop. Because it was only about forty-five degrees and there was a stiff wind, it got very uncomfortable very quickly as it started to rain harder. My first thought was that there was a sandwich place maybe another three blocks down, and if I kept going, I could snag some hot chocolate or some coffee, and at least I’d be warm.
The rain got louder, wetter, started to slap fat drops on my bare head. And then, as if I had accidentally walked under a busted gutter, it started to pour. I was not going to make it to the sandwich place. I was not going to make it to the end of the block. I reached into the Beast and took out a magazine, which I opened and held, tent-style, above my head. But I was saved! Farther down on the block, there was a branch of my bank. Its sign was much more welcoming, and more welcome, than it had been the last time I needed to discuss my account.
This time, there was no need to have anything to do with a person. I just needed to get inside the glass doors, into the little ATM enclosure. Holding the magazine to my forehead with one hand, I pulled the door open with the other and stepped inside. I squeezed a trickle of water out of my hair and swore.
I heard laughing. Of course I did. Then I turned and saw Will. Of course I did.
“Hey there.” He was leaning on the glass wall, eating a salad-plate-sized chocolate chip cookie out of a wax paper bag. He was drier than I was, having dragged himself in here before it got so bad. He wore a black jacket over a gray Henley, and it was unfair in so many ways: I knew I was at my most bedraggled, I could see a wet flop of hair dangling by my eye. Did he have to look damp and appetizing? Did he have to?
“Well, hi,” I said, putting down my bag and digging in it to get out my comb. “I guess this makes sense. Why would I think that if I got stuck in the rain and looked like hell, I wouldn’t run into you?” I dug out the comb and ran it through my hair once, twice, then I dropped it back into the bag. “Hi. Sorry. I’m just soaking wet.”
“You look great. You want a piece of cookie?” He held it out to me, and I reached over and broke off a piece I hoped was small enough to be polite, even though honestly, a piece of cookie was exactly what I wanted. Well, no, an entire cookie was exactly what I wanted, but a piece of cookie was close enough.
“Thank you,” I said. Naturally it was delicious, which I signaled by making an unseemly noise as I chewed it. I should have tried to be dignified, but these were desperate times and unusual circumstances.
“Good, right?” he said. “It’s from Reggie’s.”
“Ah, I’ve never been.”
He pulled out his phone, looked at it, then slid down until he was sitting on the floor. “My weather app says this isn’t letting up for about twenty minutes, so I’m just hanging here.” He swept his arm, indicating the wall perpendicular to his. “You’re welcome to stay.”
I wasn’t sure I could gracefully execute the slide down the wall he had just modeled, so I chose a spot beside him, and I just lowered myself down to the grubby, disgusting floor of the bank, noting for later that I would have to wash these clothes in hot water and perform a cleansing ritual over them.
“It was good to see you at the party,” I finally said.
“That was fun,” he said.
“Was it really?”
He took another bite of his cookie. “I mean, I think everybody there thought I was a freak because I don’t work in radio or the internet, but I liked most of your friends.”
“I felt like Eliza was maybe a little rude to you.”
“Oh, because she kept yelling ‘the waiter’? Whatever. It’s true. How’s it going with her anyway?”
“It’s going well, I think. How’s the picture business?”
“I’m taking headshots of a mid-level bureaucrat tomorrow.”
“I’m sure they’ll be better than any mid-level bureaucrat needs. How’s Buddy?”
“He’s good. We’re working on levels of recall.”
“Like, whether he can remember his past lives?”
He laughed. “No, like whether he can come to me when I say his name.”
“How’s that going?”
“You know, I think his attitude right now is that if he doesn’t have any other plans, he’s fine to do what I say.”
It was so strange having a normal conversation with him while the rain battered the windows and surrounded us with white noise. We sat there for a long time, not saying much. And then I said, “Can you really do backflips?” He looked at me and wrinkled his brow. “When we met. You said that was how you messed up your ankle.”
“Oh. Right. Yes. My mother taught me. The backflips part, not the ankle part.”
“Ah, an acrobat.”
“Well, she was in gymnastics for a long time when she was a kid. So she taught my brother and sister and me some stuff out in the backyard. I think it was a way to get us to burn off all the Doritos we were eating. Wear us out as fast as she could.”
“Can you still do one?”
“I have no idea,” he said. “Probably.”
I looked at him. He didn’t look away. I raised my eyebrow. He raised his in return. And then he stood slowly, heaving himself up noisily with the reluctant groans of a creaky-jointed grandpa. He looked down at me. “Are you sure you want to see this? It might be so impressive you can’t tear yourself away from this bank when the rain stops.”
“I do want to see it. But don’t hurt yourself.”
He made a noisy pfft and frowned at me. “Now I have to do it.” He stood in the middle of the vestibule with his arms dangling at his sides. “Okay,” he said several times in a row. “Count me in.”
“You want 3-2-1 or 1-2-3?”
“3-2-1. Cape Canaveral–style.”
“Three, two, one,” I said.
He bent down with his arms out behind him, then swung them forward. The next thing I saw was the wide arc of his gray Chuck Taylors as they flew over his head. He landed on his feet with a thump with his knees bent, then he popped up like he was on springs. “Aha!” he said. “Still got it.” I applauded, because I couldn’t help it. “I’ll have to tell my mom that happened. She’ll be very proud. She’ll wish I’d been wearing a helmet and pads, and that there were mats on the floor. And that I had a spotter. And a medic. Still proud, though.”
“You know,” I said, “it would have been very awkward if I had stumbled in here and ended up trying to stay dry with a total stranger. I’m lucky it was you.”
“Well, I’m glad it was you,” he said, sliding down to sit next to me, facing the street.
The rain got louder. It poured down the windows in unbroken sheets. I could barely make out the form of a person scuttling along the sidewalk, his coat over his head, speeding up until he bumped into a mailbox. Will and I both made sympathetic little “oof” noises when he did, and then we laughed. I looked over at him in time to see him rubbing his knee, like maybe he regretted that backflip. “Okay,” he said, “tell me your most embarrassing moment ever.”
“Oh, I’m not telling you that,” I said.
“Come on,” he said. “I did a backflip for you. It’s pouring rain, we’re killing time, and I’m all out of cookie. Let’s go, cough it up, most embarrassing moment.”
“Okay,” I said. Arguably, my actual most embarrassing moment was when my boyfriend of several years dumped me while I was making him dinner, but that wasn’t what he meant. “So, my friend Stacy, we worked together at the radio station where I was before this job.”
“This was here?”
“This was in New York. Boyfriend and I worked together there, he got a job down here, we moved, I got hired at Palmetto, he dumped me, he went back to New York to start his company.”
“Ah, I didn’t realize you moved yourself here for somebody else. Or, with somebody else. I did that too.” He didn’t offer to say more. He just waved his hand. “Go ahead.”
“Anyway, maybe two years ago, she got married. And when she had her bridal shower, her sister invited me, but I couldn’t come; I’m sure I had to work. So obviously I wanted to send her a present, and I knew, because we’d worked together, that she was obsessed with this very special, very high-end speaker. She used to say she thought the sexiest thing in the world was listening to music.”
“A thing a radio person would say.”
“It is. Anyway, she was a very good friend, and I knew somebody at the company that made this speaker who let me in on their employee discount. So I bought it for her, and I sent it to her sister, to give it to her at the shower.”
“And the sister stole it.”
“No. So they have the shower, and she calls me, and she says, oh, you know, I just wanted to really thank you for the gift, it’s great. I say, oh, I know you really wanted that, you can hook it up to your Bluetooth, I hope it’s as sexy as you want it to be, whatever. And she seems a little bit subdued about it, and I really thought she was going to like it, so I was bummed out. I thought maybe she thought it was too much. So I asked her. I said, hey, you didn’t think it was too much, right? Because you know I really love you, and I was happy to get it for you. She says, no, no, it was just right, thank you.”
“You got her the six-inch speaker and somebody else got her the thirteen-inch speaker or something.”
“No. I asked her if she thought it was okay with Nathan, the guy she was marrying—was he going to mind her using it? She says no, she says she already told him it was going to help her fall asleep. I’m not somebody who listens to music at night, but I said, sure, whatever, I hoped it was going to be romantic. But something seemed off, so I was trying to figure out what the problem might be.”
“It was a bad speaker after all.”
“Stop and let me tell it,” I said. “Anyway. I kept going through problems, you know, I asked her if she thought it was going to be too loud for Nate. She says, no, it’s not too loud. And somewhere around this point, I start to get just a tiny bit concerned about what’s going on. Like, something is definitely not right. So I said, you know, if you’d rather have something besides an audio gadget, I can do that. Obviously, I don’t want to give you something that makes you think about work.”
“Right, sure.”
“And she says, ‘Why would a vibrator make me think about work?’?”
His mouth fell open. And just then, the doors of the bank opened and a woman came from inside, looked down at us quizzically, opened her umbrella, and disappeared out into the weather. “Oops,” he said. “She probably didn’t hear you.”
“She has an umbrella, she’s fine,” I said. “Anyway, yeah, the sister accidentally switched the card with this thing her cousin gave her that was called the Satisfier or something like that. I read about it later and I found out that people talk about how loud it is, and she thought that’s why I was asking if it was too loud.”
“And that’s why she said it would help her fall asleep.”
“Bingo. Now you go. Most embarrassing moment.”
“Ah, okay. So I’m in college, and I’m living in this off-campus house in this cute neighborhood, and I’m out one night with all my buddies, the guys I would do basically everything with.”
“Let me guess,” I said. “Smitty. Frankie. The Nose.”
“Yes, in college I lived with mob guys from 1955.” He crumpled up the cookie bag and stuffed it into his backpack. “Okay. My friend Doug is a runner—goes out every day in his varsity wrestling shirt from high school and these bright red shorts, and he runs all around the neighborhood. I’d see him run past our house all the time. And we’re hanging out talking, and he says, ‘You know, I hate running over by your place, it’s the worst part of my route.’ I ask him why, and he says, ‘Because of the dog.’ I knew what he meant, because I lived next to this lady who had a German shepherd named Boo-Boo. And he says, ‘Every time I run by your house, that dog comes running out, up the driveway, barking his head off, scares the hell out of me.’ And I say, you know, the dog is harmless, his name’s Boo-Boo, he’s not going to bother you, he’s just saying hello.”
“Sounds right. Justice for Boo-Boo.”
“Right? And a couple of days later, Doug comes running down the street. I can see him from a couple of blocks up, so I have time. And I know that, as it happens, on this particular day, the neighbor has Boo-Boo inside, because I saw her bring him in maybe ten minutes ago. I don’t want Doug to be disappointed, so I run down to the front door, open it up, and I haul ass out to the end of the driveway, and I am barking my ass off. ‘A-WOO-WOO-WOO-WOOF!,’ I’m growling, I’m snarling, ‘WOO-WOO-WOO-WOOF!’?”
This, of course, was when a man opened the doors of the vestibule, put away his umbrella, and went into the bank. He seemed to be trying to ignore us. “This is uncanny,” I said.
“It really is. We’re all alone except for when the person in the story is barking or masturbating.”
“Anyway,” I said, “you barked at Doug. I assume somebody heard you.”
“Yeah, somebody heard me, all right. The guy who was running down the street, who was not actually Doug, but an entirely different guy in a gray shirt and red shorts.”
“No.”
“Yes. Not him.”
“What did you do?”
“Well, the guy sort of looks at me, he slows down. Safe to say he’s surprised. So I look at him and I say, ‘Oh, I’m sorry. I thought you were someone else.’ I’m not sure that helped.”
“Wow.”
“I think you’d have to admit your vibrator has been defeated.”
“Hey, it wasn’t my vibrator.”
“Details.” He smiled, and he looked past me through the glass. “Man, we are sure stuck .”
“Because of the rain,” I said.
He nodded slowly, still looking out at the flat gray day, still with the tiniest, most inscrutable smile. “Sure.”
We sat there for several more minutes until the rain finally got quieter, then even quieter. We kept looking at each other, and it kept feeling more and more like this bank vestibule was the center of the world, the only place where there was any gravity, and I’d be sucked out into space if I opened the door.
But just as I had this thought, Will stood up, and he put his hand on the door. The downpour had slowed to a drizzle. The air outside was frosty and damp, and we stood on the sidewalk for another moment as the rain freckled his shirt. “So I guess I’ll see you…the next time I run into you?” I said.
He thought for a minute. “Actually, can I ask you a favor? I have an engagement shoot scheduled on Sunday afternoon, over near my apartment. I’m a little nervous about leaving Buddy by himself—he chewed on my PS5 controller the other day. You’re one of the only people he knows besides my neighbor, who’s going to be out of town. Would you be interested in dog-sitting? He’ll mostly just sleep. And when I’m done, I’ll buy some food, I’ll bring it home, and we’ll eat. Super casual, I promise.”
“Wow, we’re making a plan?” I said. “I thought I was only allowed to see you at random.”
He nodded slowly. “Well,” he said. “There was the party.”
“Oh, I wasn’t in on the planning. I didn’t know you would be there.”
He stepped close to me. I could still see where the rain had made wet dots on his shirt, sprinkled on his chest where the jacket had been open. He looked down at the sidewalk, and then up at me through his lashes. “I knew you would be there.”
I couldn’t talk. I opened my mouth, but I closed it again. And then, out of the corner of my eye, I spotted a row of three enamel pins near the collar of his jacket that said Hike a Glacier; Las Vegas ; and Half Dome, Yosemite National Park . They might as well have reached out and poked me. He wasn’t from here. He was traveling from wherever to wherever. Get your goddamn bearings, Foster, my brain said to itself. “I can dog-sit,” I said. I wasn’t sure whether this constituted getting my bearings. “I’ll see you then.”