Dating : The Girl Who Jingled Keys Just Like in Hitch

It is Tuesday and she shows herself to me in yellow light by the window that frames her bedroom like a one-act play. What I think is: things like this don’t happen anymore. I’ve heard about these moments but never experienced them; it was like cigarettes on an airplane or dairy delivered to your doorstep, in glass, antiquitous. There are things like that — things I come from but do not know, like war, or the man by my mother in those copper lit photos, with those bony knees, dressed in wool by her father, who was the only grandparent I never met. I sit across the street on my porch and when she leaves the luminous rectangle and returns with clothes I am reminded: the worst experiences are all the things we never experience.

Before she stood behind the glass like a mannikin, she is with him on the sidewalk, under the dark violet sky god likes to paint above Silicon Valley to remind us, sometimes, that he still has some say around here. I sit on my porch across the street from her apartment and I see them: they are at the end of a date, her triceps against his and she laughs loud at his jokes. As the sides of her mouth stretch, so do his, either at the joy he evokes in her or the clandestine growth of his member incited by the implied approval of her laugh, or both. Probably both. She is prettier than he, and as they stand before the steps to her apartment, their date about to end, or not,

she stands with her back to the door and jingles her keys in both her hands. Her head is angled down but she looks up at him. Ambivalence comes from the black of her eyes, there’s pepper in his chest, she is biting her lip. I don’t know if she is in fact biting her lip, but for the sake of my brother in this delicate moment, who like the rest of us has probably spent many nights under a moth-colored ceiling, alone, draining his desire for the intimacy that’s eluded him again and again and again, and again, by throwing himself into that morbidly convenient, brain-swelling blackness of nightly surrender like a coast guard calling off the search for a warm body. I know that for him, until maybe now, these nights are life as much as holidays or grocery stores or the simmering, suppressed awareness that he’s older than he ever thought he’d be, and that this daily pattern has eclipsed habit and grown into a liturgy so sturdy he can’t help but feel it’s been ordained in his life by god, a god like the sheriff of this entrancing jail where it is always you, only you, the only one to turn off the bedroom light. It’s a kind of dream, this jail, one confined in an encaging web of finitude, malleable but inescapable, lucid and permanent. Only one thing slips through this web: the mystery that births the hope that tomorrow could be different. But it keeps you, for sure it keeps you, and by it he was not caught — rather he wandered into it, passively, allowing himself in its charming and nefarious embrace as we allow ourselves into sleep. It is a consciousness underwater, where, to quote the messiah’s favorite prophet, we live hearing but never understanding, seeing but never perceiving, with calloused hearts cultivated by our plastic and pixelated milieu that are not unable, just unwilling, to turn and be healed. It is this heart, his, that covers its face and turns inward at the sight of another, just as now, on the sidewalk, he stands in front of her with his shoulders at an angle, his torso seemingly postured to deflect her, an intruder and a threat to the cozy web where his only warrant is the white-knuckling extinguishing of want.

I recognize it because,

But now, no. Now, his sight is not that taunting, faceless ceiling, but the inviting gaze of a live and laughing woman, of her glossed lips and pink tongue and clavicles, adorned in suede. He feels fear, but he is more lost than afraid, and he looks at her peripherally, from the tops and bottoms of his eyes, to her but not at her, somehow. As she is human, this woman too almost surely has a past and regret and siblings and her own version of staring up at a ceiling of dark dust, and the sum of these is not the cause, though it is not unrelated, to her now laughing a little louder at his jokes that were probably just OK but still she laughs, it is her way of telling him I like this, even though I don’t know I like you, I like this, and now in the foot of space between their faces is the stuff that spins the rings of Neptune, or whatever, and because of this I hope, so much that I know, she is biting her lip at him, saying from her pores, you can come in if you’d like, there isn’t a law against it, because you see, my door isn’t concrete, it’s just wood, and there’s a knob on it, turns this way to open it, works fine, see, here.

Maybe not,

but I know for sure the key-jingling move has been deployed. I recognize the jingling of keys from Hitch, where Will Smith tells the other guy that if his date jingles her keys when they’re back at her door, it’s because she wants to kiss him. The key jingling is a modest play — it is not like an overhand serve in tennis — it is more like the thumb-and-index-finger toss of a paper plane, aimless but hopeful, because without hope you wouldn’t have made the paper airplane and thrown it, or put on suede and lipstick and arrived at that place at seven, like duh, which is OK, it is OK to hope and profess that you hope, and it’s OK to scream it in your car with the windows up that you actually hope a lot, even more than like a therapist would recommend, and let the sound of your throat rattle around you like —

I grew up with those silly movies, movies like Sleepless in Seattle and 500 Days of Summer that insist on some romance-oriented version of MLK’s promise: that the universe does, in fact, bend towards some sort of romantic justice, one that promises those either optimistic or cow-brained enough to hope that you’ll be alone for only a little bit longer, if you could only wait a little more, and be good. When you’re a kid, you begin to maybe see these stories form in your life, and you see it like you see the dust that floats in the sunlight around the curtain, dust that, like you, is seemingly exempt from gravity.

But of course we are not and those stories lied to make money, whatever, but maybe that’s why I am captivated by the scene across the street. I have the privilege to watch from the couch on my porch — I even have a beer. It’s like sports except it matters. There could be children, grand children, two-carat solitaires on the line. I watch closely and become anxious, thinking for him: in thirty years when your colonoscopy comes back bad, do you want to come home to a human woman who knows everything you’ve done or those fanning pictures of polar bears and frogs on Apple TV and a stack of mailed coupons to Bed Bath and Beyond and that ceiling, still. The choice is his, and it is a choice, and his heart beat is his but only for a little longer, and she is looking at him, on the steps to her door, jingle. If she wanted to end it and go inside she would’ve done it by now. He as well. This is either so much or so much nothing; it is either a meteor or a pebble. Then it happens: in some agoraphobic flinch, I guess, he leans over his toes, raises his right arm over her shoulders, holds a one-armed hug for a second, and leaves.

And like smoking a pack of Marlboro’s, I believe I will die a day sooner for seeing this.