The Reunion
Chapter 1
Manhattan
I had picked this particular coffee shop because I knew it would be mostly empty at this time of day. Of the dozen tables in the place, only mine was occupied. When you went up to the counter to order you had whistle, or cough or do something to attract the attention of the teen barista who was, by now, completely checked out of her job and deep into her phone.
I didn't know what to expect, and the anonymity of a mostly empty café was appealing. It seemed more intimate, somehow, you know, just me, my friend if that's what she was, and a pimply teenager.
Was she a friend? More? I didn't know, which accounted for my fidgety anxiety. Logically, she was probably no more than a friend, since I hadn't seen her now in more than thirty years. But there was a certain chemistry between Sydney and me that I somehow didn't think would be gone. We had never been lovers, but the spark had been there. Would it be there still?
We had been friends first, all those years ago when we'd gone to community college together. We each had our own girlfriend/boyfriend. But we spent lots of time together and we touched each other far more often than "just friends" could account for. There was this undercurrent, this thing between us. She had joked to me once that someday, when we were old and gray, we'd come back together somehow and spend the rest of our lives together.
I was going gray now. I wondered if she'd remember the joke.
We had toiled together all those years ago publishing a college newspaper. Late nights tracking down sources, getting the story straight, doing the writing, the production, answering the phone and even driving the pasted-up flats to the printer, usually in the wee hours. I was learning my craft, and the lessons I learned there remain with me still. I was the hard news guy, chasing the misdeeds of an administration more interested in building their resumes, it seemed, than providing a good experience for the school's two thousand students. She was the culture reporter -- music, art, theater were her bailiwick, but we often pitched in to help each other out. I remember feeling awe at her encyclopedic knowledge of the arts, how, after just the first couple of bars of any song, she could effortlessly name the band, the lead singer, the album it came from, when it came out.
We were so different, in so many ways. She came upstate from New York City -- the Bronx, specifically - for her first two years of college, to get away from the grime and take in the fresh air. I was a country boy, born and raised. I was at the community college because my father had died and financially this was my only option.
I remember telling her about my dad's death, my grief still fresh in those days, my emotion raw. I looked over at her as I finished relating the story and saw a tear rolling down her cheek, glistening in the dim light of the college's student union, turning her brown skin black. She reached out and took my hand that day, squeezing it and holding it.
Our color was another of those differences between us. I was the palest of white boys, she was the darkest person I had ever really known, yet it never seemed to matter. We were utterly in-tune with each other, finished each other's sentences, laughed at the same jokes, shared outrage over the same injustices. People often mistook us for a couple and when they said as much, it evoked this awkward explanation. "Well, no, we're just friends, sort of ..."
We were so tight, so simpatico, that in our second year when I was editor and she was our number two, I heard mutterings from the other staff, who saw us as an impenetrable pair excluding everyone else. We never meant to exclude people but when we were together we saw only each other.
Our two years together was over too soon. We'd had a painful goodbye, certain that we'd never see each other again. I was heading off to University hundreds of miles away and she was as well, hundreds of miles in the opposite direction. There were no cell phones, no free long distance calling in those days. The reality was that we'd probably lose touch. It was an awful recognition evoking a feeling that was very much like grief.
For our parting we'd met at the newspaper office -- I mean, where else? -- but once there decided it was too crowded. I grabbed her hand and we went to a nearby mostly unused stairwell -- a place we'd gone to dozens of times to have conversations we didn't want overheard. I'd bought her a parting gift -- maybe just a little self-centered --a box of stationery with my new address penned inside the lid of the box. She'd gotten me an expensive silver ball point pen which I had carried in my pocket every day since. We laughed . Together they were a pair, a little like us, an unmatched set. I came determined to finally tell her how I felt. I tried to say as much, but my voice caught a little and I stumbled over the words and as I did, my emotion came pouring out like a flood. She held me, and eventually we'd kissed for the first time, long and slow and sweet, mouths open, the passion and heat denied for two years spilling out.
"Syd, I.. I..." I said, unable to get the words out.
"Shh... Steven, it's okay."
"But... I need to tell you..."
"Silly boy. You think I don't know? I love you too, Steven. Always have. Always will."
I often wonder why we didn't seize the day. Why didn't we scrap our plans and act on our love? But then I remember this was 1986, the idea of me bringing a black woman home to my family was, frankly, unthinkable. It would have meant the end of my relationships with my family. My mother would have forbidden me to bring her home, which would be the same thing as banishing me. My sister had married a Catholic, and that nearly caused a rift. There was always this chilly silence at the Thanksgiving table after the blessing, when he made the sign of the cross. A black girl at that table was unthinkable, if not for me, then certainly for the rest of my family; no matter how much I loved her. I guess I wasn't brave enough to take that step. And for her part, Sydney never suggested we do that either. I could only speculate about the kinds of pressures on her from her family.
Whatever the reasons, after we'd kissed and held each other, we'd somehow pulled ourselves apart. I got to my car in the parking lot and watched my perfect mate walk out of my life forever. Until today.
It's not that we hadn't communicated since. She was good to her word and wrote me semi-regularly over the first couple of years. We even talked on the phone a couple of times. But my career took off and I had little time for a personal life. I was a journalist, starting at a small town daily where I received an enormous break as the town I was covering turned out to be sitting on top of a horrific toxic waste dump. I covered the story relentlessly, earning many insults and a handful of death threats from the legion of employees desperately worried about their jobs. But I'd won a Pulitzer prize for those stories, and it had catapulted me out of the small town and into the life of big city dailies. It was a few years later when I'd been dispatched as the London correspondent for a major daily that we lost touch. When I came home three years later, her phone number had changed and my letters came back to me as "addressee unknown."
But then, twenty-odd years later, I wrote a book. Not my first, but this one was hugely successful -- a bestseller that had uncovered a major scandal that was now rocking the White House. Suddenly, I was the darling of Washington talk shows. My book adorned the shop windows of virtually every bookstore in America. Eventually she'd seen my photo on the back cover and made the connection. To avoid the nutjobs, my publisher had taken pains to keep my address secret. But she was undeterred. Rebuffed by the publisher, she showed up at the offices of my agent in New York City, where she lived, and argued and cajoled and eventually got him to agree to send me her name and address and phone. When I got her info, I'd called her immediately, and we'd talked, but both of us were on the run at that moment, so we agreed to meet when I came to town a week later for a book signing.
I'd spent much of the week going through the monotony of book signings in city after city, every spare moment lost in thought about Sydney. I was doing the same just now, sitting in that empty coffee shop, nominally looking at my phone and wondering how she'd changed, more than just a little nervous at the prospect of meeting her again.
"Steven?"
I snapped out of my reverie to find her there in the flesh, the woman I'd dreamt of so many times.
"Sydney."
I stood and we looked at each other a little awkwardly for a moment, but she grabbed me and hugged me fiercely, finally holding me at arm's length, examining my face closely.
"I told you."
"Told me what?"
"That we'd be together someday when we're old and gray." Then she laughed, a trill so delightfully like her younger self that any awkwardness between us vanished.
Chapter Two
Manhattan
I prodded the teenager behind the counter to make a chai latte for Syd, then rejoined her at the table.
"So, where have you been all my life," she said, turning the tired old line into a joke, with a million watt smile and a short chirp of a laugh.
"I was thinking the same thing," I said. "Why did we ever let so many years go by?"
