Fool at the Embassy

Flashback Fiction

I noticed an uncanny likeness, and imagined she were Susan, about age 25. From each angle, the resemblance began to make me restless. She had her head down so I could not see her face. Later, the way she held her blond hair back with the bows of her glasses: Susan would do that.

I did not get a chance to view her closer as my area of providing the wines being taught was far away, across the hall. Once or twice, I walked closer but averted my glance. The resemblance was uncanny. While pouring wine, all attention was directed to the glass to make absolutely sure one ounce, no more, filled the bottom of the Riedel glass. These Bordeaux were two hundred dollars and more each bottle.

If Symposium participants thanked me, I smiled or murmured, but could not look up except rarely.

I never got close enough to look…

I was standing in the back of the room, and my heart stopped a moment as she left her chair, turned toward me and walked past. Her face was more narrow but very pretty. I hoped my posture was relaxed enough not to give myself away. I awaited her return from the part of the Embassy where restrooms were found, and studied her gait carefully as she ambled up to row three from the back, next to the center aisle.

Later, I was standing on the side of the room listening to Andrew Jeffords, the speaker that day. I noted the way she leaned into the conference table, the way her hands against the table seemed to disappear into an ample bust line pressing the edge of the table. I tried to contain my breath.

Her shoulders. She held her elbows up and flicked her hair back, head swaying side to side. I had seen Susan do the same just after college…right handed. Her hair was parted on the right side. I wrote this down. I didn’t know why, but it made my mouth water.

She turned her head to the right while I was surreptitiously watching from the back of the auditorium. I caught a glimpse of high cheekbones, the upturned nose, just the briefest moment.

It melted something very young in my soul all over again, but years too late…

There were a hundred twenty heads I could view from the back of the Symposium Hall at the French Embassy but only one captured my complete focus, my interest, my time.

She leaned over as she wrote, the way she held her left shoulder, the way her head dipped, was pure Susan…

2:27PM

I looked across the crowd and there seemed to be a special light by which this lady’s honey blond hair shone. Perhaps it is the way it curled ever so slightly at the ends, or its highlights or the way it had been carefully combed but not excessively…the ends were artfully but not perfectly aligned…

I carefully noted the ends of her hair reached down to her shoulder blades. She was wearing a beige sweater: her bra reached around her torso leaving a slight indentation as it curved around. All that weight unseen up front, you see…

I didn’t stare but every fiber of my being was watching with my consciousness and memory. I realized fully the extent of all this, and had no need to apologize: I would never see her again, nor would we speak…

I wondered if she noticed my attention but had been careful not to make her uncomfortable. As it was, there were eighteen or twenty volunteers like me helping set the tables, get glasses, pour the correct wines and so milling about was in no way unusual.

***

That evening at the French Ambassador’s residence on Kalorama Road, I took my turn standing next to Ray O’Marra, a florid and tough little Irishman from whom I have taken a few courses on wine in Chevy Chase. He was stone-cold, a streetwise punk by the look of him, and had a hell of a chip on his shoulder in this crowd. His condescension slowly evaporated with each glass of wine, and I stood next to him pouring, for good reason.

Everyone knows Ray from Hong Kong to Bordeaux. They all hugged him. I guess I would be what they called collateral damage, but I thrived on the fallout of good will this tough punk Irishman from Boston attracted from all sides.

He was hilarious and blunt. He loved to take pokes at pretensions to wine and knew his shit cold, well enough to teach it professionally. People loved his candor and took him at face value. A good man to know, and learn from. This was, after all, the French Ambassador’s Residence, we were slugging down the best Bordeaux had to offer between pours, he was the expert and I was a beer-guzzling Loudoun farmer.

He called me “Doc”.

I loved the guy for his attitude, hidden scholarship and his remarkable memory for top-tier, First Growth Bordeaux wines. He could have fooled anyone: for a “fat Irishman” as he called himself, he knew a hell of a lot more about fine wine than the next Grey Poupon eater. He had that tiny Irish nose that just caught his glasses from falling off his Irish face. His lenses were heavy, thick.

He didn’t read or stare at the wine labels the way I did: these had been tools of his trade for years. He could have read them in Braille if need be. I was hoping if people saw Ray and me as buddies, I might escape being exposed for the impostor at wine I was.

I was helping Ray pour the Janssen and reislings next to where the participants were lining up for Chateau Palmer.

She stepped up in front of the table Ray and I had been assigned to pour.

I took a deep breath trying not to stare, and confessed after pouring her a glass of wine. To my delight, she gave me a toothy, Pepsodent grin and I was appalled at her figure.

I swallowed hard, trying to breathe.

“Excuse me” I offered. (I could tell she liked me. Or, maybe she was just drunk on Taittinger’s or The Widow, by now).

“Excuse me, but I don’t mean to stare at you. You look very much like a woman I knew a long time ago…”

“Oh?” and I saw she was warming up to it. No hint of rejection but a warmth that I had not expected.

“Yeah, a woman I almost…”. Stop short, now, a voice within told my subconscious.

She liked where this was going. That smile again. It was friendly and pointed directly at me. There was no one else behind the bar.

“May I ask your name?” I said, knowing I was far more sober than anyone else in the room at the Ambassador’s Residence, but having a terrific time.

She grinned a big grin, lower lip slightly protruding just like Susan, and said it.

“Suzie”, she pronounced her own name.

I almost dropped the bottle I was pouring. That ended the conversation except that she also confessed to having had a crush on one of her cousins who looked like John Denver. And played the guitar.

Christ, that was unscripted, I thought to myself.

OK, so I was now out in the open and no longer could stare at her surreptitiously. No big: only one more day of the meeting and she will grin that same Susan grin and will wrinkle that same short Danish nose each time my gaze meets hers, and be gone forever.

Just like Susan.

Again.

Thing was, with my experience, I would never blush or feel sheepish. Nor would I pursue it any more than giving a handsome lady her due as a fleeting acknowledgement of a past interest.

Later, I went through my pockets for the notes I had jotted down in the margins of a program. There was nothing about wine. It was all short written sketches of why and how this one woman reminded me of Susan. It was about how, years later, there are so many months, each of four weeks of seven days, each day of twenty four hours, and minutes and seconds.

I realize I was looking for that lost Susan still, after all these years. Was I imagining this woman, Suzie, Suzie of the French Ambassador’s reception, looked like Susan?

Absolutely not.

Later I saw her standing under a lovely portrait, maybe Lafayette, talking to a few Symposium participants. My God, she was stacked. The black dress brought it out in a wonderfully subtle way. Leggy, too, in a very Susanly manner.

I remembered another heart-stopping moment years back in Frankfurt International that I found myself watching a passenger from behind, that same figure, the same honey blond hair and how it struck me to the core when she turned and had a different face.

Later I regretted having lost or misplaced my best writing of the day on another program. Not that it mattered as illegible marginalia. I had managed to capture a general realignment of each molecule in my poor, pathetic body, and express something that had been a fundamental part of my physiognomy these years since.

It was on paper, some of it. It was not even about the other Suzi’s over the passing years. That electric tale might be too raw yet. To have this one floor me with a single word at this evening’s reception.

Well, it just seemed as random coincidence about which I might have been stewing recently, and may bear seeds of some as yet unwritten cosmic truth.

Nah.

But, maybe…