Spindletop
Houston, Texas
From the top, the city in its entirety could be seen, due in no small part to the fact that the restaurant rotated. The lights below, sparkled, adding something special and glittering to the few drinks and small hors d’houvres the two could afford.
“Where do you think we’ll be ten years from now?” she asked.
This surprised him.
“…probably at another ballet performance, but hopefully able to afford formal dinner and a good bottle of wine in a place like this…how do you like your drink?”
She sipped tentatively at the swizzle stick, glancing upward at him through questioning eyes as she did. The formal crepe dress, especially around her neck, shoulders and décolleté, emphasized her best features and set off her waves of auburn hair.
One day he would buy a fine gold chain and have his recently purchased Bolivian rhodochrosite stone mounted: it would add just the right focal point to her ensemble.
“What color is your red dress?”
“I’d call it cranberry, crepe d’chin…and the ballet? It was highly professional, don’t you think?”
“The ballet? You’re the musician. Wish I knew more about wine,” he said evasively looking down the list.
The two just sat back in their chairs, enjoying each other’s company, away from the pressures of the week.
“You like to dance,” he tendered after quietly appraising her posture and elegance.
It had been funny or at least he thought so at the time, that early date to her own amateur dance performance.
Outside work hours, she studied flamenco and performed with an amateur troupe in Houston.
“Remember your performance at Tio Pepe’s?” he asked her.
She looked up in alarm, just short of snorting the cocktail she was nursing.
“How could I forget?”
He grinned: sooner or later, she might come to appreciate his humor.
The troupe she danced with had lined up an engagement at a Houston club that featured Spanish cuisine and live music: the program was flamenco, and she had looked the part.
Afterward, a drunken sailor had tried to pick her up and she had appealed to him to intervene from his seat in the back among the audience.
“Miss, have we met? Don’t think I know you…” was the best he could offer before breaking out in the laugh he was having trouble stifling.
They had had some hilarious hijinks in the brief breaks in their academic schedules.
He thought her the best looking woman in their graduate school class, and likely the brightest. Her brother had parlayed his enlistment after the Viet Nam, into a physician assistant degree, eventually gaining his M.D. degree.
Although she was studying retrovirology, it was clear she might well follow her brother, uncle and father through medical school.
He returned from his weary ponderings while enjoying her company, and glanced at his watch.
“Well, we’d better go: next week will arrive sooner than we think…”
She seemed satisfied and pleased, and the two walked out arm in arm, throwing a backward glance as they reached the elevator.
* * *
In the vastness of the Texas Medical Center, there were rarely parking spaces and so he had pulled to the curb and let the engine idle.
He could see her skipping down the steps from the Tumor Institute as she walked toward his car.
“So?”
“You are really leaving?”
“Yes.”
She was leaning closer and closer to the window and he had to look up at her.
Neither wanted to address the issue, and neither had an idea when they might see each other again.
Later, he would not remember the look in her face, her eyes or their mood. It would just be his waiting there, not quite wanting to leave, and there was something he could not articulate about the moment.
They chatter a little further.
“You know I was born in New Haven?” she casually mentioned.
He wanted to take her but there was something preventing him from saying it.
Perhaps it was the way her velour at his eye level put all other thought out of mind.
“Get in,” he said. “You are going with me…”
* * *