I met M at a dirty bar decorated with large oil paintings of small breed dogs staring out winsomely from their frames. She was animated with a casual mania, dressed in tight black pants and thrift store boots. I had worked late and rushed to the bar to avoid being too late. We had arranged to meet at 9:30. I showed up at 10, riding on a wave of apologetic texts. M was outside waiting for me. We hugged and walked inside. She looked like a teenage boy in drag, like one of the dimpled teens I imagine might have dawned a wig and played Ophelia in the 17th century.
We settled into a booth pressed against one of the front windows. M spoke in a soft voice. I kept asking her to repeat herself, leaning in to better hear her. She spoke quickly but would slow down at the end of her sentences and punctuate her thoughts with a widening of her eyes. She disoriented me. I felt like I was watching a hummingbird hovering in mid-air, the rapid flapping of its wings almost imperceptible in the surrounding calm.
I mistrusted everything she was saying. I felt like she was trying to hypnotize me with ornamental motion and a kind of mystic explication of David Lynch movies. I noticed she wasn't opening her mouth much as she spoke. I started to catch glimpses of flickering metal in between her lips. "Do you have braces?" I asked.
She immediately pursed her lips and looked away blushing. "Yeah," she said.
I asked her to show me her braces. She didn't want to, but I pressed her. Seeing braces in the mouth of a twenty-eight year-old woman was immediately more exciting to me than hearing more armchair philosophy about independent film. I had braces when I was in my early twenties so I felt a basic kinship with her handi-capable mouth. The more reassuring I tried to be the more she shied away from showing me.
I realized I was being too nice to her. I knew as soon as I saw her that we didn't have a strong connection, and the more we talked the more I realized that we weren't a good match. I'm blunt, deliberate, and invasive. She was effervescent and insinuating, filled with a self-possessed mystery that I could never have taken seriously. But the fact that her teeth were literally strapped into a metal stricture so commonly linked to the torturous embarrassment of puberty was exciting. I had gone through that as an adult too. I wanted to share that with her.
My friend C insists the first time we met I told her to fuck off. We were sitting on a plane from Beijing to Chengdu and I was sulking in my window seat looking at the stepped rice patties cut into the gorges below. She introduced herself and told me about some mix tape her girlfriend had made her, then let me listen to one of the songs from it on her iPod. After three minutes trying to separate Tori Amos from the roar of jet engines I handed her back the earbuds. I asked if she ever had the experience of being unable to say anything in English after having been in a foreign country for a protracted period of time.
She said she hadn’t and quickly moved back to another conversation she had been having across the aisle. I didn't have anything to say about her Tori Amos song, but was feeling honestly overwhelmed with Chinese culture shock. She took it as a personal sleight against her personal confession, and spent the next several days stewing over how I had offended her. She retaliated by embarking on a small crusade to get me to like her.
Watching M squirm, I realized I was being too nice to her. Did she really want some guy to validate her discomfort with metal fixtures in her mouth? Was the sea change in my personality, going from half-hearted engagement in a chat about movies to fixated curiosity about something completely superficial, too much to handle?
We all like having our insecure parts teased. It's a kind of intimacy when someone can look at you, spot your weakest area, and tickle it with some well-placed movement. There's an exhilaration at having been discovered. The subconscious nakedness of it all can help to cement a link between two people sharing a common and personal frame of reference.
Conversely, there's something distancing about someone who seeks to only validate the people around them. Showering someone with attention, insinuated promises of kindness and understanding, is always self-reflexive. It doesn't point to any genuine understanding of the other person, but is a kind of self-aggrandizing act of personal generosity. It's about the other person trying to fit something that is your own into the box of their experiences. It's less sharing and more taking.
When M finally relented and gave me a few seconds of a wide-mouthed smile, showing off her parallel rows of metal, I was only thinking of myself. That's what I must have looked like when I was 22 and eating sushi with R, or asking bartenders to make anything so long as it was blue. I didn't like M enough to tell her to fuck off. Instead, we talked about David Lynch and Miranda July. Then we kissed for a while.
Close to midnight I walked her back to her bike. We said goodbye and I watched her flit away into the night, like some flannel appointed hummingbird. I'm pretty sure I'll never see her again.
*Top Image is "Swans are Evil" by Corey Arnold.
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