She was my best friend’s ex-girlfriend. They’d been each other’s first, so, while it had been some years (five? six?) since she’d left for college and they’d amicably split, it was still unthinkable. Despite her looking so lovely that night. Despite our being so young and unattached. Despite it being just two of us sipping cocktails at Lava Lounge. And when the swing band started playing, and I stood and said “You wanna dance?”, her eyes widened, as though, having grown so accustomed to whatever it was they’d long seen in me, it had been some time since they’d last really looked. She cocked her head, smiled and offered me her hand, and we took our unexpected moment onto the dance floor where we twirled, my hand on her hip, leaves spun by the same playful breeze. 

I don’t remember how we ended up at Lava Lounge on a Monday night, or why it was just the two of us. As much as we enjoyed each other’s company, dive bars weren’t her thing. And as frequently as we may have hung out alone during my freshman (her sophomore) year in college, when we’d hung out back home in LA, the others had always been around. In college, apart from the hometown crew, it felt like we brought them along with us, like they were just about to arrive or they were in the next room. Those hangs had been echoes of our past, comforting in their continuity. And, in being no different from what had been, there was a complete absence of sexual tension. They’d felt like coffee dates with a super cool, non-judgmental older sister who had her shit together. And by had her shit together, I mean that she seemed to know who she was and who she wanted to be. And she was spending her time in pursuit of being that person—studying, hiking, joining gardening co-ops, going to record stores and buying the new Portishead album as soon as it was released. Meanwhile, I was waking up too late on the weekends to make it to the dining hall in time to catch dinner.   

But that night at Lava Lounge belonged to a new era, one tangibly distant from high school, first loves, and those shadow days that would dissipate in a single smoky exhalation before night fell and the drinking resumed. 

I would have picked her up at her house after having dinner at my folks’. She’d have gotten into the car and hugged me, and that would have been different, and in being different, it might have kicked off an unusual dynamic between us. Because, while I’d been driving since the day I turned 16, and while I often drove my friends all over town, she always drove wherever she was going. Assertive, muscular Jeeps. In high school, it had been an iconic red Cherokee. At some point in college, the Cherokee was replaced by a black, soft-topped Wrangler. They fit her personality to a tee. She knew where she was headed. 

But on this night, I was behind the wheel. And in the passenger seat of my car, she might have seemed smaller. I mean, physically, she’d always been on the small side; I must have been ten or eleven inches taller than her. But her cars, her posture, her voice—a tenor that slipped here and there into baritone—enhanced her stature. 

It would have been at this moment that I suggested a place. “How ‘bout Lava Lounge?” 

To which she would have shrugged and said something like, “Whatever, dude. Lava Lounge it is.”

Perhaps it was the subtle redistribution of power created by being the driver and choosing our destination that, subconsciously or consciously, put it in my head that this was going to be the night that I would show some backbone and make a long-overdue apology.

After a quick trek through the Caheunga pass, we would have arrived at the mostly empty bar and gotten a table. And because the bar would have been mostly empty, I would have told her to relax at the table while I got the drinks. We would have sipped our gin and tonics while the swing band set up. And, the idea of apologizing having moved to the forefront of my mind, she would have almost certainly sensed my suddenly nervous energy. She would have searched my face and posture for clues as to what had changed. (Between a guy and a girl, the source of this kind of nervous energy is usually obvious, but owing to our particular history, it wasn’t.)

“Look at that brass section,” she might have said, nodding toward the band. “This could be good.”

I would have shrugged. “This whole swing renaissance really isn’t my thing, but, yeah. Could be.”

That kind of comment would have effectively shut down the smalltalk, so she would have drawn a valiant breath and said, “What’s up, Zach? You okay?”

At which point, the band would have started. I would have taken a breath of my own and, trying to speak loud enough to be heard, but also being uncomfortable with the need to project, I would have coughed up words like: “Okay…ugh…there’s this thing I just…something I’ve wanted to say for awhile, but…”

At this point, the thing that’s usually obvious between a guy and girl but wasn’t with us, would have seemed more and more likely, and, as her eyebrows climbed her forehead, she would have retreated in her seat and stuck her hands in the pockets of her green hooded sweatshirt. And I would have seen the effect my tongue-tiedness was having on her and quickly blurted out: “I wanted to say that I was sorry for being such a shitty friend when your mom passed away. I wasn’t there for you. And I know that you had other, closer people who were, but I’ve really regretted it ever since…my cowardice.”

A sad, soft smile would have spread across her face. And she would have fiddled with a coaster and collected herself, because it hadn’t been more than a couple of years, and the conversation’s sudden turn to her mom would have triggered big feelings. But she would have taken another breath, and then she would have moved in closer to say, “You got a little quiet. I remember that.”

I would have frowned and hung my head.

And she would have said, “Aw, but that’s okay, Zach,” and squeezed my knee. “I forgive you.”

“I just…maybe because I didn’t know her that well, I felt like I didn’t have a right to say anything, you know? And I worried that saying something would make it seem like I was trying to pretend like I knew her better than I did, and that just would have been insulting.”

She would have laughed. “That’s just stupid.”

And I would have laughed, too, because her remarking on my stupidity would have felt hugely validating. And I would have known that her forgiveness was sincere. “Yes! I’m not very bright!”

“Obviously.”

The chuckles would have taken their time in petering out. We would have gone back to sipping our drinks. And the music would have gotten my toes to tapping. And, in the afterglow of my relief from guilt, I would have grown chattier. I would have shared more freely. I would have asked better questions and listened more intently to her answers. I would have learned more about her mom’s illness and those hard final months, and learned about the tension between her and her dad, about her disapproval of the woman he’d ended up with after her mom passed. I would have learned a little bit about what grief looks like and how we move through it. I had no real experience with grief myself, but I would recognize that listening, more than having experience with a thing, is often the best thing we can offer.

At some point, after a lengthy but not uncomfortable swing-music-filled conversation lull, I would have smiled, stood and offered her my hand. “You wanna dance?”

And then she would’ve given me the look that’s stuck in my mind’s eye all these years. And in that moment, in that look, I would discover a confidence I hadn’t known I’d been so hungry for. 

This narrative trajectory makes sense. It feels natural. But, of course I can’t be certain that this is the way it happened. 

The truth is, I may have had no intention of doing anything other than getting a buzz on that night. And I may have done nothing braver than get a little drunk and flirt with my best friend’s ex. But I know the confession happened, and I know it happened during this era of our lives, and I like the idea that it happened on this particular night, because otherwise, whatever she thought she saw in me—when her eyes went wide and she smiled—would have been fraudulent. If I didn’t confess that night, that would mean that I was still holding onto the guilt, and only the booze would’ve enabled me to push it down deep enough to ask her to dance. And that’s not a story I care to tell, to you or to myself.

So, I’m asserting that it happened the other way. Because, while I may not have been entirely sober, I can tell, from the way my memory folded itself around these few fleeting moments, that I was clear enough to register something significant happening—someone, with whom I’d once been close, seeing something new in me. And today, in this moment, it’s important to me that she be right about what she thought she saw.

She wore that smile for the rest of the evening. I can see it clearly now through the intervening years and the soft red light, through that long brown hair of hers that swept across her face when she danced. 

Out on the mostly empty dance floor, I discovered that my feet could approximate some of the steps I’d learned for dancing with girls at bat-mitzvahs. And the confidence her smile endowed me with allowed me to laugh at my missteps and be unconcerned with what the real swing dancers, who were beginning to rise from their seats, thought about the way and the body in which I moved. 

The bar gradually filled and the swing band cranked up the volume. And we were done drinking, so, we got into my car and took a detour on the way back to our parents’ homes. We climbed Laurel Canyon, headed for Mulholland Drive, and parked at a lookout spot perched above the San Fernando Valley. We got out of the car and sat on a bench. I lit a cigarette. Or maybe I didn’t. Even back in the early aughts, a time before megadroughts and apocalyptic fires, we were conscious enough to refrain from smoking around an abundance of dry brush. So, probably, we just sat on a splintered bench, admiring the twinkling lights and talking about the future, the present, or the past, while my gut tingled. 

Maybe I was afraid that if I tried to kiss her, she’d laugh. Like I said, we’d always had a sibling kind of rapport. In any case, while there’s a part of me that wishes I’d tried, because I want that young guy to be less afraid of embarrassment than he was, there’s another part of me that’s glad he didn’t. From a distance, my memory of the look she gifted me would almost certainly have been submerged beneath a memory of being rejected, or making out, or wherever making out might have led us. Because we weren’t in love. And physical contact of any kind had a way of changing that for me. And, okay, I know we weren’t teenagers anymore, and we were living in an almost-adult world where people have flings and move on, but moving on was never really in my DNA. I had some growing up to do. Words such as “yes” or “no”, however small, may well have been big enough to send me off in a backward direction.

So, we sat there on the splintered bench and continued the conversation that had started in the bar. And we didn’t smoke. And the lights twinkled beneath us and the LA-air kept us warm, allowing us to extend our conversation comfortably, to share an intimate, unworried moment. And all these years later, I can’t say with certainty what exactly I was thinking or what exactly I was feeling, but I can, if I put things in the right order, place that night on a trajectory that brought me a bit closer to forgiving myself for being so maddeningly me, to realizing that being me was nothing that needed forgiving in the first place. 

And the girl. I promise you she won’t remember this. Though she’ll want to, because she’s very kind. Maybe she’ll read it over a couple of times (I certainly would if the roles were reversed) and, by that second read, she’ll think that she does vaguely remember it after all. Maybe she’ll be generous enough to say that she wouldn’t have laughed if I’d put the moves on her. Probably it’ll mean something to her that she figured so prominently in a story that felt important enough to write down…even if I did get some of the details wrong, and she remembers us dancing at Boardners, not Lava Lounge, and it being a Thursday night, not a Monday. Just so long as I wasn’t drunk when we danced. I’m happy to alter any of the other details. But I want the wide eyes. I want the surprised smile. I want the mostly sober dance. Some of these stories of ours are truer than the facts ever could be.

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