#6: Sharon Stone and the flash of opportunity
When I was at university I played a game of squash with a friend. Neither of us knew the rules and she was a terrible squash player. It was an absurd thing for us to be doing and I have no idea how we ended up in that situation in the first place, but I do remember the moment she paused the game to show me that she could do the splits up the wall.
There it is. A flash of... no, it’s gone.
She was a dancer. We occasionally spent time doing flips on the lawn outside the library in between talking about literary theory, which she understood much better than I did, given that she tended to read whole books whereas I tended to read the first few chapters and then get sidetracked.
(I did, however, do copious amounts of photocopying, so my knowledge was basically some kind of vast but largely useless collage of titles, abstracts and introductory chapters.)
We talked. We went to a friend’s dance performances.
Later, I found a letter she had written to me when she was in China. I had forgotten the letter, forgotten she had gone, had forgotten most things, but remembered her voice, her way of speaking, her face, a few of her stories, the times on the lawn, the time we studied Venus in Furs (I didn’t finish reading it before the tutorial presentations, but did afterwards), the fact she seemed so much stronger than me but said that doing yoga always made her cry.
I remember her telling me about when she was cycling and was riding in a certain gear up a hill. A man had come up next to her and, without being invited, had decided to offer her some advice on which gear she should choose. She was indignant about the whole experience, but I remember the way she described it. She leaned forward and said he had put his face “closer than anyone I wasn’t about to kiss.”
The moment. Such a gorgeous phrase. She is... what? And then it’s gone.
I had a partner. She had a partner. I sat on the end of her bed holding a long suede boot with the zip open while she changed out of the gear she’d played squash in. Her partner played the violin. They shared the flat, but he was out.
Out???
Years later, I returned to Melbourne after living overseas. She had been successful in a competition. I had noticed and sent her an email. I admired her. Maybe there had been something, maybe not. I could never tell, but nothing had ever happened, nothing had ever even been said. (At least, nothing had been said that I had comprehended, which meant that a lot could have been said that I didn’t.) We had been friends.
Before we met up for coffee, my then-partner decided she wanted to come. She argued that it made sense, that it was normal for girlfriends to come along, that my friend would probably bring her partner along and we would have a fine time. So she came along.
We entered the coffee shop. Sharon was sitting at a table, reading a book, alone. Her face clouded for a moment when she saw that my partner had come along. She put her book down. Conversation was awkward. It had been a long time. She seemed disappointed.
Nothing happened. Which made me think that something had happened, once, that time when nothing happened.
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