A Stranger's Familiar

The night started with a glass of bad wine, which is not how I thought my life would change, but that's how most things go. Nobody hands you a memo.

I had just come off a twelve-hour night shift in the ER. Three car accidents, one kidney stone the size of a walnut, and a guy who swallowed a fork on a dare. By midnight I was dead on my feet, and the last thing I wanted was to go home to an empty apartment where my ex's toothbrush used to sit. So I walked past my block, kept walking, and found myself outside a bar called the Velvet Room that I had passed a hundred times and never entered.

I almost didn't go in. I stood there in my scrubs with my hair in a ponytail looking like exactly what I was, a thirty-two-year-old nurse who smelled like hand sanitizer, and I thought, no, you need sleep, Emily. Then I thought about the empty apartment again and pushed the door open.

The place was dim and kind of nice, the kind of bar with real candles on the tables and a piano in the corner. The wine list was longer than the food menu, which told me I was out of my tax bracket, but I ordered a glass of red anyway. It came in a glass that cost more than my stethoscope and it tasted like somebody had already drunk it once and put it back.

I was nearly done with it, doing the thing where you sip slowly so you can stay without ordering a second, when I saw her.

She was sitting at the far end of the bar, alone, reading something on her phone. Tall. Dark hair pinned up. A green dress that fit her like it had been sewn on that morning. Long neck, sharp jaw, hands with rings on them turning the pages of her phone. She was beautiful in a way that made me sit up straighter without meaning to.

And then my brain did the thing I'm not proud of. The fast, ugly arithmetic. The jaw, the height, the hands, and it landed on a conclusion. I decided she was a man in a dress. I had that thought, complete and whole, and then I had the next thought right behind it, which was, Emily, what the hell is wrong with you?

Because it didn't matter. Even if I'd been right, which I wasn't, so what? She was sitting alone reading her phone in a nice dress. The only person in the room doing anything wrong was me, staring at her like she was a chest x-ray I was trying to read.

I looked away. Looked at my wine. Looked back, because apparently I have no self-control at four ticks past midnight on a Tuesday.

She was looking at me.

Not glancing. Looking. She'd closed her phone and turned on her stool and everything about her posture said she had been watching me watch her for a while. She didn't smile. She didn't look away either. She just held it, the way you hold eye contact with somebody who owes you money.

My face went hot. I did the universal gesture of guilt, which is picking up my glass and drinking bad wine like it's going to fix anything.

That was when she got up and walked over. She walked the way nobody in the ER walks, slow and unhurried, like the floor was glad to have her. She pulled out the stool next to mine and sat down without asking, which should have annoyed me and instead made my stomach do something unprofessional.

"You've been staring at me for a while now," she said. Her voice was low and warm and had some kind of accent underneath it, maybe training, maybe travel, I couldn't tell. "I counted."

"I have not." I said it automatically, the way you deny things on the chart before you check the chart.

"You have. Four minutes was just my necklace, that was fair. The other six was my face." She flagged the bartender with two fingers. "So here's your options. You can keep gawking like I'm an exhibit, or you can buy me a drink and tell me why a woman in hospital scrubs is drinking bad wine alone at midnight, looking like the world just ended."

"It's the wine that's bad, not me."

"Oh, I know the wine is bad. I ordered one. It's terrible here and I keep coming back anyway." She smiled then, and it changed her whole face, and I understood I was in trouble. "I'm waiting for someone who isn't coming until tomorrow, so you have a window. Drink with me or go home. Either way, stop staring."

I should have gone home. I need to be honest in these stories, that's sort of my rule, so I'll admit the thought crossed my mind. Twelve-hour shift, empty apartment, stranger at a bar. Every common-sense cell in my body voted for sleep.

"Emily," I said, and stuck out my hand like we were at a job interview.

She took it. Her grip was firm and her rings were cold. "Elian. With one l."

"That's unusual."

"It's Catalan. My mother was stubborn about it." The bartender came over and she ordered for both of us without consulting me, some Spanish thing I'd never heard of, which should have annoyed me too and didn't. "So. Scrubs. Nurse?"

"ER. Night shift, mostly. Tonight was a guy who swallowed a fork."

"On a dare?"

"On a dare. He's fine. The fork is in a plastic bag with his name on it." She laughed at that, a real laugh, and something in my chest unknotted a little for the first time in weeks. "What about you? You don't look like you're from here."

"Nobody looks like they're from here. That's the point of cities." She took a sip of her drink and made a face that confirmed the wine situation. "I'm a singer. Opera."

"Opera. Like, professionally?"

"Like, rent is paid by it, yes. Mezzo-soprano. I'm here for six weeks. There's a production at the concert hall, The Magic Flute, you'd hate it, everybody hates it until they don't."

"I don't hate it. I've never gone, but I don't hate it."

"That's the most honest thing anyone's said to me all week." She turned on her stool to face me properly, and I noticed her eyes were dark brown and there was a small scar over one eyebrow. "Now. Your turn. Who ended, Emily? Because you have the face of a woman who got dumped recently enough that her friends are still lying to her about it."

"That's rude."

"That's accurate."

I looked at my glass. "Three months ago. Eleven years together. She left a note on the counter like we were breaking a lease." I don't know why I told her that. I hadn't told anyone that part, the note part. "Anyway. She took the good couch."

"Eleven years." She whistled, low. "You started young."

"Twenty-one, so, yeah. Basically my entire adult life had a co-signer." I shrugged and pretended it didn't sting, the way I'd been pretending for three months. "Your turn. Who's not coming until tomorrow?"

She smiled again, but this one was smaller. "The rest of the company. My flight got moved and theirs didn't, so I have one night in a city where I know nobody, in a bar with terrible wine." She raised her glass a little. "Or so I thought. I know somebody now. Somebody who rescues fork-swallowers. You know what I mean."

I laughed before I could stop myself, my first real laugh in weeks, loud enough that the piano player looked over.

We talked for another hour. About the ER and whether opera singers get stage fright. About her hometown, somewhere near Barcelona, and how she'd been on tour so long her plants back home had a professional sitter. About the note on the counter again, a little, when my second drink arrived and I got honest about it.

Somewhere in there I realized I'd stopped looking at her jaw and her hands and started just looking at her. The difference matters. I won't act like I understood it all right then, but the ugly little math machine in my head had gone quiet, and what was left was just a woman at a bar who was funny and sharp and paying attention to me like I was worth paying attention to.

It was nearly two when the bartender started giving us the polite closing-up look. Elian checked her phone and made a face.

"I have rehearsal at ten," she said. "I should sleep. Which is a lie, I should do vocal rests and I never do."

"Right. Yeah." I stood up and immediately didn't know where to put my hands. "This was, um. Thanks. For the drink I bought you."

"You're welcome for the drink you bought me." She stood too, and up close she was taller than me by a couple inches, and I had to look up slightly, which I discovered I did not mind. "Emily. Ask me."

"Ask you what?"

"Whatever it is you've been not asking for the last hour. You get one night of me before the company lands and this becomes a polite hello at the stage door. So ask."

I looked at her, and my heart was doing something I'd have called tachycardia and treated if it were anyone else's. "Would you," I said, and then made myself finish, "like to come back to my place?"

"Yes," she said, like it was easy.

"Actually," she said, holding up one finger, "change of plan. My place is closer."

"Your place."

"I have a serviced apartment two blocks from the concert hall. The company pays for it, which means it's nicer than anywhere I've ever lived on my own money, which is its own kind of sad, but there it is. Also I want to show you something."

"Something."

"You'll see. It will change your mind about assumptions."

"That's a terrifying sentence."

"Good. Terrified is honest." She paid for my second drink before I could argue, dropped bills on the bar like she'd been doing it her whole life, and held the door for me with a little bow that I was pretty sure was mocking me and pretty sure I liked anyway.

We walked the two blocks, and the night was one of those fall nights that can't decide if it's cold, and she talked the whole way. About the production. About the director, who she described as "a genius, which is what terrible people call themselves when the budget runs out." About the venue, which had a fly system she didn't trust.

"You know the fly system?"

"I do, actually. Before the singing paid the rent, I built sets. Stage carpentry. I still do it between contracts because the quiet of a shop at two in the morning is better than any meditation app. You measure, you cut, you sand, the thing either fits or it doesn't. Very honest work. Singing is honest work too, but nobody hands you a square and says check it."

"You miss it."

"I don't miss it. I do it. There's a difference. I built the stairs in my apartment back home. Badly, the first time, and then again, well." She waved a hand. "Anyway. I work late, I always have. My body doesn't believe in mornings, which is why a ten a.m. rehearsal is a personal attack."

I laughed, and she looked pleased with herself, and I realized we'd arrived at a glass door of a building that was much nicer than mine.

The apartment was big and temporary-looking, all pale wood and furniture that looked like it had been chosen by a committee. But there were things on top of the temporary things. A scarf over a chair. A case for sheet music on the table. Shoes lined up by the door with the neatness of someone who travels a lot and has opinions about hotel carpet.

"Sit," she said, pointing at the couch. "Actually, no, stand. Come here. Look out the window first."

I looked. The concert hall was lit up across the street, all glass and warm light, and below it the empty plaza.

"That's where I sing tomorrow," she said, next to me. "Six weeks of it. And tonight it's just sitting there like a big expensive paperweight." She turned to me. "Okay. The thing I want to show you. Are you ready for the thing."

"You've built this up so much I feel like I owe you money."

"First. The assumption part." She sat down on the arm of the couch, which put us almost at eye level, and looked at me straight on. "I'm trans. I want you to know that before anything else happens tonight, because I've had the version of this evening where it comes up later and it goes badly, and I don't do that version anymore. So. Now you know. If that changes things for you, say so, and I'll call you a cab and mean it kindly."

I thought about it for maybe three seconds, and most of those seconds were just me being surprised at how not-surprised I was.

"Okay," I said. "Thanks for telling me."

"That's it? Okay?"

"That's it. I mean, I have questions, probably, but they can wait. It doesn't change things." I paused. "You look like you were braced for a worse answer."

"I was. People surprise you in both directions." Something in her shoulders came down an inch. "Second thing. The actual thing I wanted to show you." She crossed to the window again and opened it. Cold air came in, and the sound of the city, and she pointed across the street at the dark bulk of the hall. "That," she said, "is an empty concert hall, and from this window, at this angle, at this time of night, the acoustics bounce off the plaza and come back to me. I found it the first night. I've sung to an empty hall from this window for two nights now and I wanted to do it once for a person."

"You're going to sing to me out a window."

"I'm going to sing to you out a window." She grinned. "You can close the door on it if it's too weird."

"It's weird. Do it anyway."

She took a breath the way I'd seen runners set themselves at a start line, and she sang.

I don't have the vocabulary. I could say it was like something, but everything I reach for is wrong. It wasn't delicate. It was big and low and it filled the window frame and went out across the plaza and came back, and I stood there with my arms crossed like an idiot, holding my own elbows, while a woman I'd met two hours ago sang into the dark for me and only me. It lasted maybe a minute. When she finished she closed the window and turned around and her face was pink and she looked, for the first time all night, young.

"Well?" she said.

"I don't know what to do with my face."

"That's the best review I've had in years." She came back and sat, properly this time, next to me on the couch. Close. Not touching. "So. Assumptions. Did I change any?"

"You sang opera out a window at two in the morning to a nurse you met because she choked on a fork story."

"That's not an answer."

"It's the only answer I've got. My whole plan for tonight was going home and eating cereal standing up."