The Worn Blue Sofa

*I wanted a first date that didn't try so hard... where the chemistry came from a shared funny silence and a stranger's love note in a book. Thanks for reading something tender that doesn't need to be swept up into a grand gesture.*

The thing about dating apps is that they train you to hold two conversations at once, one with the person and one with the exit strategy, and by October I had gotten so good at the second one that I mostly forgot to do the first. I am twenty-eight, I work at a gallery downtown where I say the word "curatorial" more times per week than any human should, and I had been on eleven first dates since June, every one of them fine, which is the most damning word in the English language. Fine coffee, fine banter, fine explanation of his startup, and then a fine little hug on the sidewalk and a fine text two days later that said we should do this again sometime, which we both knew was a lie the way weather forecasts are lies, technically possible but nobody believes them.

So when a friend of a friend passed along that Edgar, thirty-two, rare books, "you'd like him, he's weird in a good way," I said sure in the same tone I say sure to free wine at gallery openings, and then he surprised me by not asking me out through the app at all. He asked if I wanted to meet him at a bookstore on a Sunday afternoon instead of a bar, and he said there was something he wanted to show me, and normally that line makes me reach for the block button, but he said it about an object, not about himself, so I said yes.

Which is how I ended up standing in the doorway of the Bookmark & Bindery at three in the afternoon on a cool Sunday, hands in my coat pockets, watching a man in a corduroy jacket flip through a book the way you'd check a pulse. Two fingers on the page, thumb walking the edges, pausing here and there like he was listening for something in the paper. He was tall and stooped a little over the cart in front of him, and the light coming through the grimy display window was that thick golden October light that makes even cracked linoleum look like a deliberate aesthetic choice, and the whole store smelled like dust and old glue and, faintly, somebody's coffee.

I did not go in right away. I stood there maybe a full minute, which is rude, technically, and watched him, and I remember thinking that I had never once in my life watched a man read anything with his whole body before. My gallery dates read their phones. My sculptor in Chicago, years back, had read catalogs the way you skim a menu, and that constituted the entirety of my data. This guy was holding a book like it owed him money and he was glad of it.

He looked up before I decided to make a sound, which saved me the trouble of a clever entrance, and he grinned, and the grin was crooked and immediate, no warming up.

"You're Ramona," he said, closing the book on his finger to keep his place. "You've got the gallery walk. I could tell from across the room."

"The gallery walk?"

"Yeah, you know, the thing where you enter a space like you're reviewing it." He set the book down on the cart and picked up a slim volume instead, thin, plain wrapper, a little battered at the corners, and held it out to me with no preamble at all, arm extended, like handing over a ticket. "Here. This is yours."

"Yours. I mean, mine?"

"Yours. It was yours the second you walked in, that's how gift giving works in a bookstore, there's a ceremony and everything." He was already turning back to the cart, sorting spines, talking over his shoulder. "First edition chapbook, 1974, poems by a Korean American writer nobody paid attention to at the time because the big presses were busy being wrong about everything. It's not valuable, don't get excited. It's just good."

I took it. The paper had gone soft at the edges, the way paper does when a hundred hands have turned the same pages, and the spine was sun-faded on one side like it had lived half its life facing a window. "You bought me a book before you'd even met me in person."

"I bought three books before I met you in person. This was the one that survived the cut." He came around the cart and put out his hand, and we shook like normal adults, which felt absurd after he'd handed me a present. "Edgar. Sorry, I skipped the whole front half of the date, didn't I. Hello. You look like your photos, which I'm told is a compliment in this economy."

"It's a compliment, yeah." I opened the chapbook. The signature page was signed, actually signed, a looping pen name and a date, and something about that got me in the sternum, this stranger fifty years ago writing her name in a book that ended up in a shop in Portland, and now me. "This is signed."

"She signed maybe a hundred copies for the little press that printed it, then the press folded and she moved to Honolulu and stopped writing poetry entirely, as far as anybody knows. There's a whole essay in that and I refuse to write it." He was grinning again, watching me hold the book instead of watching me, and I want to note that difference, because it mattered. "Anyway. You're holding a book with both hands and you haven't checked your phone once, so I'd say the date is going well so far."

"I hadn't noticed I was doing that."

"Nobody ever notices. That's how you know it's real."

The shop itself was narrow and overfull in the honest way, paperbacks stacked two deep on the floor, hand-lettered category signs taped to shelves with names like MARITIME DISASTERS and POETRY, SAD, and somewhere in the back a radiator ticking like a slow clock. He walked and I followed, because that seemed to be the structure of the afternoon and I found I didn't mind, and he talked the whole way in a low voice, not performing, just telling me things, that the owner had run the place since the eighties and refused to renovate, that the rent had doubled twice in five years and the inventory was the only thing keeping it alive, that gentrification in his opinion was just eviction with better lighting.

"You're doing the thing," I said, halfway down the aisle, "where you give me the store's biography like a tour guide."

"You don't like it?"

"I didn't say that. I'm just taking notes for the review."

He laughed at that, a real laugh, quick and unguarded, and I felt something in my chest loosen that had been set to the wrong tension for months. "So how was the gallery this week? What did I miss in the world of important white cubes?"

"A man suspended a dead tree from the ceiling with surgical tubing and called it an inquiry into suspension."

"Was it?"

"Was it what?"

"An inquiry into suspension. Did it inquire?"

"It hung there," I said, and he laughed again, and I realized I'd made two jokes in a row and meant both of them, which hadn't happened on a date since before the apps got their hooks in me. At the back of the shop there was a landing of sorts, a little alcove where the aisles ended, and in it sat a single blue velvet sofa, worn down to the weave on the arms, the color gone from royal to something like dusk, and he stopped in front of it with his hands in his jacket pockets like he was introducing me to a relative.

"This," he said, "is what I actually wanted to show you. The book was a warm-up."

"It's a couch."

"It's the couch. Sit down, I'll explain, there's a story and it involves a dead poet and a misunderstanding at an estate sale, and I've been waiting three days to tell it to somebody who might appreciate it."

I sat. The velvet was flat and cool under my palm and the cushions took my weight the way old furniture does, without complaint, without argument, and Edgar lowered himself onto the far end, a polite foot of space between us, and reached into the inside pocket of that corduroy jacket and pulled out another book, this one fat and cracked at the hinges, and said, "Okay. So. 1962, an anthology, and inside it a note, and the note is..."

He trailed off there, thumb resting on the cover, looking at me, and I said, "You can't just stop there."

"I know, I know, I'm building up to it, I had it rehearsed better in the shower this morning." He laughed and shook his head. "The note is from a stranger to a stranger. That's all I'll say until you're sitting right."

I scooted over, which put my knee maybe two inches from his, and he opened the anthology across our laps like it was a shared table, and there it was, a note folded in half and tucked between two pages, the paper gone soft and tea colored with age. He unfolded it with two fingers, the way you'd handle a moth wing, and turned it toward me.

The handwriting was slanted and hurried, fountain pen by the weight of it, and it said, S.F., you would have loved this line. Write back.

"That's it?" I said. "Is that the entire note?"

"That is the entire note. No name, no date, nothing but those two sentences and somebody's initial. I found it in a lot I bought at an estate sale out in Gresham, and I have spent, no exaggeration, four months wondering about these two people." He smoothed the paper flat with his thumb. "You would have loved this line. Which line? The poem is right there on the facing page, so we know which line, but we don't know why she would have loved it, or what S.F. stood for, or whether she ever did write back."

I touched the ink, just barely, the pad of my finger on the last letters, and the paper was dry and faintly soft, like old cloth. "Write back," I said. "That's the part that gets me. It's almost a command. Write back. Like whoever wrote this knew S.F. was terrible at letters."

"Or knew that S.F. owed them one," he said. "You don't demand a letter from someone who doesn't already owe you one."

"So who were they? Have you built a whole theory? You strike like a guy with a theory."

He sat back against the sofa arm and looked at the ceiling, which had a water stain shaped vaguely like Oregon. "A theory, yes. A theory I've refined and discarded and refined again. Current version, the note writer was in love with S.F. and hadn't said so, and this was the closest they could get, hiding it inside a book where the confession would only be legible if you already knew."

"That's sad."

"It's very sad. Previous version, they were siblings, and the line was a private joke from childhood, and the note is almost cheerful under the economy of it. I liked that version for a while but it doesn't explain write back with the period, that period is doing a lot of work."

I looked at him sideways. He was doing the thing again, talking about the book while the book sat forgotten, and his hand had come to rest on the top edge of the sofa back, not touching me, just there, a few inches from my shoulder, and I noticed, because I was noticing everything, that his thumb was tracing the seam of the velvet back and forth, the same slow absent motion he'd used on the page edge of the chapbook, like his hands didn't actually stop when he was telling a story, they just changed instruments.

"Which line do you think it was?" I asked him.

"That's the question, isn't it. I've narrowed it to two candidates. Either the one about the snow falling on the water, which is pretty in a way that anyone would love, or the one about the mother mending the net by lamplight, which is a stranger thing to love and therefore in my opinion the more likely candidate." He looked over at me. "What do you think, you're the curator, curate it."

"The net one. Anyone can love snow. S.F. was clearly loved by somebody with taste."

"S.F. was loved by somebody with taste," he repeated, and looked pleased, and his thumb kept going along that seam, back and forth, and I made the mistake of imagining it on the inside of my wrist, and then I made the further mistake of not correcting that imagination.

"Your hand," I said, before I could stop myself.

He looked down at it like it had committed a crime without his knowledge. "Sorry. Nervous habit. I fidget with fabric, with paper, with anything with an edge. If it's annoying I can..."

"It's not annoying. It's just, it's very close to me, is all. I noticed." And then, because eleven first dates since June had taught me that nobody ever resolves anything by noticing quietly, I added, "You can put it where you were going to put it, if that's what was happening."

He looked at me for a moment, actually looking, not at the book for once, and there was a beat where either of us could have laughed it off, and neither of us did. "It was, yes," he said. "I was working up to it. Slowly. In case the shower rehearsal hadn't made that obvious."

"Rest it on my shoulder then. Or my hair, whatever it does."

His hand came down from the back of the sofa onto my shoulder, light, his thumb still moving in that same slow trace, and the weight of it was so ordinary and so enormous at the same time that I had to look at the note again just to have somewhere to put my eyes. "Okay," he said, quietly. "There. Is that all right?"

"That's all right. That's, yeah." I cleared my throat. "You were saying, about the estate sale."

"I was absolutely not saying anything about the estate sale, I've lost the entire thread, you've ruined four months of theory in ninety seconds." But he was smiling, and he didn't move his hand, and we sat there like that for a minute with the radiator ticking, and it was the most pleasant minute I'd had in a season.

* * *

We got up eventually, because he said his leg was asleep, and because he said there was one more thing, and by now I knew the shape of his afternoons, one more thing meant three more things, and I followed him back up the aisle to a section near the window where the light came through the grimy glass in a long gold slab and lay across the spines. Travel, said the sign, in the same hand lettering as the others, and underneath someone had added in