talkative husband in tow, we crossed 8-Mile and drove into the city. I was not quite comprehending what we were driving through and could not stop staring at the ruin—mile after mile of burnt-out homes, boarded-up storefronts, all the husks of an abandoned city—inexplicably desolate on a Saturday night. Nestled in every so often, we saw a well-maintained home, the glowing lights of inhabitants, little patches of life eked out of what, especially in the dark, looked like nothing. Even when we got to the hub, it was deserted. All these gorgeous buildings and no one on the street. I was used to Greenwich Village on a weekend night where you have to fight the throngs to even get down the sidewalk. Bill narrated the entire experience from the front seat in a kind of free associative poetry-slam manner, rolling his own cigarettes from pouch tobacco, and bringing everything he had to the mic—which included his own upbringing in Dearborn, his formidable knowledge of Allah and the Muslim world, a long thesis on automobile versus train travel in Amerikkka—and Misty deftly downshifted when we hit ice patches and occasionally tapped her husband on the knee and said, “Easy, William.”
We ate a forgettable dinner in Greektown, had a great drink at The Rhino Club, and enjoyed each other. I think. In my paranoid condition, it seemed more than possible that she was just being hospitable to the unraveling out of towner who had just slept in her car in her own driveway as she might be to, equally, some neighbor’s homesick Swedish au pair.
But I still wasn’t sure, even by the following spring, and when she invited me to her home for a meal, I took it as a declaration and was thrilled.
Her collected pack of six stray dogs all came racing out and barked their heads off when I pulled up the driveway and stood, pretending not to be afraid, behind my car door. She came out and calmed them all, getting down herself on all fours and kissing and hugging some of them more intimately than I have ever seen her interact with a human person, including her husband, either then or in the fourteen years since that I have continued to know her. I hardly recognized her.
Their home was a hundred-year-old brick house with rough-hewn beams exposed in the basement, surrounded by farmland and part of a land conservancy started by Bill and some friends and neighbors. There was a hand-me-down working John Deere tractor in the driveway and the spring night air smelled of tilled earth. There were budding fruit trees scattered around the fields, flower beds surrounding the house, and there, sprawling out behind the shed, was an organic garden just two mules shy of a farm. She had her own duck prosciutto hanging between the racks in her refrigerator. Shell beans from the year before had dried in their pods in bushels in the garage.
At this first dinner, she had brined a capon, and then roasted it on a tightly sealed grill by indirect smoky heat. It was possibly the most delicious thing I had eaten all year. We sat on the sun porch, surrounded by all the dogs and cats and houseplants that she devoted herself to, and she poured us some rosé wine, an excellent Bandol. Another glimpse of herself.
“Misty, nobody drinks rosé but my mom! Americans think it’s déclassé.”
“Un-hunh,” she nodded. “We had this one in France. We liked it.”
I walked around her warm, beautiful house, snooping everywhere with the same disoriented fascination as meeting someone’s identical twin for the first time. Her pantry shelves had dried anchovies, salt-packed capers, homemade vinegar, and homemade brandied Michigan cherries. Her kitchen cabinets were filled with heavy Le Creuset pots and clay earthenware from Mexico. There was a whole room packed to the rafters with cookbooks. Bill recited half-remembered poetry and filled in the half he couldn’t recall with whatever he could make rhyme. Misty drank the wine and spoke in full paragraphs and laughed full-throated laughter and I could not believe this whole other person before me. I began to feel the stirrings of a remote past, a someone I had been a thousand lifetimes and fluorescent-lit kitchens ago, and suddenly I found myself digging deep, way deeper than the PVC ring molds and the Silpat mats and the propane brûlée torches of my entire adult life, to find the language to keep up with her. I had to remember the exhale of Bandol