new show you might like—”
“I’ve heard you’re doing comedy now.” My mother changed the subject, not wanting to test our good fortune.
“Yes, I’ve done a lot of comedy. I try to do one or two shows every month,” I responded, without a clue as to how she had found out.
My mother asked me if I was getting married. That, of course, would be news about which she could get excited. I laughed and told her about Wesley. That she had graduated from Harvard Law School and was a practicing lawyer. I took immense pride in telling her that.
I said that we could come over soon and that she could meet Wesley if she wanted.
Another pause.
“I have nothing. If you want to come, that would be great news.”
When my mother said she had nothing, she didn’t just mean her calendar was empty. I knew what she meant.
“This would be glorious news to meet your girlfriend,” she added. I could hardly believe what I was hearing. She would never have said that in college. In fact, she didn’t.
“Okay, we can rent a car and come see you.”
We said our goodbyes and hung up the phone. I sighed deeply. Have you ever walked into an ocean that’s just a little too cold? It’s a deeply uncomfortable shock to the senses at first, but you hope your body gets used to it as you submerge yourself farther into the water. And then you take another step. And then another.
I was one step in and ankle deep.
Three
“I almost did not recognize you.”
It was hot. I mean, really hot. It took approximately eight seconds after I stepped outside to reconsider the wisdom of this trip, though I shouldn’t have been surprised. After all, we were in Kolkata in July.
For those of you who might need a reference point: Take a blazing ball of fire and put it in a microwave, and you have Kolkata in July. Add in a sprinkle of monsoon season and you have a recipe for unbearable discomfort.
Wesley and I stepped outside the Netaji Subhash Chandra Bose International Airport after a four-hour flight from Dubai (which was preceded by a fifteen-hour flight from New York). We emerged to the chaotic pulse of the city. The honks of cabs. Yells in Bengali. Police officers ordering cars to keep moving. It was worse than Times Square at the height of tourist season.
I felt overwhelmed, but Wesley looked strangely calm about everything. Knowing her, that made sense.
We met shortly after I started working at the Times in early 2017. For a brief period, the reporters for the culture section were being cycled through the breaking news desk, also called the Express desk. It was an ambitious section, known for producing the paper’s best digital content. Rotating culture reporters through the section was an effort to get us to move faster and be more like the reporters there.
During my first week on Express, I was assigned to write about a story that had gone viral. A gate agent for United Airlines refused to allow two teenagers to board a flight to Minneapolis from Denver because they were wearing leggings, incurring the wrath of the Internet. It turned out that the teenagers were flying with “pass riders,” tickets given to friends and family of airline employees. United claimed that passengers had to meet a certain dress code to use these tickets, so I posted a message on Twitter asking the public to write or call with their stories of flying with pass riders. Many did. (That includes one person who was working at a temp agency answering phones. He reached out again more than a year later after starting as a writer for Stephen Colbert, and we’ve since become friends.) I wrote the story and it went online. Easy peasy.
After it published, I got a message from someone named Wesley Dietrich, offering a friend who could talk to me for the story.
I thought this was a little odd, considering that my story was already up. I thanked her for the offer but didn’t think much of it. We started exchanging messages. I learned that Wesley was finishing up law school and also concluding a gig working for Al Franken, who at the time was a Democratic senator from Minnesota. It also turned out we had a mutual friend who had covered the 2016 presidential campaign with me. I let her know that I’d love to get drinks if she was ever in New York, though I never expected