By Paul Facinelli

The storm hit at rush hour. I was working late. I grabbed an egg salad on toast and a coffee from Jimmy’s. I cleaved to the wall of my building as I headed back. At a corner, Kristi and I collided.

Our apologies clashed as we shook off the rain in the lobby. Her eyes were blue, but not identical. The left iris had a pinhole of yellow. She suggested that we wait out the storm, get a bite at a bistro down the street.

Our table had the circumference of a large pizza. When I leaned in to make a particularly salient point about my business acumen, our knees brushed, delivering a welcome jolt. A bottle of chardonnay, a couple of orders of avocado toast, a mess of crab-stuffed mushrooms, and a slow walk on dampened streets later, we waited on the platform for her train. The taste of her tongue was sweet.

~

Three days later, we met at an Italian place downtown. The transformation was subtle but stunning. A little more makeup, hair down, a shimmering, just-above-the-knee blue dress that played with the subdued light, heels.

Our server arrived with water. He began to recite a litany of specials. Kristi stopped him with a raised hand. “Take this away, please. His, too,” she said. “We want water, but no ice.”

I was silent, but I was certain my face wasn’t.

“Sorry. But it takes 350 kilowatt hours of electricity to power an icemaker for one month.”

Over chicken and veal, I learned that Kristi worked for Global Energy Alternatives. I did a lot of nodding and lip-pursing as she made her way through wind, solar, geothermal, bio, hydro, nuclear, and just plain turning off the lights as the only ways to save Mother Earth.

As the statistics cascaded and my eyes glazed—I could always blame the chianti—I pondered the immutable truism that men are imbued with seemingly infinite forbearance when in thrall to a singular possibility, and how nothing—not sitting through Waiting for Godot in Sanskrit, or a two-hour bagpipe concert, or a screed on the wonders of decaying plant matter as an energy source—has power over their patience when it’s born of this most basic anticipation.

Under the transom, the kissing and caressing sent urgent messages to the deepest nodes of my reproductive tract. Kristi tilted her head back.

“About the veal.”

“The veal?”

“If you ate chicken instead of beef for a year, you’d reduce C-O-2 emission by 882 pounds. Cow flatulence is strangling the planet.”

I offered another nod and purse and wondered who measures such things. And how.

“Come over Saturday. I’ll make us dinner.”

~

Toting a pinot grigio, I stepped into Kristi’s apartment. There were candles everywhere. It looked like the orgy scene from that Kubrick movie.

“Your pupils will adjust,” she said. “Did you know that lighting accounts for 12% of the average electric bill?”

Kristi walked to the kitchen. I took a seat at an oval dining room table that was curiously free of candles. She whisked something or other for a few seconds, then moved to a wall panel and flipped a switch.

“Do you like it?”

I’ve found that honesty, while laudable in most circumstances, is frequently not the right move in a budding relationship. There’s a lot to be said for benign deceit.

“Yes.”

“It’s my bicycle.”

The fixture could have been thrown together by Jane Goodall’s chimps. It was massive, incoherent, a mish-mash of spokes, handlebars, rims and frame. Tubular rubber, the former tires, snaked its way throughout. In the center were three of those curly-fry light bulbs.

“It’s called upcycling. There are almost always other uses for stuff you want to throw away.”

Kristi fixed our plates in the kitchen: Cod with lemon-butter sauce, pilaf, a corn, tomato and green pepper salad with vinaigrette.

“You can cook. And this is a classy place. Cloth napkins.”

“No paper towels, napkins or tissues here, mister. Did you know that…”

“Yes, yes, I think I do. Last year, worldwide, a gazillion trees were cut down to make paper products. The rainforests in South America and Borneo are threatened. So are the Cloud Forest in Costa Rica and the Argonne in France. The sequoias and redwoods are next.”

“Cute. You’re very cute.”

We moved to the couch, talked, nuzzled, kissed. With a dram of wine still in our glasses, Kristi rose, took my hand, and led me down the hall. I leaned against the doorjamb while she lit the candles.

Inside were the usual bedroom trappings, or so I presumed. My lines of vision were obscured by an array of, well, collectively, fabric: towels, shirts, panties, bras, jeans, socks, sheets, pillowcases, placemats and napkins, all draped over two length-of-the-room clotheslines.

“I did three loads of wash today,” Kristi said. “Nothing was clean.”

“Is your dryer on the fritz? If it’s down, we can take all this over to my place afterward.”

She looked at me as if I had just said something kind about Jeffrey Dahmer. Her eyes narrowed, her jaw tightened. Sinews rose.

“Dryers are lethal,” she hissed, pausing between words with pounding enunciation.

I stood frozen. The rant went on and on. I heard none of it. Pleading was useless. A sickening silence prevailed.

“Shit,” Kristi muttered. “I thought everyone knew, that everyone understood.”

~

As I walked from my rapid stop to a bar near my home, I wondered if anyone with Kristi’s zeal could ever be happy or even content in the personal? Maybe only with someone of like mind. Even then…

“What’ll you have, pal?”

“Scotch. A double. Lotsa ice.”