missed connection no. 10

a crush! a red cardigan! a campari soda!

welcome to missed connection where I recommend a book to someone I was too distant from or distracted by or shy to actually… recommend a book to.

Dear [NAME REDACTED], 

Here’s my fantasy: I walk into the bar where we met, the perpetually dim bar in Brooklyn, the bar with one scuffed pool table and rickety stools, karaoke on sundays, the bar where I celebrated when I got a new job, the bar you tend on weekday afternoons and the occasional, serendipitous late night. It always feels like a rainy day in that bar and that late afternoon is no exception.

I sit on my favorite stool on the corner.

You say, “I like your sweater.” 

I say, “Thanks,” in a very cool and casual way, instead of turning red, squeaking out “Thanks it’s from Old Navy can you believe that,” and running to the furthest booth from the bar. This (the turning red and squeaking) is what happened last time you complimented an article of clothing of mine, but since then I’ve learned how to speak French and have somehow developed amazing posture. I don’t need to tell you that it has pockets, the sweater, because I’m now a confident woman who knows a few things about obscure bands and soccer teams in Europe and poets in Ireland. My new motto: if someone wants to know if it has pockets, they’ll ask.   

I take a seat, order a Campari soda, and ask if you could add a lemon wedge to the glass. You nod, like obviously, like why would anyone drink a Campari soda without a lemon wedge? I pull out the book I’m reading. It’s a novel called Pizza Girl. You don’t comment on the cover or ask what the book’s about. I find this very hot. You don’t need to say things just to fill the silence.

You put your elbows in the bar and lean very close and your breath smells like cherries from the gum you’re chewing. You have a tattoo of a cowboy boot on your arm which is somehow (this part is actually true) not pretentious and you blow a bubble and it pops so loud, almost like a gunshot, but I don’t flinch, and the gap between your teeth looks like heaven, like you could slide the stem of a daisy in it, and then you say, “You read a lot.” 

I nod. 

You invite me to swing by your friends’ book club which inexplicably begins at 11 PM in the back room of an Italian restaurant which only takes cash. “We’re reading Edith Wharton this week,” you say. This is the beginning. 

By summer, we somehow end up in a small seaside town in Portugal, smoking hand rolled cigarettes and playing cribbage and lying in the sun for hours and hours. One hot afternoon you ask if I want to go swimming and of course I do. I always want to go swimming. We wade into the water and float on our backs. It’s the kind of summer sun that feels like it is in my bones. You have freckles on your nose. 

“Have you ever read a book that made you feel like this?” you ask. 

Of course I haven’t. Nothing feels like this. This can’t be real. And it’s not. Soon it’s over, the whole thing, and when I’m home, back in my real life, I mail you a copy of the book Hot Milk. I’ve underlined the part with the silk halter top, beloved. It’s not an actual hot summer day. A book could never be the ocean. But when I read it in my bathtub in Brooklyn on a gray January day, it felt close.

Fourteen years later you mail the book back with a boarding pass to Lisbon tucked inside the front cover. The airplane leaves the next day at noon. It’s a one way ticket. 

See you soon.

Love, 

Stuart 

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are you a stranger? I would love to write to you about a book. click here. you don’t have to answer all the questions or give me an email address or create a password. fun!

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thank you so much for reading!!!!! you can find all of the books mentioned here or anywhere else on my substack on Bookshop. Hot Milk is currently a cool $15.81, the cost of a dirty iced chai latte in Manhattan (kidding…kind of) and is truly one of the most toe-curling, smart, luscious novels I’ve had the pure pleasure of reading. I really liked Pizza Girl too.

you can also find me rarely here and more often here and I would love to be friends with you. if you missed this month’s interview with a friend, you can find it here. it was a good one! and I can’t wait to see you in February for the next installment of shelf life. spoiler alert: I finally finished that biography I’ve been reading since November!