Sharp Words

Did you miss me? I’m sorry I told you to get lost three hours and forty-two minutes ago, but I wasn’t in my right mind. I had just opened my mailbox to find Private Arrangements waiting for me, and, of course, I had to read it.

Now that I’ve read it, I wish I hadn’t liked it quite so much. Perhaps then I wouldn’t have read it so quickly. And if I hadn’t read it so quickly, I would have had more time to enjoy it.

Private Arrangements is a grand book. Really, that’s the only word I can think of to describe it, except, perhaps, “delicious” and Delicious happens to be the title of Sherry Thomas’s next book, which I will be buying the day it comes out in August, 2008, so I really should conserve that word for further use this summer. And speaking of this summer, expect another terse blog post telling you to go away. I apologize, in advance, for my future rudeness, but if today was any indication, I won’t be in my right mind.

I should start by saying, this is not a review. I’m lousy at reviewing, and I’m suspect, besides, since Sherry Thomas wrote a lovely double review of my novellas Ember and Like a Thief in the Night for Dear Author back in January which probably sold more copies of Like a Thief than all of my confused, sorry little attempts to promote the story, combined. But please don’t think I am biased just because I have reason to be, because if you do, you will miss out on one of the best historical romances ever. Ever!

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Happy Valentine’s Day. This post is on Romance–not the stuff we write about or read about, but the way it is.

My husband and I go out to eat fairly often. Much of the time we sit in silence. One dinner out we said about three sentences to each other during the whole meal. At the table next to us, a college-aged couple was having a date–first or second by the sound of it (yes, I was shamelessly eavesdropping on their conversation). When the couple got up from their table, the girl gave me this weird, pitying look, like there was something sad about a couple sitting together and not saying anything.

Maybe for other people there is something sad in silence, but not for us. If you’ve met me in person, you know that I’m a talker–a nervous talker. The more nervous I am, the more I talk. And being in public makes me nervous, so, as a result, I tend to talk a lot. My husband, he is the tall, silent type. He’s the exact opposite of me in that he doesn’t talk much in public, though he’s very talkative in private and with friends.

One of the many, many things I love about my man, one thing I don’t get with anyone else, is that I don’t feel like I have to talk when I’m with him. We talk all the time about many random and ridiculous subjects, but because we want to, not because I feel like I have to. I can sit with him and be quiet, and be utterly at ease. We have comfortable silences.

For Valentine’s Day, I don’t want poetry or flowers or candy. I just want to sit next to him and lean my head on his shoulder, and not say anything except, “I love you.”

…not the stuff you write about, or read about, but the way it really is.

A couple of weeks back, when it just kept raining, my husband and I went to our favorite Japanese noodle place for dinner. We were the only people in the place, but we chose the booth way at the back. We sat side-by-side on the brown vinyl bench and watched the rain fall through the big plate-glass window beside our table.

Cars drove by outside. Their headlights illuminated the falling rain and the slick black streets. Couples on their way to dinner and a movie scurried past the window. They walked walked close to the building, slowing when they passed under the awnings, happy to be briefly out of the rain. They wore winter coats and gloves and hats to stave off the chilly high-forties temps. They cuddled together beneath the same umbrella as they walked, awkward as they tried to match their strides to the movement of their partners’ bodies.

The owner of the restaurant must have been in a pensive mood that evening, because he’d replaced the usual soundtrack of 1980s American pop with sad love songs in Japanese–the kind of songs you hear over the credits of movies with bittersweet endings. My husband and I, we ate our steaming bowls of nabeyaki udon and curry soba. We didn’t talk, but instead watched the steam from our bowls trace curls and swirls into the air in front of us, and condense on the window beside our booth.

When we finished eating, we sat back, warm and full and happy. We didn’t say much. We held hands, listened to melancholy songs in a language neither of us really understands, and watched the rain fall.