I moved to Albany, New York, in April of 2005, and the city couldn't give me much of a welcome. State capitols are never the most interesting places, and I recall Albany as mostly state offices and lobbyists and pricey restaurants to service political types. I was there for the state university, where I was to start graduate studies in History in the fall with the intention of getting my PhD and entering academia. That was a pretty ambitious dream, especially considering that I was nearly broke at the time.
I landed in an old, run-down house near the hospital where four friends were renting rooms and had an empty one for me. Classes didn't start until September, so in the meantime I got a position with a private firm that graded standardized tests. You know those exams you have to take to graduate high school? I graded the essay sections. Me and two-dozen underpaid grad students grading high school essays on computers, all day long. The pay was just enough for me to pay the rent and eat, mainly oatmeal and rice and tubes of Fosters. But a gig is a gig, and I knew what else I could be doing for my money, so I didn't bitch about it...much.
Among the crew was a young woman, maybe twenty-five years old. She was pale and petite, with copper hair in a short, boyish cut over her green eyes. She was quiet and reserved, but I did manage to coax a name out of her: Tess Janssen.
"Forget it, dude," grumbled the chesty brunette who sat at the computer next to me. "She bats for the other team."
I have a history of being attracted to lesbians and I'm curious to know why. Someone once suggested to me that a straight woman has spent her life developing strategies for dealing with men, whether she wants to attract them, or fend them off, in that moment. In any case, the theory went, a man rarely gets to see the woman's authentic self, not until she trusts him, which could take a while. All he sees is the strategy. But a lesbian wouldn't bother with a strategy towards men, since they are deemed sexually irrelevant. They could just be themselves, and that authenticity was what attracted me. Interesting theory, and I have no idea if it's right.
Not to worry, I reassured myself. In September, you'll be at the university, and no doubt the women will cycle through your bed like it was a subway turnstile. I talked to myself like that to keep my spirits up.
In July, the office crew decided to go out to Bombers on Lark Street one Friday night. Lark Street is the Latin Quarter of Albany, just eight blocks deep, and all the college students were down there on the weekends. Bombers had a burrito bar downstairs, greasy and cheap, and upstairs was a red-painted bar decked out in Christmas lights and tinsel and pennants like an amped-up Mexican brothel. It was loud and everyone got fairly drunk in the three hours we were there.
Tess was more outgoing than I'd ever seen her - a little red-headed social butterfly, flitting from woman to woman and ending each encounter with laughter. Maybe she had to get out of the office to perk up, or maybe her 90-pound frame needed just half a raspberry daiquiri to loosen up. She wore jeans with the cuffs rolled up, blue chucks, a tight black tee, and a khaki jacket with a flag I didn't recognize on the shoulder.
As the group broke up at around eleven, we stood together by the old jukebox, and she leaned against me tiredly.
"I'm hungry," she said.
"Not sure if the kitchen's still open," I replied.
She suddenly lit up with a smile.
"I have an idea. Come with me."
I followed her downstairs to the street, where people smoked and chatted outside the bar. She led us a block down the crowded sidewalk, pulled keys from her pocket, and a parked car's lights came on in front of us. It was a Jaguar F-Type convertible, hunter green.
I looked at her as we got in. We were making about ten dollars an hour at the office, pre-tax.
She dropped the top and ran a few red lights on the way to Route 787. When we merged onto the highway, she stomped the pedal and punched up Coltrane's "Giant Steps" on the stereo.
"My parents threw a party at their place on the river last night," she shouted over the wind, motor, and jazz. "There should be a lotta good stuff for us."
Leftovers with the lesbian in the Jag. Why the hell not? I'd been surviving on red beans and rice for three months.
We crossed the river to Rensselaer, then turned south down Rt. 9 through the woods along the Hudson. Tess braked hard when we got to Janssen Island Road and made a squealing right, pulling up to the estate.
And that clarified everything. The Janssens were one of the first settler families in Albany, straight outta Amsterdam in 1620, long before the British captured what is now New York. They were the oldest money in the capitol region, the kind of wealthy people who don't need to show off because everybody already knew. They still had a lot of land and influence up here.
I looked at Tess in the moonlight, and now recognized the flag of the Netherlands on her shoulder. The name hadn't clicked before this.
She stopped in front of the old stone estate house, three hundred and fifty years old. The lights were out in the windows.
We went in through the commercial-grade kitchen, which was larger than my entire apartment, and she turned on the lights and started rummaging through the refrigerators.
"See what you can find," she told me.
I pulled open a refrigerator.
"Here's...shrimp? No, it's lobster. In risotto. Looks good."
