She Was Named After a Flower

There was once a woman in my life whom I think about often. She was my boss at one of my first jobs out of college, and we worked together the year before I started law school.

She was late fifties or early sixties, tall, blonde, beautiful. She read books all day. She never worked. I could see her fighting against the mentalities that came in the generations before her: she wanted a man to take care of her and pay for her life, but she hated most men. She wanted to be alone. She was alone, following two great relationships. The first, her husband, who cheated on her with his secretary while she was having a miscarriage in their home upstate. The second, her decades-long love affair with a Frenchman, who deserted her when he moved to Miami to date young women. I met her in the middle of her breakup with the Frenchman, during which I was also going through my own relationship misfortunes. She was a feminist, like her mom, but not radical. The type of feminist who works at City Hall, attended the 2017 Women’s March, and complains about men walking around the office with their crotches jutting forward. She would say things like, “behind every great woman is another great woman.”

I loved her dearly. She was named after a flower, grew up in Boston, a rower in college, an investment banker early in her career, she loved the snow, the sun, soup, old buildings, and conversing with strangers. She was warm and kind, but never welcomed a hug. I wanted to hold her hand more than anything in the world. Her big blue eyes glimmered every time she smiled, so much so it sometimes looked like she was crying.

And like every extraordinary woman I’ve met, she could be cruel and knew when to be cruel. She insisted I date older men who would take me to ballets and galas, so that I could become “cultured.” When I gained weight, she purchased a dress two sizes too big for me and requested that I reimburse her for it. She encouraged my affair. She would advocate for me when I wasn’t in the room, but simultaneously I felt her jealousy emanating from the cubicle next to mine.   

Her cruelest act, however, was when she stopped talking to me.

I had quit work to start law school during the height of the pandemic. My affair was coming to an end. I was emotionally devasted and I needed her. We sat in rusted chairs in a communal garden in the Village, drinking champagne and eating blinis topped with caviar and dill. I was worried always that I would do something incorrect or say something stupid that would reveal the differences in our upbringings. I came from dirt and tuna helper; she, from townhouses with white lofted ceilings and summers in Martha’s Vineyard. But she knew all too well where I was from and who I was.

I can’t remember the details of what we talked about that day. I remember she loved my blue, floor-length dress. She asked about my affair. We gossiped about a mutual friend. She told me she handed out finger sandwiches to the homeless every Sunday at the church around the corner. I recall walking out of her garden, tipsy from the champagne, believing we had just started a tradition. I had no traditions, but I desperately wanted one. I thought I would be back the next week, and the week thereafter, eating caviar in the garden and clinking my toasting flute against hers.   

Weeks went by, and I texted her when the media ran a story on a monumental project we had worked on together. I can only surmise that she thought I took too much credit for the project during the journalist's interview, when it was really decades of her hard work that led to the project's completion. I didn’t mean for it to happen that way. And when I texted her again, years later, to let her know I passed the bar exam and so many of my accomplishments could be attributed to her encouragement, I didn’t hear back. I knew then that I would never hear from her again.

I hope one day I'll run into her in the places she'd frequent: the Jefferson Market Library, Takahachi Bakery in Tribeca, or the farmer's market at Union Square. I used to hang my hat on every word she said. I miss listening to the way she talked about her mom, and how she glistened when she described the way men dress in Paris.