Budding Boughs About To Blossom

By David Fitzsimmons

A German at the bus stop this morning. She is a brunette, medium height and build, and she is talking on the phone with someone. I cannot tell who: a boyfriend, her boss, a friend? She is a little younger than I am, not especially pretty, but I have seen what the Germans do. There is nothing sick or profane in the world that one could ever think of that the Germans have not done before, not done better, not done with élan. Swapping and transference. Man-to-woman or man-to-man or woman-to-woman. The snowball. The cream pie. There is one video that I have forever been unable to delete from my hard drive. At this point, I keep it for sentimentality’s sake. It is really quite something, if you have never seen it. In it, these Germans, none of them particularly attractive (but that’s not the point, is it?), seven of them, or more – are caught depositing and re-depositing, licking and sucking – bodies that have been tanned under sunlamps, bodies that have been waxed up for the occasion. The Germans have done something special. Angela Merkel should establish a holiday.

The German girl gets on the bus before me, or perhaps I don’t notice her at all, for I am immediately engaged with my friends from the bus – two men my age. One is a Brit, who we are certain is royalty. Went to Cambridge, then came stateside to attend an Ivy. Got two advanced degrees there, now is a banker and is in all ways a lovely chap: cheerful, kind. I am pleased to think of us as friends, and, if not friends, then friendly. The other is a lawyer (who isn’t a lawyer in Washington? – there are lawyers, consultants, not-for-profit aide workers, and then what I have heard referred to as “Hill People” – that is, young professionals working on Capitol Hill – they are a nice looking bunch, but beware – they have intransigent opinions). The lawyer is also a pleasant guy.

We have met for happy hours, the lawyer and I, and we have brought along our significant others. In the mornings, naturally, we talk about the bus ride the previous night, our misadventures. Last night, the bus didn’t come at all (a fuel leak near the Pan-American Health Organization building), and the lawyer and I ended up taking a cab. A strange man who works at State joined us. We see him all the time, and he has tried to form similar relationships with the bus-community, but, because he is strange, he has failed. Because the lawyer and the Brit own homes, they talk about property taxes and how they are separately appealing their tax increases and how they fear the values of their homes will drop. I listen, sitting across from them. What will we do this weekend? The Brit is beginning a home remodel project and the lawyer – his wife is out of town and so he will sleep. But the cherry blossoms are still in bloom, I think, and it may be worth it to make a trek downtown, in spite of the crowds. The Brit encourages me emphatically to do it, do it early in the morning with a Thermos of coffee, that’s the best way. He should write copy for, well, anything.

Several seats back there is my Belarus friend, a tall, bleach-blond woman a couple years younger than me. I know two Russians, her and another – I call them that but I am not sure that is right. Belarusian? Is that right? They are a frugal group of people, it seems. And yet, they like to shop. Love it. A gossipy bunch, too.

Washington is one of the places where everyone truly is from someplace else, but more interestingly, from somewhere else in the world. It is foreign to me. There is a durability they possess that I don’t. I envy it. The Brit travels for work to Mongolia, to India, to Norway, and speaks of it as if it were only a little more difficult than our morning commute. He has never spoken of travel to Germany and he has never spoken of travel to Japan. The Japanese, now there is a group of people. Our bus clique is absent of Japanese, it seems, and the worse for it, in my opinion. Oh God, the Japanese – what they do! The Germans have nothing on them.