Then there you were

You ran a few minutes late so I killed time in the Brooklyn Heights coffee house where we were supposed to meet by wondering why the streets in that part of town were named for fruits—pineapple, cranberry, orange. Was the original developer an orchard fan? Or maybe he just liked slot machines?

Then there you were, standing at the counter, buying us coffee and apologizing all over the place for getting stuck in traffic, like the traffic was your fault, and you kept on explaining, in that slightly ragged voice that people get when they’re tired and more than a little talked out, how you had just come from one interview in Manhattan, and you had one to go when our hour was up, and then maybe you could salvage the day with a hockey game that night, although you were too nice to use the word salvage.

And anyway, you had me at… hockey?

“Oddly, I am a hockey fan,” you say, sitting there with your anonymity at once protected by the black top and the black jeans but slightly undone by that dazzling pair of black patent-leather loafers. “I wouldn’t say I’m a knowledgeable hockey fan. But I do enjoy watching it more than the other… like, um, golf,” and the last word comes out almost in a whisper, as though you are thinking to yourself that maybe you haven’t given golf a chance.

This is the first hint of the fundamental decency, or the sense of fair play, or maybe just an impulse for generosity that steers you away from easy answers or mean-spiritedness, a quality that bubbles up repeatedly in your conversation and dominates your new book.