About a month ago I emailed Ed, the Weekly editor, that long list of article ideas, and we discussed them over coffee. The conversation soon wandered to his new job, how it's only his third week, everybody's coming to him with questions, he doesn't really know what to do, he didn't realize how much work it would be...the kinds of things you’d tell your good friends, not your potential employees.

He’s probably 40ish, and has been here since the 1990s. He has an easy laugh and a similar sense of humor to mine, and I enjoyed talking to him. What surprised me though was that he kept sending me little shyish/fear-of-rejection signals—unsteady eye-contact, a certain kind of smile, hesitation, I don’t know. It felt like he, the editor-in-chief of the newspaper, had packaged up the power in the situation, tied a ribbon around it, and just handed it over to me, the random twentysomething who out of the blue asked if she could do some freelance work. Puzzling.

We went for coffee a couple more times (Him: It's nice chatting with other Americans, are you free again next week? Me: Sure, I think I'll have made some progress on the article by then. Him: Oh...well I guess we could talk about that too), and last Friday he invited me to a party with a bunch of newspaper people.

Or rather was supposed to be a bunch of newspaper people but it ended up being me, him, and his friend Sam who writes the movie reviews. Luckily the awkwardness dissipated pretty quick, 30% because we killed multiple bottles of red wine and 70% because Sam is really cool.

Sam has the sort of nice, ambient flat that you’d expect someone a little older and more settled to have—a wondeful change from my normal, poorly furnished, hideous-Sovietly-wallpapered, landlord-crap-laden, this’ll-do-for-now surroundings. We got along famously. He loves to argue, and substantiates his points by doodling on an ever-present piece of typing paper (his picture for why September 11 was perpetrated by the US government had two vertical rectangles with downward-pointing arrows, and a circle with a line through it that represented the different sides of the brain that deal with images and facts.) I loved having carte blanche to challenge and dissect and mouth off, a rare feeling when most of my social-time is spent in an English classroom or with people who aren’t as into talking about ideas.

Sam walked me and Ed to the metro (and said he had really enjoyed my company, which was hugely flattering coming from him). In the metro station, Ed started saying Oh, I left my keys somewhere across town, I don’t know where I’m going to stay…mind if I come over? I wasn’t going to say no if he really didn’t have anywhere else (although the obvious choice in retrospect was go back to Sam’s), and I refused to believe that he was trying to sleep over sleep over with that sort of line, so I said, as disinterestedly as I could, Ok you’re welcome to come crash with me, I live really close to the language school, so people I work with sleep on my couch all the time. Still a little stormcloud of Bad Idea had gathered over my head.

He got super cozy next to me in the empty metro car, took my hand, and started carressing it. (I had given him zero indication I was into him. I’m sure he saw the 1984 when he xeroxed my passport so he could put me on the payroll. I swear this city preys upon a certain kind of Western man and makes him think it’s forever okay to try his luck.) I didn’t respond, he gave my hand back, and I looked down at it and thought Rats, what do I say when I have to look up and meet your eyes. Thankfully he read the silence, got off at the next stop, and waved at me magnanimously from the platform. I’ll spare you the details of the subsequent flirtatious text messages.

Blueberry pegs him as your garden-variety sleazy boss, but that’s almost giving him too much credit. He doesn’t have any quid-pro-quo agenda, he’s not shrewd and manipulative, he just seems kind of clueless. I spent a lot of the next day putzing around the flat, cleaning stuff, making brownies for Olga and Vladimir, and at intervals wondering aloud to him What did you think?