Impossible Odds

department. He’d gotten a stern lesson in all the ways job satisfaction can be limited. While the years rolled on, it began to dawn on him that career advancement can’t stand in for a trustworthy and loving partner.
    Workaholic habits and the occasional date with female expats did nothing to relieve the creeping sense of aloneness that had begun to haunt him. It seemed clear this was a time in his life when there was no real choice other than to go it alone—at least until he got back to Sweden someday. It left him with a torn feeling of living an incomplete life, dancing to the music but singing off key.
    He had just returned to Nairobi from a week in Zambia. That evening, he went to a small party at a friend’s house. Nothing reallyclicked there, so he and another single guy went to Gypsy’s, a local nightclub that was popular with the expats in the area. The place was a bit of a dive, but in a comfortable way: cheap eats and drinks, plus a casual atmosphere that was civil most of the time.
    Erik found the crowd at Gypsy’s that night to be the usual mix of foreign aid workers, British military on leave, foreign tourists chasing Kenyan nightlife, and local Kenyan party people, plus a few prostitutes following the money. People were on the dance floor, but that looked like a lot of work to him. The evening was doing nothing for the restlessness that put him there. After one beer he decided to call it quits.
    The place was far too noisy to make a phone call, so he leaned back against the wall and sent a text to his friend to let him know he didn’t plan to stick around. He happened to glance up while he was typing away, and over on the other side of the room a young woman on the dance floor locked eyes with him. She was a pretty European-looking woman, a tall one, and she had obviously been doing a lot of dancing; her long hair was plastered down from the exertion. When their eyes met, she smiled and reached out one hand to playfully crook her finger at him.
    He laughed to cover up the fact that he didn’t know what she was doing. But he figured it must be some sort of joke and the cool thing to do was to nod, give a knowing laugh, and drop out of the moment.
    He went back to texting and hit Send, but that was as far as discipline could take him—he had to look again just to see what was going on with the tall, sweaty dancer. Surely by now she would be casting her attention in some other direction.
    Their eyes locked again.
    This time she laughed and swirled her whole arm in a sweeping gesture, “commanding” him to cross the room to her. This was a new one for him. It seemed clear she wanted a dance partner. Unfortunately, Erik had spent thirty-one years learning to accepthimself as a guy who will never tear up a dance floor unless somebody tosses him a crowbar and a hammer.
    But there wasn’t any reason not to go over and find out if the tall dancer with the pretty face was serious about wanting to talk or dance or whatever. She seemed to radiate a playful sense of humor, and he was already curious to see what that might be about.
    •  •  •
    Jessica:
    It had been a tough evening so far. I was out to dinner with two friends from Nairobi, “chaperoning” them on a fix-up blind date. The guy, Evan, was an American artist who had done aid work in South Sudan, and Jen was a fellow teacher at the Rosslyn Academy. She was a lot of fun to hang around with, a real wild child when she was away from campus, and Evan seemed like a perfect fit for her unconventional personality.
    After the first five minutes it was clear my inspiration to put these two together was a disaster. Honestly, it was like they secretly planned out how badly they would fit together, finding themselves in agreement over almost nothing, with personality styles that caused each one to dissolve into dull indifference. There was no disguising their lack of chemistry; you could almost hear the air leaking out of the balloon.
    We decided to all go dancing. They wouldn’t have to deal with each other if they stayed on the dance floor with other partners and the music was too loud for conversation. We made our way over to Gypsy’s, where Jen and I liked to stop in on weekends and sometimes dance until three or four in the morning. We avoided the heavy drinking some expats fell into to disguise their feelings of being out of place, but a night of dancing was a great way to blow off steam.
    As soon as we got there Jen and Evan both