She asked if she could join me at the square table and left her tan leather backpack on a chair when I nodded. This gave me time to ponder how pleasant and beautiful she was, in a flower-print dress cinched at the waist, then billowing out and down to her shin. Her attention puzzled me, but I figured she preferred to have company, any company, rather than sit and eat alone in a dining hall that was practically deserted. She introduced herself as Lucy when she came back.

“Do you know what your schedule is at the museum yet?” she asked. “You’re in the Development Office, right?”

It turned out that Lucy was an art history major who worked at the Conservation department and had seen me at my work-study job.

I apologized for not recognizing her, made an excuse about being too absorbed in my thoughts when I was walking around. We started discussing our favorite pieces at the museum, and I told her about encountering a map of the London Tube as part of a show called “What, If Anything, Is an Object?” and how it shifted my perspective on art’s function, how works that we officially designate as art are more like models for a larger world that was full of art, rather than rarefied and separate from that world. I noticed how I sounded like I knew what I was talking about, how I’d absorbed lessons from my classes and my museum job, ideas I would not have been exposed to back home, as I spoke in a borrowed language that once again felt incongruous and new. Lucy’s attentiveness confirmed my inkling that I, offhand, had said something smart and that she looked forward to more conversations with me.

After a few minutes, an ebullient friend of Lucy’s named Omiyinka came by, standing next to our table while she sipped a mug of coffee. She seemed so relaxed in our world even though she was black, and I wondered whether she hid her alienation like me. But unlike me, Omiyinka was beautiful, waifish with a long neck and delicate features that pleasantly contrasted with her boisterous personality, her voice echoing against the walls in that cavernous space. Lucy and Omiyinka left together to go about their day, but over time, they became regular meal companions, along with other beautiful women like Dana Gotlieb, Asia Goodwyn, Danielle Sherrod, as if a single year of college made me eligible enough as a fabulous gay man to have them as friends.