Dec 09, 2006 23:36
As she sank into the seat across from me, her face slowly settled down between her shoulders, gliding side to side as she hunched forward, toward me, into me. She began to talk, her voice flowing smoothly back out over the ice in her scotch, three glances back and forth across the table for every once raised up to me. Nervous movements of her hands, flittings in and around her glass, to her hair, tracing the table, became a cigarette became a second scotch became a hand on my hand, in my hand.
She spoke, more often than not, into her glass, the fullness of her voice growing even more rounded. And when she lifted herself out of her drink, every time, her lips pursed together as if holding in some great flood, only to fizzle out in a long exhalation through a nose that never flared, never quivered, never drew any undue attention away from her lips and from her eyes. And oh, those eyes, two yawning earthen pits drilled deep into her head, beginning with the brown just below the grass and ending in a black only to be found on Great Expeditions. I always found, looking back, that I remembered the way that her eyelids moved, lazily, like they weren't particularly worried about anything, far more than I remembered her words, poetic as they seemed to me in the moment.
Across the table, and I could still feel the skin wrapped to her spine, the softness of her skin tight over the bone, my fingers running up one side and down the other. I could see, out the corner of my mind's eye, her skirt twisting clock-, counter-, clock- around her thighs, with the most bewitching upswing at the apogee of each turn. Across the table, and I knew she was thinking about her drink, about her day, about anything but my hand on her back, helping her into the car on the way here. But what could be done? Nothing to be done, nothing to do, nothing to change the situation or make myself more relevant.
And that was the sad truth of it all, that what I lacked was not appeal, was not that je ne sais quoi that draws a woman to a man. I lacked relevance. I was not appropriately timed, positioned or connected. I simply did not matter in any of the ways that now concerned her in her search for suitable companionship. I had thought, mistakenly, that she was looking for a suitable companion, but her words made plain the impossibility of a suitable companion, in a total sense. All that she could or would hope for lay in the companionship, itself.
Her hair fell, as it so often did, across her eyes, across her lips, against the curve of her glass. Her fingers, fore- and middle, joined together as if one, pulled back at the hair, caressing a line up her cheekbone and behind her ear. Up and over, all the way round, and then back down her jaw, her fingers tracing lines everywhere that, connected, constituted a line drawing I can still see sketched on the red behind my eyelids if I concentrate. I loved her in that moment, her eyes closed just before opening, like light is about to be spread out over the world, rolling over field by field and spilling into the valleys.
That light will come. The world will burst into flame, the trees will burn their brightest greens, and her eyes will shine with two white squares reflected on the surface. Lips will break out across those bright, white boxes in a smile that will warm a cold nose and two cold ears and the only tragedy is that the cold nose and two cold ears will not be mine. So I carry chap stick in my pocket, and mittens and a scarf and a woolen toboggan, and I wear a warm coat when I go out. And someday I will find someone whose smile will warm my own. I only wish that I already had.