by PIA QUINTANO

Every time he saw the girl at Starbucks he thought he should talk to her, but he remembered his bad skin and thinning hair, and thought it unlikely that his status would improve over that of a stranger.

He loved the pooled caramel light of her hair across the back of her beige raincoat, the black tights and flat, ballet-like shoes. She sat in front of tall cups of latte, curling a strand of hair around her index finger or fidgeting with her hoop earrings. She always seemed to be there on Wednesdays, so he made it his business as well, although he had to remind himself that it had been a habit before he knew her. He went there after his last adult class each week, unwinding around total strangers who would be unlikely to ask him questions, unlike his endlessly curious students. He had seen her for the first time in March in a drizzle that pasted the windows with gray spots. She had stared in, at him, it seemed, and he thought he knew her. But when she walked in and shook herself out, he saw that her features were strange, as if she were a mix of different languages and habits which had somehow boiled themselves into a unified whole. He was uncertain what it was that caused him at first to think she was not pretty. Maybe she was simply a configuration that was unknown to him. His students were mostly older women, pinched, painted lips and eye makeup melting into their crow’s feet and fragile hair. They had become his orbit; he was powerless to dispute the authority of their images over all the others that ran through the city, for the others had nothing to do with him. The tiny rooms in the Village which he had shared with his wife before she miscarried and moved away, where he was the ruler over a kingdom of cockroaches and dirty plates, seemed to seal his separation from the rest of humanity as well.

When he first saw the girl, she seemed to him to be a mistaken traveler, into the outer rings of the solar system he inhabited. She sat at the counter in front of the window, and he watched the back of her, the bones that swelled in her neck when she pulled her long hair aside. Her hands were small and delicate, her face smooth and unformed as if no thoughts had hardened it.

He forgot about her after that first time but then saw her again the following Wednesday and again the next week. And he began to feel a kind of companionship with her—as if he were reaching out his arms from the loneliness of an unlisted planet and allowing her to enter its stratosphere—yet she kept out of reach. He watched her as she read paperbacks whose titles he couldn’t decipher. She looked like a student, yet she carried no textbooks, only a small black bag hanging from a thin strap on her shoulder. It rained every Wednesday, and each time she stood before the window, peering inside as if he and the other customers were the inhabitants of a zoo she couldn’t decide whether or not to visit. He studied her as she stood on line, the thin calves and small feet; she was completely beige and cloud colored. He sat at the counter where she might choose to join him, but she never used the vacant seats next to him. Fate was against him; a more private spot always seemed to open somewhere else.

Then, on the last Wednesday in March, with a sense of nothing left to lose, he picked up his cup and brazenly sat down next to her at the counter. She was looking straight ahead at the window, at the streams of drizzle running down it and he had an impulse to touch her face, clear the reflection of the water from her cheek. She didn’t look at him, but he could tell by the movements of her eyes that she had found him in her peripheral vision. He tried to drink as neatly as possible, to make only a slight interruption in the straight and unfettered line she kept. Her shoulders appeared narrowed and sloped and there was something fragile about the thinness of her neck. He wondered what thoughts were trapped within the smoothness of her skin. He didn’t attempt to talk to her.

In April, it rained heavily, and on the first Wednesday she came in and sat in the seat beside him at the counter. He felt himself blush and thought about the uselessness of his ideas, the things he was attempting to teach his class that beaded up on them and rolled away, the literature he would explain to them as if he were coaching them in the possible existence of unicorns. They had no talent for anything that wasn’t nailed down. It was as if by teaching them a work like Turn of the Screw he was asking them to become Satanists or sell their country homes to the state. She took a book out and he saw it was a popular novel, the kind he would never give his class, the kind having no “vertical life.” All the equations happened on the surface. She read steadily and then came up for air, poking her head up and looking out the window in front of her, then laying the book down and reaching for her coffee.

It was almost spring, and he was 45. He thought of himself as something damaged, which stood outside the seasons since he only piloted its ships and did not come to harbor with anyone he cared about. His wife had miscarried a deformed infant in the second trimester and in his grief over the unrealized baby for which they had bought crib and clothes, he saw in the girl something newborn and fresh, and into her image, he poured the spilled feelings of fatherhood and shame. He couldn’t sympathize with his wife because, on some level, he blamed her for the loss, not of the child but for the loss of the idea of the child in his head. When he looked at the girl, he saw no blame: something for which he felt no sympathy or regret. His mind embraced her as if she were something too special to have been born to them.

He cleared his throat. “Good book?”

She turned to him as if she had been poked, and he suddenly regretted having intruded into the space that had been established between them. But then her face softened a bit.

“So far. I haven’t finished it yet.”

Her voice was gentle and tan-colored like her face, as if it had been mixed on a beach with sand as fine as silk.

“I always ask because I teach literature, and I’m always curious about what people like in books.”

She seemed to be weighing what he said, not as if she didn’t believe him, but as though she were seeing inside, wondering how she should judge someone who played their card so soon.

“I don’t know what I like about books. I just like to read.”

The simplicity of her response endeared her to him. He noticed that she wore a delicate watch, with a thin gold band that hung on her narrow wrist like a bracelet.

“I like to read too but I forget that sometimes in teaching.”

She nodded. “I like to read,” she said again. “But I’ve never studied it.”

“No reason to,” he said. “If you have a natural instinct toward understanding it.”

“I think I do.” She seemed to tuck herself away, lifting her elbows up. For a moment, the view of her face was obscured.

“Are you a student?”

She looked at him as if she had momentarily forgotten his existence. She shook her head.

“No, I’m finished with school. I do websites. I wouldn’t want to be in school again.”

“I guess most people wouldn’t.”

“Except if they teach. I guess a teacher never really graduates.”

“No,” he said, trying to strangle a dry cough. “We retire…sometimes. If we don’t die first.” He looked at her and smiled.

“I guess it’s sort of a relief either way.”

She seemed to be drinking her coffee at a faster pace. He wondered if at any moment she would get up and leave. What would he do then? Would he look back over the last several weeks and see them as nothing but an illusion leading up to a disappointment? But she sat there still as if she were a child at a table waiting for a parent to dismiss her. He forgot he had a cup in his hand and spilled a bit on the counter, making a small puddle in front of him.

Finally, unable to bear the silence between them, he stood up.

“I guess I’ll move on,” he said.

“What direction are you walking in?”

“Seventy-seventh Street. I take the subway. The six.” The subway. The word was suddenly part of this new universe: there it lay in his mind, warm and long and eel-like. The subway. A lovely word.

She stood up, too, and followed him out. Once in the street, he saw that she meant to walk alongside him, and he was stupefied. They walked through the crowded drizzly streets that still didn’t feel like spring and talked about nothing. Her presence and his discomfiture seemed to take up all the space between them and the humidity made his mind feel as soft as cloth. Yet he was walking with her. The people who passed them took on a complementary glow. They were inside the dream.

When they reached seventy-seventh street, she waved goodbye and turned east. He walked down the subway steps, a person unlike the one who had gone down the same ones many times before. Once in the hot station, he took off his raincoat. The train took a long time to come. He didn’t care.

That night, he studied his face in the bathroom mirror. His hair was thinning but not gray. Still, the mirror wasn’t very clean.

The next Wednesday, he didn’t expect to see her, but she was there again at the counter, and like a mirage she waved to him. He hung his raincoat behind the chair next to her and then ordered his coffee, feeling his whole body vibrating slightly. When he returned to his seat, he saw that she had a book open: The Ballad of the Sad Café.

When he sat down, she closed it and turned to him.

“I think that poems are a great act of love,” she said. “Have you noticed that no one demonstrates that anymore. Young men are lazy.”

He didn’t stop to wonder why she was confiding in him. He only wondered why he was so suddenly blessed.

“Well, I don’t know that it’s lack of energy so much as lack of imagination.”

“That’s very sad,” she said. “But it doesn’t surprise me.”

“Imagination can be stimulated by reading. If young men are no longer reading books about romantic gestures, then they won’t know they are supposed to make them.”

“I guess not. But I didn’t read those things and I still know. By instinct.”

“That’s remarkable,” he said.

“I can always tell when something is missing. It just comes out as too pragmatic. Dry.”

“I’m surprised you would say that, considering that your work involves the computer.”

“It doesn’t mean I want my relationships to be pragmatic. Although sex is that way sometimes.” She seemed to get a little depressed. He was rubbing the rim of his coffee cup repeatedly, thinning out the streaks of coffee. If he kept up the same motion maybe the spell wouldn’t break. “I was always very romantic,” he said. “Probably frightened a few young ladies away.”

She brightened. “Did you? I think it’s better that way. I guess I was born in the wrong era.”

“All romantics feel that way,” he said, happy to join in her distress. “I certainly always felt that way about myself. It’s probably why I love literature so much. It isn’t just that it takes place in a past era, but people no longer seem made the same way emotionally. No one makes grand gestures anymore unless it’s shooting up a school.”

She nodded her head vigorously. He had noticed a bit of color rimming her cheeks.

“Why do you think it appeals to us so much?” she said. “The idea of romanticism?”

But that was a question he couldn’t answer because, looking at her, she seemed to him to be embodiment of the romantic ideal he had searched for his entire life. All the things he had felt and suffered so recently—grief, loss, meaninglessness—evaporated in her presence.

“I think you are here to teach me a lesson about life,” he said. Then he wished he could take it back.

“Maybe I should hide in books, too,” she said.

They left together a few minutes later. After walking a block, he stopped and, feeling suddenly very close to her, cut through the space between them and hugged her. She was so slender it reminded him of the time he had stooped down and picked up an injured sparrow from the sidewalk. He’d closed his hand around it and felt within his fingers the near possibility of breaking all its bones. It felt like he could break her, that he should apologize for the force he had applied, but they kept walking, and she left him at the subway. He wondered if he had offended her.

The following Wednesday, they arrived at Starbucks at the same time, and he felt exhilarated just entering the shop with her. They spoke of the book she had brought: La Vita Nuova, poems he practically knew by heart. It moved him incredibly that, because of him, she had bought a book of poetry. He had never felt that way about any of his students. In fact, the ones who really seemed to listen to him offended him most of all.

That day he waited only until they were outside the shop to hold her close to him and she shivered a bit in his arms. She took his hand, leading him past the subway when they reached Seventy-seventh Street, and he tried not to let it show in his gait that he had crossed a barricade in his life he had never passed before.

She led him to a shallow street east of Second Avenue, to a small walk-up on the edge of an inordinately ugly block, and up three flights of steel-rimmed steps to a small, dim apartment. Without turning on the light, she opened his coat and pressed herself against him. He felt like he was kissing a cloud, like he was touching an image that was retreating from him and yet he continued to do it, without the satisfaction of meeting flesh. She led him into the bedroom and undressed in front of him in the twilight. He did the same, slowly fumbling with his shirt buttons, belt, and zipper. He felt like he was inside a dream, his actions far away, his mind shrouded in mist.

He was unable to get an erection. It was as if his body refused to be stimulated by the slim perfection of her, her smooth pale limbs that asked no participation from him. He began to wonder if the nature of attraction were in the acknowledgement of incompleteness, of the need to add something to the imperfect. They lay side by side on her narrow bed and he looked at the shadows from the striated blinds on her torso. He saw that she was fragile as a bird fallen from the nest: tiny bones, transparent skin. He almost expected to see her heart beating visibly through her breast. She bent her body toward him and kissed him on his face and neck and he shuddered at the idea of her lips upon his pitted cheeks. He was aware that the smell of coffee wafted up from him and his hair was hanging in strands from his face, the moon gleaming off his bald spots and oily skin.

Finally, at midnight, unable to bear the sounds of his stomach growling into the quaint solitude of the room, he sat up. She was resting beside him, her eyes open and he saw in the perfection of her something distasteful, like the uncovering of the soft body of a snail inside a shell. He wondered if this was the beauty at the center of his books which he saw his students gnawing at like a bone. He was side by side with it and couldn’t reach into it, could barely hit against the image. He got out of the bed, and she bent toward him again, putting her fragile hand like a cold leaf against his back. He got dressed and left her coiled on the bed, her hair spread out like a palm leaf.

The next Wednesday, he stood outside the shop and saw that she was once again at the counter inside. Her thin fingers were around a book. He saw that for all her beauty she was vulnerable: there was something edgy and frightened inside of her that needed him. Perhaps he could go inside and sit there, finding in the harsh light an imperfection in her. Perhaps the desire would rage in him like a storm.

But he stood outside, unable to move, knowing that if she failed him that way, the ideas that had become the template for his existence would lose their meaning and pool into a cradle of grief at his feet.

Ω

Pia Quintano is a New York-based writer/painter who likes to explore the temporary atmospheres found by people who have recently endured a loss. Will it be a permanent state or is it providing only a transient peace? Her short stories have been published in Havik and Lunch Ticket.

Steve Zimmerman is a writer and photographer grown in Ohio, now rooted in the Pacific Northwest, finding outlets in literary and art journals such as the Evansville Review and the Bellingham Review, as well as gallery shows and the Tacoma Art Museum. More work available at szimages.photography.