Page 37 - WTP Vol. VIII#2

Dipper was upside down.
If I let her in, she’ll be in for the duration, until Ian gets home. And who knows what “forty-five minutes” re- ally means? In South Africa, if someone says they’ll be coming over “just now,” that could mean an hour or two.
And if I leave her out there, does that not make me an incredible asshole?
After a fruitless effort of trying to read, I finally got up, went to the fridge and pulled out one of the bottles of rosé I’d bought that afternoon on the way home from the train stop. I grabbed two plastic drinking glasses from the metal cabinet above the sink. Checking to make sure the door keys were
still in my pocket, I walked out with the wine and glasses.
“Ian said your name is Celeste? Is that right?”
She whipped her head around quickly, like I’d shined a flashlight in her face. “Is he here?”
“No. No, I...we spoke on the phone. He’s coming just now.”
And the wonderful thing about just now is that it lets you off the hook. It is understood that one doesn’t ask for specifics after just now, and she did not. Instead, her eyes followed the wine bottle as I set it on the wall between us. I offered one of the glasses to her.
“Thanks,” she murmured.
We drank in silence for a couple of minutes while below us in Fish Hoek Bay, the harbor lights began to come on one by one. A boat horn wailed in the distance.
“You’re American.”
I couldn’t tell whether it was a question or an obser- vation. She still made no eye contact, preferring to gaze over the branches of the fig trees at the darken- ing sky.
“Yeah. Here visiting for a few weeks. And you live in town?”
She took a gulp of the wine and wiped her nose on her sleeve. There was a smell about her – sour sweat and unwashed hair.
“Oh, me? Yes, another denizen of Cape Town. We are legion. Did you know him in New York?”
“Yeah.”
“You don’t look it. You’ve a kind of wholesome, farm- girl look about you.” And for the first time she re- ally looked at me, sideways, her eyes razor focused through the limp hair.
“Well, I didn’t grow up there.”
“And he didn’t grow up, period.”
I had to laugh at that. It was mean, but it had some truth to it. It was what was behind all of our stupid fights, my disappointment in him, how he could never be a real boyfriend.
But then, if you’d never been a real couple you could never have a real breakup, and of course, here I was, proof of that syllogism. In South Africa for a month. How else could I have ever done it? I think all these thoughts as I finish my glass of rosé, wishing I was upwind of my strange drinking partner.
“You’ll never know him the way I do, you know.”
She blurted out this declaration, punctuating it by plunking her glass down on the stone wall, level-
ing me with a piercing look that left me in no doubt that she knew exactly all my thoughts. Just then, I glimpsed the plastic bag she’d been holding, and in it, a flash of yellow and green.
“Is that...a bird?”
Her eyes dropped to her lap, and she lifted the bag and held it up before her, regarding the dead para- keet, its pink feet drawn up neatly to its breast.
“Sammy. I had him for five years. Don’t know what he died of. It was sudden. I left Ian a bunch of messages. He never got back to me. I figure it was just too... abstract for him, you know? It’s important to make death real, don’t you think? Confront it head-on.”
All the while, she was holding the bag at eye-level, turning it over and over in her hands, the tiny, folded cylinder of the bird rotating as if on a rotisserie. The muscles of my face felt frozen in place. I couldn’t have said anything if I’d wanted to.
Then, thank God, came the crunch of Ian’s car tiles on the gravel drive.
“I’ll leave the bottle,” I said, and made my way back into the house.
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