Page 49 - WTP Vol. IX #10

off the old men and the folks like me who would soon be old men. For now, though, the couple was alone in their vibrant sociality. They bubbled up between the quiet regulars, the perfect pairing for the lively gusts that rocked the trees beside them.
Usually, I made a point to leave the bistro before the young people showed up. I liked the place best in
the mornings and with coffee. I liked to watch the steam sway over the top of my cup and warm my chin while I made notes in my sketchbook: add fleece here, fringe along the sleeves, etc. Sometimes, on weekdays, I was the first person to show up, to have a cup of coffee before I hurried off to sell fast-fashion at the retail store where I was a clerk. On my days
off, though, I’d have an Irish coffee or a beer out on the patio, trying to remember how it felt to draw a skirt hanging on a woman’s hips, on the actual bones. I would sketch and erase until the early afternoon. Then I would go home and sleep until my wife came home from her job at the laundromat. We stayed in fashion that way. I put new clothes on people, and she got those clothes cleaned up and ready for an- other round of wear.
“What are you thinking?”
The boy was leaning over his lunch, resting his chin in his palm, no sign of a belt-ridged belly like mine. The girl had taken off the sunglasses and was staring back at him with a teasing smile, an I-know-a-secret smile. I heard their voices over the street traffic and the drawn-sword sounds of silverware. I saw the col- or in their cheeks burning with the coming possibili- ties. I hadn’t yet been married when I’d last asked my wife about her thoughts. In fact, I’d nearly forgotten about the whole universes that were exploding and turning in on themselves in the soft matter beneath her skull. At some point, I’d begun to categorize her answers by their nearness to my coming gratifica- tion, and I found little use for any real thoughts she might have had. Are we all so willing to lose the eter- nal thrill of discovery to dusty habits wrapped in a pawnshop word like “love,” to go on unmoved by the explosions in our so-called “lovers’” heads?
“I think you can take a guess,” the girl said.
Her boy bit his lip. The both of them smiled, un- haunted. Soon, I was settling up for my drinks and hobbling out to my car with the bolt of wool under my arm, cursing the hormonal ease of the first-date conversation. People, especially young people, often say that it is hard to talk to prospective partners, but when we are young, it is about the most natural thing we can do. Our bodies are warm and full of butter-
flies, our minds quick, focused, ready to fire. One day, however, we wake up with a stillness in our chests, and from that day onward, we must dig up every careful word for our partners, must make promises beyond our genitalia, if there are any promises left to make. The instinctual gives way to the mathematical, and there is no solution without its proof.
~
I did not drive home from the bistro. My stomach was burning with drink. The couple’s infectious sense
of discovery had me feeling brave and open to the world outside my couch, where my wife was certainly already watching something I wouldn’t understand.
I drove to a craft store, clicking the white stripes on the highway with my teeth as I struggled to keep my steering proper. Hot-faced, I kept the appearance of virginal sobriety. The craft store was part of a strip mall, the sort of place whose name had, when I was
a child, evoked a sense of sexuality—a “strip” mall, a place for stripping. I was in my teens before I learned that a strip mall was actually another concrete tumor of our consumptive need to buy, a place for the stores that could not afford the rent of the indoor, stripless malls. I was in my twenties before I had any idea
of what that actually meant in any material, social sense. I was in my thirties before I paid to watch anyone strip.
The row of shops at the strip mall was all dim lights and shuttered windows, cut hours and layoffs on ac- count of a market crash and low evening sales, hardly the glut of sexiness I would have imagined as a child. Nothing would be open “after dark.” The craft store itself would close in twenty minutes, according to
the sign on the door. The part-time staff had already pulled the plug on the neon letters that hung behind the front window. Still, a handful of cars (most of which likely belonged to those employees anxious
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