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By Christina Kovac
It was a bright, clear day—too warm for November. There
was a breeze coming off the river, waving tree branches and rustling what
was left of the leaves. Chubby brown birds sang from the low rooflines and
the tops of gas street lights lining the historic streets. Katherine was
having a late breakfast on the patio of her favorite café, an elegant old
dump that called itself antique and offered a high tea service that no one
ordered anymore. A brick wall enclosed the little patio. You couldn't see
the café itself unless you came looking for it and, even then, you had to
circle that brick wall until you found the gated arbor and pushed through
it and then you were in.
The café owner brought her coffee the way she liked it—no
cream, no sugar, nothing to dilute the hot bitter blackness. He stood over
her a moment, as if waiting for her to look up, and when she didn't, he shuffled
away. She reached into her handbag, inhaling the rich smell of expensive
leather, and she pulled out the Post. She hid behind it but did not
read the words. Her mug of coffee sat untouched.
The sun went behind a cloud, and in the darkening light she
lifted her sunglasses and saw a man lounging at the table across from her.
He didn't seem to belong, she thought, nor did he seem to care. He wore faded
jeans, white at the knees. Mud covered his boots. He was picking off little
pieces of bread from a half-eaten sandwich and throwing them into a riot of
birds. She watched the arc of his arm, the rolled-up shirt sleeve rising
over his tanned muscular forearm. His brown hair lifted in the breeze. He
leaned back into the laziness of the moment, and she noticed there was a long
leanness to him.
She put her sunglasses on again and tried to read. She thought
about the distance between herself and the man. It did not seem so far.
In the arrogant way of women who were born beautiful, she knew without caring
that men still looked at her. She had only to lift her sunglasses and smile
and he would turn to her.
She wondered how young he was. It didn't matter so much,
but he did look young. In his late 20s maybe. It was preposterous,
though, the idea of that man. She tried to think about what she had to lose,
but there was still the blur of travel and the noise of the campaign still
echoing in her head. All of those long months on the filthy fatiguing road,
living like a vagabond for God's sake, all of it for nothing. It had been
her candidate’s race to lose, everyone had promised her, and then he had lost,
making her the loser too. Losing was something she had never considered,
and yet it had happened. Somehow she had lost. Sitting in the bright sunlight
watching the man with his outstretched legs, she realized she no longer cared.
There was something clean and strong about his profile, the
line of his nose, his brows drawn together, a shade against the sun. He had
a beautiful face, she thought, and then she tried to recall her husband’s
face. She pawed through her handbag, and pulling out her wallet, she spilled
a pile of business cards across the iron table top. She found no pictures.
She dug deeper into the slit in the center of her wallet and she found it.
It was a silly thing to laminate, she thought, all of those
years ago, when she was still thrilled to see her name in print. She had
read the elegant words of her wedding announcement countless times, could
recite them from memory, but she had never paid much attention to the picture.
Her thumb covered her husband’s image as she studied herself. All of her
features were there, the dark hair darker and the pale skin paler in newspaper
ink. She was leaning forward in an aggressive way. She looked young. No,
she looked vacuous.
She moved her thumb and studied the image of her husband.
His blonde hair had already started thinning. His features were blurred.
There was nothing really there, except that tuft of hair and that round chin.
She had never noticed his chin before. That was one weak chin. Hadn’t her
friends called him attractive and successful? Maybe just successful. She
could not remember him looking this way. Why, he’s ugly.
If there was any fault, it must have been the little blue
box. She remembered that night, how he had asked her to meet him, and how
she had thought he had a story to give her, although he had never given her
a story, not in public. She had gone to the restaurant on top of the building
overlooking the river and the monuments and the bright white city beyond.
She dropped his name to the hostess and watched the recognition in the woman's
face and then waited for him at the bar. She had always liked the way people
noticed him, whispering, is that him? She liked standing there waiting
for him and then the proprietary way he had kissed her cheek, casually bringing
his stature to her.
Out on the terrace the panorama of city lights had seemed
to her full of dizzying possibilities. That summer night had been warm and
close and she had imagined reaching out and scooping those city lights in
the cups of her hands and gulping them down. She had not been able to speak
for the wanting of it all. She turned absently back to him and saw him fumbling
with the suit jacket tossed over his arm. There were tiny beads of sweat
along his forehead. It’s not that hot, she had thought, and then she
watched him pull a small, pale-blue box out of his jacket pocket. She knew
it was the shortcut to it all, and she imagined pulling the end of the white
satin ribbon and the bow unraveling and everything she had ever wanted pouring
out of the box and onto her lap.
He had held the box out to her and then she wasn’t looking
at the box. It was his thin pink hand above her hand. His was smaller.
She recoiled and heard his quick intake of breath and saw his face flush and
become blotchy before it shuttered.
That blotchy look had always nagged at her. She did not
see it again until years later. He had worn that face when he grabbed her
in the doorway as she was leaving for one of her many trips.
“People tell me how lucky I am to be married to you,” he
had said. She could tell he wanted to slap her.
“You’ve always gotten what you wanted." She remembered
then to embrace him. “It’s quite a trick you have.”
“Yeah,” he had said, “some trick.”
She shoved the wedding announcement into the bottom of her
handbag.
She thought instead about her big house with its yellow pine
floors that creaked under her footsteps and about her sitting room at the
top of the house with its window seat overlooking the river. She thought
about her clothes and her car and his job that helped her job. She thought
about the weekend routine of Saturday night parties and late Sunday masses
and the brunches with mimosas and four-dollar coffees and the newspaper and
the lazy afternoons still reading and laughing about the people they knew.
She thought about all of the comfort she could fall back into, if only she
could stop looking at the man with the dirty boots. Maybe she could have
both.
He turned to her with an apologetic look. She lifted her
glasses.
“I asked if the birds bother you.”
"The birds don't bother me." She could not read
his smile. Now that it was actually happening, she felt confused.
“You seem like a woman easily bothered.” He laughed at his
little joke she didn’t get, and now she was really confused about whether
or not this was happening with him, and she could already hear the anecdote
he’d tell his friends. I met this woman in that café by the river in Old
Town, this woman who was easily bothered…
She saw, before he did, a short, curvy woman standing under
the arbor at the entrance of the café. The woman stood in the full bright
sunlight catching her breath and watching him. There was something very beautiful
about her face that was not beautiful at all. His sister, she wondered,
and then no, not his sister. He scraped his chair back and moved quickly
across the stone patio. He lifted the woman, one hand under her wide bottom
and the other supporting her neck, and he spun her around so that her legs
arched back. Her mouth cut through the swing of her dirty blond hair.
It was disgraceful, this public display, this groping and
grabbing in the middle of the courtyard in front of all of these people, and
the woman not even beautiful. He lowered the woman gently to the ground and
rubbed his cheek against hers, and then he put his hand on her stomach. Her
own stomach clenched. I want that, Katherine thought, before she could
edit herself.
She stood on wobbly heels and walked out of the courtyard
and onto the street. Her bag was heavy. Her silk jacket felt too tight.
The sunlight warmed her dark hair, and she squinted, realizing dimly she had
left her sunglasses on the table. The hell with her sunglasses. She’d buy
a hundred new pairs of glasses or not buy a thing. She’d squint all the way
down King Street and wrinkle and let her skin burn to hell. She had earned
her wrinkles. Let them come.
A red cab stopped at the street corner for her. She considered
for a moment, and then she waved the driver on. Her heel jammed into a crack
in the brick sidewalk and she pulled off her Italian leather pumps, letting
each tight toe crack into the stretch on the cool, rough bricks. She felt
the theater of city life moving around her. A northerly wind swept up the
street, carrying with it the scent of the river, all of the mucky smells of
matter breaking down so that new matter could be born. She swallowed the
moist river air and tilted her face to the sun. The gulls gliding over the
copper roof-tops, and she wondered where do I go from here?
Christina Kovac is a producer/assignment manager
at NBC News in Washington, D.C. and lives in Olney.
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