His laughter, which began on the page, bubbled then out of his scalp, tumbled down the spiral tangles of his hair, and fell again onto his handwritten manuscript. A young woman watched him working from behind a cash register, drawn in by the life cycle of his rapture. On that evening he had finished his book, a collection of short stories, right there in front of her. At precisely the time the café closed, she walked over to clean off the table next to him, and she watched as he wrote and underlined his final word. The rolling scratch of his pen felt like the end of a great society or natural disaster. Then he waited to read her his work. Ignoring the closing announcement, he hid between the chairs until her laughter gave his position away. Then he waited outside to read her the story he had been telling her about at the cash register all night. As she walked out, she wondered what she would do if it was terrible. Two sentences in she was certain she would never be the same. A complete stranger. The love of her life was the written word, and this man had charmed the written word away from her, making it at once alien and more attractive for its infidelity. Today, however, he was simply reading a book.
Every thirty minutes or so, he would leave his small table and come to her for another small hot water to steep his own tea in. Then, while his tea steeped, he would roll himself a cigarette, adding his own filters and carefully sealing the thin paper with just the tip of his tongue. The young woman would watch him intently, behind the ungainly machine that dispensed the espresso, as he rolled cigarettes for himself. While he went outside and smoked, she imagined that he leaned against the brick building with one leg on the ground, the other on the wall, letting curls of smoke up into the rainy night. She kept an eye on his book, his bag and his hat with the feather, lest they be stolen, as they sat and waited for him to return.
The other girls asked her, between customers, what was going on with that finance major, did he call? Well yes, he had called. And he said…I don’t remember what he said, but it was all about going to bed. He could make the weather report into a crude suggestion, but that was not the kind of thing she was after. She wanted to live up to the notion that humans are such stuff as dreams are made on, but with the finance major she was just a wet dream. Once he’d had her in the dark and then seen her in the daylight, she knew he’d never call again. Or at least, a part of her hoped that he wouldn’t. She had been sucked into his life, somehow, willingly, but now couldn’t escape until he got what he wanted. He wanted a mother figure.
Enter, once more, the writer, and she would stop talking about the finance major. He walked into the café as though he had just walked off of the tip of Fitzgerald’s pen. His walk would strike her every time, every step. It was confident without pretention. His feet landed on the ground exactly where he meant them to, but it seemed he would be delighted should they decide to go off on their own. He smiled at her as he went by. She was hooked. Ever since she had heard his story. A complete stranger. And perhaps he was the devil. Perhaps, like he had told her over tea, the devil didn’t want us to do what we did. He would present two options and let us decide. And we would invariably fuck it up.
And so the options were presented to her, one afternoon.
She brought the finance major into the café. He was out of work and “taking time off” from school. She was trying to help him get a job. She bought him coffee. She saw him, that writer, sitting reading the first page of the same book she’d sworn she’d seen him read last week. She leaned in, and tapped his shoulder. He disentangled his headphones and sat up straight, taking in the barista and the finance major. He quickly outcharmed the charmer, as devils often do, and the two men sat down on either side of her. Her knees were touching them both, and her heart was desperately trying to escape through the hinge of her right leg. There was a beehive in her head.
“I say you take the year off! You’re twenty, you live in America, you shouldn’t have to work. Read the classics, learn a language, draw up the ultimate business plan. But then, I have a rather humanistic worldview. I think you should just live.” With his final word to the banker, the writer took out his tobacco, paper, and filters to roll himself another cigarette. She finally got to see the process up close. From her seat she could smell the tobacco, and she watched him seal the first cigarette. He noted her interest, and rolled a second.
“Are you going to smoke two?” The finance major inquired.
“No. She is going to join me outside on a lovely day for a cigarette.”
And she did, leaving a flabbergasted finance major in the café behind her. She went out the door and down the escalator with the writer. Would it be overdone to say that she was drawn to him like a magnet, powerless to do anything but follow him? It would be too overdone.
He lit one cigarette in his mouth and passed it to her, then lit his own, as they went out the revolving door. She didn’t want to smoke, she protested, so he told her to hold it for a while and talk with him. He didn’t stand the way she had imagined, but she found that she did herself. He stood with his back to the wind; his tangled black hair like the halo of a saint around his young, medieval face.
“I’m sad that you’re moving to Colorado. But I’m very glad that I met you. Is that strange to say?” She felt a surge of honesty as she realized this may be her only time spent alone with that man who had captivated her so very quickly.
“No, I hear that a lot.”
“I used to hear that a lot, when I was more interesting.” She mused to herself.
“You are uninteresting? Then why have I brought you out here? Why did I bother to steal you away from your date?” he joked.
“I’m not interesting to myself anymore, I suppose.”
“You seem to hold what’s-his-name’s interest.” His comment knocked her off guard.
“Derek? He’s a finance major.”
“So this means?
“I’m not certain that I want to hold his interest. He doesn’t thrill me. And he’s not interested in me, he just wants to have sex with anything that moves.”
“On those lines, do you know what would be interesting? It would be interesting to spend time alone with you before we head our separate ways. What time is it? Six? We could have only a few hours at the most, forty-five minutes at best. But I would still love to see what you are like in bed.”
He reached out and took the second cigarette from her, putting both in his mouth and smoking them together, one in each corner of his mischevious smile. She imagined him, then, as the modern incarnation of her idol, William Shakespeare. He had it all down. There was the sly smile, the way with words. The look of the creative genius. The beautiful face. The unassuming charm. All that she imagined Shakespeare to be was standing in front of her, wanting one night with her with no strings attached. Not even one night; wanting an hour! Wanting one city to offer the perfect farewell rather than urban indifference.
“I’ll tell you what,” he said, “I’ll meet you here at eight thirty. If I don’t get here by nine, I couldn’t make it.”
As they went back inside, her hands were shaking. She was fired up, her every emotion exploding onto her face.
“You’re going to have to calm down a bit before we get back to your date.”
“I can fake anything. I’m an actress.”
“You act?”
“I write plays. How could I do that without experience?”
They made this the new topic of conversation. In they went. And fake it, she did. The writer left with his sometimes lover, who stopped by to pick him up. Their last brief outing before he took off, no doubt. His history with her entranced the girl in the café. This woman, who he was now merely entangled with, had his baby nearly five years ago. They named their daughter Miranda. Miranda, after the daughter of Prospero in Shakespeare’s The Tempest. This was the café girl’s favorite piece of writing, and her heart skipped a beat when she learned he had named his child Miranda. It was Miranda who, upon seeing a man for the first time, uttered, “Oh brave new world that has such people in it!” and fell in love eternal on the spot. Who, through a life banal and limited, was ever enchanted. What a vision to have for his daughter. However, the couple who adopted her renamed her Kate. Shakespeare’s shrew. The girl was as disgusted as the writer must have been upon hearing this. The finance major merely nodded, as if to say, “Well yes, adoptive parents rename babies.” Fool.
The girl went home with her finance major. She had dinner with him, and the clock ticked closer and closer to eight thirty. She thought about how to make him go away, how to tell him that she would rather spend three hours with the writer than all night with him. She thought about saying, “Derek, I know you want to sleep with me tonight, but truly, there is a man waiting for me who stimulates my mind. I have to go to him now. Hate me if you will.” She thought about saying, “I have to do a lot of work tonight. Perhaps we had best do this next week.” Most of all, she thought about saying, “Please go away.” But she didn’t do any of this.
“I have to go back to the café and check my schedule for next week, I can’t believe I didn’t check it when I was there earlier!” And Derek volunteered to go with her. He was persistent, he was determined to have sex with her that night, and she knew that was his only intent. And yes, that was the writer’s only intent, too. They were no different in what they offered. Identical choices it would seem. But then, if the choices had been identical, she wouldn’t have been able to make the wrong one.
