Janet Mitchell.
That had to be Ms. Lonesome. I don’t want company. I don’t want to talk. I just want to be left alone. She wouldn’t share her living space with anyone, male or female. Not her.
So now he knew her name and where she lived. Janet Mitchell, 2391 48th Avenue, Apartment 2-B, San Francisco. And what good was this information? What could he do with it? It was irrelevant, really. The questions that mattered to him were inaccessible, closely guarded inside her glass shell.
Who was Janet Mitchell? What had made her the way she was?
The prospect of never knowing was like a splinter at the edge of his mind.
June became July, July became August. Ms. Lonesome continued to come to the Harmony every night, without fail. Continued to eat the same dinner and to speak to no one except her waitress. She grew thinner, more gaunt — or so it seemed to Messenger. As if the hamburger patty and tomato and lettuce garnish and fruit cup were the only meal she ate each day. Or could afford to eat? He didn’t think that was the case. She must have some money; her clothes were not shabby and her apartment, even in that old stucco building, must cost at least $800 a month. No appetite for food: no appetite for life. A woman who simply did not care anymore.
He tried to stop himself from making the Harmony his only source of supper, managed at one point to stay away for three consecutive evenings. But she kept drawing him back, like an iron filing to a piece of magnetized iron. He didn’t try to approach her again. He didn’t follow her again. All he did was show up between six-thirty and seven and eat one of the specials and watch her eat her meal — and wonder.
Obsessive behavior. Unhealthy. He knew it, chafed at it, but couldn’t seem to free himself from it. The one saving grace was that his obsession was mild, low-grade; away from the Harmony, at work or alone in his apartment, he thought about her only now and then, for brief moments; he lost no sleep over her. But it worried him just the same. His was not an obsessive-compulsive personality; nothing like this had ever happened to him before. It was even more frustrating because he couldn’t understand what it was inside him that made him react to a stranger in this fashion. Their only common bond was loneliness, and yet hers, so acute and evidently self-destructive, repelled him as much as it fascinated him.
One clear Saturday afternoon he went walking on Ocean Beach, something he often did for exercise and because he enjoyed the sea air and the company of young lovers and children, the exuberance of dogs chasing sticks thrown into the surf. On the way home he caught himself taking a detour that brought him past Ms. Lonesome’s building on Forty-eighth Avenue. Would she be there, shut up inside her apartment, on a bright, sunny day like this? Yes, he thought, unless she works Saturdays. If she even has a job. What kind of job would a woman like Janet Mitchell be able to hold?
While he was thinking this, he stepped into the foyer and laid his finger against the bell button above her mailbox. But he didn’t press it. He stood for almost a minute touching the button and not pressing it. Then he swung around, stiff-shouldered, and walked away without looking back.
What could he say to her? Please tell me your troubles, I’m a good listener, I know what it’s like to be hurt and lonely, too? No. No. There was nothing he could say, no words to help or comfort her.
All he could offer Ms. Lonesome was more loneliness.
What did he have, really, to offer anyone?
Name: James Warren Messenger. (“I hope you never bring me any bad news,” a joking client had said to him once, “because then I’d have to kill you. You know — kill the Messenger?”)
Age: 37
Height: 6 feet
Weight: 178 pounds
Eyes: Brown
Hair: Brown
Distinguishing features: None
Distinguishing physical characteristics: None
Background: Born in Ukiah, a small town a hundred miles north of San Francisco. Father owned a hardware store, mother worked in a bakery. Both dead now. Both missed, but not deeply so; it hadn’t been a close-knit family unit. No siblings. Average childhood, but none of his boyhood friendships had survived his moving away to attend college. No high points in those first eighteen years. No low points, either. And therefore few memories and fewer conversation pieces.
Marital status: Divorced. The marriage had lasted seven months seventeen years ago, while he and Doris were students at U.C. — Berkeley. “It just isn’t working, Jimmy,” she’d said to him one night. “I think we’d better end it right now, before things get any worse between us.” Not long after they separated, he found out she’d been sleeping with a prelaw member of the track team for more than three months.
Employment: Certified public accountant with Sitwell & Cobb, Business and Personal Financial Consultants, Income Tax Preparation and Strategy.
Length of employment: 14 years
Annual salary: $42,500
Possibility for advancement: Nil
Interests: Jazz, all kinds, with a slight preference for the old New Orleans style — stomps, rags, cannonballs, blues — of Armstrong, Morton, Ellington, Basie, Kid Ory, Mutt Carey. Reading, broad range of subjects. Old movies on tape. Travel. (He had never been farther east than Salt Lake City, farther north than Seattle, farther south than Tijuana. Someday he hoped to visit Hawaii. And the Far East. And Europe.)
Hobbies: Collecting old jazz records. Building a comprehensive private jazz library.
Activities: Occasional outings to one of the Bay Area jazz clubs, and a long weekend every other year at the Monterey Jazz Festival. Occasional baseball games at Candlestick and the Oakland Coliseum (though the recent greed-based strikes had pretty much destroyed his enthusiasm for the game). Walks on the beach. Running (but he didn’t do that much anymore because of his knees).
Special skills: None
Future prospects: None
Mr. Average. Mr. Below Average.
Mr. Blue Lonesome.
August melted into September. And on the third Sunday of that month, Ms. Lonesome didn’t come to the Harmony for supper.
Messenger waited until a quarter past eight, drinking too much coffee and watching the door. Her failure to show up bothered him much more than it should have. Maybe she was ill; there had been a strain of Asian flu going around the city. Or maybe she’d gotten sidetracked somehow. In any case it was nothing for him to get worked up about, was it?
She didn’t come the next night.
Or the next.
Or the next.
He was concerned by then. Relieved and concerned at the same time. He didn’t want her in his life, yet he’d allowed her to become a small part of it — a part that he missed. Eating his supper at the Harmony was not the same without her. In some perverse way her absence made that segment of his day emptier, more lonely.
He wondered if she was ever coming back. For reasons of her own she might have decided to eat her evening meal elsewhere. She might have moved to another part of the city or another city altogether. Suddenly here, suddenly gone... didn’t that hint at a transient existence? Lonely people didn’t always stay in one place. Sometimes need and restlessness turned them peripatetic. She hadn’t seemed to be looking for anything — just vegetating. But maybe he’d misread her and she’d been biding her time, waiting to end her suffering in some other place. Waiting to find a new beginning.