“Yeah, well. I’m not all that.”
“Nobody’s ‘all that,’ not until they’re with somebody who thinks they are.” She pretends to check him out. “You might clean up pretty nice.”
“Excuse me,” says a voice behind them. “Can I solicit an opinion?”
A good-looking guy in his thirties wearing a suit and a loosened tie, his face an exotic sharp-cheekboned mixture of African and Asian heritage. He’s very drunk, weaving a little.
“My girlfriend… okay?” He glances back and forth between them. “I was supposed to meet her down…”
“No offense, but we’re having a conversation here,” Bobby says.
The guy holds his hands up as if to show he means no harm and offers apology, but then launches into a convoluted story about how he and his girlfriend missed connections and then had an argument over the phone and he started drinking and now he’s broke, fucked up, puzzled by everything. It sounds like the prelude to a hustle, especially when the guy asks for a cigarette, but when they tell him they don’t smoke, he does not—as might be expected—ask for money, but looks at Bobby and says, “The way they treat us, man! What are we? Chopped liver?”
“Maybe so,” says Bobby.
At this the guy takes a step back and bugs his eyes. “You got any rye?” he says. “I could use some rye.”
“Seriously,” Bobby says to him, gesturing at Alicia. “We need to finish our talk.”
“Hey,” the guy says. “Thanks for listening.”
Alone again, the thread of the conversation broken, they sit for a long moment without saying anything, then start to speak at the same time.
“You first,” says Bobby.
“I was just thinking…” She trails off. “Never mind. It’s not that important.”
He knows she was on the verge of suggesting that they should get together, but that once again the urge did not rise to the level of immediacy. Or maybe there’s something else, an indefinable barrier separating them, something neither one of them has tumbled to. He thinks this must be the case, because given her history, and his own, it’s apparent neither of them has been discriminating in the past. But she’s right, he decides—whatever’s happening between them is simply not that important, and thus it’s not that important to understand.
She smiles, an emblem of apology, and stares down into her drink. “Free Falling” by Tom Petty is playing on the box, and some people behind them begin wailing along with it, nearly drowning out the vocals.
“I brought something for you,” Bobby says.
An uneasy look. “From your work?”
“Yeah, but this isn’t the same…”
“I told you I didn’t want to see that kind of thing.”
“They’re not just souvenirs,” he says. “If I seem messed up to you… and I’m sure I do. I feel messed up, anyway. But if I seem messed up, the things I take from the pit, they’re kind of an explanation for…” He runs a hand through his hair, frustrated by his inability to speak what’s on his mind. “I don’t know why I want you to see this. I guess I’m hoping it’ll help you understand something.”
“About what?” she says, leery.
“About me… or where I work. Or something. I haven’t been able to nail that down, y’know. But I do want you to see it.”
Alicia’s eyes slide away from him; she fits her gaze to the mirror behind the bar, its too-perfect reflection of romance, sorrow, and drunken fun. “If that’s what you want.”
Bobby touches the half shoe in his jacket pocket. The silk is cool to his fingers. He imagines that he can feel its blueness. “It’s not a great thing to look at. I’m not trying to freak you out, though. I think…”
She snaps at him. “Just show it to me!”
He sets the shoe beside her glass and for a second or two it’s like she doesn’t notice it. Then she makes a sound in her throat. A single note, the human equivalent of an ice cube plinking in a glass, bright and clear, and puts a hand out as if to touch it. But she doesn’t touch it, not at first, just leaves her hand hovering above the shoe. He can’t read her face, except for the fact that she’s fixated on the thing. Her fingers trail along the scorched margin of the silk, tracing the ragged line. “Oh, my god!” she says, all but the glottal sound is buried beneath a sudden surge in the music. Her hand closes around the shoe, her head droops. It looks as if she’s in a trance, channeling a feeling or some trace of memory. Her eyes glisten, and she’s so still, Bobby wonders if what he’s done has injured her, if she was unstable and now he’s pushed her over the edge. A minute passes, and she hasn’t moved. The juke box falls silent, the chatter and laughter of the other patrons rise around them.
“Alicia?”
She shakes her head, signaling either that she’s been robbed of the power to speak, or is not interested in communicating.
“Are you Okay?” he asks.
She says something he can’t hear, but he’s able to read her lips and knows the word “god” was again involved. A tear escapes the corner of her eye, runs down her cheek, and clings to her upper lip. It may be that the half shoe impressed her, as it has him, as being the perfect symbol, the absolute explanation of what they have lost and what has survived, and this, its graphic potency, is what has distressed her.
The jukebox kicks in again, an old Stan Getz tune, and Bobby hears Pineo’s voice bleating in argument, cursing bitterly; but he doesn’t look to see what’s wrong. He’s captivated by Alicia’s face. Whatever pain or loss she’s feeling, it has concentrated her meager portion of beauty and suffering, she’s shining, the female hound of Wall Street thing she does with her cosmetics radiated out of existence by a porcelain Song of Bernadette saintliness, the clean lines of her neck and jaw suddenly pure and Periclean. It’s such a startling transformation, he’s not sure it’s really happening. Drink’s to blame, or there’s some other problem with his eyes. Life, according to his experience, doesn’t provide this type of quintessential change. Thin, half-grown cats do not of an instant gleam and grow sleek in their exotic simplicity like tiny gray tigers. Small, tidy Cape Cod cottages do not because of any shift in weather, no matter how glorious the light, glow resplendent and ornate like minor Asiatic temples. Yet Alicia’s golden change is manifest. She’s beautiful. Even the red membranous corners of her eyes, irritated by tears and city grit, seem decorative, part of a subtle design, and when she turns to him, the entire new delicacy of her features flowing toward him with the uncanny force of a visage materializing from a beam of light, he feels imperiled by her nearness, uncertain of her purpose. What can she now want of him? As she pulls his face close to hers, lips parting, eyelids half lowering, he is afraid a kiss may kill him, either overpower him, a wave washing away a tiny scuttler on the sand, or that the taste of her, a fraction of warm saliva resembling a speck of crystal with a flavor of sweet acid, will react with his own common spittle to synthesize a compound microweight of poison, a perfect solution to the predicament of his mortality. But then another transformation, one almost as drastic, and as her mouth finds his, he sees the young woman, vulnerable and soft, giving and wanting, the childlike need and openness of her.
The kiss lasts not long, but long enough to have a history, a progression from contact to immersion, exploration to a mingling of tongues and gushing breath, yet once their intimacy is completely achieved, the temperature dialed high, she breaks from it and puts her mouth to his ear and whispers fiercely, tremulously, “Thank you… Thank you so much!” Then she’s standing, gathering her purse, her briefcase, a regretful smile, and says, “I have to go.”
“Wait!” He catches at her, but she fends him off.