Then there was no money to take for a little while, and I lifted the gate and initialed the running total and wrote it down. She didn’t know what I was doing, and she thought maybe it had something to do with her. She said, “Am I doing it wrong, mister?”
I turned, kind of leaning around her, and looked into her girl eyes for the first time, girl eyes about eight or ten inches away. Strange color eyes, not brown, not green, some crazy bronze color in between. Something moved somehow behind her eyes, maybe like a second pair of eyes behind them, suddenly opening to look out at me. It is something happening, like the world turning over and stopping at an angle you didn’t know about. She had asked me something, and I didn’t know what she had asked me. “What did you say?”
“Just... I guess is everything okay?”
“Yes. It’s okay. Fine.”
Like being trapped there, like our eyes got caught somehow, and I couldn’t move away.
“Girlie,” a voice said, “you going to give me some change sometime today?”
So that broke it and I went away. And work went slow that day. I kept coming up with bad totals. Her eyes looked up at me out of the column of figures. The next day I went way out of my way to go back there to eat lunch, so it was an hour and fifteen minutes lunch instead of twenty minutes I always take. I didn’t know what I ate or how it tasted, from watching her. I waited until there was nobody ahead of me or behind me when I paid. I had the right money, but I gave her a ten to make it last longer being close to her.
“When,” I said. I didn’t know where to take it from there. “When do...” The words got clogged up. Some idiot.
“Four o’clock,” she said. “Across the street?”
She did not let me see her eyes. Her face was pink, sort of. And I went roaring through the rest of the accounts. God, I was fast. But not fast enough. Sixteen minutes after four when I got there, and I had to walk-run, walk-run the last blocks, leaving the cab that got tied up in a crosstown mess, all the horns yammering. She was gone, I knew. But she wasn’t. She stood a little shorter than I thought she’d be. Smiled like I met her right there every day for years, and we went walking slowly together in the direction she turned.
There was one of those new mini-parks and an empty bench in the sun because the day was cool. I said my name, and she said she knew it because she asked. “Andrea,” she said. “I get called Andy, but I don’t like it much.”
“Then I don’t use it. What I want to say... Look, I’m getting bald. I should lose fifteen pounds, maybe twenty. I got a wife.”
“I saw the gold ring.”
“I got a daughter, closer to your age than I am.”
She laced the small fingers between mine. “So I should get up and walk away. Right? I know that. You should get up and walk away. Go ahead, Martin. Just try. Like I tried not waiting anymore when you were late. Just one more minute and I’ll go. Just one more minute after that. And then there you came, out of breath. Can you walk away?”
“No.”
“So something happens, and I don’t know what it is. I know it was too late to stop it the minute it started.”
“I’m a nothing. I’ve got this job a long time, scuffling around, keeping the books for little businesses. It’s all I know how to—”
“You got to stop knocking yourself, Martin. You knock yourself, and you hurt me somehow. I’m not so much you got to apologize.”
“Andrea. Andrea, I’m forty.”
“Let’s walk some more.”
“I got to go right now to get back in and turn in all this stuff.”
“How about after?”
“Where will you be?”
“Across the street from wherever you go to turn it in.”
“It could take an hour to settle up.”
“So?”
It was that day we counted, and so I gave her the makeup mirror on the two-month anniversary of the day it happened to us, when we got caught in it and couldn’t ever get out.
So now from the bed I can see the back of her and also the front of her at the same time in the mirror. She combs her hair first, biting her lip when she has to tug the comb through snarls. Both hands high, elbows out to the sides, one hand combing, the other holding the hair close to her scalp. It lifts her breasts when she reaches high. They are small breasts, but the part around the nipple is big. It is a color that isn’t pink or orange or tan, but like those colors mixed. I had forgotten about all the colors in the world, but since Andrea I see colors everywhere, as if they had washed the world and made it brighter.
She sits very straight to comb her hair, so that it makes the small of her back hollow. In the crease of her back just above the hollowed part I can see the little knobs of her spine. Lower down there are two dimples, one on each side. I see the small muscles slide and change over the smoothness of her shoulders and back as she combs her hair.
In the mirror I can see that her young belly is almost flat, just gently rounded. She sits so straight it makes her waist look even more slender than it is. That is because of the contrast to the white smooth weight of her hips and her behind, I think. The shape is as if you take a ripe pear and stand it upright on the heavy end, and then slice the stem end right off, about an inch down from the stem. That cut would come right at the narrowest part of her waist.
I look at her, memorizing her, looking across this ten feet of afternoon light, and seeing such a total ripeness, all the hip-ripe, breast-ripe, mouth-ripe, thigh-ripe warmth and moisture and smoothness of her, all so totally woman, that it is strange to remember how, such a short time ago, thirty minutes maybe, after we had made love in a hungry, grinding, straining way, she had slowly sagged into a total drowsy relaxation, and I had studied her hand and arm where they lay in the window light, thinking that the slack resting fist was a child’s hand, resting after play. The wrist had looked so small, so touchingly fragile. And the forearm was slender as a child’s, all the tiny golden hairs so fine fine fine, lying in a perfect pattern.
Her body is very fair, and the places the sun has never touched are the impossible marble white of the natural blond. On all the rest of her there is a faint overtone of gold, a memory of all the summers and the swimming. Often when we are quiet, when we are asprawl with hearts and breathing slowing, I have looked down the length of our bodies, seeing my coarse-textured, swarthy, hairy, flabby ugliness next to the glory of her, and felt shamed and humble that such an animal could be allowed to give her pleasure, that that short, thick, sallow worm down there, soft and dead in its nest of harsh dark hair, could have been welcomed so many times in all its thick, vulgar, arrogant, throbbing rigidity into the sweet, tight, flowing depths of her.
So I count the flaws in her perfection, looking for a confidence, a justification. Pale freckles on the tops of her shoulders from a time when she got too much sun. Three moles. A small brownish one centered on the back of her left thigh, perhaps two inches below the crease of the overhang of the left buttock. One smaller and quite black, an inch below her belly button and off to the left. A small tan one on the inside of her right elbow, on that very satiny skin texture near where the funny bone is. Two scars. A little white triangle below the left corner of her mouth, where a stone struck her when she was nine years old. She was riding her bike. A truck threw the small stone from its big tires. A little white ridge of appendix scar. On both feet the smallest toe is pinched in and malformed by the pinch of pointed shoes, the forward pressure of high heels. A crooked eye tooth, slightly gray in contrast to the others because the nerve is dead or dying.
She has told me of other imperfections, of things she cannot change. She would like to be taller. She thinks her neck is too short. She does not like her earlobes. If she does not work at it all the time, her scalp gets too dry and there are little flecks of dandruff. She yearns for slightly larger breasts, smaller hips and thighs. She wishes her upper lip were fuller, to match the underlip. She wishes her eyelashes were thicker and longer.