Leanna insisted they go over to Fernando’s, a café and bar clotted with hanging plants, and everywhere you looked a sign that read THANK YOU FOR NOT SMOKING, a phrase that always seemed to resound in his head, like a dental tool. When they got there they went through a tangle of decision-making before taking a place by the window. English didn’t care where he sat; he hated the whole restaurant.
He started right in. “I’ve changed addresses eighteen times in the last twelve years,” he told Leanna. “I lived in Lawrence, Kansas, that whole time. I’m a nice person, but I have a lot of inside trouble.”
“Inside trouble. What is that? Inside trouble.”
“Unsound thinking. Getting myself all worked up over nothing, you know what I mean.” If you told people these things right away, they discounted it all. Later you could say, I warned you. “I smoke cigarettes,” he told her.
“That’s okay,” she said.
“I eat meat.”
“And you’re aggressive in conversations.”
“That’s true. Yeah. Okay, I sometimes am.”
“That way you don’t have to respond to anyone.”
This happened to be the truth. He looked around. “They have any coffee in this place?”
“When you’re on a bus, nobody sits near you because you look too lonely. I bet you’re lonely, but not because nobody wants to know you. It’s because, really, you don’t want to know anybody.”
Her accent wasn’t New England; she spoke in the way of stewardesses: “Are fline time wull be wen are en fifteen men-nets.” He thought it made her sound unintelligent.
“I’m not that lonely,” he said. “Really.”
She seemed not to have heard him.
“There’s a difference,” he insisted, “between solitude and loneliness.”
Leanna raised her eyebrows. “You’re the loneliest person I know.”
The waitress, a large woman dressed in jeans and flannel shirt like a lumberjack, was staring down at him as if in support of Leanna’s assertion.
“I guess I’ll have whatever she’s having,” he told the waitress.
He wasn’t getting any less irritated with this restaurant. These places felt underdecorated if they didn’t have all the accoutrements of a subtropical swamp, including fish from outer space in glass tanks of water and fat little palm trees in big clay pots full of dirt, and a menu on which every kind of item — even tea, even ice cream — was something he’d never heard of. And he was irritated with himself, too. Here was this beautiful woman giving him a little of her time, and he couldn’t think of anything very charming to say.
In a minute he said, “You’re good at interpretations, so what about my love life? Can you interpret that whole mess for me?”
“You tell women a lot of lies, but at the time you’re saying them, you think they’re true. Right? I can tell by your expression I’m right.”
“Well,” he said, really embarrassed, really unhappy, “I can see we’re not going to hit it off.”
“You think you’ve been involved a lot, but really the story on you is that you’ve just been into a lot of indiscriminate random fucking.”
And she looked so sweet! Hadn’t he seen her at church? “Do you know a lady named Marla Baker?” he asked — because he wanted, in any way he could, to crack her smile.
“You know I do,” she said, “or you wouldn’t be asking.”
“No, no, it’s just a name — there was a call for her at the station. She’s not in the book.”
“She moved across town.”
He couldn’t think why he’d started this, or how to get out of it. Lamely he said, “Well, you’ve got my past all scoped out, don’t you?”
“You’re a type,” she said.
“A type. Am I your type?”
“You’re predictable. Not overly funny.”
“Oh. Yeah. Predictions. So what about the future? Are you kind of like gifted with that knowledge, too?”
“Oh, you’ll probably doodle along just like you are now, until you set yourself on fire because you’re smoking one of those cigarettes of yours in bed,” she said, “and then you’ll die.”
A bad prophecy. He himself had imagined something similar. “I mean, I was talking about the future of my love life. Not if I’m going to burn myself up in bed.”
“You mean you were trying to flirt?”
English sweated a lot. He sweated at parties where he was lost, at interviews for jobs he didn’t want, at those times when he met strangers who used to be his friends. “I’m sweating.”
“Do you take honey?” She started doing businesslike things with their two pots of tea, which had just arrived, giving out a fragrance like detergent, while he mopped his face with his napkin. He thought it was very gracious of her.
Her manner was straightforward, but she was physically quite languid and — modest, English believed. She talked low, she kept her left hand in her lap and gestured delicately with the right one, or lifted her cup, which she didn’t bend down to, but raised up to her lips, and she had this quality he’d seen in many young girls, and a few women, and which had always made him feel he was being tortured invisibly, this quality of seeming not to weigh even one ounce. And she was having a great time, she was delighted. He burned to be responsible for that. But he knew he wasn’t.
“What,” she said when she saw him watching her and failing to drink his camomile tea.
“I was trying to think what I want to say.”
“And what is that?”
He was sure the tea wasn’t all that bad. It was only that his stomach was in knots.
“My fear level is pretty high,” he said.
“I’ll bet it’s pretty high all the time,” she said.
“This isn’t my usual kind of conversation at all,” he said.
“If it’s all too new to cope with, then don’t talk.” She took a sip of tea. “Drink tea.”
“Am I so funny?”
She drank her tea.
“Am I such a fucking joke?”
She put down her cup. “Now you’re pissed.”
“I was trying to get someplace with you.”
“I got that.”
“But I’m a joke, it’s a fucking joke that I come on to you, just because I’m not a woman? Because if it is — I mean …”
“You don’t know what you mean.”
“Yeah. No. I mean, it’s wrong”—he sensed his own biases were showing—“wrong to be so prejudiced, is what I’m getting at.”
“I’m not prejudiced, I’m gay. I told you I was gay.”
“Then how come you’re having coffee with me? Tea, I mean. Tea.”
“Because I’m thirsty.”
With his napkin English blotted his forehead. “You’re stepping all over me in this little talk. You’ve had practice. You’ve said all this before, and I haven’t.” This silenced her. “I never have.” He pushed his tea away, and his spoon. “The one who’s playing games here is you, and I’m being honest for a change.” The place before him was clear. “And anyway, why have I been sitting here pretending I like camomile tea? In other countries,” he told Leanna, “they soak their feet in camomile tea.”
She smiled at everything, like a person at the circus. “Lenny? Or Leonard?”
“Two people meet,” he said. “They each have three or four qualities they can show each other, you know the ones I’m talking about, the ones that always get them by. For the woman it could be that she makes jokes all the time, or she could be kind of self-effacing. The man could be scientific and easygoing. He could show her he likes her jokes because he has a good sense of humor, and he could deliver some compliments. That shows he’s not going to beat her up, like the other guys did. They tell each other things like, how old, what are your hobbies, I work at the hardware store, I’m going to be manager someday …”
“Are you telling me about a movie? Have I lost my place?”