I Hate Everyone, Except You(39)

I sit down at a table near the window and contemplate the menu. I should have the oatmeal because I’m trying to lose ten pounds, but when the waitress arrives, I order the combo platter of scrambled eggs with cheese, a biscuit, and potatoes. At the table next to me, a blonde with perfectly beachy curls is drinking a green smoothie. She must be a model. She has the most flawless golden skin I have ever seen. I don’t know how she could possibly achieve such a color, except by sitting in the sun for no less or more than seven minutes a day, every day, and taking regular baths in rainbows and the blood of angels. She has a little star tattooed on the inside of her left wrist, I assume to remind herself that she is one. Her sunglasses cover three-quarters of her face.

The man she’s with is not a man, despite the fact that he is the perfect specimen of manhood. He is a boy, at least he must be because he has not a wrinkle or a pore, not so much as a freckle. And where did he get all the muscles? One must work for those, right? And yet he looks as though he’s never worked at anything a day in his life.

I was this young once, wasn’t I? Certainly never Roman-statue-quality like these two, but cute enough. Right? Except . . . I didn’t feel cute at the time. There was always something wrong with me. My jaw wasn’t square enough, my shoulders not strong enough, my clothes not cool enough. This couple is literally everything I was not.

I despise them. No. I despise the fact that I want to be them. Just for a day. Either one of them. Or both of them. I don’t care. I want to ride a bicycle shirtless. I want to dance in a club with strangers lusting after me. I want to look in the mirror after taking a shower and not wonder who will eventually win the battle to destroy my body: Father Time set on degrading the strands of my DNA, or Mother Earth with her incessant pull of gravity.

I want to live to be one hundred years old for the sole purpose of tracking these two down. I will find them sitting in a café like this one and reach out both of my withered hands. I will touch them on the slack, mottled skin of their forearms.

“I knew this would happen,” I will tell them.

“What would happen, old-timer?” the boy will say. He will be in his late seventies now.

“The skin. The hair,” I’ll say. “It’s gone. You have been betrayed. You thought you wouldn’t be, but you were.”

“Go away, old man,” she will say, brushing her hand at me. Her star tattoo is gone. Perhaps she had it lasered off when it began to blur and fade.

*

“I hate to bother you,” the girl says. She is speaking to me.

I am snapped out of my trance. “No bother,” I tell her.

“Are you Clinton Kelly?”

“I am.”

“I’m sure you hear this all the time, but I love you.” She has taken off her sunglasses so that she can look me in the eyes.

I am surprised that a human being this beautiful even knows of my existence in the world. It is always strange to hear I love you from a stranger. My instinct is to say I love you in return, but that seems to me disingenuous, condescending. What I really want to say is, You know some of me, and I’m glad you love that part of me but if you knew all of me you might not even like me. Nevertheless, I hope that someday a stranger tells you how much they love you, because it feels pretty good.

“That’s very nice of you to say. Thank you.”

We talk some more. Her name is Maddy, short for Madeleine. Her friend’s name is Preston. He does not know who I am. I tell her there’s a song I love called “Madeleine” from a musical called Jacques Brel Is Alive and Well and Living in Paris. She suggests we look it up online right now and listen to it. There is no need, I say. I have it on my phone.

“Let’s hear it!” she says excitedly.

It takes me a minute to find the song and I begin to feel self-conscious, they probably think I don’t know how to use modern technology. I press play and the song begins. The four-part harmony sounds like a barbershop quartet sung in double tempo.

“That is old school,” Preston says before the first verse is over. Maddy shushes him. Other patrons in the restaurant are looking at us, and I realize I am being self-indulgent, playing a song written in the sixties, probably before the parents of this young couple were born: “I’m waiting for Madeleine / In front of the picture show.”

“You don’t need to listen to the rest,” I say, hitting the pause button. “Basically, the guy’s in love with Madeleine, but she keeps standing him up. He waits for her in the rain and catches a cold. The end.”

“Do you think Madeleine is toying with him?” she asks. It’s a question I hadn’t thought of before, but I get the impression she, this real live Madeleine, is toying with me. She’s being flirty, charming, staring me in the eyes with a broad close-lipped smile. Is she interested in any of this, honestly? Or is this the way she might talk to any old man feeding pigeons on a park bench?

“Perhaps,” I say. “I don’t usually consider Madeleine. I’m more focused on the guy getting soaking wet in front of the movie theater.”

“Maybe she’s watching him from the window of the coffee shop across the street,” Maddy says.

“That’s mean. Maybe his cold turns into a really bad case of pneumonia,” I say.

“Maybe she rushes to his bedside and declares her undying love for him,” Maddy says, “and they live happily ever after.”