Writers & Lovers(36)

We have beers at the Cellar, and he walks me back to my bike outside Iris where he parked his car. He leans me against the passenger door, his hands on my hips.

‘These,’ he says. ‘These are real baby-making hips.’

I laugh. I’m actually pretty narrow in the hip. I’ve often wondered how a whole baby would come through.

We kiss for a long time, and I feel him nestle in along the hollow between a baby-making hip and my pelvic bone. It fits nicely there.

‘Mmm,’ he says. ‘Snug.’

I tell Harry about the date at lunch the next day.

‘Good heavens,’ he says. ‘Is that what it’s like with writers? The word “snug” and you’re mad in love?’

‘I’m not mad in love.’

‘The man is in his forties with two bloody children.’

Later when we’re in the weeds and I’m frantically replenishing the tea box for a six-top of librarians, he says, ‘Move your baby makers, sweetheart. I need a steak knife.’

And when it’s over he tells me there’s a cute guy in the hallway who wants to see me.

‘See? He’s adorable, right?’

‘I don’t think this is your daddy complex.’

‘He looks a lot younger than forty-five. And fuck you. It’s not a daddy complex.’

I make him check my teeth for poppy seeds and go to the door.

It’s not Oscar. It’s Silas. The sight of him gives me a jolt. He looks younger, leaner. He’s wearing a black leather jacket, an old one, with deep creases and corroded zippers on the pockets.

‘Sorry to pull you out of work. I just wanted to make sure you were okay.’

‘It’s fine.’ I wave toward my tables through the door. ‘Most of the checks are down. How are you? How was your trip?’ I’m trying to calculate how long since he’s been back. Two weeks probably. He left me a couple of messages then gave up. I’m done with guys like this, on and off, here then gone. I’ve learned my lesson.

‘Good. Good.’ There’s a stack of business cards on the hostess stand and he flicks them with his thumb. Fftht. Fftht. He looks up. ‘I’m sorry I broke our date. I just wanted to tell you that in person. I understand why you’d be mad or—’ Fftht.

Marcus’s door is open, and I know he’s listening to every word.

‘You don’t have to explain.’

‘I want to,’ he says, more loudly than he meant to. ‘Sorry. It’s just. Sometimes in the past year or so this feeling would come over me, kind of like a rash, you know? I needed to be in motion. And this time I had the opportunity to really go and I felt like I had to take it even though I really did want to go out with you. Really. A lot. I just wanted to explain that. I thought it would be a better date with you if I’d gotten that feeling out of my system.’

‘I get it. I really do. Thanks for telling me.’ I try to make it sound final, like that’s the end of it and the chance for that date has passed. I try to start moving back into the dining room but my body doesn’t budge.

‘Any glimpses of the sublime out there?’ I hear myself say.

‘One or two.’ He grins.

I forgot about the chip in his tooth.

Shit.

‘The sublime always tracks you down eventually.’

He nods. My tables all have probably put down their credit cards by now. He’ll go down the stairs soon and out onto the street and this makes my stomach feel hollow, even though it’s stuffed with Helene’s poppy seed cake.

‘So, what do you think?’ he says.

‘Maybe we should go to the museum.’

‘Saturday?’

Fabiana comes out and reclaims her hostess stand. Silas lets go of the little stack of cards.

‘Saturday’s good. But I work at three.’

‘I’ll pick you up at ten thirty.’

He goes down the stairs like a boy, fast and all in one motion, one loud rumble. The door at the bottom slams shut.

My tables glare at me when I go back into the dining room. I don’t make eye contact and head straight to the wait station.

‘Please tell me you did not let that one go,’ Harry says.

‘I did not.’

‘Oh, you are a minx in a stained apron,’ he says and hands me the two credit card receipts he ran for me.





Early Saturday morning I print out my draft for Muriel. I can’t bear to look at any of the words as they come out of the machine. I don’t know what it says. I don’t know what the book is about. I see the name Clara and my stomach sinks. Did I really name a main character Clara? After fifty pages my room gets humid and smells like the copy shop I used to work at in college, moist paper and toner and electricity. The pile in the printer’s basket grows too high and pages begin to slip off and I take the first part of the book and align the edges and put it facedown on my desk. I do this five times until the printer spits out the last page and cuts off abruptly. I feel like it should break into song. I flip over the stack, and there it is. I put it in an old Kinko’s box, write Muriel’s name on top, and shove it in my backpack before I start marking up the pages again.

I ride over to her apartment and drop the box on the mail table in the foyer of her building. On my way home I imagine her telling me she didn’t get it and then seeing it published a year from now by one of the other tenants in her building—probably the guy who works at the tropical fish store and denied using her fabric softener—and having to sue him with proof of all the pages I have in notebooks and on my computer. Open-and-shut case, my lawyer would say. But I wouldn’t be able to pay a lawyer, so I’d have to represent myself. Or I’d call my friend Sylvie in Virginia who was an intellectual property lawyer. She’d studied art history and drama and I saw her in Three Sisters and Arcadia and both times she completely transformed herself. I didn’t recognize her as my friend Sylvie when she was onstage. I think of her in her office in Alexandria, playing the role of a lawyer for so many hours a day. I think of all the people playing roles, getting further and further away from themselves, from what moves them, what stirs them all up inside. And I think of my novel on Muriel’s mail table and I hope that tropical fish guy will leave it alone.