It becomes crystal clear to him the very reason why he should not be involved in this very moment unfolding right here, right now.
They are hunched over platefuls of curry and rice in a static white shop somewhere in the east village. The restaurant is narrow and there are no tables. Just one long bar with stools; patrons eating elbow to elbow on one side, the Japanese waitresses and Mexican cooks fumbling with language on the other.
She is talking and he nods as if listening, but he’s not listening. He’s drifting on the tone of her conversation, playing along by processing the general theme and disregarding the specifics. Nothing she is saying is real anyways. It all spills across as bad movie dialog, dramatic exaggerations of her life, her decisions, their past relationship. She is selling a certain maturity beyond what he credits her with. She wants him to see an accomplished woman, impress him with it even, but it doesn’t ring true to him and he can only see the awkward college girl with father issues that he met so long ago.
Just a few minutes before, waiting outside on the sidewalk to get in, the perception was not the same because the conversation was not the same. It had been playful, flirty banter and a lot of long looks back and forth. The mutual delusion of “accidental” sex as a plausible outcome was never spoken, only hinted at through glances, body language. He’d grab her arm and laugh, but the grasp was more firm than it should have been and she knew what that meant. She might walk forward a few steps ahead of him, looking and speaking over her shoulder because she knew what it would remind him of. Or she might overreact to the narrowing of the sidewalk and step into him, pressing against him, forcing him to smell her. And of course, he’d respond by gently grabbing her by the waist to steady her, leaving his hands there for a little too long. These were all familiar flirtations, things they used to do back then to let each other know tonight might be special.
But now, in the bright lighting of the curry shop, he finds the both of them pathetic and desperate. Here they are, the unattended housewife and the fading middle aged cliche, together again after so many years, both nursing lonely desires to rewind the clocks to when their lives were once dangerous and exciting.
And he should have stopped it then and there, but he didn’t. The more she talks, the more she expresses a loneliness that echoes all too deep for himself. But not her, she isn’t the cure, even he can see this. But does he want to see this?
Now, he’s not so sure.
May 19, 2009, 8:13pm Comments
