“You’re sure?” he asked, still talking down to the chair. “I heard this seat was unoccupied.”
“It’s not. You see the plate of food in front of it? It’s occupied. Trust me.”
He looked over at me and there was something loose and afire in his ice blue eyes. “So I can take it? It’s okay?”
I stood. “No, you can’t take it. It’s taken.”
The man swept his hands out at the patio. “There are plenty of other ones. You get one of those. I’ll take this. She’ll never know the difference.”
“You get one of those,” I said.
“I want this one.” He spoke reasonably, carefully, as if discussing something with a child that was beyond the child’s grasp. “I’ll just take it. Okay?”
I took a step toward him. “No. You won’t. It’s spoken for.”
“I’d heard it wasn’t,” he said gently.
“You heard wrong.”
He looked down at the chair again, then nodded. “So you say, so you say.”
He held up an apologetic hand that matched his smile and walked back into the restaurant as Vanessa stepped past him onto the patio.
She looked back over her shoulder. “Friend of yours?”
“No.”
She noticed a small splatter of rain on her chair. “How’d my chair get wet?”
“Long story.”
She gave me a curious frown and pushed the chair aside, pulled another one out from the closest table and settled back into her original place.
Through the small crowd of patrons, I saw the guy take a seat at the bar and smile at me as Vanessa pulled her replacement chair over to our table. The smile seemed to say, I guess it wasn’t taken after all, and then he turned his back to us.
The interior of the restaurant filled as the rain picked up, and I lost sight of the guy at the bar. The next time I had a clear view, he was gone.
Vanessa and I stayed out in the rain, drinking mineral water as she picked at her fruit and the rain found the back of my shirt and neck.
We’d reverted to harmless small talk when she returned from the bathroom-Tony T’s fear, the Middlesex ADA with the ferret’s head who was rumored to keep mothballs and carefully folded women’s underwear at the bottom of his attaché case, how pathetic it felt to live in an alleged sports town that couldn’t hold on to either Mo Vaughn or Curtis Martin.
But underneath the small talk was the constant hum of our shared want, the echoes of surf and sheets of rain in Bermuda, the hoarse sounds of our voices in that room, the smell of grapes on skin.
“So,” Vanessa said after a particularly pregnant lull in the chitchat, “Chardonnay and me, or what?”
I could have wept from lust, but then I forced myself to conjure up the aftermath, the sterile walk down her stairs and back to my car, the empty reverberations of our approximated passion ringing in my head.
“Not today,” I said.
“It might not be an open-ended offer.”
“I understand that.”
She sighed and handed her credit card over her shoulder as the waitress stepped out onto the patio.
“Find a girl, Patrick?” she asked as the waitress went back inside.
I said nothing.
“A good, low-maintenance woman of hardy stock who won’t give you any trouble? Cook for you, clean for you, laugh at your jokes, and never look at another man?”
“Sure,” I said. “That’s it.”
“Ah.” Vanessa nodded and the waitress came back with her credit card and bill. Vanessa signed and handed the receipt copy to the waitress with a flick of the wrist that was, in itself, dismissal. “But, Patrick, I’m curious.”
I resisted the urge to lean back from the carnal force of her. “Pray tell.”
“Does your new woman do the real wicked things? You know, those things we’ve done with-”
“Vanessa.”
“Hmm?”
“There is no new woman. I’m just not interested.”
She placed a hand to her breast. “In me?”
I nodded.
“Really?” She held her hand out to the rain, caught a few drops, and wiped them on her throat as she arched her head back. “Let me hear you say it.”
“I just did.”
“The whole sentence.” She lowered her chin, caught me in the full impact of her gaze.
I shifted in my chair, tried to wish my way out of this situation. When that didn’t work, I just said it, flat and cold.
“I’m not interested in you, Vanessa.”
The loneliness of another can be shocking when it lays itself bare without warning.
A dire abandonment broke Vanessa’s features into pieces, and I could feel the hollow chill of her beautiful apartment, the ache of her sitting alone at 3 A.M., lover gone, law books and yellow legal pads spread before her at her dining room table, pen in hand, the pictures of a much younger Vanessa that adorned her mantel staring down at her like ghosts of a life unlived. I could see a tiny flicker of hungry light in her chest, and not the hunger of her sexual appetite, but the conflicted hunger of her other selves.
In that moment, her features went skeletal, and her beauty vanished, and she looked like she’d fallen to scraped knees under the weight of the rain.
“Fuck you too, Patrick.” She smiled as she said it. Smiled with lips that twitched at the corners. “Okay?”
“Okay,” I said.
“Just…” She stood, a fist clenched around her bag strap. “Just…fuck you.”
She left the restuarant, and I stayed where I was, turned my chair and watched her walk up the street through the drizzle, bag swinging back and forth against her hip, her steps stripped of grace.
Why, I wondered, does it all have to be so messy?
My cell phone rang, and I pulled it from my shirt pocket, wiped the condensation from its surface as I lost Vanessa in a crowd.
“Hello.”
“Hello,” the man’s voice said. “Can I assume that chair’s free now?”
21
I turned in my chair, looked into the restaurant for the sandy-haired man. He wasn’t at a table. He wasn’t at the bar as far as I could see.
“Who is this?” I said.
“What a tearful breakup scene, Pat. For a minute, I was pretty sure she’d toss a drink in your face.”
He knew my name.
I turned again in the chair, looked along the sidewalk for him, for anyone with a cellular phone.
“You’re right,” I said. “The chair’s free. Come on back and get it.”