Short Story / You Think Inside Out

My desire for a chaider overcame my desire to stay in today. Thus, we find our heroine nestled comfortably in a leather arm chair in the recesses of the giant Barnes & Nobles six blocks from her home. I look like everyone else here, with my layers and my books sitting on the table and my coat draped over the back of the chair, scarf still wrapped around my neck because I color-coordinated it to go with my outfit. I love how in New York the game is to avoid making eye contact as much as you can with other people. That way, you don’t have to speak and suffer that uncomfortable moment when you try to discern if the individual who caught your eye is smiling because they are friendly or because they are about to pickpocket you.

There are a lot of college types here today, still off on their Christmas breaks because classes don’t start back up until next week. You can tell which ones are getting a jump on their studies and which ones are just goofing off because the goof-offs’ pens are still uncapped. Otherwise, everything is the same. Books and notebooks open and spread out on the tables, cup of coffee stowed in the nearby windowsill and out of the way of accidentally bumping elbows.

It’s a great place to people watch, which is what I had my heart set on today when I woke up and saw the dreary sky. Perfect day for storytime. See that blonde bookish fellow over there with the long, black-haired girl nestled beside him on the couch? He is a graduate student who went to Russia to study the language and fell in love with his raven-haired beauty. He found her waiting tables in some dank bar where he spent a lot of his grant money on top-of-the-shelf vodka, and in a liquor-induced haze, he told her he could expand her horizons if she would only come back to the U.S. with him. They got married in a quiet justice of the peace ceremony two days after she returned with him. She was wearing an emerald-colored dress, and he was wearing khakis and a sweater that brings out the blue in his eyes. She never said goodbye to her parents, and they don’t know where she is. His mother thinks he met her at university and has no idea they are married yet. His father is a disinterested former Vietnam veteran who could care less what the truth is. Our scholar fears he has made the wrong decision; you can see the regret in the way his lip twitches downward at the corner. She fears he will abandon her in a strange new country after she has given up everything for him; you can see it in the way she clings and dotes, bringing him fresh coffee when he is out.

The brunette in a suit in the corner is nervous because he told his wife he had to go to the office, but really, he is waiting for his mistress to show. They both live in Manhattan, but they meet in Brooklyn because no one knows them here. He taps his pen on his open files in restless irritation, glancing up every time someone walks by because he is waiting either for the mystery lady to show or waiting to get caught. It’s possible he wants to get caught given the worry lines around his eyes and the way he keeps twisting his wedding ring around his finger over and over again. When his mistress finally shows, she’ll be a Jackie O. type in a raincoat belted at the waist and large, round sunglasses despite the day’s gloom. Her shoes will be cheap though, like her bag, and she’ll be about a decade too young to do any kind of decent impression, her face registering too much naivitee to ever play the mistress. He is much older, and the affair evolved because his wife has grown plain and nagging as she has gotten older, and his young mistress is only a replica of his wife twenty years ago. He never meant to hurt the girl, you see, it’s only that he was so desperate for a taste of the romance he once shared with his wife when they were teenagers, without all the responsibilities of raising a family in New York.

There are four people sitting at a table in the corner, and occasionally, their laughter explodes in a quiet burst before they can control it. The two with the matching charcoal peacoats are natives, and the pair sitting across from them are tourists. Visiting friends. The two men have an air of contention about them, while the women chatter away happily like long-lost sisters. The native man says something with a sarcastic smirk, and the women burst into laughter while the tourist man adjusts the cuffs of his sweatshirt. The women are blissfully unaware that there are any problems whatsoever, and the tourist man looks as though he is slowly sinking further and further into his own private misery. Come to think of it, the women do look like sisters, only one is much prettier. The prettier one, with professionally streaked hair and perfect symmetric features, outshines her plainer sibling, but not just in looks. Her personality is clearly the more intriguing of the two, and while the two sisters have never fought between then or experienced the stabbing arguments spurred by jealousy, the men around them have always quietly strained to win the heart of the prettier one, the older one. You can see it in the way the tourist man looks at her instead of his wife and in the way the native man protectively circles her in gesture, does everything he can to demonstrate their easy and natural companionship. The tourist man settled for the sister because she was as close as he could come to the older sister, and now he resents his wife and the man who bested him. Watching the sisters, though, you have to wish for their kind of love blindness. It’s not that they are blind with love for their husbands. They are blind with love for each other. That’s the way to do it, girls.

There is a girl with long dark hair streaked with blue shelving books slowly. She is sitting on the floor and blindly sliding covers between covers without seeing much. A customer calls her three or four times before she hears him, and then, she doesn’t even get up to show him where the book he is searching for is located. She points him in the right direction, and he turns to go seek it with irritation at her lack of enthusiasm. She has those gummy bracelets around her wrist; couldn’t be much more than twenty-three, and her blue eyes are rimmed with red. She was late to work this morning, and her boss told her that if she was late one more time, she would get the boot. Other mornings she may have found some clever response, but this morning she just nodded mutely and shuffled off to go fulfill her tasks. Only she and her adamant boyfriend know about the abortion she had only a few days prior while her parents were away on Christmas holiday. She isn’t sure getting rid of it was the right thing to do, but her boyfriend had told her he loved her and that he would help her get through it, all words of love with a firm undertone. It would have been her first child. She would have named it Olivia for a girl. Braden for a boy.

There is a couple in the corner by the fireplace sharing a love seat. They really only need one chair because they are wrapped in one another. I can’t really tell whose arms are whose, but her head is resting on his shoulder, and they are reading from the same book quietly, he holding the book and she flipping the pages. A single cup of coffee rests between them on the coffee table in front of them, and whenever one leans forward to grab it, usually her, she takes a sip and hands it to him before setting it back in its place. Every once in a while one will murmur a line from the page they are on without any further explanation, simply pointing out the turn of phrase that caught their attention. They are young, but they look old like that, and fifty years down the road, I imagine they will be in the same position on a porch somewhere, gray heads close together. They haven’t known one another long, but the whole area around them is filled with that aura of comfortable peacefulness, as though they came out of the womb and both began walking their respective paths lazily, knowing that sooner or later they would meet in the middle. They waited a long time for this, you see, but even though they’d both been with other people in the past, they knew these relationships were only fleeting fancies, that ultimately, they’d been destined to sit on this very love seat and read these very books together some day. Every once in a while, he will turn and kiss her, and she will kiss him back, and later they will walk hand in hand down the sidewalk discussing how the author almost had the portrait of humanity right, but that he was lacking in one crucial piece of understanding that skewed the effectiveness of the book.

And then there is me. The woman sitting and tapping away quietly on her keyboard, a part and apart of the scene with her legs curled under her and her laptop resting carefully on the arm of the chair, cigarettes and lighter out on the table as though just the sight of them was comforting, sitting there ready to be lit. That’s where my imagination dies. Storytime is over, at least for now. Her part of the tale is, “To be continued.”

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