I remember one cold, wet January morning, I walked down Prince Street to Dean & DeLuca to meet her. Typically, she had called me a few minutes earlier, out of the blue.
“I can meet you now,” she said. That was all.
I, of course, dropped everything. The moist, frigid air penetrated my leather flying jacket, my gloves, my shoes. The light was wan. In that gray, muted light I could take in the details, the intricacies of Soho’s architecture—the rust shades of brick walls, jagged fire escapes, the cobbled streets unfolding. It was all so drinkable.
This was back when Dean & DeLuca opened its first gourmet food store on Prince. It was so new, so young, that Giorgio DeLuca himself would serve you. Small, bespectacled, with dark curly Bacchus hair and black eyes, he was nervously energetic, so determined with his young mission that he seemed hardly able to focus. Giorgio would talk to you in clipped phrases as he grabbed a croissant or pain au raisin—“Hey good to see you. Try the Romano cheese. Unbelievable.”—and shoved it into a little bag, darting around his young workers, reaching for something else.
I bounded up the two riveted iron steps, opened the door. As I walked in, the big door jingled. Just to my right were wicker quivers holding arm-long crusty baguettes, backward leaning. Directly in front of me was the counter, shaped like a tuning fork, behind which workers with optimistic faces circulated, moving in that frantic choreography of service.
In the back of the store were tables where patrons could sit and drink coffee, talk, write, or read. I stood on tiptoe, stretched my neck to look in the back to see if she was there.
She wasn’t. I ordered a café au lait and took it with me to a vacant table in back. The wood floors creaked as I made my way there. There was an old skylight above the tables, an ancient facet that poured light on you as you sat and drank or ate. There were no computers. There were no cell phones. Only pens and pencils working against paper and people reading or conversing.
I had a notebook with me. I pulled it out and imagined I was Hemingway in a Paris café. I had the pen, I had the café au lait. It was easy to convince myself that I was a writer here. I sipped the strong coffee, which was rich with breeding.
But the people around me were too interesting. The smells were too ravishing. There was too much life. Instead of writing, I looked around to see who else was there. I could do that for hours. It was the best cinema.
Then I felt something. I turned and looked up and there she was. She was standing next to the table, silent. She wore her long Salvation Army men’s coat, a fat cable knit scarf wound twice around her neck and a cable knit hat. Her long gray-brown hair streamed from under the cap and flowed onto her coat. She wore, as usual, glasses—old fashioned, the kind 1950 movie stars wore, with flares at the edges. She had put on lipstick. For me? Silly to think that! I couldn’t help it, though. My heart raced. She didn’t say hello.
“Oh, hi!” I said, a bit flustered that she hadn’t said a word.
“Hi.”
I stood up. I moved to pull out a chair for her.
“I can sit down by myself,” she said. She took the chair from me, and I was left standing there, an absurd tableau vivant, leaning toward her chair. She had limitless ways to make me look foolish, and I seemed to try on every one.
“Oh, yes, sure,” I said. I sat down.
“Look,” she said, “I don’t have much time.”
“How about some coffee?”
“I don’t drink coffee.”
“That’s right! Well, what about some tea?”
She nodded. I got up and went to the front and fetched her a pot. I put it before her. She took the tea bag out with a cautious gesture as if I’d tried to poison her.
“How’s the work going?” I asked her.
“I don’t like to talk about it while I’m doing it,” she said.
Her feral baritone! She had very little subtlety in her tone, very little modulation—a minimal range. She didn’t use the pitches, timbres or keys of her voice to help express what she was thinking or feeling. Her speech was pretty much level. She did all her expressing with her razor-blade words.
“Uh, well, ok,” I said. “What can I ask you about?”
Those wary eyes examined me through her glasses. Then she glanced at her watch.
“Don’t tell me you have to go already?” I said.
“Soon.”
Still, with all her stone cold incivility, I loved looking at her. Those lips! Those eyes, darting about the room even as I spoke to her, as if she were searching for some prey to devour. That streamy hair.
If I had had the presence to look at her closely, I would have seen someone who had no room for anyone else. But my vision was impaired.
I was under her spell, obsessed, a lap dog, a mess. I’m sure it was ludicrous to watch, laughable, embarrassing. There was no reasoning with me. I was a stranger to myself. And when a stranger inhabits you, someone who will go to any lengths for so-called love, it shakes you, like moving earth under your feet. There was no part of me that I could rely on. I doubt if I could even tell you why I was so drawn to her. I still can’t.
Do we ever have full control of ourselves?
“Well, what did you think of Danny’s piece?” I asked. At our last writers group meeting, Danny had read a piece about going home to visit his parents.
“Not much,” she said. She took two beats. “Oh, there were a few places that were all right.”
“I sort of liked it,” I said.
“We’ll,” she said evenly, “that’s the problem.”
“What? What do you mean?”
“What if I said that about your writing? That I sort of liked it.”
“Hmm.”
She reached into her old leather bag she carried and pulled out a paperback. “There’s something I want to give you.” She pushed it across the table to me. I picked it up. It was The Beet Queen by Louise Erdrich. It had obviously been read, perhaps by more than one person.
“You should read this,” she said.
“Oh great, thanks, I will.”
She got up to go. She hadn’t even taken off her coat. She’d only taken one sip of her tea.
“You’re going?” I looked up at her.
“Thanks for the tea,” she said. Then she turned and walked away.
I watched her open the store door and walk out. I wondered where she was going. To write? To meet someone else? I stayed there in Dean & DeLuca for twenty minutes or so, restoring myself with the power of the place.
I finished my coffee, got up and went outside. I drank in Prince Street. I took a deep breath.
I was miserable. I walked back toward my apartment. I waited for her call.
Richard, I enjoyed reading this very much. The atmosphere immediately draws you in. It stands well on its own as a short piece, and yet it also reads like the beginning of a novel, one I would very much like to continue reading.
Wonderfully descriptive!