Meeting at the diner March 2012

  

I don’t know why I left my hat home that morning. I suppose I always saw it as a kind of prop for a character I could hide my real self behind.

I was in a panic to get to up there in time, park the car and make my way to the diner where I was supposed to meet her.

Sunlight glinted off the windows of the diner, so I didn’t see her standing in the doorway until I got up close.

She was dressed nearly as professionally as she was at the office, as if she planned to interview me.

“Where’s your hat?” she asked.

“I left it home.”

“That’s too bad. I like the hat.”

“Net time, I’ll wear it.”

“Next time?” she asked, one eyebrow rising. “Who said there will be a next time?”

She laughed, but her big eyes didn’t.

Most men, she told me later, loved her eyes, which she had made an art of emphasizing with makeup. Her eyes were what I looked at first with each new photo she texted me, though in truth, I was particularly attracted to her slanted mouth, which always bore the expression as if she would come out at any moment with a snide remark.

We climbed the steps and pushed through the glass doors into the glassed-in vestibule of the diner, and then into the diner itself, booths and counter straight ahead, a large dining room to our left. This being Sunday morning, the place was packed. The hostess directed us to a booth where the sun shone brightly through the window. We sat across from each other, both uncomfortably stiff. We were office colleagues, and this felt odd.

The waitress came, took our orders and left.

“I don’t know why you picked this place,” she said.

“Because it’s public,” I said.

“I scare you that much?”

“You terrify me,” I said.

“I’m so sorry, Maybe we should…,” she said and feigned to leave.

I laughed. “Not like that.”

“Like how, then?” she asked and settled back into her seat.

“Like I don’t know what you’ll do next.”

“That’s a bad thing?”

“I never said it was bad, only that it scares me.”

She smiled. The waitress arrived with coffee. She found packets of sugar and dumped several into her cup. I put creamer in mine.

This was not her venue, and we both knew it. She was mistress of the dark and the scalding bright light despoiled it.

I tried to break the tension with a trivial question.

“Did you really win five Grammys?”

“I sang on five Grammy winning records,” she said.

“That’s amazing. I’m working with someone who can really sing. Why are you here?”

“In this diner?”

“No, silly, working with us.”

“Because I want to.”

“What about your musical career?”

“I still have that,” she said. “Didn’t you see my video when I performed uptown from here?”

“Yes, you were dressed in a black dress,” I said, poking fun. “But with five Grammys you ought to be a star.”

“Are you implying I’m not?” she said, her big eyes staring straight at me.

I stuttered. “I…”

She laughed.

“Those Grammys doesn’t mean anything to me,” she said. “They weren’t about what I do.”

“Why didn’t you pursue something on your own?”
“I did. For two years. It didn’t go anywhere. So, I moved on.”

“To what?”

“To a lot of things. Some restaurant work. I did some dance. I even worked with horses for a while, and then became a bartender in New York.”

While she said this our food arrived, but neither of us was hungry, dabbling at the meal.

“Do you want to get out of here?” I asked.

“And do what?”

“Go for a walk.”

She stared straight at me as if trying to read my mind, then nodded, “Okay, but let me use the restroom first.”

She vanished through a door next to the counter. I waved for the check, then went to the registered to pay, then waited at the door feeling more than a little nervous, the way I remembered feeling waiting for my date to the prom years ago.

When she reappeared, she gave me an odd smile, as if none of this was what she’d expected. We went outside, turned down the first street we came to, away from the business district, over the viaduct and the busy flood of traffic bound for the Lincoln tunnel below.

She talked; I listened.

She talked about growing up in a small town.

“I was a dork in high school,” she said, glancing at my disbelieving expression. “No, really, I was.”

She spoke about her family, not the phony tale she told our boss about her father dying when she was eight, but merely how he had wandered off, leaving her to deal with her mean mother.

“She beat me all the time,” she said. “I protected my brother. I didn’t want her beating him the way she did me.”

“Where is your brother now?”

“He lives in my building, in an apartment a couple of floors below mine.”

“What does he do for a living?”

“He says he’s a photographer – and he really is pretty good. But I think he just uses it to pick up girls.”

Her brother earned a lot of money, something she resented especially because he didn’t help her, yet expected her to do things for him.

“Is he the one who takes those photos of you?” I asked.

“Some of them,” she said. “But I’m not comfortable with him. He’s always saying sexual stuff the way he does with all his models.”

We talked briefly about my life and my life ambitions.

“Have you always wanted to write like you do now?” she asked.

“Not like this,” I said. “I always wanted to write novels.”

“Why don’t you?”

“I do. I just don’t publish them.”

Then, she talked about going to college and the job she got afterwards, teaching spoiled rich kids in some private school somewhere in New England, about the book partly written about her – the author had followed her around the school, and she talked about her eating disorder which she still struggled with.

“Why did you stop teaching?” I asked.

“I got raped.”

“He was the boyfriend of my girlfriend. He kept hitting on me all the time. Finally, I had sex with him, but he wanted more. He drugged me. I didn’t know I had been raped until later. After that I didn’t want to teach anymore.”

“Then what?” I asked, trying to get passed the incident to something positive.

“That’s when I met my husband, only he wasn’t my husband then,” she said. “He’s a musician, a very talented guitarist. But he’s also a jealous bastard. He constantly accused me of cheating on him. But I never did.”

She stopped, turned to me and stared straight into my eyes.

“Understand one thing,” she said. “I never cheat. Other people cheat on their wives and girl friends with me. But I don’t do that.”

“Okay,” I said, holding up my hands. “I believe you.”

She seemed to relax a little and we resumed walking.

“And is he the one who got me into music,” I asked.

“Yes,” she said. “We did cruises with a band full of the crudest men I’d ever met. I had to teach them how to behave around women. They were always doing and saying rude things. But eventually, after I worked on them a while, they got better.”

“How long were you with them?”

“Four years.”

“And you got married?”

“Yes, I got married. He helped me with my music. He’s on my CD doing some of the guitar.”

“And then?”

“And then I left them to try to do my own music. I left my husband. I started to see a woman who owned a restaurant. Only that went bad. She started to stalk me. Still does sometimes.”

She took up with a horse trainer as some point after this and did some dancing. But she had to move after some fire gutted her apartment, something she claimed wasn’t her fault, but the landlord wanted her to pay for.

She ended up working in New York City as a bartender, got involved with the owner, and when that went sour, he started to stalk her, too, and still is, she said.

“All I wanted was a fling with him,” she said. “But he fell in love with me. He thought he was going to rescue me – from what I still don’t know.”

“Have you had a lot of stalkers?” I asked.

“Yes, many.”

“Is this one the worst?”

“Oh, no, I’ve had worse.”

At this point, we came up to a print shop, and I mentioned I had once worked as a printer’s apprentice after high school with the aim of eventually becoming a die maker. As I said this, a man with keys dangling from his fingers came along and informed us he owned the place.

“Would you like to come in and look around?” he asked.

I noticed the “for sale” sign on the wall near the door.

We walked inside and into a world that dragged me back in time, the sharp scent of ink and oil, and the memory of the paper cuts I used to get loading large printing machines as a kid.

We walked through the narrow aisles as the man showed us smaller versions of the machines I had once worked on, like a proud father getting to boast about his off spring.

It was a magic moment drenched in nostalgia, something we both acknowledged as oddly significant, even as we left and turned back, passing the newly constructed high school, towards the overpass, and then back to the business district to where she said she had parked her car, though did not return to them yet, lingering, pausing near the highway where she told me about a student she once had that had thrilled her, someone she helped prepare for marriage, and how crushed she was on hearing about the girl’s suicide on the eve of the wedding.

A huge silence engulfed us then, unbroken even by the heavy rhythm of highway traffic, her grief consuming us both, putting us in a bubble. She said she still mourned.

Finally, we strode back to where she parked, passing my car, and the diner. She had parked across from a bank a block away.

I said goodbye, gave her a peck of a kiss, and hurried away, texting her a few minutes later with one word, “Thanks.”

 

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