She looked bad when I saw her again on Tuesday, even though she had all her usual elements in place.
They just didn’t come together as they usually did.
It was something different in her expression, a look that our former temporary boss once described broadcasting intense pain.
Her face tends to change depending on time and place, or even the role she is playing – such as that brilliant performance she put on during that day I accompanied her to the high school to watch her teach. She can be teacher, writer, party person, close confident, a cub in search of a mentor, a vulnerable soul in need of protection.
Sometimes, she lets the mask slip, as she did a few times when we were in the bar and she played the role of barfly – most memorable that time outside the German bar when she went for a cigarette, her mouth puckering and eyes narrowing so that I saw something almost ruthless in the void beyond. Street smart, but also scared. Once or twice at meetings her mask slipped and I caught the intense look of rage, glaring at me across the table whenever she saw me looking.
But the face I saw this Tuesday, looked bewildered, a bit scattered, despite the perfect make up, lipstick and mascara perfectly placed, still utterly professional and yet – something more desperate showed from beneath the mask, as if some real expression showed she did not intend to reveal.
She laughed a lot yet did not sound like her real laugh. I wanted to laugh, too, needing to down grade the alert status from a constant state of war, wanting to have work turn into a cease fire zone so that we could both get on with our lives.
At one point later – just as she had the previous Tuesday – she came up to my desk and asked a work-related question, as if she, too, needed to turn down the nightmarish volume with both suffered through over the last few months.
Perhaps – as Mary Ann claimed – she felt more in control after her threats and the threats her family (if that’s who they were) made on her birthday worked and I was in my proper place again.
Perhaps she wonders why I’m not more hostile after all that.
Perhaps she missed the owner, who took the week off to go to Michigan to see his family.
Yet, I sensed something else wrong, perhaps something to do with the eating disorders she complained she had, or maybe something else, some bad medical news.
She seems more alone than ever, caught up with men who professed to love her, but always had to go home at night to their wives.
For all the bad things that went on, all the horrible things said between us (even that arrogant forgiveness poem), I find myself feeling sorry for her, not the masks she puts on, but rather the person she seems to hide behind them.
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