SKYLIGHTING
I go over to the esplanade and sit on a bench. As I put my arm across the backrest a woman sits down and leans into it. She jumps up from the touch, as if I have groped her, and I stand up too, equally startled. We smile to acknowledge our mutual embarrassment, then she turns and walks off. It is merely an accident of timing.
Flip-flops and sandals: the sidewalk applauds. Since when has the esplanade drawn such crowds? I feel a gnawing at my innards as if my stomach were teething on an iron tine. It is beginning to feel like hamburger time.
I go over to the Hab-or-Nab to have a quick bite. “What’ll it be, Extraño?” I always sit at the bar and the barmaid always calls me that.
“Medium rare, pepino solo.” My usual order, her usual grin at my high-school Spanish.
“And an order of rings,” the woman who sat beside me on the bench says as she takes the next stool. She starts fumbling through her purse. “They have a beer menu here but I can’t find my glasses. I was born farsighted, it isn’t from age. Are those for reading?”
She takes the dime-store specs from the neck of my shirt, a strand of brown hair slipping down to her dark brunette eyebrow. She blinks her green eyes. “Two point five,” she says, adjusting my glasses on her nose. “I’m an excellent judge of magnification.”
Our conversation is a series of overstrikes. By last call I feel imprinted in an old-fashioned way like paper slowly working through a typewriter.
“Louise,” she says, “since you’ll want to know my name.”
She takes me by the arm as if she were batting left-handed. “I knew you were nice when you jumped off that bench. I bet you open doors.”
An understanding has been reached; she simply comes with me. The night is a medley of crickets and frogs. They quiet as we approach and pick up again after we pass.
We turn up my walk, and inside my apartment I drape a towel over the cage to keep the cockatiel quiet. She says she is thirsty, but that sounds like a line, and as I take a favorite glass down from the cupboard I wonder if she has to take a pill.
She drinks the water in the bathroom, the only place in my apartment that is private. When she opens the door, dim light floats out toward the couch where I am waiting. She is naked except for the matching towel wrapped under her arms like a strapless dress.
“I want to make love without taking it off. You don’t have to know why.”
She pulls the bathroom door shut and goes over to the window to widen the blind. Partly blocked by the slats the streetlamp looks like a lunar eclipse. I keep my hands to myself as seems to be required. “A moon like this,” she says, stroking the strands of shadow and light.