The Feast of Love - Charles Baxter [56]
“It’s close to work.”
“Or that maybe you were attracted by the paintings, the ambiance, all this comfortable furniture you see, or perhaps even the quality of the coffee.”
“It’s close to work.”
“Okay,” he said, “it’s the staff, the friendly unassuming service people you tend to encounter periodically around here, like Chloé, snoozing there in the back.” He gestured in the direction of a punkette half-asleep in a rear booth. I was about to get up and flee from his defective overtures when he said, “I’m sorry. You’re exasperated by me, I can tell. You know, I don’t mean to be exasperating. I’ll let you finish your coffee. Sorry to bother you.” He waited. “By the way, where is work, for you?”
“A mile or so away.” I pointed a finger westward. “You’re not particularly exasperating, you know. Not specifically. I’ve known worse.”
“Thank you. What do you do? For a living?”
I told him.
“Ah.” Sudden thunder crashed outside. We both moved, though I think I must have shuddered and surprised myself, because he told me a month later that I had shuddered and he had noticed and recorded it. That little movement, that tremor of mine, struck a flame. Bradley is interested in fears and phobias. He gestured toward the center of the mall, where there was nothing at all to see. “Violent weather,” he said.
“Right.”
“Well, you know . . . an improvement.”
“Ah.” I decided to nod, but not emphatically. An improvement to what? I would not inquire. A nod without enthusiasm, a nod that withheld final agreement, was what I gave him. I realize that my irony and my distance can become fatiguing, tiresome. But evasiveness is deeply erotic, at least to me. I can fight my own chilliness when the situation demands, when I rouse myself to charm and warmth. He smiled at me as if facing a strong headwind, which I had created and which collaborated with the storm outside. “You like it?”
“What?”
“The . . . the violent weather.”
“Oh,” he said, “sure.” He was very agreeable.
“So do I, I suppose.” I was trying to make a bit of a social effort. “When I was a little girl, I was afraid of thunder.” I glanced down at my newspaper. Something by Paul Hindemith was being revived at Lincoln Center. And something else by what’s-his-name, the boy genius, Korngold. What had happened to the Mark Morris article? “I was quite a cliché in those days,” I said, remembering the conversation.
“But you’re not a cliché anymore, probably. What are you afraid of now?” he asked.
“Now?” I thought for a moment. “You’re very direct. Why do you ask?”
“Because you don’t look like you’re afraid of much. You don’t look like the afraid type.”
“The afraid type? Exactly right. I’m not. Well, since you ask, I am opposed, emotionally I guess, to open spaces,” I said. “They get to me sometimes. Fields. They make me slightly loopy. Any place without a boundary. I have mild agoraphobia. Also I’m terrified of being bored. I get bored, and then I get scared of the way I’m bored. Nothing I can’t handle, though.”
“My ex,” he said, “was afraid of dogs.”
A pause. He didn’t say anything, and neither did I. The thunder and wind outside made a theatrical sound-effects din, but externally, distantly, an irrelevance to people in a shopping mall, except those who wanted electric light and couldn’t have it. “You know,” he said, pressing his luck, “sometimes, when I’m working here, I look out into the . . . recesses of this place, and I see all these people walking by, and I think about what they like and what they’re afraid of, and what makes them feel desolate.” Desolate. I’d never heard anyone use that word in conversation. What would be next? Disheartened? Forlorn? What a strange counterproductive and counterintuitive way to flirt! The style beyond a style. He kept on smiling, despite the turn in the conversation and despite his ineptitude at this sort of talk.
I still didn’t know his name. Shopping specters slid past us on their way somewhere. Winds belted the mall, whipped it.
It felt and looked