Part two of three

Three Wednesdays, Part 2: The Best Bench In The Park

She’s The Kind Of Pretty That Can Haunt A Man

Read Three Wednesdays Part 1: The Worst Alley In The Universe, HERE

The clock on the living room wall reads 10 pm.

I feel the night call to me. I abandon the whisky I’ve been nursing for the better part of an hour and I grab my coat.

Getting out and about at this hour is standard for me; the days are harsh, the nights less so. Nights cast a veil of anonymity over misanthropic creatures such as myself who prefer to exist during its finite collection of dimly lit hours. We are all strangers when the stars are out, we are free to wander this maze of sidewalks and streetlights in which aimlessness is expected, not deemed worthy of even the smallest measure of scrutiny.

I climb down the four floors to the entrance of my apartment complex and completely ignore my overflowing mailbox on the way out of the building. The street smells like it’s hungover. The air is humid. Artificial lights everywhere flicker and blink, out-of-shape lamp posts doing their damnedest to replicate at night a task that, during the day, takes the full might of the sun to accomplish. Given the circumstances, those streetlights are fucking heroes.

I walk for a long time, avoiding eye contact and enjoying the noisy humdrum voice of the city. I follow my feet along a collection of streets and, as usual, they lead me to an old ice cream vendor who sells me a chocolate ice cream cone for a palmful of change, and finally to a bench I like in a small park which overlooks more blinking lights, more city sounds, more of this urban night that feels like home, or a respite from home, maybe. Perhaps both. Anyway, a place that I feel tolerates me, and that I tolerate right back.

It’s a Wednesday.

Once I’ve made small work of my ice cream cone, I fish a crumbled cigarette pack from my inside coat pocket and pull one out. I find a matchbook and try a match, and another, and a third. Sometimes matches cooperate and, sometimes, they don’t. There’s no law to it. Matches are a fickle thing. “Here,” a woman’s voice says, and a little flame flickers to life a few inches from my face. I turn to look and, lo and behold, a girl is sitting on the same bench as me, holding a zippo lighter and looking at me from behind it. I feel the heat from the little flame as it dances by my right cheek. I quietly take a match from my matchbook, light it with the lighter’s flame, and take that to the end of my cigarette. My mouth fills with delicious smoke as I perform small puffs in quick succession to properly ignite the tobacco and get my cigarette going. I suck all that smoke into my lungs, waste not, want not, and all that. I relax. This part feels so good. I settle on the bench, facing forward, and admire the gorgeous urban landscape sprawled out before my tired eyes, saying nothing to this woman who apparently materialized next to me, right in the middle of my solitude, on my bench, without permission. How rude.

From what I gathered in the brief moment I saw her face, hidden behind the flame of her lighter, she’s the kind of pretty that can haunt a man. She has short black hair that knows better than to get in the way of her arresting gaze, and hazel eyes that tell you the beginning of a story but not the end. She has nice lips that luckier men than me most likely kiss from time to time. Those lips look like they burn, like the moment they press against yours, the soft, tender impact ripples from your lips all the way through you, to the very start of you, right down to that first spark, and turn that into a sun.

I have no words to give to a woman like that. My words are ugly and sharp and sound like boulders rolling on shattered glass. Once my cigarette is duly flicked from my fingers and lost to the night, I get up and, keeping all my words to myself, I leave.

But she’s back the next night.

On my bench again.

This time she’s already there when I arrive, my ice cream cone in hand. She says hi when I sit down. I say nothing. Is this no longer my bench? It has been for years, from the first days of Summer to the last. Every Summer. There are plenty of benches but this one has the best view. It’s mine. I sit here. All the damn time. She waits until I finish my ice cream, takes out two cigarettes from a pack she produces out of somewhere on her person, and sticks both in her mouth. A flame ignites from her zippo which it appears isn’t as fickle as the matches from my matchbook, and she proceeds to light both cigarettes. She hands one to me. I take it, reluctant but something else, too. When I fit the cigarette filter in the corner of my mouth, I find it is slightly damp, adored by a small collection of spit bubbles she left behind. They burst under the skin of my lips. I refuse to admit this, most of all to myself, but the feeling is electric. A kiss by proxy. I’m an old fool and I shouldn’t paint images like that in my mind. Not even for a second. If I start, I’ll paint more. I won’t stop…

Normally I would sit at my bench for at least an hour, just staring at the city or reading a book, but this night, same as last, I stay just for the one cigarette and, not saying a word, I get up and leave.

The next night she’s there again, and the one after that.

Against my better judgment, I begin to look forward to these quiet meetings, even though I resent her for the place she’s taken in my life. I’m a lonely man and that’s how I know myself. It’s what I’m good at. Good for. There’s no one else. That’s the entire point. What happens when you start looking forward to seeing someone? What happens when the thought of someone, just a thought, makes your steps land lighter and your heartbeats take up more room in your chest? From experience, nothing good. And yet, for the first time in what feels like forever, there’s someone else existing, beyond me, in this tapestry of strangers and silhouettes. There’s a woman who seems kind and smart and is probably full of stories and her shirt is always unbuttoned just low enough for the curve of her breasts to make a promise that would haunt a pope, and her legs are long, I wonder how they’d feel wrapped around me… How her breath might taste on my tongue… How she might sound when she whimpers my name from pleasure… Would she like my hands squeezing her waist? My fingers digging into her pale flesh as she bounces on top of me? Her red lips locked to mine… her hips rocking back and forth… fuck. Fuck. Get it together. Quit painting, old fool.

On the fifth night, I arrive at the bench with two lit cigarettes at the ready. She’s there, maybe waiting for me. I sit next to her and hand her one. She says thank you and I say you’re welcome.

Those are the first words I’ve ever spoken to her. If it takes her by surprise she doesn’t show it. She takes a long drag of her cigarette and says, holding the smoke in her lungs, “Why am I meeting you at this bench every night? How come I’m not out at a club, dancing, getting guys to spring for drinks? What’s this story, in my life, where you apparently play a part? And what’s the part? And how does it end?”

A quiet moment passes. She lets the smoke curl out of her mouth, snaking up her upper lip and around her nose, toward the night sky.

“You a mind reader?” I ask.

“I like that you didn’t say one word to me, that first night. No desire to impress or engage. I came back the second night to see… well, first if you’d show up again, but also — if you did — whether you’d say something or not. From what I understand it takes courage to talk to me, on account of how I look I guess.”

“I can stick to quiet if you prefer…”

“No,” she says, exhaling smoke, “you kept up the quiet for, what? Four nights? You’ve proven you’re capable. Let’s try words.”

I take a drag off my cigarette and try to think of some words. None come to mind. That’s not true, but she’s half my age and all the words I can think of I know better than to say out loud. It’s easier to just sit back and smoke so I elect to do that instead.

Finally, a thought crosses my mind, an idea, a thing to say that has nothing to do with the slight curve of her upper lip, or how perfectly her chest is hugged by her shirt, how her black bra shows through the white of its fabric, how much of her thigh her skirt lets me see from the way her legs are crossed right now…

“How was my day?” she repeats, slightly amused, “that is actually the perfect question, isn’t it?”

“I’d take full credit for it,” I say, slowly easing himself into this person I’m trying to be, “except, I think I heard it somewhere before, maybe in a movie…”

“First time I ever hear it,” she cracks, deadpan, “must be from an older movie, something in black and white from before my time…”

“You’re calling me old, now?” I say it, looking at her through a thin veal of cigarette smoke. She looks so good…

“Real dinosaur,” she smiles, “anyway, yeah, I didn’t have a very good day…”

There’s a pause then. The moment we’re having takes a backseat and stays quiet. She traps me in her eyes. Locks me in. She smokes, and I smoke, and she casts spell after spell on me, bewitches me, with her youth and her innocence and her wit and the infinity in her gaze.

Then she sighs.

And she tells me about her bad day.

I listen to every detail. I’m not used to caring about events that aren’t happening to me but today, for one thousand reasons, I do. She tells me about her father and his expectations for her, which don’t much coincide with how she intends to go about the rest of her life. She tells me about the pressure and about how it’s tricky to complain given the life she’d led, with money and private schools and violin lessons and generally having all her needs met. She tells me so much about herself. It feels like too much. I don’t understand why, what I did to gain her trust, but here it is.

Trust.

It has taken shape between us and now she’s using it like a pillow and a punching bag and a caress and a blade and a book where everything painful and everything haunting can be put away. A book with a key and a lock and I guess I’m that, I’m all three, and she’s giving me her words to keep locked away and safe. They pour from her in torrents, and I catch them all, and a picture starts to take shape in my mind.

We sit on our bench for hours and, for hours, with broad masterful and sweeping strokes, she paints. She creates something in my mind that is vast and beautiful and complicated. I take several steps back so I can see the whole thing. Eventually, after a night and half a morning on that bench, with only ice cream and cigarettes as sustenance, while the city night quietly fades and the day starts to roar around and over us, I understand. The picture in my mind, big like a country, bright like it’s been painted with ink drawn from suns.

It’s a portrait.

A grand, heartbreaking portrait.

Of a princess. A princess without hope. Her expression draped in sorrow. Her life trapped in the footsteps of a king whose dark, evil empire she sees no choice but to inherit…

She gets quiet and lights a cigarette.

She takes a beat to look at the city as it slowly gets its day on.

She turns to me, finally, and she says:

“My bastard of a father is a dangerous, powerful man, and I need your help.”

Read the conclusion, Three Wednesdays, Part 3: The End Of All Things, HERE

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