Something Is Out There (22 page)

“I feel fine,” she told him. And she did. She noticed it; the cloud had lifted again, was gone again. She wiped the counter and gazed at him. “Everything all right?” she asked him. “The food, I mean.”

“Just right,” he said. “The food, I mean.” He smiled.

“Wonderful. How’s everything else?”

“I’ve just moved house. Everything’s in boxes. Just went back to the old place to make sure everything was out of it.”

“No fun,” she said. “But the coffee’s good, right?”

“Perfect.”

A moment later, she asked if he would like a refill.

“Thank you,” he said. “It’s good coffee.”

“I make it myself,” she told him. “Because I drink it, too.”

He held the cup to his lips and blew across the lip of it. “Very rich.”

“Yes. Some people think it’s too strong.”

“They pour a lot of cream into it?”

“And sugar.”

“Never liked it any other way but black.”

“I used to put a lot of sugar and cream in it when I was young,” she said.

“You’re still young.”

“Well.”

He turned the pages of the book and sipped the coffee. When she asked him if he’d like still more, he nodded, and held out his cup. She poured it full again.

“Thanks,” he said. “I’ve had some good news this morning.”

“Really.”

He nodded, still smiling, though she thought she saw a kind of sad light in his eyes.

“Is it something you can share?” she asked.

The smile stayed. “I’m not gonna die just yet.”

“Oh,” she got out. “That
is
good news.” She believed he might say more, but he went on eating, reading one of the books. She watched him. He did not look ill. Probably some routine medical exam had showed him to be healthy. Or maybe he
was
ill, and in some kind of remission. She caught herself trying again to imagine how people got through. There was work, and she went about it with a kind of heavy concentration, glad of him there, but not wanting to bother him, either.

Presently, when he got up to pay she went to the register and he handed her a twenty. “That was very good,” he said while she made change. “You made me feel like I was in your kitchen.”

“You’re very kind.” She handed him his change, and he was already on his way out the door. He stopped where he had been sitting and put ten dollars down. “Thank you,” she called after him. He waved. She watched him walk on up the sidewalk, toward Main Street and the trolley stop there. He trotted the last few steps because the trolley was arriving. He got on, and rode away toward the loop leading around to Mud Island
and the river, and for some reason this gave her a sudden strange sense of abandonment, as though she were watching the departure of a precious part of life. She went to the big sink and washed her small hands and wondered.

Perhaps a minute later, she found a playbill on the floor by the stool where he had been sitting. It was for something that was showing that week at the Orpheum. Inside was a ticket stub, and a little piece of notepaper with writing on it, not quite readable, and what appeared to be a phone number smeared to illegibility by moisture; it looked like running mascara. She put the playbill and its note in the little box her boss, Mr. Green, kept for lost and found. To her knowledge, nothing had ever been put there before.

That evening, she had an extra glass of Sancerre, and went to bed a little groggy. She tried to read, but kept nodding off. Yet as soon as she shut the light, she was wide awake, lying there open-eyed in the perfect dark—her bedroom windows were covered by heavy curtains; no light from the street and no bright moon could get through. She kept thinking of the man in the straw hat. It was such a funny, wide-brimmed hat, and he’d worn it at an angle. It shaded his face, the little beard and mustache, the green eyes, friendly eyes that were also somehow rather gloomily piercing. The irises didn’t quite reach the lower edges, where the little pouches drooped, the color of old
bruises. It was a strange face; it was very interesting, even unforgettable. But no one would have thought it was good to look at. Indeed, at first glance, one might have said it was ugly.

She kept seeing it, trying to go to sleep. And sleep wouldn’t come. It had felt so strange, standing there watching him come, as though he were her future itself. She couldn’t shake the idea. Nothing important had taken place. She had served breakfast to him and he had left a large tip and gone on his way. And the little playbill and note had dropped from his pocket.

At dawn, tired and bleary-eyed, she finished packing for the visit to the house in Arkansas, drank a big cup of coffee for what she knew would be a long day, and drove her little car to the diner. Yesterday, last night, she decided, was an anomaly, weariness,
and then too much wine, and perhaps the start of a fever. Insomnia sometimes did give her a feverish feeling; and songs—passes in her day, voices, things people said or did, images, instances—replayed themselves with the persistence of delirium. She recalled the way it felt, pausing to watch him walking along, from nowhere, it seemed. That sense of life shifting in the very moment. She thought about him all the way to the diner. After she parked in the lot, she stepped to the side of the road and looked toward where she had first seen him. Preposterous. The sun was brightening there, rising to the level of the far trees yonder. At the top of the farthest hill up that way there was the YMCA building, and she decided that he had probably spent time there, and walked out looking for something to eat.

She said aloud, “What the hell is the matter with you, girl?”

Her shift mate, Colleen, had warned her that she would be alone in the first part of the morning. She opened the diner, went inside, and looked in the little lost and found box. The playbill with its scribbled note and name and number inside was still there. She got things ready for breakfast, and drank more coffee as she brewed it. Colleen called just after seven to say she would be later than planned. Her boys were in trouble at school, again. She had conferences with teachers this morning, and one of the teachers would be delayed. She couldn’t possibly be in until after ten o’clock. “Are you so busy?” she said.

“Not a soul yet.”

“Oh, I hope it’s a light morning.”

“Mr. Green won’t like that.”

“Is he there?”

“You know he never comes in before noon.”

But Mr. Green came in scarcely five minutes after the conversation with Colleen. There were only two customers in the
place. A boy from the high school on his way to early swim practice, and an Episcopal priest, a regular, who had spent the night in the emergency room with one of his parishioners.

“Slow?” Mr. Green said to her, coming in.

“You’re early.”

“I thought you’d need help. Doesn’t look like you do.” He took an apron from the hook on the wall, tied it around himself, then went to the grill and turned the bacon that she had put on. She made an English muffin for herself. The place was always a little slow on Friday mornings. The tourist crowds would start wandering in toward noon. But when the priest paid to the penny and left, they were alone for a time. They talked about the skinflint priest, with his dour morning moods.

“He has an excuse this morning,” Elaine said.

“It’s your tip,” said Mr. Green.

She leaned against the counter and gazed out at the street, the prospect of antiques shops, boutiques, restaurants, the line of stores, the public parking lot up that way, and the trolley stop. She expected to see the man come walking along. But there was only the ebb and flow of traffic gliding past Third Street, the shine of the cars out there. People began to trickle in: several men apparently on their way to some kind of landscaping job; a woman with two preschool children; a couple who had clearly come from the superhighway, their car full of boxes and clothes, with a portable carrier on the roof, and two bicycles on a rack behind.

Through the rest of the morning and into the afternoon, she was too busy to think. At her lunch break she walked up to the sushi place, Bluefin. This part of Main Street was closed to automobile traffic, and she sat out on the patio in the warm breezes and watched the trolleys and the horse-drawn tourist
carriages go by. She was aware of herself purposely not looking into the trolley cars that passed. The waiter was a tall willowy girl with a stud in her nose and an enormous pair of rings expanding the lobe of each ear. Looking at the stretched-thin flesh of her ears undermined Elaine’s appetite. She kept her attention on the street, with its stores and attractions, and the girl bustled around her, bringing edamame and water and chattering about the weather, which was in fact seasonably unremarkable: Memphis was always this hot in late July.

When she was with Sean, the two of them used to come to this part of town and walk down past Beale Street and the Orpheum Theatre to the galleries along South Main. A man who worked in a boutique near the train station was a source for Sean. They’d buy a nickel bag from him. Sean would make four joints out of it, and Elaine would put it in her purse. They’d go into some of the galleries, walking back toward Union Avenue. And sometimes they would take a table on the outdoor patio of Bluefin. Sean would light a joint. They would pass it back and forth under the table, while they waited for the food to come. She would watch the young families walking by—couples with babies in strollers or toddlers tagging along. Sean called them “citizens” in a dismissive tone and with a
little tilting back of his head, as though the word itself contained some power to cause a recoiling, like the kick from a pistol shot, and his phrase to describe what they were doing, sitting there on the open patio, was “watching the citizens.”

She ate her edamame and some soup. The sky above the city was gray, and that fit her mood. When she got back to the diner, she peeked into the lost and found box. The playbill with its unreadable note and number were still there. She took it out and tried to read the writing. She could make out one word:
can’t
. She was pretty sure that was the word. The rest of it was smudged ink, draining down the little page. She put it back and turned to Colleen, who was carrying two plates on one arm and one on the other, crossing to a table by the window.

“Am I glad to see you,” she said.

She was run ragged, and Mr. Green had stayed to help at the griddle. As the hours wore on Elaine lost herself in the bustle and stress of keeping up with it all.

Just before the end of her shift, the man in the straw hat entered.

She looked up from taking the order of two women from the university, and saw him. Something turned over in her blood. He went up to Mr. Green and said something, and Mr. Green reached for the lost and found box.

“Excuse me,” Elaine said to the women. “Be right back.”

She moved down the crowded counter to where the man stood. He had retrieved the contents of the box and set them down. He was nearsightedly holding the note up to his eyes, very close.

“Hello,” she said to him.

He only glanced her way. “Hi.”

“You were gone by the time I found it.”

Now he stared. “Do you expect a reward or something?”

“Oh, no.” Her heart sank. And then she seemed to pause in herself and observe that fact. It made her repeat the phrase, with exactly the same emphasis. “Oh, no.”

He looked back at the note. “Can’t read it anyway.” He folded it into quarters, and put it in his pocket, then rolled the playbill. “Well, thanks.”

“Don’t mention it,” Elaine said. “I think I’d call the number. You can read the number.”

His eyes narrowed, and he took her in. “Pardon me?”

“Just a suggestion.” She thought how foolish to suppose that yesterday had made any kind of impression on him, or that it meant anything. “Never mind,” she said.

He took the note out again. “The number’s mine. My new one. I wrote it down so I wouldn’t forget it.”

She said nothing.

“The note, well, that’s something else. Something my daughter wrote. She came through town and left it on the door of the house I just left. I was out getting tested for a tumor that wasn’t there. She comes through town. She hasn’t spoken to me in three years.”

“I’m so sorry.”

“Yeah,” he said. “Well.”

“Order up,” Mr. Green said behind her.

“I’m sorry,” Elaine said again to the man, because it was all she could think of to say.

“What do you reckon her note says? Did you try to read it?”

“I only looked at the number. I thought if you didn’t collect it in a couple of days, I’d call it.”

“Maybe you’ll call it anyway.”

“Well, I didn’t memorize it.”

He handed her the note. “Here. You can have it. You’ve got it now.”

She held it up to the light. She read again the word
can’t
. She thought to say that to him, but he had turned and was moving to the door and out. He walked on down toward Third Street.