When I think of him in this city, my breath catches. We have no confirmed lunch plans, but when I arrive at my block’s corner cafe, I already know he’ll be there, claiming my little slice of sunshine in this perpetually foggy city. I turn the corner, smiling fleetingly at the man living on the bottom steps adjacent to the cafe, realizing that in the context of my life he has never been anywhere but this sheltered stairway. His left hand is on the iron banister and his right arm hangs around an almost empty bottle of whiskey. A sour smell rises around him. He has told me his name is Fred, Bill, Bob, and Jacques, but, other than his multiple personalities, our relationships lies in familiar glances and the comfortable silences that accompany them. I walk by, and he remains wrapped in the grime of the city.
There he is, in my cafe, charming my waitress, and he sees me outside and waves. I slide in next to him, each of us with one thigh in the sun, our jeans rubbing against each other like sandpaper. He’s drinking coffee, waiting for me to order so he can eat half my food. His arm hooks around my shoulders. Two people who haven’t seen each other in so long should have a lot to say, but I only inquire about the length of his visit to which he shrugs his shoulders. My omelet arrives. I take in his sounds: the tap of his pen followed by the relief of exhalation. I pretend to read the newspaper, my eyes dragging themselves without his permission back to his scribbles. He’s always writing, and I’m always looking for a way to understand him through it.
“That’s beautiful,” I say, exposing myself.
He crumples the napkin and puts it in his pocket. His fork shovels my potatoes and the remainder of my omelet into his mouth. I want to stick my thumbs in his dimples every time he smiles at me. Instead, I break this never-lasting intimacy and ask a dreadfully familiar question.
He tells me things I already know from correspondence through e-mail. He and her have just moved in together.
I nod, but I’m busy picturing his tiny, narrow apartment, and what it must be like to have to stumble over him to get to the bathroom in the morning.
“Are you pregnant yet?” he asks me. His hand floats over my stomach, his finger falling to touch right below my belly button as he pulls his hand away.
On my way to the cafe, I’d taken a detour to a little lingerie boutique, asking with a flushed face if I could wear the ensemble out of the store, under my clothes, my old underwear and bra shoved and zipped in the largest pocket of my purse. I knew he wouldn’t see it unless I grabbed and pulled him to the nearest hotel room, but the feeling of the silk beneath my clothes makes it easier to sit with him now.
He’s smoothing the crumpled napkin back on the table, the pen between his teeth, and I’m kicking the table leg. His head jerks up from his napkin, and I know he disapproves of the clack my city-inappropriate heels are making against the wood, but he’s just staring at me like he’s forgotten my name.
I turn away and Fred/Bill/Bob/Jacques—“it’s Sanjay today, baby”—is walking to the counter with a five-dollar bill in his hand. My temperature is rising, and when I look down at my lap, our sunlit moment is gone. Sanjay pays for his cup of coffee and lifts his purchase to the sky in a celebratory expression of faith. “Today is truly beautiful day,” Sanjay says.
Expecting to find him back in his own head, scribbling words together in a way I could never do, I’m surprised to see him drawing perfect circles, one after the other. I have never seen him doodle. Pressure on my hand startles me. He’s drawing a circle on me, but this circle has a ring around it, like Saturn.
“I’m taking you,” he says.
I wet my finger to clear away a stray smudge near my wedding ring.
I walk out of the cafe in front of him, and he stands immediately behind me, his left hand on my shoulder, and I can feel his pen on my neck. It’s another circle, but this one has masses of land filled in with horizontal scratches. I don’t know where we’re going, but I walk fast, barely holding down the instinct to flee from him as he pulls my shirt up off my hip in the back. I think we might be going to a hotel, but we veer off to a fading yellow Victorian with a swinging screen door. Signs of how he’s associated with this house aren’t easily visible to me: no pictures of him as a child and none of the book he reveres. A small black suitcase sits at the foot of the staircase we’re ascending. In a little room upstairs with a rich plum rug and an ivory futon, he pulls off my shirt and draws a cluster of small planets around my hip, but he’s traded his pen for a box cutter, and my skin burns from the shallow cutting; the wavy outline makes this sphere the sun.
After he has mapped our solar system all over my body, telescoping in on a map of a city I don’t recognize because it’s his city, all bleeding corners and intersecting grids, we lie on the futon. I am nude except for the places blood pools in the shallow carvings. He remains fully clothed. We are not touching. In every one of his actions, I know I’m supposed to find some hidden meaning, this solar system is my clue, and when I inevitably can’t find it, he will leave just like he always does.
Nicole Hughes earned an MFA in fiction from San José State University and lives in San Francisco. She is an event manager for Peninsula Arts & Letters, the non-profit partner of Kepler’s Books, and a writer. She has been published in Liebamour and recently interviewed Vendela Vida and Ruth Galm on stage.