Stuart Dybek - Ecstatic Cahoots - Fifty Short Stories

“That would explain why she doesn’t consider me a worthy escort. You notice the evil eye I was getting.”

“Maybe she could see I’d been crying. Can you tell?”

“You look like you just came in from the cold.”

Gwen polishes a teaspoon with a paper napkin and examines her reflection in the concave finish. “My eyes are puffy,” she says.

Rick takes the spoon from her, brings it to his lips as if it’s brimming with steaming soup, and sips. “I love the taste of your reflection,” he says, dropping his voice. “I could lick it off mirrors.”

“A little over the top, but better. You’re making a comeback,” Gwen says, and takes his hand and slides it into the pocket of her fur coat. The strapless bra Rick undid in the movie theater is still balled in the pocket. The pocket has a hole in it and Rick can reach through the pocket and then through the torn lining of the coat to brush his fingers along Gwen’s right breast.

“Oh-oh,” Rick says, “this is how it started at the movie.”

“God, I was so close, too,” she says. “I blame it on that old, atmospheric theater and its velvet seats and winking starry sky. Like we’d entered a time machine to get there, the way the movies used to be. I always envied those generations that grew up making out at drive-ins instead of ordering Netflix. I wanted us to come together while Fred and Ginger were dancing.”

“Foreplay interruptus,” Rick says. “We’re both probably suffering from posttraumatic sex disruption. No wonder you got upset about a heart on a car window.”

“It wasn’t just a car . It was a vintage Jaguar. That was the point, a beautiful, sleek green Jag inscribed with a heart. Tomorrow morning some lonely venture capitalist is going to come out and find that heart on his car and see only my initials in it ’cause you were freezing and couldn’t wait around. He’ll think it was a message for him and inscribe his initials where yours were supposed to be, and then he’ll slowly cruise through the city, hoping for G loves blank space , whoever she is, to wave as he goes by.”

Sandra brings a plastic tray to their table. Arranged on the tray are two small metal pots filled with steaming water and two thick white chipped cups on matching chipped saucers. There are two Salada tea packets on a separate plate, two spoons, and a little white bowl of lemon wedges. She carefully transfers each item to their table, setting a cup, pot, and spoon before each of them, and the bowl of lemon wedges in the middle. She opens each tea packet and places a tea bag in each cup and then from her apron pocket produces two small containers of honey.

“Anything more I can get you?” Sandra asks.

“This is wonderful,” Gwen says. “I wasn’t expecting a tea ceremony when I ordered.”

Sandra smiles, pleased. “It’s just tea bags,” she says. “My mother really knew how to brew tea — real loose tea from India in a little silver ball with a chain. She’d read the leaves.”

“Really!” Gwen says. “I always wanted to see someone do that. My mother told me my Nona Marie used to read the cards. Not tarot, just regular playing cards. The family story is that it was the cards that told my grandmother her future was in America.”

“I read the cards,” Sandra says. “It’s in my family. All the women can do it. My sister Irene can read eggs. Don’t laugh,” she says to Rick. “It’s true. I read palms.”

“Who taught you?” Gwen asks. “Or did you just like know how?”

“My mother taught me. She taught me what I already knew but didn’t have the confidence for. I can show you,” Sandra says, and sits down at their table. She extends her hand toward Gwen, and Gwen releases Rick’s hand in the pocket of her fur coat, and gives her hand to Sandra.

“It’s amazing what we’re born knowing if someone just shows us,” Gwen says.

“Yeah, and amazing what we think we know when what we know is nothing,” Sandra says. “You have a warm, lovely hand, hon.” She turns Gwen’s hand palm up and lightly traces the lines with her crooked forefinger, studying them, and then looking up at Gwen, who meets Sandra’s eyes and smiles.

Sandra doesn’t smile back.

“You’re laughing on the outside, but your heart is crying,” Sandra says.

Rick feels caught off guard. He notices Gwen flinch and instinctively draw back, but Sandra grips her wrist. Gwen closes her hand and Sandra gently pries it back open and studies it again. “You two, you’re the wrong chemicals to mix,” she says, and shakes her head disapprovingly.

“Pardon?” Gwen says.

“Not a good fit, no balance. Don’t go near the ledge together,” Sandra says, and pushes herself up as if she’s suddenly weary, then shuffles away.

“Mondo weirdo,” Rick says. “There goes her tip. I think we just experienced the gypsy tea ceremony. That line about crying in your heart sounds like it comes out of Fortune-telling for Dummies .”

He pours hot water over his tea bag; the water in the cup turns tannic.

“My great-aunt Lucile used to look like she was reading tea bags,” he tells Gwen. “She’d put hot tea bags on her eyes when she had a migraine. She could tell the future from the spatters of bacon fat, too, and forecast winners at the track from feeling the fuzz on a raspberry.”

He sips his tea. The water that appeared to be hot is tepid.

Gwen reaches for the glass container of sugar that huddles together with the salt and pepper shakers, a squeeze bottle of mustard, a bottle of Tobasco, and a clotted bottle of catsup missing its cap around the napkin dispenser, like a little village rising from a Formica plain.

“Did you and your friends ever fill the sugar container with salt when you were in high school?” Rick asks.

“What a callow, guy thing to do,” Gwen says. She stops before pouring sugar into her cup, and instead touches the tip of her index finger to the sugar spout and then extends the sugary finger toward Rick. “Taste. Some gang of knuckleheads like your high school homies might have been messing around here.”

“It’s sweet,” Rick says. He licks the grains from her fingertips, then spreads her middle and forefinger as if spreading her legs and runs his tongue down the side of her forefinger to the webbing and laps her there. She takes his hand, sprinkles sugar on his forefinger, guides it to her lips, and sucks it. He closes his eyes.

“Did you like it in the movie theater?” Gwen asks.

“Loved it. I’m sorry we got kicked out into the cold before we found out if we could get off before Fred at least gets to kiss Ginger.”

“What if going to that old theater was going back in the past, and because we got kicked out instead of staying until it was over and returning to the present, we were kicked out into the past? I mean, look at this place. Think about outside, how nothing looked the same.” Gwen releases his hand and bobs her tea bag in the cup. The string slips from the staple that attaches the bag to the Salada label, and she spoons the tea bag out and presses it to her eye. “Oooh, that feels good. Great-Aunt Lucile was on to something.” Gwen places the tea bag on her saucer, and then sprinkles sugar on the lemon wedges in the bowl. “I like tart tastes. I used to suck lemons even when I was a little kid. My friends all thought I was crazy. I like how clean they make my mouth feel.” She sucks at a lemon wedge, and then inserts the wedge into her mouth and retracts her lips, giving Rick a lemon-peel smile.

He peels open a honey container, dabs out a fingertip of honey, outlines her lips, and kisses her. The lemon wedge still in her mouth blocks the probing of his tongue. Her kiss tastes of lemon oil. He dabs his forefinger in the honey again, and then slips his hand beneath the table and carefully slides it between the folds of her fur coat and up under her heather woolen skirt. When he reaches her thighs, her legs part. She looks at him and narrows her eyes. There’s the tink of her spoon as her right hand absently stirs her tea. “So you think maybe we’re like stranded in the past together?” Rick asks. The lemon peel smiles back at him from between her lips. The radiant warmth of her body defies the grains of ice slashing through the dark trees that line the curb, the sleet ticking against the pinkish plate-glass window and pocking the film of snow on the windshields of parked cars. No way would that heart on the Jag survive until morning. She slouches down in her chair, pressing his sticky fingertip against her panties, and then past the elastic so that the honey mixes with her slickness. They may have entered the past, but for this moment there’s only the present between them.