Something In the Time of Cholera

"Does she... does this Lynn have bigger breasts?" she asks. She is standing in front of me and she is sobbing and she pauses between words as though each were its own sentence. "Oh. Oh God," she says. "I thought--" she says. I sit on the sofa and I light a cigarette and I study the geometry of the wood floors. She paces. She opens "Love in the Time of Cholera" again and she reads the inscription aloud again. I already know what it says. She already knows what it says. But she reads it out loud anyway.

"You said you remember life by whatever you were reading at the time," her voice trembles. She coughs and she clears her throat and she continues: "...like the way some people are about music. Let this be our song. With Love -Lynn." And then she closes the book and she drops it and she says my name. She says my name like she's begging for change.

"How could you do this to me?"

"We are broken up," I say. "Broken, actually."

She looks at me looking at the book on the floor and she whispers, "But I love you."

I say nothing.

The front door slams and then the driver side door of her Nissan Sentra slams and but the engine does not start. The pages of Marquez are bent.

There is most of a case of Newcastle in the refrigerator. Recent take-out boxes from Chef Lee's with all of the good bits missing. An old pat of butter and a forgotten egg. I grab two Newkies and I return to the sofa and I pour them both into a plastic cup. Ella and ivory are on the stereo and a miasma of dusk settles in.

She comes back through the door and she hesitates and she says, after a time, she says, "Can I have one?"

She follows me to the kitchen and I feel arms around my waist as I stoop to pluck another bottle of beer from the case. I fish a church key from my pocket and I pop the cap. She kisses the back of my neck and she tongues my ear. The cap skips into the sink. I turn and I give her the bottle. She kisses me with a mouthful of beer. The sound of every movement echoes in the kitchen.

In thirty minutes she is gone and I return to the sofa and to the beer, to Ella and to the night. Marquez is still on the floor.

When Lynn arrives she reaches for it and she says, "Really?"

The only other thing she says, after, is she says, "I can't do this anymore." She sits up and she searches the bedding for her bra. I absently note that Lynn's breasts are not bigger than Colleen's breasts. And I pass out.

In the morning I plod down Franklin with a leather bag slung over one shoulder. In the leather bag are notepads and textbooks and that fucking copy of "Love in the Time of Cholera." At Morgan's I get coffee to go and Morgan himself tells me I look like shit. I shake my head and he says something banal about "...rough night last night" and I shrug and I leave. I stay on Washington until it becomes Abrego. At Fremont I walk east until I reach Lagunita Mirada. The dirt path takes me to a bench. I sit with my back to the nearby adobe and I pull Marquez from the bag and I begin to read the tale of a constipated schmuck who squanders his life pursuing a chick he can't have.

Nice one, Lynn.

The small, murky lake is populated with reeds and a scattering of bitchy Canadian geese. Its name is a sudden puzzle to me. "Lagunita" is the Spanish diminutive for "lake." Little lake. But the "Mirada" part is the problem. "Mira," in the Spanish, is "look," where "Mirada" might refer to the word "glance." I don't know what any of it means and but thinking about this is far better than wrecking my head with any degree of introspection, like, whatsoever.