At Griffin Plaza

The problem being her shoes. I don’t get them. She is wearing a gray t-shirt that probably once belonged to someone else, its screen printed ink faded and flaking and missing, in spots. The t-shirt hangs untucked over a pair of stretch jeans that are loose around her skinny legs; the jeans suggesting a drunken spree spent in the senior wear section of a Montgomery Ward’s catalog. She is not exactly short and her dark hair is pulled back in a sloppy ponytail. Her face is expressionless and she is leafing through Marian Keyes’ “Watermelon.” And but while Keyes and “Watermelon” present an entirely different issue, it’s really the shoes. They’re date shoes. High heels, black suede, only a hint of toe cleavage. The shoes make no sense, given the ratty t-shirt and the geriatric denim. I don’t get them.

At all.

I watch her as she sips tea and reads Keyes at a small, rickety metal table a few feet away from my own small, rickety metal table. And I imagine dating her.

There was something about her eyes, at first. Large, brown, proportionate to her high forehead. I see her in a pub and she’s with an ugly group of giddy friends. Coworkers. Margaritas and cosmos and other uninspired cocktails. She approaches the bar and orders another round of unsophisticated drinks for her hideous company. We talk. Later in the night I hear about her recent breakup and I see her naked. It isn’t awful.

My phone rings the following day and we plan our next date. That date ends without clothes too and she confesses to never letting Gavin do that, after. Drunk, her, dates into it, she tells me she hates her body. The story devolves and she complains that her boobs assumed early pronunciation and but faltered in her mid-teens, and but that she went from being The Girl in Elementary School With The Big Boobs to the girl in high school with the flat chest. Which is why she lost her virginity to Kent, because Kent had split up with a popular bigger-boobed girl who made fun of her smaller boobs and so by sleeping with Kent there was painful validation.

She makes me rent and watch “Fried Green Tomatoes” even though I have read and have not enjoyed Fannie Flagg, Flagg, whose name, phonetically, is a euphemism for vagina in the UK. I don’t point this out and I watch the movie with her and she cries too much, during. All the way through, really.

And the relationship yaws. It yaws and it lists and the insecurity is unbearable. My pager is a mess whenever I’m not with her. She accuses me of cheating even though I haven’t. Obsessive where are you calls and scribbled insinuations left on my windshield. Facie ad faciem is quieter, if, now, less frequent.

I go out alone one night and I get drunk and I decide to find and to sleep with a chick with large breasts. The experience is hollow, I think, as I sit at the edge of a stranger’s hotel room bed. I smoke in the dark and I drain the last drops of flat beer from a warm bottle of Bass. The stranger with the rack wants to go again. I don’t. We go again anyway and it takes forever. And I leave.

Splitting up is ugly and it plays out over weeks. I change my number and I avoid familiar places. There will be a scene at the Hog’s Breath down in Carmel –something about a waitress from Pebble with whom I’m temporarily becoming familiar. She’ll show up and she’ll interrupt the drinking and fondling and she’ll announce that it’s over. That we’re through. And she’ll call me names. And the Pebble waitress and I, we’ll laugh about it, about her, about the scene in the small and intimate hours of the foggy morning.

And.

The weird girl wearing date shoes with the laundry day outfit is looking at me. She is smiling and the smile transforms her face into a vision of simple beauty. There is an adrenal uneasiness in my stomach and I struggle to locate kind words about Keyes because despite the shirt and the jeans and the date shoes (and Keyes), I want to meet her and I want to know her. I smile back and I open my mouth to speak.

She blushes. She places Keyes on the rickety table and she stands up. A younger guy with a book bag walks between us. She hugs him and they sit and they chat and they laugh. Old friends, maybe lovers.

I still don’t get the shoes.