The smell of pancakes filters in, raking up my belly for the second time this day. Bacon and sweet treats, and other barbaric, inane American things. The taste of scoping up grease and having it dribble lazy and erotic down your mucky chin.
I've a man I'm watching, on account of tit-for-tat. Him watching me. Intrigued. I make a story of him before I glimpse his eyes, for the way he cradles his shirt-on-a-hanger in the collar of his taut black tee. The way he uses himself as a door and a parapet, an endless possibility from across the street.
Too late, he's spotted me.
He watches me through the window of the first mezzanine, making his way up the old stairs, taking note of me in my bright, yellow dress. My strange, made-up eyes, all ripe for outgoing. Except I get waylaid often in interminable cups of coffee, and indoor rites, the keen mooring on some forgotten island. Past Bethesda, I tell him I've never flown, so he grabs my ankles bare and wraps them lovingly around his elephantine ears. And so, another day squandered and vanquished in my loving him.
I must make myself new kinds of rituals. I watch for a time. Have the unmistakable impression of being noticed from second mezzanine, and then, where goes he? That's two last apartments that could mean him, except he's no gardener, which means he must be a garden. In the barren, stripped-to-rights apartment across the landing.
Clamp my thighs in embarrassment. Can he see from there the little white wings, the shame of being a woman in the 21st century, still? Is he put off or turned on, and can he feel the bear stench of me under midday sun? My middle of the day growling on all fours, can he hear, and does he want to see?
Disappointment. I wait, but he's nowhere.The walled garden of the last floor is not his for beatifying. The window remains closed on the other end. If he is watching, he takes full advantage of the torrid sun, hiding in embarrassment, and in a moment I know why.
Emerges before I've had time to redress myself properly. Glances up precisely once. To see if I'm still looking, or to let me know I, too, have been watched? Has changed his shirt, all handsome and business-like,or maybe he stretched the black tee so far out of recognition, in that tremulous act of disappearing up the stairs, and back.
Maybe he thinks with a lie, I won't know him the next time he looks up, and me, feigning innocence, nothing but a dirty, hungry peeping tom.
Find, when I reach, the easy plurality of loving, once you're being loved.
Except that's me. Lying to you. I've always loved too much to people-watch. Hold his watch. Behind slick shades, he holds mine, then lets go me, lets me on my way. Get up, you wench. You intolerable lout. Make something of yourself, your life. Quit wasting your day putting pen to paper, making love.
How does he know. The same way that I now. Locks the car with relish, gets on about his day. Over the neighborhood, lets me up here, keeping watch.
