Author's Note:
Back with part 1 of a 2 part story. Both work as standalones, in my opinion, but they're connected. The usual disclaimers etc.
The sweat was still running down my back as I held my hands under the tap in the bathroom in the basement of the coffee shop on Singleton street. The heat, not the nerves, was what made me sweat, though I'd not seen Paul in two years. I let the cold water run over my hands, splashed it up my forearms. Down south, where I'd gone for college, tap water didn't stay cold in the summer. But here, home, even in the eternal heat, I could count on the ice chill. I dried my hands, tried to fix the lay of my blue dress, the one adorned with little yellow flowers.
Paul waited for me upstairs, at one of the tall tables along the brick pillars in the middle of the coffee shop, where he could hear the barista up in the raised kitchen call out the order numbers.
"Twenty six," the barista called as I emerged from the stairwell. "Two cold brews, one cream and sugar, one black."
Paul started up, but I beat him to the counter.
"Thanks, Noora," he said when I set the coffee down. "How long are you in town?" Even half-seated on the stool at the table, Paul was taller than me.
"End of August."
He had thick, dark hair, cut close on the sides and combed to one side, gelled down in an imitation of mid-century masculine order. When I'd known him first, that hair had been wild all down to his jaw, a rebellion against the sportcoat, high-and-tight professors and politicians who comprised the leading men of our town. But Paul had gone to Oberlin three years ago--he was two years my senior--and found that the powerful there were loose and unkempt.
He always had to rebel against something. It was what I'd liked about him.
The coffee was good, nothing to remark on. I passed the sugared one to Paul and set mine on the table. He touched my arm, as we drank.
We'd been close once. Not sex close. Not kissing close. But maybe almost. He asked me to homecoming his senior year and I turned him down. He went with a bottle; I went with my friends.
"And you?" I said.
"I'm gone tomorrow," he said. I felt some vague hope I'd had for a summer romance slip away. I'd seen him walking the west-side river park while I drove around earlier in the week and figured I'd text him. The high summer was on us, late-July, after the first wave of summer camps at the university that dominated the town receded, but before the arrival of the August cohorts. That stretch, that long, holy week, was always the quietest, the hottest point of summer.
For days, nothing moved. From the high ridges north of town to the low sweep of Winthrop bay and the barrier islands beyond--so close that on a still day the exhaust from the cars idling on King Philip's parkway hung shimmering over the low, dark woodland--the only movement was the trickle of sweat down the center of your chest. No one in the streets, no one on the buses, no one in the basketball courts or the super markets, the parks and libraries, the churches. Even my father's masjid stood empty then.
On those long days I woke early to the sound of my father praying the fajr with just enough time to join him, even though he knew that outside the house I never prayed. Then he went to the water department and I would put on one of my light dresses, pull back my long hair, and drive downtown for my shifts in the little bookstore on Cathedral avenue. In the heat they ran slow, and I could text my friends, my acquaintances, and all the other fevered returnees in the opening movement of the flirtatious dance of the townie kids. The yes-but-nos, the stolen kisses, the coffee and ice cream under the motionless sun.
In the heat, anything was possible.
Not that I'd considered sleeping with Paul, or even kissing him. At least not since the summer after my junior year of high school. That summer, when my mother died, Paul didn't even come to her funeral. I guess I wanted some closure to that wound and to all the little moments that might've been. Sometimes you need that tension to pull you across the summit of summer.
"Gone where?"
"Vancouver," he said. "My roommate invited me out for a long trip. We'll be doing trail maintenance. I'll be back a day before school starts. Maybe two days."
"And what are you planning at Oberlin this year?"
"I intend to cause trouble," he said. "I've got our literary magazine to run, we finally got it going, and now we can publish stuff no one else will run."
"Like?"
"Well, all those kids think they're libertines, but they're really puritans." He withdrew his hand from my arm, leaned forward. His hair shifted, fell a bit in front of his face. "They're easy to scandalize. Put some sex in a story and they get all Hays code. But enough about me, what are you doing down in Virginia?"
"I don't know," I said. "It's not like that in the south, you know. There are the aristocrats, the greeks to counterbalance the puritans."
He lifted his lip in a tight little sneer.
"But good luck getting anyone on that campus to read anything interesting," I said. "I'm just there for a good time." Which was true. My life there was full: intramural sports, the sociology department journal, work-study in the library cafe, poetry readings in the low-slung suburban houses across the state road from campus in the lingering heat or the damp of winter. Or teaching the sorority defectors how to French inhale, telling them about Celine and Pasolini and Sappho. In the south, I got to play the intellectual, the northern sophisticate. One of my friends had given me a stick-and-poke tattoo, a design that verged on the abstraction of a Rohrschach blot; it was blurry enough that I could make it mean whatever I wanted.
"Have you had some good times?" He said. "Down among the seceshers?"
"A few. And you, what happened to, what's her name, Alison?"
"She cheated on me while I was abroad."
"I'm sorry."
"I wanted out anyways," he said. "There's hotter girls than her, and more interesting." He looked hard in my eyes. I blushed. In high school we'd both been Model UN kids. I always represented a beleaguered middle power trying to plot a course between American hegemony and isolation. Paul volunteered to take North Korea, Cuba, Eritrea, all the little countries that no one ever wanted. We had, at some MUN parties, danced, his big hands on my slim waist. But nothing ever came of it.
I sipped my coffee. Cold brew always sits high in my stomach and the caffeine goes right to my head. My eyes seemed clearer, as if they'd zoomed in on everything around us. My legs shook a little, with restless energy. I needed to walk.
"Out, yeah, sure," I said. "Want to take a lap around the block?"
Out behind the coffee shop, which occupied the ground floor of a 19th-century stocking factory, was a courtyard covered with crushed oyster shells and shaded by immature elms. A disused canal, long dry, separated the courtyard from the blank brick of the old rowhouses turned to offices and the low parking garage opposite. To the right, the offices of a non-profit blocked the way to Adams Avenue, and to the left, a university building with irregular shaped walls, closed off the yard, save for a couple narrow alleys. In the school year, this was where students came to pace and wrap up their coffee dates. And this was where, when Paul asked me to homecoming, I'd hemmed and hawed and told him no.
But we were alone with burning heat and the perennials planted at the base of the elms and the rare dirt patches where the oyster shells lay thin. The sun shone dazzling on the oyster shells, a white so harsh I had to squint and Paul raised a hand to shade his green eyes while we stood on the back patio of the coffee shop.
We crossed the yard and took the alley out to Singleton and walked along the shadowed sidewalks, past the university buildings and shops, empty in the heat. It was an aimless walk, and I told Paul all that had happened in my family since we'd last spoken. He wiped the beading sweat from his brow.
The courtyard exerted a strange force on us, drawing us back in a slow loop around the block. I couldn't stop thinking of the empty silence and the wide stretches of white shells.
Summer wilts some men, but not Paul. He stood taller, his loose seersucker trousers and dark shirt, open over a tight wifebeater, gave him an air of alert ease. We turned the last corner of the lap and stood again by the front of the coffee shop and the alley beside it. For a second, we both hesitated. This was the natural end of an hour of coffee and conversation: I would drive home, he would go pack for Vancouver.
My father worked late that day at the water authority. My little brother was off at his science camp. There was no one else in town, all my friends gone off on their expensive vacations or working dead-end jobs in the suburbs, or still in their college towns. The only thing before me was a long evening in the quiet of my too-small childhood home with the ghosts of my mother and of my past selves thick in the still air.
If we turned back into the courtyard we could keep the tension going, the friendship that had always been a little more than friendly. And maybe we could drive the shaded streets between the big victorians up, out of town, to the north ridge, and there overlook the city and get beyond the formalities of catching up. Then, come November or December, when we both came home again, we could pick it back up.
I turned into the alley and he followed.
"I'm sorry I'm going away," he said, when we stepped back into the sightless white of the oyster shell courtyard.
"It'll be fun, working up there in the hills. As long as there aren't any fires."
We walked along the wall, into the shade of a young elm.
"I'll be thinking of you," he said. His left hand settled on my back where the dress pulled in a bit to show off my slim figure.
"Don't think about me too much. If there's a wildfire, you'll need all your wits," I half-turned to him.
"And when I'm back," but he didn't finish the thought.
"We could've been something," I said. "Back th--"
