A Waltz

This story is published in a humble-yet-mighty Literary Journal called The Helix. Don't tell them I'm posting it here, ok?

Shaky. The man lights a cigarette and tap-tap-taps it on the rim of a glass ashtray. Airport bar, generic Irish name, no windows. The theme is “clutter.” Smokers smoking, drinking, eating, smoking. The air is hazed with it. Everyone seems insulated, clustered in pockets at tables too small for comfort. Black bags crammed next to every chair, their handles up like antennae. The man sits with two TVs in his periphery. This is unavoidable, as they adorn every wall and every corner in the bar. He twitches a sleeve, checks his watch. Within three seconds, he does not remember what time it is.

Plump, olive hands set down a coaster and a gin and tonic in a glass tumbler. A crumpled tissue peeks out from a sleeve of the Hispanic server. She has skin like papyrus.

“Eight-fifty.” One hand remains extended.

He looks up at her.

“Eight-fifty.” She offers an obligatory smile like a napkin.

He pulls out his wallet, hands a twenty to her, and stares at the drink. The tonic fizzes. The lime looks old. The man lays the wallet on the table, pulls at a sleeve, checks his watch. The second hand tic-tic-tics. Nine-twenty a.m.. He has an hour to catch his flight.

The man drags from his smoke, lifts the drink, and sips. It has stopped fizzing. He Tap-tap-taps, drops the cigarette into the ashtray, and lays his hands on the faux mahogany table. The man looks down at them, ringless and gaunt, and it seems that they are someone else’s hands. Little tremors run through them like some post-mortem anomaly. His eyes defocus, and the man tries not to think of his wife. The cigarette sends a blue-white wisp up from the ashtray, swaying like the ghost of a snake. He picks up his wallet and flips it open to see the face of the once Arthur Brill smiling up at him. He rubs his cheek. The man in the photo has neatly trimmed dark hair and the shining skin of health, of contentment. The face that looks at this face bears little resemblance—gin-glazed eyes, hair grown out; cheeks stubbled and creased by the muscle memory of a down-turned mouth.

The server’s plump hands place bills and coins on the table in a little pile. Arthur Brill does not look up. Staring at his own hands, wrists swallowed by khaki sleeves. The metallic watch with its bland black face like a circle of nothingness. The tremors. He is fascinated and disturbed that he cannot picture his wife’s face. Try as he might. Arthur refuses to flip the wallet to the picture of her opposite the driver’s license. He retrieves the cigarette. Tap-tap-tap, and he drags deeply. Eva. Her name was Eva Brill. He sips his drink; ice crowds the rim of the glass.

A loud outburst. The server is arguing with an old, fat man.

“Two drinks,” she says.

He is shaking his fat head. Grey hair like a pubic region grows on the back of his fat neck. Arthur stares at the man, then through him. He is searching for Eva’s face, her laugh, anything. There are memories. A blanket lain on soggy grass at a music festival. Arthur seeks with no regard for chronology or historic relevance. A hotel balcony in Puerto Rico. Details are vivid—humid, salty air clinging to his lungs, the white noise of the ocean—he knows she is there, but he cannot see her.

“Shot is two drinks.” The server’s voice edges toward the hysterics of evangelism.

Then. A bare room with a wooden floor. A dance studio, and Eva—I knew I’d find you— is dancing with a young woman with wild red hair. She is laughing as she twirls slowly to the waltz that plays on an antiquated stereo. There is her face. Her smile. Her voice and her arms and her sweetly curved brow, arched in sudden comic comprehension of the absurdity of the moment. This is where they learned to dance for the wedding reception, so they wouldn’t look like idiots in front of everyone.
The fat man barks and the vision is banished.

“Look, a shot is a drink. One drink.” He knocks the empty shot glass on the table three times, like someone knocking on a door. “A double-shot is two drinks. You served me one shot!” He is serving this verbal lob with the faux-Mexican accent of a stand-up comedian.

The spark of ugly infatuation lights in Arthur’s breast. He hates this grotesque lout. The emotion is groundless and strangely gratifying. He crafts a quick highlight reel of the old man as stereotypical impotent, wife-beating prick. The movie thug who gets away with everything because he lacks remorse for anything. The fantasy casts Arthur as de facto protagonist, without obligating him to act. But he has acted. He has been ejected from a bar, two restaurants and one funeral parlor. Never a brawler, Arthur has developed a keen talent for antagonizing his imagined enemy verbally, while attracting enough attention to guarantee intercession by a staff member or Samaritan. This is pleasure now. The two argue, and Arthur twists unconsciously in his seat, words forming.

Something brushes Arthur’s elbow, and the spell is broken. The a*s of a woman, wrapped in a black skirt. She looks down and breathes a quick “Excuse me,” and walks away from him towards the bar. A carry-on bag with its little wheels trails behind her like an obedient dog. The jolt of an involuntary shock. Arthur studies the long swish of dirty blond hair that billows over a crisp white blouse. He needs to see her face again, because the afterimage of that instant is ‘familiar.’ She has reached the bar, and she has Eva’s shape and height, her exact bone structure. Shoulder blades like little wings beneath the fabric of the blouse. Her bra straps are pink and faintly visible. Wrong hair color, but it could (not) be Eva. She finally turns, and her profile is wrong—nose too prominent, jaw too square.

Anguish. Arthur feels it rise slowly, like steam from a shower. Eva Brill is dead. Beloved wife, beloved daughter, beloved friend. Arthur never got to see the scene—the car enmeshed with an oak in a damp stretch of bare April trees beside the highway—except on a TV news report. The preened reporter, the yellow tape and flashing red lights. When he finally saw the car, half perfect, half abandoned origami, it sat in a scrap yard, Eva long since washed out of it. Arthur never saw Eva again. He’d balked at the last minute when it came time to identify the body. Her father had pushed resolutely through the double doors instead. The look he’d cast back as he’d shouldered his way in was a gavel.

Closed casket, closed case. She’d had a heart attack while driving down the highway. She’d lost control of the car. She’s hit a tree. The doctor couldn’t tell Arthur Brill if his wife had died before impact, and had no answer when he asked how the hell a twenty-seven year old woman in perfect health could have a heart attack. ‘An aberration,’ he called it. Three years of courtship, three years of marriage, nine days from goodbye in the kitchen to goodbye in the ground.

The woman perches on a stool at the bar and leans in to the bartender, who laughs. Flight attendant? She leans back and tilts her head a bit in a way that is excruciatingly familiar. It has been one year. Arthur is flying to Philadelphia to see Eva’s parents. Financial matters to settle—a grim bounty to be collected. It will be the last time he sees them. The woman crosses her feet and taps one white sneaker on the other absently. Arthur stamps out his cigarette and watches her pull a cigarette out of a small black purse and light it. Eva had never smoked, and Arthur had given it up romantically until one year ago.

Arthur orders another drink, smokes cigarettes, and watches the woman. There is nothing else to do. She sips from a straw, telltale that her drink is non-alcoholic, and chats with the bartender. That head tilt. The tapping sneaker, as if to secret music. Finally, she gets up and turns. Arthur Brill, buzzed and morose, is stunned. The woman, from this view, is Eva reborn. Her eyes, her chin, her odd little dimples, like scalpel cuts. The likeness is uncanny, and he is absolutely one hundred percent sure that she is not Eva and that she is instead some stranger who has a life and a job and probably a husband who looks nothing like Arthur Brill. She grabs the carry-on and walks towards him, and for a brief instant that will sit in his mind like a snatch of a melody for the entire flight, she locks eyes with him. Her eyes do not dip as she smiles, and he realizes that he is smiling back. She is wearing a pin with tiny gold wings and she passes and is gone.

Arthur stands, pockets the wallet and snakes between tables like a man in peril. The fat man looks up at him and is gone. The waitress scoots out of his way, and she is erased too. There is only the bright light, white like sunrise, from beyond glass double doors. He pushes through them and sees the woman ten yards distant, walking briskly across the airy expanse of the concourse. There is a great echoing of many footsteps and there is music playing through sequestered speakers. A waltz. He follows, half walking, half jogging; and the brisk tempo of the waltz propels him forward. He makes headway, dodging bodies and keeping her in sight. The shoulder blade wings, the swinging blond hair. And he catches up.

The woman, who is not Eva, sees Arthur Brill come along side her and take two more steps to stand before her. She is perhaps puzzled at this odd behavior, but her calm expression reveals nothing. For a long second, Arthur stands before her, immobile. His hands do not shake. And then he speaks.

“Hi. I’m Art.”

He lets go of the carry-on bag.

The woman tempers a smile with a furrowed brow. “And?”

He raises his arms in a universal pose of the box step. “Would you dance with me?”

The woman just stares. Her mouth screws up a bit, as though she’s biting the inside of her cheek. Arthur holds his pose, mannequin-like, and says nothing. The heat of embarrassment creeps up his collar, but it is a fresh feeling, a living feeling. She loosens and barks out a little laugh, like a cork popping. She has let go of her carry-on, and looks down at her feet.

“I’m wearing sneakers.”

Arthur remains stock still, implacable.

With an undecipherable sigh, the woman takes his outstretched hand, and they take their first improbable steps across the concourse.

Author's Note

slice and dice.

Reviews

[W. Braid Anderson]

I loved every bit of it. It's a great story well told, congratulations. The prose flows well, and I found myself inside Arthur's head. The airport bar, so familiar. The constant checking of the watch, and forgetting what it tells you. I had to hold my breath for a moment when he asked her to dance. Would she? Or would he be carted off to a nut-house?
PS Years ago Shell called their new oil Helix. It took a while for the opposition to bring out their reply. They called theirs Shesux.
regards
Braid