Jaufr�

Love, entropy, and exploding whiskey glasses.

Please No CSS

Jaufré is just simmering down next to a girl in a Bismarck-era cooking frock and with a face like Stella Adler in the eyes and forehead but much more similar to Molly Picon in the nose and downward, same cheeks, same lips, same chin, when from the brighter side of Taverne d’Tourniér a stray bullet explodes his tumbler, ricochets from the copper frame around the bartender’s daguerreotype of some indeterminate fish, and embeds itself in the smoldering wallet of a positively mortified clergyman who clearly did not wish to draw attention to himself this evening regardless of near-misses from errant gunshots. Tumbler-shards leave trails of whiskey as they spiral from the nova, Jaufré shielding the Stella-Molly concoction from the stings, an instinctive shoulder blanketed around her hybrid features, their smooth duality welcome in his defense. Their automatic form, a defensive alliance forged in the instant of a gunshot, crafted between the intertwined arms of two strangers, begins a slow tumble, spinning like the barman’s picture frame, falling, twirling as it were by fate’s whim, to crash to the grim porcelain earth. The couple lands on him, Jaufré too incensed to oomph out the pain, too wandered away from ego, cradling the likewise stunned mixture-girl like one clasping their knees for warmth in a cold cave somewhere. The clergyman is screaming now, thinking he is shot and dead and damned for his stupidity, his careless sinning, his poor timing. The barman stands amorphous, half contrived to somersault to the subterranean safety of the basement stairs and half irate with the presence of moving bullets in his tavern. But Jaufré glides her down, seeps himself into the fall, lets the crash absorb his mass, let hers be a strange and beautiful feather to shelter between his fingertips, let him receive the tiny daggers, spare her from feeling the slicing of skin, the bloody hair, the bizarre torque of the joints on impact. Let him hear more in the blink of a heartbeat, her heartbeat, than could any man in a casual lifetime. Her plea is infinitely basic; his reception is primordial love, removed of all impurites, filtered of apathy and avarice and artifice.

 

Clock hands in the tavern accelerate back to normal, the faint wind outside resumes, and the new silence deafens the ensemble of turning heads, uniform glance to the strangers crumpled together amid the broken glass, then swiveled back to the five drunken soldiers on the bright side, still not quite aware of the commotion, much less which one of them had pulled their trigger or whether the preceding joke had been properly punctuated. Were those strangers on the ground intact? Crap, but what’re we gonna do when they’re not? From drunk one to drunk three: are we in trouble or something? Drunks four and five gruff him off: nonsense, this is a bar! Shrugs all around! All their candor seems to scrub the tension away, the voices and music sweat back into the air, and in maybe thirty seconds the drunken gunshot is forgotten and drowned away in fun and wine. Resumptive entropy increases to a maximum, and the nagging question of were those strangers on the ground ever going to get up? is not deleted, but rather blown up and scattered like the tumbler, impossible to ever again reassemble because it shattered into pieces, and then those pieces shattered into more, recur ad infinitum …

 

Jaufré, cognition returned to him like a punch to the face, flicks open his eyes in time to watch hers (blue or green, he decided, depending on the mood) sway up to meet his. He’s substantially nicked up, yes, and the whiskey stings his cuts, yes, but … at this moment the tavern floor seems incredibly comfortable, and her gaze worthy of a smile in riposte … Cognition punches him again before he may continue that thought. “Are you hurt somewhere, or at all, or what happened, did I break my glass?” the realizations stutter out.  He takes his arms from hers, swings one around to prop himself up, overcorrects, and slams back to the floor beside her, finally letting the cringe come out.

 

“Hello again,” she stammers through a growing smirk. “And I think I’m alright.”

 

But they are both alright. Jaufré has cuts and will shortly have bruises, and her cooking frock has new spots of whiskey-stain, but they are both intact and somehow improved, more resilient partners on the floor than the strangers in their seats above.