AFTER SHE GOT out of the hospital (eight stitches, not that Bill would know; he spent the day at the vet’s office while Kong got a series of painful shots), she headed straight back to school. Mandy would put her up. Mandy never liked Bill. She’d be the first to listen when she talked about how he loved his dog more than her, told her how to talk and act and walk, how he’d given her typewritten instructions on how to deal with a dog, how he’d watched her like a hawk when he wasn’t off being famous somewhere, how he was slowly closing in on her but only on his terms, only when it was convenient for him, how he almost got her, she was this close to falling for it, how all the little things she liked about him in the beginning were all the things she hated about him in the end.
I see you, beautiful you, walk in the door, and a simple, potent pain strikes me in my chest. I would like to ask that woman to dance, I think. If I could I would. But your eyes are pointed south, like you’re not looking for any company (or trouble), just a quiet night out, you and a drink. So I decide not to intrude on you and whatever thoughts might be fighting for your attention. I know what that’s like, the fighting. Instead I drop two more quarters in the pool table, rack ’em, and start yet another imaginary game with myself. After I’ve sunk all the stripes, I order another pint. As I’m leaning on the bar, chalking up my cue, checking out my next shot, that’s when you finally notice me, that’s when you speak to me for the first time.
“Nice night, isn’t it?” you say, and I say nothing.
You’ve heard of pauses, right? People use them for dramatic effect in speech a good percentage of the time, and then there’s that small sect of people like me, where we’re pausing because we’re thinking of what to say next. And in that time, a million thoughts zing through our heads, until we are ready to pick through them all to find the exact right thing to say. Sometimes even more than a million.
“It sure is,” I say. “We got lucky this year. Indian summers are pretty rare.”
“It’s my first fall out here. Out west. I was afraid it was going to be raining the whole time.” Your head is down when you begin to speak, and then your neck rolls to the side, slowly, brushing against your shoulder, like you are stirring from an afternoon nap; and the words roll with you, with your neck and head, your hair brushing your bare freckled shoulders, until finally I can see your face, that your eyes are still sleepy, that the freckles on your shoulders match the freckles on your cheeks; and then at last, when your eyes are wide awake and meet mine, it’s as if you’ve just taken my hand and held it. “But it’s been lovely,” you say.
Most people I meet don’t know how to wait for the next sentence. They think I’m ignoring them, or judging them. Or that I’m shy. Or that I’m slow, which I am, but not in the way that you’re thinking. They’ll turn their head after the first ten seconds, start talking to someone else, or look over their shoulder to see if there’s something distracting me. It unnerves people. I know it.
“New in town?”
I motion to the stool next to you, raise my eyebrows. You nod. “Please,” you say. I settle in, balance the cue against the bar, drop the chalk next to my idling pint glass.
“New, yes,” you say. “Everything is. New, I mean. New job. New apartment. New life.”
My mother (unofficially) clocked my longest pause at a full six minutes in 1986, after she asked me if I had taken out the trash. I had, in fact, done it, but I just couldn’t remember, and then this song came on in my head, and I was off. I think it was something off of Rush’s 2112—I had been making my way through a stack of albums my older brother had left behind when he went off to college—and all those songs were long as hell. During those six minutes my mother grounded me twice, and almost slapped me. This was when I had just started pausing. My parents thought I was stoned throughout most of my freshman year of high school because of it.
I pick up the glass, examine the rich red jewel color of the beer. Then I take a studious sip, a long one, like I’m trying to get drunk, which I’m not. I hope I don’t give you the wrong impression. “Where you coming from?” I say.
“Back east. New York. Westchester.”
My parents took me to all kinds of doctors in Portland after I started pausing: speech therapists, pediatricians, psychologists, psychiatrists (I can never remember the difference between the two, only that I needed to see both), and even a neurologist. The CAT scan scared me, and the psychiatrist (or was it the psychologist?) put me on so many meds I used to cry at night, when I wasn’t so numb I was staring into space. I begged my parents to let me be.