“Why not?” he says, looking right at me. I see his expression is as eerily sober as it is when he talks about harmonica maintenance or extols the virtues of the chromatic over the diatonic scale.
Thankfully, a customer comes up. A man in a worn suit and a trench coat clutching a yellowed slip of paper fervently in his fist. On that paper will surely be a list of about ten out-of-print books on some obscure subject. This man is one of Archibald’s regulars. I wait for the man to leave even though my shift has been over for seven minutes by the time they’re finished, and Mel is waiting for me at the apartment to sample some new CDs. When the customer finally does leave, I say to Archibald, “Can I think about it?”
Archibald smiles at me with one side of his mouth.
“It’s not a ring, Lizzie. Just consider it an open invitation.”
? ? ?
The next day at work, I’m flirty, casual. I even have a plan, which I thought of last night and then visualized all day in Old English and Renaissance Poetry and then on my way to work. I’ll thank him off-the-cuff for the note, then suggest, off-the-cuff, that we go for coffee. Just coffee. I’ve borrowed Mel’s Celtic cross necklace, and put my mother’s lace tank under my work shirt, which I’ve unbuttoned down to the middle of my chest. I’m liberal with the Winter Dew eau de cologne. More careful than usual in my application of Rebel blended with Lady Danger, then topped with Girl About Town gloss. I even hazard a look at myself in the subway car windows on the way to work and I don’t immediately look away.
I find Archibald in the break room, sitting in the far corner on a lopsided futon by a moldering tower of Harlequins with ripped-off covers, scarfing banana bread out of a Tupperware container, looking seriously stoned.
He doesn’t acknowledge me when I come in. Even when I clear my throat, he’s still scarfing his bread as though in a kind of dream.
“Hey,” I say. Flirty, casual.
He raises his eyebrows in vague recognition, grunts, and then keeps eating the bread.
I sit down beside him on the futon, half-facing him, and braid my hands together on my lap. It’s not flirty. I feel as though we’re in court or I’m his therapist. I unbraid my fingers and run a hand through my hair. Cards, you have all the cards, remember.
“So I’ve been thinking about your offer.”
“Offer?”
I feel myself go red in patches the way I hate.
“What you wrote. On that scrap of paper yesterday?”
“Oh, right, my offer.” He smiles as if recalling the lovable antics of an old friend. “And?”
“I was thinking how it was really rude of me to just brush you off like that.”
“No worries.”
“Anyway, I was thinking that maybe . . .”
“Yeah?”
“Well . . . you know . . .” I trail off. Janice comes in just then, this obscenely depressed woman who works in Kids. She’s eyeing us now from where she sits on the broken rocking chair, frowning over her mug of cheap fennel tea.
“Maybe we could . . .” I say, lowering my voice.
“Could what?”
“You know, meet.”
“Really?” He looks pleased. Too pleased.
“Not the note. I mean go for coffee.”
Behind me, Janice snorts into her tea.
“Coffee,” he repeats.
He gives me the same look he gave me last time, the long, lingering one like I’m not wearing my bookstore uniform, but something sexy, even obscure.
“How about tonight?” he says.
“Tonight?” In my head I was picturing a date in the future. At least a week to prepare. Prepare for what? I should be spur-of-the-moment. That’s how you live life, isn’t it? Carefree.
“I finish later than you do tonight,” I say at last.
“I’ll wait.”
“It’ll be late. I mean for coffee, though.”
“So we’ll have tea,” Archibald says.
? ? ?
The cabdriver’s name, according to the lit-up license on the back of the seat, is Jesus. A scentless pine tree dangles from the smudged rearview mirror, in which I can see one of Jesus’s eyes, mud colored and narrowed, the brow over it thick and severely furrowed.
“He doesn’t care,” Archibald said in a low voice when we first got into the cab and he tried to take off my shirt. “He sees this kind of stuff all the time, trust me.”
I shook my head.
“You’re holding out on me, Lizzie. But that’s okay. I consider myself lucky just to be here with you. Just keep driving, Jesus,” he called. “We want to see more.”
“Where I go?”