By Jacqueline Chia
He cannot take his eyes off the couple sitting at the table near the glass panel at the front of the café. The glass panel is shielding the blue-grey sky from them. For more of the afternoon, the glass panel had allowed trickles of the late morning winter sun to caress their arms, the faces. Veiled their eyes from stares of love and guilt from loving too much. The way they sit facing each other, their silences, their movements feel like rituals of entombing one within the other. It is as if the glass panel covers them from the sideward glances from passers-by in the street and the other tables in the café, too. The woman has black hair that flares up with a trace of nut-brown when tossed into sunlight. She is wearing a pale floral dress that drapes awkwardly over her graceful and slender figure. So slender that she looks almost too frail to bear any strength, her wrists no more than circlets of vulnerability. There is, he decides, certain toughness about her. The fine, but resolute jaw line and a deadpan gaze seem to hint of her unearthly appetite for desires that are powerfully engulfing. Anyone predisposed to such passions must possess a strong will to escape a complete incarceration of the soul from such ravishing hunger, he thinks.
There is a glow in her cheeks as she smiles and there is ease in the man, too. A man he cannot take his eyes off because of his attractive features. Slightly receding hairline, dark arresting eyes and a sensitive mouth. He belongs to a category of men whose soft and silent movements appeal erotically to both men and women. This, of course, is a quality that lends charms to the man and draws helpless attraction from women who dare cross his path and catch a glimpse of his godly features. Already, he has noticed several patrons in the café stealing numerous hungry glances at the man’s striking looks. This man is very handsome. And from their soft, musky warm ways, he knows that this couple had just ventured out into the day for the first time, probably after spending most of the morning in the privacy of his or her house. They must have come from his apartment.
It is poetry, this communication between this man and woman; their glances toward each other are velvet, magical and electrifying. At times he pictures the woman picking up her fork, and in swift successive movements, stabbing the Apollo fatally in the chest. He also imagines the undeniable sexual affect the man has on her, something he seems to do so casually (to every one else in the room), even as he lifts the cup to sip his coffee. There is food on their table but he noticed that they had hardly touched it. Instead, they were engaged in a quiet conversation punctuated by many breaths of silences, as if compelled to savour each other’s presence in the air around them. They think they’re in love, he scoffs in his mind. But what do they know? Love has never taught lovers about the price they need to pay until they’ve spent every breath of their soul loving each other’s flesh. That’s just the beginning, isn’t it?
The present is no more than a ghost, a buried object unseen by the wistful eye. The present tricks you into thinking that everything is real. Right here right now. It moves in your shadow, constantly reminding you of its existence with a shining halo. It deprives you of everything you ever wanted, locking it away into the future, but allows you enough illusion to live. It is soaking your hand into warm water after removing your glove, hand blistered from winter frostbite. It destroys time and space, creating a yearning for the tomorrow that never arrives. It carries the faithless and hopeless, and the all the illicit lovers of the world into a dream world where time almost always moves too swiftly to eradicate their pleasure.
The couple is sitting at the table near the glass panel of the café, where the world walks by and is invited to partake in their intimacy. They are not afraid to display their love or their capacity to devour each other’s bodies with strangers. They are proud and they are private. He can see their affection and their lust just as well as anyone in the café can see them. Pardon my eyes, for they can’t help but fall for your lips. Where will they go after their coffee, he wonders? Do they head back to his place or her place, and spend the rest of the day cuddling and reading with each other, drinking wine until it is dark and then venture out into the streets once more in search of food? Will they go to a secluded park and feel nature’s wonders echoing their needs for each other? Do they care about anyone else in the world? Pardon my fingers for they are pulled towards your hears. They evoke in him so many questions.
He had been sitting in the café with his newspaper and his third cup of coffee when they arrived. They have no eyes for no one else in the room, even if there are other dreamy men and lustful ladies staring at them. The woman had ordered some toast and salami but had hardly touched it. The handsome man keeps fidgeting with the cigar in his pocket, as if he cannot wait to stand up and walk outside to light it up. He cannot wait to inhale his happiness as he smiles through the glass at the woman.
As he goes on observing the couple, he thinks of his love for his wife. In the fifth year of their marriage, she had bought him George Orwell’s 1984 as a birthday present because he said he has never read it but had expressed a desire to know of the story. He was shocked to his core at Winston’s ultimate betrayal of Julia because Big Brother had merged his love with his fear of rats. And Winston had rat out Julia’s name. He was horrified that Julia had also succumbed to her fears and betrayed her love for Winston. Love changes everything by degrees of vulnerability. When he recovered from his initial shock that such betrayal can be written and recorded in print, he resolved then to overcome all his fears so that no one could ever threaten him into giving up (betray) his love for his wife. No one can ever narrate any kind of betrayal (give up their love) between him and his wife. He never told his wife of the shock he got from the ending of the love affair between Winston Smith and Julia, nor the terror the story conjured in him. Instead he told her how much he loved the book, and just how prophetic the story have become in writing the story of countries and cities.
They have been married for twelve years now. Maybe there was only a need to understand one thing: fear is an inescapable part of our lives. But twelve years has merely been a flitting dream to him. He felt that there is a lifetime no an eternity no end in sight of love for his marriage. How long would the two of them last, he wonders. But he has seen enough of the woman and that man. What is your fear?
He beckons to a waitress passing by his table, can I get the bill please? She nods and just as she is moving away, he touches her arm gently and said see that couple of there? She nods, can you bring me their bill too? She raises an eyebrow at him. They are my friends, I know them but I do not want to intrude on their privacy their privacy. He gives her a smile that seeks her understanding of his manners.
She looked at them and smiled back at him knowingly. He can see that she is taken by the man’s good looks. Although still a little hesitant, she agrees and moves away.
While waiting for the bills, he pulls a clean sheet of serviette on the table towards him and fished in his briefcase for a pen. When the waitress came back with the bills, he placed a generous tip into the bill folder and handed her the serviette, folded.
Give it to the woman, will you? It’s my quiet way of saying hi to them. He smiles gently at the waitress. Then he gets up and walks towards them, towards the exit. The woman’s back is turned to him. No one noticed as he pushes the door open and streams out into the sunlight. A draught of cold, fresh air enters the café like a summer bloom of the first sunflower. A breath of icicle inhales the warm smell of coffee. He turns to walk down the street. As he passes the couple’s table, he stops, turns back and looks through the glass panel at them. He stares, softly.
The woman, who is lifting her cup of coffee, stops midair in shock. The handsome man, seeing her expression turns towards the glass to look at him with slight unpleasantness. Then he gives the woman a slight a wave, turns, and briskly walks out of sight. Today I penned the saddest lines. On my eyes.
The woman’s hands were trembling. The waitress comes up to the table. This is for you. She holds out the folded serviette. The waitress steals a glance at the god-man, Apollo. None of them looked up at her. The man is trying to see where the man, who had caused his sweetheart such distress, had gone. The waitress simply didn’t care. She wanted the god. The woman took the serviette and waited for the waitress to leave before opening it to read its contents.
What is it? The god asks. But there was no reply from her.
What is it? He urged again, worried at her distress. She was reading and she was crying silently.
She looks up, tears welling in her eyes.
