Easy on the Eyes

“Vultures love a carcass, but they love nothing more than a broken heart. I suppose you can say a broken heart is a kind of carcass of its own. And these vultures are simply less feathered, more polished, and kind of easy on the eyes. Their breath, somewhat less fetid, but their intentions far worse. At least real vultures perform a service. A civic duty. They prevent the spread of disease. They remove the dead from view. But these vultures, mainly of the male species, these walking upright ones with the same haircut and aftershave, the same machismo, they spread the disease they carry from one broken heart to the other, that pathogen which multiplies, breeds in the misery of its host, and becomes even worse than it was when it was picked to the moral bone…” His pen stopped abruptly, but was pressed hard upon the page as though it might continue. Then it relented. Literary sneezes, word orgasms, semantic seizures, or delusional episodic aneurysms of letters. However, you want to look at it. “Or maybe they are more like mosquitos...”

He looked around the pub and relaxed, having written the above paragraph on a cocktail napkin in blue ink. He has at least forty in his pockets. The great American novel, one napkin at a time, he laughed at himself. The beer gave him optimism he doesn’t otherwise have. Then he thought of writing about female vultures, but lost interest in the analogy, or metaphor, or whatever they call it in Freshman English and Literature Composition. A class he slept through in college. Cap, you see, was one of those broken-hearts and his ex-girlfriend was one of those broken-hearts, wherever she was. And surely, he knew, she was being picked by someone. Maybe subtly, but picked, nonetheless.

“Female vultures are just as obvious as their male counterparts, but they are far more infrequent…” The pen ceased. “The female vulture has the frequency of occurrence in nature of that of albinism. An albino vulture.” He exhaled, unsatisfied with it. He was done. Fast getting drunk again. Anytime he started writing about albinos, midgets, or leprechauns, it was time to hang it up for the evening. Tonight, it just so happened to coincide with a female vulture in a gold-and-brown-sequined dress who looked like something left over from New Year’s.

“How ya doin’, honey,” she asked plopping down on the barstool next to him. She was pretty, but worn, like a holiday party favor put in a closet, year after year, just the way she was and then brought out again and again. Her voice was raspy and she smelled like stale cigarettes and grape-scented Spam. He imagined her body had the same glaze that Spam has on it in its can. If you could wiggle her out of the dress it would cover her an inch thick. He was sure of it. She was still waiting for him to reply as they looked at each other for a moment in time that was very consequential, though it felt quite the opposite then.

He said nothing at all. “Whatever,” she huffed indifferently, slithering out of the seat. She went to the end of the bar and sat next to someone who looked like a mortgage broker. A gym enthusiast with thinning hair. His eyes were the color of dollar bills. Cap smiled at her as she looked back at him and grinned, as though he ought to be jealous. This was the guy that hit on Cap’s ex at a real estate party once while Cap was in the restroom. They were the only two who dressed up that night, close to Halloween. Indians that hung in their closets. The girl’s Spam-glazed body inched closer to the married father of three who was single for the night, as they say. Ring in the old pocket.

Cap had a thought to write, but the enormous wad of napkins in his left jeans pocket and the lack of an available napkin suppressed his desire enough to pursue it. It wasn’t that good anyway, he decided judiciously. Probably a memory he’d rather not rehash. When they were Indians, maybe. And then in a blink of an eye, the thought was gone. Where do they go, he considered. To someone else? Do they stay the same, or do they change? How many good ideas had he lost in his life to a lack of motivation? How many bad ones had he kept? A few seconds later, a beautiful voice came from behind and broke his contemplation. “You dropped your napkins.”

“What?” he turned.

“On the floor. Your napkins,” she pointed down. She spoke softly, which made it hard to hear her, but her voice seemed on a different pitch than the music and somehow made its way through all the hullabaloo of a Sunday night bar scene, one of the few in town that was upscale and open.

But he didn’t follow her pointing finger to the napkins because he hadn’t made it past her eyes. Whatever she had said left him. She was standing there holding a beer looking around nervously. She noticed him observing her. “My ex,” she said. “He isn’t such a good guy. He likes to show up in places where he sees my car. That’s why I look around so much. To see him before he sees me. That’s why I’m nervous as a cat in a room full of rocking chairs.”

“Oh,” Cap replied as he bent over to pick up the napkins. He suddenly got dizzy. “I seem to have the opposite problem. My ex likes to avoid the places where she sees my car.”

She chuckled. Took a drink and looked a little less nervous.

He continued. “So, I guess the secret would be to not drive then. Uber? Or go with friends?”

“I walked here,” she grinned. “I live a block away.”

“Really? I do, too.”

“I’m that way,” she pointed, smiling.

He pointed in the opposite direction. “That way am I.”

She nodded her head and took a deeper breath. Then another drink. She was stunning in the bar light. Dark brown eyes and golden-brown honey-colored hair. She was thin, maybe a little too thin, and the lines of her body were easily noticeable in the tight jeans and sweater she wore. He thought to write about her on one of the napkins, but he didn’t. Something about her legs and her knee-high boots that made her look like an equestrian of sorts. Frank Sinatra played on the pub’s radio. It was Sinatra Sunday night. The reason he came. “Something Stupid” was playing, one of his favorites, and he tried hard not to say something stupid to this beautiful woman, but he knew, at that, he would inevitably fail.

“Sit with me,” he invited bluntly. “Please.”

She smiled and sat beside him, where the Spam party favor had set only moments before. What a difference a moment makes. Had he allowed the vulture to pick his bones, to ease his suffering for the night, this woman wouldn’t be here. Who she was, he had no idea, so he was quick to make an introduction. “I’m Cap,” he said offering his hand.

“Cap?” she laughed. She nearly choked on the drink she took. “Are you being serious?”

“I’m afraid so.”

“Like Captain America?”

“No. Just Cap.”

“Is it short for anything?”

“Captain.”

“Your parents named you…Captain?”

“Yes.”

“Was your dad in the Navy or something?”

“No.”

“Your mom?”

“No.”

They both laughed.

“They really liked Captain and Tennille, I guess. I’m just lucky I was a boy.”

“Well, I’m Noelle Bradly,” she smiled shaking his hand. “My parents really liked Christmas, I suppose.” She smiled like no one other. And she had the most unique and distinctly beautiful face he had ever seen. The radiance in her eyes was beyond anyone’s ability to describe on five thousand cocktail napkins. She was less nervous now that she was sitting, as she felt out of the way. Out of view. No one was looking at her. Vultures weren’t circling. The music was loud, but not too loud except for when the brass played their overexcited parts. The conversations and laughter of people often overtook it until there was a lull, but there at their high-top table, he could hear and see her just fine. And she could hear and see him just as well.

Mutual attraction is less frequent than the occurrence of albinism in nature. True mutual attraction. Not “good-enough” thoughts. Not “what am I waiting for?” And certainly never “I may as well see where it goes.” Those don’t do. That sort of attraction which makes everyone else in the room vanish. That which makes celebrities and models and anyone from the past an unsuitable and inferior rival of the person you are presently with. But with Cap and Noelle, it was in an instant. In the blink of an eye. Attraction not to be confused for lust for it is certainly not that primitive and plain. But not to be confused with love, either, for that isn’t somewhere you get in an instant. It’s not an Uber ride away. A fair you pay. A short walk. And often there are impediments like logistics and logic. Sense and sensibility. Pride and prejudice. All those Jane Austen things one must put away.

They had two drinks and then four. Noelle was as much a Sinatra fan as Cap. And when she inquired about the napkins, he showed her, spread them all out before her, and she looked at him like he was a mad genius writing quantum theory, though she couldn’t read his scribbles at all. She asked him to read them and she listened intently with a beautiful smile frozen on her face, or a cute cringe when the subject matter called for it. Then she smiled and nodded and sometimes continued his thought. And he flipped the napkins over and wrote a few of her ideas down because they were brilliant. Her eyes were full of admiration which Cap never knew before. No one ever cared for his napkins, or his thoughts. Then she looked about, and turned back around to him and lifted her shirt sleeve like she was hiding a big secret, and there on her left arm was a fresh sleeve of red ink.

“Song lyrics,” she smiled. Whenever they come to mind, I write them down. If I write them on paper, I’ll lose them. Or a journal, I’ll lose that. I never lose my arm.”

He smiled. “You’re a songwriter?”

“Yes. Well, an amateur. But I play guitar and perform. I haven’t for a while, though. But I want to again.”

“Because of your ex?”

“Yes. Unfortunately. He never came to a show and eventually I stopped playing when it caused problems.”

“That is incredible. Not him. You.” Inadvertently, Cap took her hand and marveled at the clear composition of what she wrote. It was a song, she said, about surviving emotional abuse. Then he realized he had her hand and he let her go, reluctantly. He didn’t want to let her go and there was a strange sadness to it. What they might call foreshadowing in that Freshman English Literature and Composition class someone is currently sleeping through somewhere.

At some point in the night, the bartender turned off Sinatra, saying they had ran the gamut. And 90’s music sobered Cap and Noelle, and woke them from an inexplicable reverie that had them feeling as though there were no other two people in the world. They didn’t stay for last call, they left and it was raining outside as they stood there in the pub door watching fat raindrops fall by the streetlights to rising puddles. Water gushed down the curb to the sewers.

“Oh, hell,” she laughed. “I picked a great night to walk!”

“You and me both,” Cap smiled. “I walked, too.” They stood outside under the awning and the rain grew louder. He took off his jacket and gave it to her.

“I can’t take your jacket!” she protested holding herself to keep warm in the cold Spring air. “What if I don’t see you again?”

Cap smiled, “Kind of the point. To assure me that maybe you will.”

She grinned and her teeth chattered. She looked around nervously. “Put it over your head and let me walk you home,” he said.

“I can’t do that.”

“Why?”

“Because that way you are,” she pointed. “And I am this way.”

“Well, if I walk you home, I can get my jacket back.”

She nodded with a grin. “Okay!”

He didn’t mention it, but he thought that her ex might be waiting for her. Maybe that was the ominous feeling he had got when he let go of her hand. His mother said that you should always pay close attention to such feelings and he always had. But they cannot always be so easily understood.

“You ready?!” he asked. She put the jacket on to keep warm rather than keeping it over her head for cover.

She smiled and they took off hand in hand out into the rain, splashing as they went. Of course, the rain picked up, and they ran faster like they had as kids before they ever knew each other, or before they slipped well into adulthood. They ran past the Walgreens and had to stop at a traffic light. A semi barreled down the road and a few cars passed. The drivers and passengers looked over at them as they stood waiting for the light to turn, getting soaked, but laughing wildly as though in madness, cold and drenched. Before the light turned, when they got a break in cars, they took off across the street and her house was in view.

The porch light bled through the night. A small dog’s overly-excited black-and-white face appeared in the door glass. She ran up to the porch and he stood on the sidewalk, not to trespass uninvited. He was already soaked so it didn’t matter that he was assailed by the unrelenting rain a little longer. She unlocked the door and turned to him. “You can come inside and get dry if you like.”

He stood there for a moment and thought of those vultures, and as much as he wanted to say yes, he pushed his hair back and wiped the rain from his eyes and said, “No, I’m fine. I don’t think this rain is going to stop anytime soon. I would be drying only to get wet again.”

She looked up at the sky from the porch as though she could see something in the black of night and concurred. Thunder cracked. “Yeah. I don’t think it will, either.”

“Maybe I can see you again?” he shouted over the rain from the sidewalk.

“Yes. Maybe,” she smiled. “I’d like that.”

“Sinatra Sunday?”

“I’d like that. And maybe it won’t rain!” she hollered back over the heavy drops on the porch roof and vinyl siding of the house.

“Yeah. Maybe not.” He was taken captive by her then at that moment. As she stood on her porch and pulled her wet hair back and hugged herself for warmth under his jacket. She smiled and shivered at the same time and her beautiful knees knocked. “Well,” he said finally after a long pause, “I better be going before I catch a cold.”

“I’ll bring you soup if you do,” she blurted nervously. “For being so kind. And for being a real gentleman. I’ve missed that. Thank you.”

He nodded. “Well, I better go. You are easy on the eyes, Noelle. Goodnight.”

“Wait!” she called as he jogged off. “Your jacket!”

He stopped a little up the sidewalk and turned and she walked down to him, taking off the jacket to give to him. But she didn’t stop with the jacket, she leaned into him and he held her and kissed her for what felt like forever there on the sidewalk by the alley. The jacket fell to the ground and was suddenly of no consequence to either of them. Their lips were wet and she pulled away and tried to apologize, but he didn’t listen. He only thanked her and assured her that he would see her again. He carried her back up to the porch, let her down gently and made sure she got inside. He stood outside on her porch and waved at her through the window panes of the door and she smiled. He turned and left and picked up his jacket and sang all the way home some carefree fifties song about love that he had never thought he would ever sing. He was very much in love, a happy captive of a worthy captor, and he knew it.

Next Sunday couldn’t come soon enough. He found himself getting ready for the short walk to the pub hours before he intended to go. He bought her flowers, but couldn’t decide how he would give them to her. He sprayed cologne and then thought it was too much and washed it off, only to spray it on again. He fixed his hair with pomade then thought it looked too greasy and washed and styled it with something else, only to use the pomade again. His stomach turned in the good way it turns full of butterflies and everything that makes life wonderful. Tonight was warmer and there was no rain, but he bought her an umbrella as a joke to go with the flowers. Maybe that was all too much and he shouldn’t have bought her anything at all. To hell with it, he thought, and he took the umbrella and flowers and went an hour before he normally would go, just in case she came early. He didn’t want to lose time with her.

He sat there and waited. Several people asked him about the flowers and he said they were for a friend. Such a simple word for her. Too simple. Not nearly good enough. No word would have been good enough. He could hardly stop smiling as he sat there. He no longer thought of his ex who was cruel in her heart and had treated him so indifferently at times that he should never have missed her at all. He no longer wondered what she was doing and where she was. There was no room in his heart for her anymore and she had never really deserved a place there to begin with. He smiled on his stool and watched the bartender make drinks to pass the time and the unexcited expression on her face when a song played that had played before. She wasn’t a Sinatra fan, she said. She was more of an Elvis kind of girl.

Cap watched the door, and the door opened, but every time it did it didn’t bring Noelle in with it. It brought vultures and alcoholics and the freshly broken-hearted. It brought sleazy married mortgage brokers with their rings in their pockets, and left-over party favors from New Years. It brought jealous exes, and desperate singles, and young couples who haven’t been together long enough to know they are in love, and old couples who had been together for too long to realize that they weren’t. It brought some Sinatra enthusiasts who styled themselves as being part of their own Rat Pack, snapping their fingers and mouthing words to the choruses of songs they barely knew. It brought everyone and anyone besides Noelle.

Cap had several drinks, then several drinks more. The flowers lied on the table like flowers someone put on a casket. A dozen cocktail napkins with scribbles lay on them, spread out across the table like people at a funeral in the parlor of the table. The same high-top they had sat at last Sunday. Then finally they called last call, and he balled them up and threw them out, picked up the flowers and left. A part of him died. The optimistic part that was born last Sunday and had grown through the week. Something like an entirely new person. A new Cap Coleman that was very much in love with a beautiful stranger. A once happy captive to an apparently indifferent captor.

He stood outside under the awning and thought about the rain from a week ago and how they stood there for a long moment before they ventured out to her house. And though it made him feel weird, and it was against his better judgment to do so, he walked to her house. He stopped when he got to the alley next to it where they had kissed. And there on the concrete was a discoloration about the size of a baseball in the definite shape of a heart. He felt odd standing there in front of her house. It was too late to knock, if even he was so bold, which he knew that he wasn’t. He hadn’t the right to inquire, he felt. She had simply changed her mind. The lights were out, but the TV was on. He walked up to the porch and to the door and laid the flowers on the doormat. He couldn’t see anything inside but the glow of the TV off that couch and a blanket that seemed to cover the side of someone who lied perfectly still.

He left and several Sundays passed. He went to Sinatra Sunday every Sunday just in case she would show. She didn’t. Spring slowly turned into early summer and every time it rained he thought of her a little more intently, but he thought of her when it didn’t rain at all. He thought of her when he ate soup, when he put on his jacket, when he heard Sinatra, when he went to bed, when he brushed his teeth, when he sneezed, and when someone said something of a jealous ex. He thought of her when he heard a singer strum a guitar and sing, and he thought of her when he was in bed and there was no light but that which came from his TV and glowed softly upon the ceiling like the light of hers glowed softly upon the lump of a blanket on her couch. Maybe it glowed on him, too.

Eventually, he resolved, he would never know what happened just as no one would ever know if there were aliens in Area 51, or a monster in Loch Ness, or if Bigfoot was shitting in the woods of Aberdeen, Washington. And eventually, you must be okay with that because if you cannot be okay with that then you cannot go on with your life and that is the purpose of man. To go on with life no matter what. Despite heartbreak, or misery, or loss, or pain. We must go on, they say. They are the little things inside of us that govern the collective world. The tiny Gods. That which put together makes up the sum of all things.

Church helped somewhat. God says Let Go. God says He has a purpose. That things happen for reasons and there is scripture for about everything anyone has ever suffered whether that be disease, pestilence, an attack of lotuses, the loss of a first-born child, or the flooding of the entire world. There is purpose in all of it, in all your pain and sorrow. It was not clear to Cap if God does it, but He certainly lets it happen. He orchestrates everything, as they say. Like Gershwin orchestrated “Rhapsody in Blue.” Or maybe, He doesn’t. Maybe he simply lets us do what we want to do, we have complete freewill, and he simply gives us signs to nudge us to where we should go, to what we should do.

Cap thought about the baseball-sized heart on the sidewalk. And as much as he wanted to say to hell with her for not coming, he knew he couldn’t without lying to himself. That isn’t something he was ever any good at. He was in love with her as much as anyone loved anyone. As much as the 92-year-old couple in the second pew in their seventy-second year of marriage. As much as all of Shakespeare and very much to the death.

But he couldn’t do anything about it. So he adopted a dog from the shelter and named her Tennille. He had to. There is a point in life after the desperation of trying to stay alive, where humor is what gets you through. And you got to find humor anyway you can the way kids dig through trash dumps in other countries for food. You got to dig for humor. God doesn’t explain why kids suffer that way and He doesn’t explain why you must have your heart broke. You just do. Everyone must go through it, just as everyone must breathe. It happens, they say. But time makes all things better. Time. That magical and painful thing. And eventually those things that can’t be explained just lay down in your head and you aren’t so bothered with them anymore after you get used to them.

Cap walked Tennille around the neighborhood and he walked by Noelle’s house more than once. Usually, at night, so it would be less likely that he would be caught. But the idea of hoping to run into her accidentally was beautiful to him. And he hoped that if he did, she would feel the way she felt before and there would be some wonderful explanation that he couldn’t possible have conceived as to where she had gone. And though he never did run into her, he found some comfort in being close to her, though she had chosen not to be close to him. And he felt foolish for thinking that one night, that meant so much to him, could have possibly meant that much to her for such things, he had learned, are never so equal and the unfairness of love is often that difficult imbalance. Or as Sinatra says in Send in the Clowns: Isn't it rich? Are we a pair? Me here at last on the ground and you in mid-air. Send in the clowns. Isn't it bliss? Don't you approve? One who keeps tearing around and one who can't move. But where are the clowns? Send in the clowns.

Or it is the imbalance of one’s self, torn between his heart and his mind. And there is a tightrope of life to walk with the heart and brain on opposing sides at the end of a long balancing pole. And if one should fall, they lose all.  

A few weeks later, on a warm midafternoon near June, he saw a man leaving her house. And he stopped across the street and that feeling in the pit of his stomach made him sick. Tennille tried to console him, licking his face, as he bent over. But he pushed her away and realized what was done was done and what little hope that he had that it was all a miscommunication, or that there was a logical explanation, vanished. The man stopped from across the street and looked at Cap. “Are you okay?”

“I’m fine.”

The man shook his head and got in his van. But then her door opened and as Cap got to his feet from across the street, she rushed out to catch the man, who had just started to pull away. The van was parked between her view of Cap and Tennille, but Cap could hear her speak.

“You left your work belt. And I forgot to ask when will I owe the first payment for the alarm system?”

“Someone will get a hold of you. And thanks. I’m always leaving it around. Good meeting you and take care.”

“You too. And you’re welcome.” She stood on the curb when the van pulled away and then suddenly there was nothing between her and Cap besides two curbs and the street. He didn’t notice the difference at first because he never made it past her eyes. And she was frozen, standing there. Her eyes thick with tears that fell rapidly and which reminded him of the time her face was wet from the rain. Their rain.

“I’m sorry!” she cried running back towards her house.

“Wait!” he called to her. “Don’t go! Just tell me why! Please.”

She stood at her door with her back turned to him and he walked Tennille across the street and stood at the bottom of the walk to her porch.  

“Why what?”

“Why didn’t you come the next Sunday. I did. And I’ve been in there every Sunday for three months waiting for you to walk through that door. I am not mad, I just don’t understand. I thought I felt something in you. Coming from you. Something I haven’t felt from anyone.”

“There was nothing coming from me,” her voice cracked, her back still turned, her hand on her door knob.

“Then if there was nothing in you then, there is nothing in you now.”

“That’s right.”

She could see his blurred reflection in the window glass, but he could not see anything but her back. He hung his head.

“This drought has been pretty bad. Haven’t had rain in two or three weeks. I hope it rains again sometime, Noelle. And I hope you get caught out in it without a jacket or an umbrella. Because that person was truly beautiful. Goodbye to you.”

Cap walked away, across the alley, and was just over the heart on the sidewalk, when she called to him. “Oh, Captain, my Captain! Your real name is Walt Whitman Coleman. You chose Captain because you didn’t like the name Walt. And Oh, Captain was his most famous poem. Shortened it to Cap when kids laughed at you in grade school. I’ve done my homework…Cap.”

He smiled and turned around and walked back slowly. She was still facing the door.

“I was lying,” she admitted seeing him again in the reflection in the glass. “I did feel it, too. And I do feel it still. But please don’t ask why and just leave.”

He walked closer.

“Please! Go.” She turned the knob.

“I can’t. I guess I am going to stay here. Because if you felt that way, and you feel that way now, then this is where I belong.”

“No!”

“Yes. It is!”

But then she quickly turned and he could see why she had not met him that Sunday night. Suddenly, it was perfectly clear and it stood before him. The Bigfoot, the aliens, the monster of Loch Ness. All at once.

“He came back. This time rather than words, he had a knife. It was the day after we met. I had made you soup that day for your cold. The one I presumed you’d catch by giving me your jacket. That perfect night. I was going to drive around until I found your house. But he found me first. He cut my face, as you can see. He tried to slit my throat, but I got away from him. I landed a kick to his crotch. But my face, well, it is as you see it. Permanently disfigured. I look horrible. He said no one will ever want me this way. And he laughed. They arrested him and he has trial in August.

“So, I couldn’t meet you. You can understand. I couldn’t come like this. I couldn’t send anyone because I thought they would tell you the truth rather than whatever story I would have sent them to tell. And I knew if you knew the truth, you would come. So, I guess, I hoped you’d forget. That it didn’t mean as much to you as it did to me.”

Cap didn’t say anything. He let the dog go and she walked to Noelle on the porch and Noelle smiled and bent down to pet her. The dog licked her face and Noelle closed her eyes and smiled.

“Do you know what I named her?”

“Tennille,” Noelle smiled. “You named her your dog Tennille.”

“How did you know?”

“Facebook,” she said, looking down at him hopefully.  

“Well, if you are going to be stalking me, we may as well be together.”

She laughed. “I can’t. Look at me.”

“I am,” he replied. “You’re easy on the eyes.”

She smiled and began to cry.

“Can I come inside this time?”

“But it’s not raining,” she smiled.

“It will. Eventually. And we will dance in it this time. I love you.”