Copyright 2001 by Morris Rosenthal
Friday and Saturday nights were Eric's nights off, and he usually hung out at the Cave, a combination cafe and second hand bookstore with an entrance on Main Street. The Cave had a take-out counter on the ground floor, but the bulk of the action was in the basement, where some twenty small tables and a few overstuffed chairs were scattered around the four large rooms walled with books. There was a full service counter downstairs selling exotic and domestic coffees, teas and homemade baked goods..
The cafe was often packed during the school year, but at the beginning of the summer it was pretty deserted. About half the crowd at any given time were likely to be college students and lesbians, or some combination of the two. The remainder of the crowd was made up by what Eric thought of as 'Gentle' people. A mishmash of bare foot, poncho wearing, self educated people who devoured the books and coffee with the occasional oversized cookie or slice of cake.
Friday and Saturday they were open to two in the morning, and he didn't show up until midnight. Usually he ran first, at about ten in the evening, doing seven minute turns around the three-quarter mile Smith jogging track in the dark. Eric loved running in the dark. You went slower then usual, but you felt like you were flying, and you were barely winded when you finished your miles. Then, a cold shower, and a fifteen minute walk to the cafe downtown.
There was always a small pad in his back pocket, should the urge to put some rhyme down come over him, but for the main part he read novels and enjoyed the anonymous company. Sometimes, when a particularly pretty girl was working the counter or drinking coffee, he'd lose his concentration and barely finish a page all night. Tonight he got stuck with a rickety little table next to the mascot, a museum quality reproduction of a male Neanderthal with a sign hanging around it's neck that read 'Caveman want book." He was just getting settled with his black coffee and a homemade brownie, when he saw Carol walk up to the counter.
"Carol!" he lurched up, losing an ounce of coffee into the saucer. Nine months of therapy and he had never run into her socially. He moved up to the counter to intercept her, wondering if he'd finally get the chance to meet her girlfriend. She seemed to be ignoring him. "Carol," he said again, and put his hand on her shoulder. She turned and looked at him, and suddenly it was all wrong, the cheekbones slightly more prominent, the eyes a darker shade of brown. He flushed, and stuttered "I'm sorry, I mean, you look so much like someone else."
"I have a sister Carolina," she replied with a cautious smile, "What's your Carol's last name, if I might ask."
"Dr. Weinberger," he responded, still confused by his error, "You see, I run without my glasses, and I forget to put them back on if I don't get in the car. Carol's your sister?" he concluded on a rising note, finally registering her question.
"Yes, I'm Connie, that's short for Connecticut."
"Eric, Eric Levy." She gravely shook his proffered hand, politely allowing him a few moments to recover from his surprise. "I have a table if you'll join me there," he pointed, "I mean if you're not with people."
"I won't be interrupting you're poetry?" she asked, then widened her eyes and put a hand to her mouth.
The blood rushed to his face, and he found himself literally speechless.
"I'm so sorry," she said, stepping closer and putting a hand on his forearm, "I just put two and two together and..." she stopped talking, and led him to the table he had pointed out.
"Oh damn," she ejected, as she sat down across from him, "This is so embarrassing. My sister's going to kill me, and you don't seem to like me very much either."
"I'm not sure I even like myself now," he replied.
"Let me explain," she continued, "I've been staying with Carolina this week, and we're so opposite that we can never get a conversation going. The other night, when we ran out of things to say, she mentioned that she had a engineering student for a patient who wrote technical poetry. I could see that she regretted even bringing it up, but she's always been like that, her mouth gets ahead of her brain. She only said that you were a guy about my age, and that you were kind of shy. I knew that she only had one male patient, she hadn't intended to have any, you know. Then you show up here, and call her Carol and Dr. Weinberger, and she just doesn't know many men." Connie wound down, wondering if her sister was the only one in the family with a big mouth.
"Don't you move, I'm going to get myself a tea," she said, planning to give him a minute alone to regain his composure. "I liked your stuff by the way," she mentioned while rising, "A little weird maybe, but they hit the target sometimes."
Given a moment alone, Eric fell shamelessly to plotting how he could take advantage of the situation. Connie obviously felt that she was guilty of somehow wronging him, by being party to a breach of his doctor/patient relationship. He'd use this window of opportunity to convince her that he was relatively normal. Humor, he decided, always works with Carol. She arrived back at the table with an apologetic smile and a little teapot and cup. Before she could reveal any more of his doctor's impressions of him, he went on the offensive. "Connecticut, Carolina, were your parents cartographers or something?"
"I also have a brother, Tennessee," she answered, unperturbed, "Our parents are from the former USSR, but they got out during the Seventies. They were so happy when they were granted asylum that my father swore to name his children after the places that they lived in the U.S. The government debriefing center was in Raleigh, they both worked for a while a Oak Ridge, and before I was born, my father got his position at Yale. I'm just lucky it wasn't M.I.T or Harvard," she laughed.
Eric watched her as she talked, and she began to feel more familiar. Maybe the eyes were better that shade, and the higher cheekbones gave her a slightly more refined look. Their hair was identical though, right down to the length of the braids. He gave a friendly smile, trying to picture this beautiful Russian girl named Massachusetts, and said, "We'd have had to call you Masey or something."
"Masey, that's not bad. Sounds like heiress in one of those Depression movies."
Eric reached across the table, and filled her cup from the little teapot. "Reflexes," he said, as she looked on in surprise, "I didn't mean to invade your space or anything, but I worked as a waiter in a Chinese restaurant in Amherst. Whenever I see an empty tea cup, I get an uncontrollable urge to fill it."
Her own smile reappeared, and he saw that she relaxed visibly. Christ, he remembered, she probably thinks that I'm some kind of psycho. He saw her hesitate, exactly like Carol did before touching a sensitive area, but she didn't glance down before beginning to speak as her sister would have.
"On the subject of Space Invaders," she punned, "I feel awful about having the advantage on you like this." She waved off his hasty reassurances and continued, "I'd be a lot more comfortable if I could tell you a little about myself, sort of even the field."
Eric made an openhanded gesture for her to continue, and leaned back with his coffee to listen.
"I'm just turned twenty-six, and this will be my first full year of not going to school since I was three, so you can see right off how exciting I must be. I started at Yale when I was sixteen, Math major, and got my Ph.D. at Princeton in Physics. I probably wouldn't have picked Yale for undergrad, but my mom didn't want me leaving home, and it was free since my dad taught there. It was mainly snotty rich kids or super-bright poor kids who wanted to be snotty rich kids. Living at home, it didn't seem that different from high school to me, and I spent most of my time playing with the computers and the Internet."
"Princeton took me, mainly because of my folks, who are secretly disappointed I went in for Applied Physics instead of High Energy or Nuclear. It was more fun then being an undergrad, being on my own and all, but a lot more work too. I don't think I really got a good nights sleep the whole five years. The courses were pretty good, but I hated student teaching, and my dissertation was a lot of trouble. I ended up working on little pieces of the computer control system for the magnetic bottle problem for the fusion group, and they treated me like I was a technician. I finished up just a month ago, and Carolina invited me up here to think things over"
"Decisions?" he prompted sympathetically.
"Well, I didn't go on many job interview, because I was so unsure about what I wanted to do. I could do get a Post-Doc at Princeton this Fall, but I think that'll be about my last resort. I interviewed with the director of the new national magnetic lab that they setting up in Florida, but he was too political for me. I could get on with some private company, I guess, but I just don't feel like starting over again just yet. I suppose that I really came up here to get away from my boyfriend."
His heart dropped into his stomach, and he blurted "Boyfriend?" before he could stop himself.
"We were practically married," she sighed, "He proposed enough times. Do you really want to hear this?"
"If you want to tell me," he answered diplomatically, while silently praying that the guy was a louse.
"He's really a nice guy," she started, provoking an internal groan, "And we've know each other forever, since we were children. In fact, we've been going steady for so long that he's the only guy I ever went out with."
He cheated on you, Eric thought desperately, and he lied all the time.
"Sometimes I think I'm crazy for leaving, he has so many good qualities. He's honest and dependable, he's always been so nice to me. If it weren't for our parents pushing us together all the time, I might have fallen in love with him. Our parents were all friends in Russia, although his family didn't get out until the early Eighties. Our mothers have been making wedding plans since we were ten, and even my father always seemed to take it for granted that we'd marry when we finished school. That's why they didn't push me to get a job; they thought I was waiting for Jakob to get one first."
She doesn't love him, he exulted, turning her casual dismissal over and over in his head. Then a warning light popped on in the back of his head. Don't do it, you idiot. Look what happened the last time you fell in love on first sight. Carol was rapidly growing fainter in his memory, being replaced everywhere by her sister. The realization almost made him sad for a moment, as if she had really been his. Then he gave a mental shrug, thinking, "Carol's a lesbian, it never would have worked out anyway."
"Could I have a piece of your brownie?" she asked, interrupting both of their trains of thought.
"Please, take the whole thing. I really only buy them to in order to give them the dollar. Otherwise, at fifty cents for a cup of coffee and a quarter for a refill, I'd feel like a freeloader."
"I'm taking you at your word," she grinned, pulling the small plate to her side of the table, "I got a thing about chocolate. So now you know more about me then I know about you. What do you do when you're not in school or working and writing your poems."
Loves chocolate, he said to himself, making a mental note of it like Bill Murray in the movie Groundhog Day. "I work the graveyard shift as a night watchman in a dead industrial plant in Springfield. The rounds take about three hours, and I spend the rest of the time reading. It's a great job for while you're in school, except that you don't see other people that much. This is my big night, when I don't have to go to work when everyone else is just going out."
"This is delicious, I'm such a pig. What else do you do, or were you born with the job?"
"You really don't know anything about me except the poems and that I'm an engineering student?"
"No, and I really had to bully her to let me see the poems. I convinced her that I might be able to give her some insight." She grinned wolfishly, looking quite capable of intimidating her older sister.
"Well," he started carefully, "I'm twenty-six, and I've spent about six out of the last nine years in school myself. I originally wanted to be study writing, and I went for a degree in English Literature, but I found out that writing and literature were two separate things, so I didn't continue to grad school. I worked too many hours while I was in school to get much out of it. I think, in retrospect, I felt guilty about going to school instead of working for a living, and the jobs I found never amounted to much."
"What sort of jobs did you have?"
"Dishwasher, fry cook, gas attendant, janitor, security guard, the usual run of minimum wage jobs."
"Weren't any of them any fun?"
"Well, I worked the flea market a couple summers, that was kind of interesting. And I worked at this old refurbished theater in Amherst that showed different classic movies every night. They shut down, though, when their grant money ran out. Towards the end of school, and this time around, I worked mainly as a guard so I could get full time hours and study at work."
"That sounds lonely," she said, her eyes going soft.
"I guess it is," he agreed, "Anyway, when I got out of school the first time I traveled a little, working the same old jobs and living the same old life. Eventually I got a contract job with a computer company in Cambridge writing software manuals for thirty-five bucks an hour. I was bored to distraction, and sick of everyone telling me how lucky I was to get such a good job, so I quit, and came back here. I mainly went back to school because I didn't know what else to do with my time."
"I think you have a good feel for engineering." she said, and quoted the first verse from his poem about the air traffic control computers crashing and the incoming flights following suit out of sympathy.
She burst out laughing at his obvious surprise. "It stuck in my head, because it reminded me of Princeton so much. They kept on wanting me to incorporate more and more features in the control program, so it ran slower and slower, and I'd have to port it all to a faster box. Then they'd come back for more features. Happened at least twice a year. How did that one end by the way, I've forgotten."
"The, uh, everybody died," he mumbled.
"Oh yeah," she laughed again, "What did you rhyme 'reboot' with?"
"The dream of flight, forbidden fruit."
"Have you ever sold anything?" she asked.
"Poems, you mean?" He laughed out loud. "Who would buy them? Your sister is my only fan, and she gets paid to listen."
"The ones I've seen might be a little dark, but I'd think one of the environmental magazines would love to publish stuff along your lines," she answered seriously. "They hate technology."
"You think I should sit and intentionally write a poem bashing industry or something?" Actually, he was thinking, that's a pretty amusing idea.
"Why not? Maybe you'll find yourself in the green."
He caught it, and grinned. He'd always loved puns.
"If I write a couple this week, will you help me pick one to send in?" he ventured.
"Deal. I've got to go back to New Jersey to wrap up a few things, but I should be back Thursday night."
"Great, what time do you get up in the morning."
"I used to get up around six, but I've been sleeping to eight lately." She tilted her head to the side and gave him an odd look, "Why morning?"
"Friday mornings I see your sister at eight-thirty, I'd rather see you though, since you'll be there anyway."
Connie burst out laughing for the second time and said, "I've got an idea. I won't say anything and we can surprise her."