q: who's the lucky girl?
a: lucky? um. begins with an "l", rhymes with what "piano" would sound like, if "piano" was a feminine noun.
advice: you're gonna need an ocean of calamine lotion.
haiku prelude:
hold on a minute.
I gotta take a step back...
ahem. where were we?
the whole story*:
The coffee place. It is storming. The waitress is wary of the window-side couple, in the invisible protective bubble. (her metaphor, not mine. I would have called it a fool-proof fortress.) She only refills his water and her coffee once. But she returns in the final scene, in a last ditch effort to get a decent tip... but I'm getting ahead of myself. Where should I start?
I'm tempted to start where he says "This is
so twenty-first century- this is what dating will be like in the year two thousand." He is talking to himself, and to the overwhelmed girl across the table from him, but it seems, from the projection of his voice and the angle of his head, that he is addressing the Russian couple behind her. Very "euro," this little cafe, as she is quick to point out.
The boy shifts restlessly in his seat for the duration of the experience- presently, his head is against the window. His left hand is dancing the teabag like a quadraplegic marionette around his saucer, and the fingers of his right hand are drumming on the table a rhythm which, it might be observed, the teabag is decidedly
not following. The left hand knows not what the right is doing.
I should tell you why the boy said all that about the year two thousand, so you can get the joke- so you can understand why I chose to start, more or less, with this little witticism. After all is said and done, you still might not find it funny. And one could venture to guess that the only reason I find it funny is that I am, in fact, the very same person as the boy in the coffee place, a guess which I will neither confirm nor deny. Onward.
Both the boy and the girl have a computer, or access to one. And both have felt the urge, of late, to jump on the caboose end of a somewhat teenybopper trend called the "web diary," which, while it lends itself very well to the trite and angst-ridden ramblings of adolescence/post-adolescence, has served as something of a therapeutic experience for both of our protagonists, it seems.
Now Listen: Hey- remember when a diary used to be a pink floofy
real life book that your sister kept in her nightstand drawer, locked with a faux-gold clasp and a key, which she incidentally also kept in her nightstand drawer(it was never really worth it, btw, because there would always be like one entry in it, and that was New Years Day, six days after she'd gotten it for xmas, and all it said was that her NewYears resolution was to write every day in her diary, and she might have followed through for like a week, but by the time you were bored enough to actually seek it out, chances are it was during summer vacation, and by then all the crushes she's swooned over in January were ancient history, but when she found out you'd read it she made a huge drama of it anyway, and you got in some kinda great trouble for a few lousy, obsolete pages)? Or the black and white splotchy composition notebook that you kept between your mattress and your boxspring, and scribbled in with your best roller ball pen, mostly just figuring out the best way to sign your name? That- all of that- that's different. That's another time, another place. Those are the olden days, the days of yore. Web diaries, for the most part, all pretenses aside, are written to be
read.
Am I off track? Here, main idea: there was one person that she, the girl at the coffee place across the table from the boy making his teabag dance, didn't want to read her diary, and that was the boy across the table from her, making his teabag dance. And this is failure. You've probably guessed that that is exactly what the boy has done, and you are right. Only last night, he thought that it might be kind of fun, in a ten-yearold peeping into his sister's nightstand drawer sort of way (but complicated by the fact that the ten-yearold has the fancies for said sister), to find the diary, which she had told him she had, though not where it was or how to get to it. But the boy has a brain, and is fairly familiar, in an acquaintance sort of way, with this girl's likes and dislikes, and certain likes and dislikes made finding her little place in cyberspace a relatively easy proposition. Ta da.
Here's where it gets complicated- are you following? The boy reads some, and is delighted to see that there are some nice things said about yours truly, I mean
his truly. He's blushing and his pulse is quickening a little in the same way it does when she brushes his arm or their eyes swing into eachother or... countless other things. You could probably make a list. If you can't, if you've not felt this way, I feel a little bit sorry for you. Then he starts to feel a little bit guilty, like reading nice things about himself gives him an unfair advantage, until he reads in her diary that she's been reading
his! Dut dut DUMMMM....! Which, as you can imagine, is all very confusing and tangled and... strange, but rather nice and funny at the same time. Shall we return to the cafe?
Except first- you should know that they've been together today since around three o'clock, in the park. He ventured to kiss her, and she let him, and it was very nice, as first kisses go, but he was still feeling a bit tangled up about the whole year two-thousand computer mess, though he hadn't yet mentioned it to her. Her yellow hair looked like an award-winning photograph all swirly and weaving around the bright kelly green grass in the park. They were laying with their heads next to each other, except opposite. I mean the rest of their bodies were strewn out in opposite directions- hers toward the lake and his toward the sidewalk, so that her head was upside down to him, and vice versa. He entertained himself by imagining that her chin was her nose, and her mouth was still her mouth except upside down so when she smiled it looked like she was frowning and vice versa, and her nose was this really strange growth coming out of her chin. But most of the time he was thinking about what he ought to do about the rather odd situation of the diaries and the world wide web and all. When she asked him what he ws thinking, he said "nothing," which was only fair since she said the same thing when he asked her the same question.
And there was a short interlude at his house, where he had some spicy rice to eat, and changed into his cowboy shirt, and entertained her with some guitar playing. He tried to play "Always," by Atlantic Star, but that didn't come off very well. I think she appreciated the attempt, though.
Now, as I've said, they're at the coffee place. He is having green tea and she is having coffee. She asks him to tell her a story, and so he does. It's about a salad boy at an italian restaurant who translates a memo addressed to the manager by the morrocan dishwasher. The salad boy is a student of french. He takes the memo home to translate it, and is amazed when it emerges in english from his typewriter, in rhymed iambic pentameter, as an address from God. There isn't an end, yet, to the story. The boy says he will tell it to her in installments, and that they will keep coming around as long as she keeps coming around. He compares it to "1,001 Arabian Nights."
When he's done with the story, they sip their drinks for a while. Between sips, once, he exhales: "So I read your diary," and buries his face behind his teacup. It is not big enough. He wishes he'd gotten one of those coffees that comes in the ridiculously large mugs.
She is a dear (I realize, upon revising, that I meant to spell "deer," rather than "dear," but I've decided that it works delightfully well as is) in headlights. She asks how, etc, and he tells her all of what I've already told you in previous paragraphs, and she appears to be a bit indignant, so that he can't tell to what degree she's joking when she tells him that she hates him. He lets her go on for some time before he plays the "you read mine first" card, which is a perfectly legitimate card to play, under the circumstances, don't you think? But, while it's legitimate, it doesn't put a dent in the tension that has all of a sudden sprung up around the two patrons of the cafe, who now know potentially a great deal more about each other, and about what each one thinks of the other, than might be customary, than might be expected on this their second date. He tries to make her understand that he only likes her more, that he's impressed by the fact that she could know so much and not have written him off just yet. He's never sure if he convinces her of this. But it's true.
Now- neither one has read the other's diary
en toto, as it were. (I'm not sure how it's spelled, only I remember that a dog whose owner claimed that she was the same breed as Toto had bounded toward the couple on the grass earlier in the park- I don't know what that has to do with anything.) But it seems to make sense that, as the opportunity is available, it might suit both parties if any laundry, so to speak, might be brought out right here, right now, at the table by the window. And they do. They both have some laundry, they're both accustomed to keeping it packed up until around the fourth or fifth date.The storm is over, there is a bird, somewhere, chirping, though it's eleven o'clock at night. The boy assumes it's mechanical. He doesn't know where it's coming from- from whence it comes. Somewhere around this time, the boy says the bit about the year two thousand. There is nervous laughter, an attempt not to be so damned
earnest. The waitress bursts the bubble when she sees the mood lightening, when she hears his silly proclamation. She makes a peace offering of a free dessert. The boy can't eat any of what's on the menu, but encourages the girl to. She picks at the slice of cheesecake-y, brownie dessert that the waitress brings. They agree that they ought to leave a nice tip. And they do. Or she does. He pays the bill, she pays the tip, which ends up being more than the bill. This is what dating is like in the year two thousand.
*this is a bit of a fib, as I've edited the conversation a bit, on account of the fact that one of the main cahracters, and I'll not say who, has the rather baffling habit, among others, of making use of such fillers as "ya know," and "I dunno," consecutively. That is, he'll (did I just give it away?) mumble, "Ya know?" and then, with a sweeping, dismissive motion of his hands, say, "I dunno..." Well who does know, champ? Can ya tell me that? Who
does know?
