Fragments, like flashes of light, illuminating a moment, leaving the next moment in darkness along with the last.
She is a collection of movements as she walks through the park, late afternoon, early fall. Around her, everything flows to the uneven rhythm of the moving air, in harmony but independently, not so much in concert as in sympathy. The swirling hem of her skirt rises and falls, revealing a knee, a fragment of thigh, then concealing. Her hair, blown by the same breeze but in its own time, whips her face for an instant and then trails behind her like smoke behind a steamship. Leaves swirl and rise and fall all around her. Blink your eyes, and the magic is gone.
He is as a machine in control of his machine. Every movement calculated and precise, from the turning of the wheel to the pressing of the pedals, hands and feet moving in a Germanic harmony, as of interlocking gears and sprockets. Behind, on the asphalt, leaves swirl maniacally, without will or organization; any sense of order or design amongst them destroyed by the intrusion of the passing car. Blink your eyes, and you miss him entirely, left only with the impression of sound and smell and general disturbance.
She steps into a dimly lit tavern; neon beer signs hum, and the electronic jukebox clicks. She takes a stool near the door with her back to the street. Her back is as straight as a board, but even at rest she is a medley of movement. Eyes flicker here, there, missing nothing. Hands, one smoothing her skirt over her lap, the other tracing a water stain on the bar. Hair, no longer stirred by a breeze, still a phantasmic swirl of loose curls.
He steps into the same relative darkness not more than ten minutes later, smooth, seeming almost to not be moving at all, and yet progressing directly to the stool next to hers. His back also to the street, he sits and sips beer from a frosty glass, chunks of ice sliding down the outside onto the bar where they’ll form new water rings for some other woman to trace with a graceful finger tomorrow. He doesn’t speak to her.
She rises, walks to the far corner and through the swinging door to the ladies’ room. The door squeaks as she pushes it open, and again as it closes itself behind her.
He removes an envelope from his inside jacket pocket, adroitly, as if he’d practiced these movements a thousand times in front of a mirror, like a teenager who dreams of a stage and a microphone and an audience. It’s a letter-sized envelope, thick. He drops it into her purse, which she’s left hanging on the back of her stool. There is no sound but the buzzing of the neon.
She returns, announced by the squeaking—and then squeaking again—of the swinging door. One graceful hand lays a ten-dollar bill on the bar; the other lifts the purse from the stool-back and slips the strap over her shoulder. Her boot heels click on the tile floor. Sunlight streams in through the door as she opens it and departs.
Now as she moves through the park—early evening, amidst a dusky stillness where nothing seems to move aside from her—she glides, lighter than the air, even as her purse weighs precisely one hundred and fifty thousand dollars more than it did an hour ago.
