Underheard

Elastic and wary, they kissed.  This was only the second time.  Brooklyn’s heart bounced up and down.  She wondered where the fifteen years that separated the two of them went whenever their lips touched.

Dorian said, “Okay then.”

They were in a place outside the boundaries of campus called the Attique, a tiny café that Brooklyn didn’t know.  It looked historic and fragile, or perhaps that was just an emanation from the antique store downstairs.  Both the curio shop and the café were enclosed inside a large, converted farmhouse.  Up here, the exposed eaves slanted upwards and met perhaps eight feet above the main walkway, which necessitated the miniature furnishings.  Small knotted rugs and faded velvet runners, a modest border of faux gold leaf, and tiny glass tumblers etched with the images of deer and foxes.  On the edge of each beam, repeated in shrinking perspective from the outside entrance, a small cameo had been nailed, maidenly portraits in rose and periwinkle.  There were four gables like the one Brooklyn and Dorian occupied each with its own small table and a pair of chairs.  The windows only came up to waist level, sitting down, so that any pensive occupant had a skewed perspective if they looked out and down at the surrounding landscape.  A woman sat behind the small bar reading the local independent paper.  The only draw to such a place—other than its removed location and the privacy it offered—lay behind this stately hippie woman, a long shelf of rare liqueurs, brandies, and cognacs collected in eccentric bottles and unmarked decanters.  The smell of espresso lingered in the hardwood, and a smooth, Swahili soprano cooed through speakers, though Brooklyn had trouble determining where exactly they were located.

Dorian fit here, somehow, among the irregular surroundings and the sharp, aged liquor in her mouth, but it wasn’t until after an hour and at an appropriate turn in their conversation that she acknowledged their surroundings.

“I’m somewhere else,” she said.  “I’m not in Uniontown, am I?”

“Sorry, Doc,” he said.  “Still here.”

“No, no,” she said.  “It feels too foreign.  Parisian maybe.  Old, Victor Hugo Paris.  Or is it farther east?  Poland?  The Ukraine?”

“It’s American, plain as day.”

“Why?”

“What other place tries to recreate ol’ Europa?  While every other quote-unquote exotic culture is busy trying to recreate its cities as modern, sparkling tower yards pulsing with the envious American-made business model, we’re buying up anything that looks Old World or, at the least, colonial, to warm our houses with.  Us middle classes anyway.  We want the comforting definition of something first-generation and migrant-made.”

“Too much talk,” she said, even though she knew half the reason she’d agreed to come here was to hear him speak again, to gauge the tide of his vocabulary, to see if his always ready opinions ever slid away or rose beyond his control.  After years of reading students’ double-spaced propositions and conclusions, Brooklyn felt she had a sixth sense for detecting bullshit, but her infatuation with Dorian had her lost in a fog.  She responded to his speech on a primal level, no matter how tightly intellect wrapped the actual words.

“Well, it’s a café, innit?” he asked.  “Art and caffeine, politics and pastries.  Or at least long whispers and absinthe.”

“Does she…?”

“I don’t know.  There’s a rumor.”

“How can there be a rumor? There’s probably ten people know about this place,” she said.

“Ten is not enough for a rumor?”

“God, no.  Rumors make more noise than that.  But look at her.  If anyone in this town had some absinthe, it’d be her.  Right there under the bar.  Or maybe locked in a little chest.”

“Let’s kill her and ransack the place.”

Brooklyn covered her mouth but failed to halt a squealing, girlish laugh.  “Let’s do it.”

“Then we can rush out back to our horses.”

“Highwaymen.”

“Moonlight and stolen spirits.  The circuit judge becoming more irate and furious with each near-capture.”

“They’ll hang us for sure, if we’re ever caught.”

“Ride fast.  Ride hard,” Dorian said, his eyes glowing.

“I wear a veil during the day for a disguise.  Layers of skirts and a corset.”

“I have a silver flintlock pistol.”

“I have a husband, somewhere.  A simple man I don’t love.”

“I’m an orphan the townspeople said would never amount to anything.”

“They’ll hang us for sure once we’re caught.”

“Punish the wicked.”

“Make an example.”

“Accused of spreading lasciviousness across the countryside.  Vice-crazed cohorts and illegitimate lovers.  Sinners like us, they say, have no place in God’s country.”

“Would you hold my hand,” she asked.  “Right before they dropped the trap-doors?”

“More than likely we’d be captured separately.  You’d wait and wait one night for me to return to the meeting spot, and in the morning, though you knew the truth, you’d try to steal into the nearest town and arrange some means of escape for us.”

“It’s possible.”

He was holding her left hand across the table.  He lifted it to his mouth and bit the tip of her forefinger, right at the knuckle, a soft bite, a soft trigger.  “But they’d have their trap set.  We’d be thrown into opposite cells to wait for the night.  Listening to them assemble the scaffold all day.  Hammer and peg.  Both of us embracing the stone wall that separated us.”

She withdrew her hand on a reflex, looked down at the table then back at him.

“Or maybe,” she said, “they’d just fill our pockets with rocks and throw us in the river.”

Dorian laughed now, his already narrow eyes squinting in a way that collected all the wet reflections of light into a tiny, hopeful space.  Suddenly the proprietor was beside their table, her gypsy-inspired garb swaying around her lean body.  She placed a bowl filled with bunches of swollen, red grapes on their table then stepped away, back towards her roost.

“That’s what she does when she wants you to leave, Doc,” he said.

“No, not really?” Brooklyn reached for a grape.

“Don’t!” Dorian grabbed her wrist.  “They’re coated with arsenic!”

*

She followed his lead, maintaining only a few inches distance as if the darkness would become total at any moment and she would need to swipe out for him.  The grass behind the house was long and defensive, weaving around their shoes if they did not raise their feet high enough as they stepped towards the sound of frogs.

“See this?” he asked.

“My god,” she said.  “Now I know where we are.  This is Hapsburg’s Pond.”

“Whose?”

“We’re on the other side.”

They both looked across the expanse of still, black water, perhaps half a mile.  The opposite shore possessed thicker vegetation, and a thin row of trees blocked off further sight, but it was still possible to spy the floating, peach-colored squares of light from the nearest houses.  “There’s a neighborhood over there,” she said.  “Where a lot of professors live.”

“Looks secluded,” he said.

“Somewhat,” she whispered.  They walked for a little while close to the mossy shore, listening to things plop or drip into the pond.  They both stopped where they thought the other wanted to pause.  Brooklyn felt Dorian’s pinky curl around hers.  She felt the impulse to judge this action, to define it in terms of pathetic cuteness and irony, but after a breath, she was able to let that mild pulse of habit and tendency be absorbed back into her bloodstream.  In the dark, with the absence of a definite, central object to focus on other than the shifting expanse of the pond and its clandestine, silver shimmers, their eyes moved constantly, pupils dilating and wavering.  Dorian pulled out his tiny tape recorder from the inner pocket of his coat.

“Landscape,” he began.  “is art’s most widely practiced genre.  The most lucrative, possibly, also, for this reason: you can own land, but you can’t buy any of the mood-altering variables along with it.  Temperature, light, weather patterns.  The deed doesn’t include the inimitable power of the terrain, the mysterious union of natural elements that inspired us to create gods.  You can trim your hedges, plant your flowers in arranged rows, build up the ground or excavate it.  But it’s not a yielding environment for any dramatic flair dictated by man.  And so we need the artist, once again.  We need him to capture nature’s teasing beauty or imposing eeriness in a portable form.”

He went on, the words weaving together expertly to form reasonable opinions.  Who it was for or what inspired it mattered little to Brooklyn: she felt weightless when he spoke.  She floated through the entire verbal exercise, dropping a few feet when he paused at the end of a sentence before being buoyed up again by the next.  Eventually, his voice wound down then ceased.  Dorian’s lips remained parted—almost the exact same distance as Brooklyn’s eyelids—and the tape kept running and whirring for an uneasy moment.  When his finger finally clicked the device to a stop her freefall began.