(In Progress) A Taste of Vowels

This is it, she must have thought as she’d thought on many other occasions. Always focusing on the is and never the isn’t. “You have to jump before you think too much about it and lose your nerve,” she would have said in any other circumstance.

I slid my hand back out of her reach. “Are you sure?” I mumbled in a tone she probably pegged as self-conscious.

“He asked. I said yes. What’s done is done.”

Now I could get all nostalgic and talk about how when I met her she was a different person, and about how she changed and now this person, sitting across from me in this coffee shop I’d never be caught dead in under normal circumstances, was not that new person but the one I’d first met, but I won’t. It’s not that I didn’t have the right. I had every right to call her out. Of all people. But she was expecting me to. To catch her in mid fall. Ha, not now, sweetie, not this time. That rock on your finger would drag us both down.

“Well, congratulations or best wishes or whatever people in this situation are supposed to say.”

“You should know,” she said daring me to jump in after her. “He picked it out himself. Can you believe that?”

“I can actually.”

“It amazes me,” she said, “that everything that’s happened in my life has led me here.” She looked at the ring.

I looked at her face. I couldn’t tell how happy she was. She was purposely concealing it from me. She was making that much obvious, she wanted me to ask.

“You’ll do good with whatever you try. You always have,” I said.

“That’s not true.” Another trap.

“I have to go. I’m supposed to meet Jane for dinner.”

Of course, you know it, I know it, I didn’t have to go right then. But the feeling overcame me. And maybe it was obvious. To her.

I did meet Jane for dinner. When she asked what I’d done that day I told her every detail from morning masturbation to cleaning behind my ears. And, “Oh, yeah. Ann’s getting married.” The last thing I needed was another interrogation.

“I bet that’s a relief?” she said.

“Huh?”

“You won’t have to worry about her pestering you anymore.”

“Yeah.” I have to admit I was surprised Jane wasn’t all over me with her psych degree. “I’m totally fine with it,” I said.

“I know,” Jane said.

And then the nostalgia crept back in and I thought about how everything in my life had lead to this.

“She seems happy,” I said.

Jane was engrossed in the menu. “What are you having?”

I looked over the menu I’d seen so many times before. I almost knew it by heart. “I don’t know. You?”

“The Greek chicken.”

“Of course.”

“Hey, I know what’s good.”

I don’t have to spell it out. She always ordered the Greek chicken, no olives. And me, I’d tried I few different items.

When the waitress came, I order a cup of coffee.

“Didn’t you just have coffee?”

Then I explained how one could never have too much coffee and that she should know that about me by now and that not everything was up for shrinking. “Sometimes a man just wants a cup of coffee.”

“Alright, alright. I’m not trying to start an argument,” she said.

“All right.”

I was on my third cup and Jane had a pile of Kalamata olives sitting on the side of her plate. I popped one into my mouth. Studied the smooth texture, the meaty flesh, the abundance of vowels. The salt. “They’re actually really good. Have you even ever tried one?”

“I tried one once. I didn’t like it,” she said, a child’s response.

“You have to taste it like you have no idea what it should taste like.”

“I know what it tastes like, and I don’t like it.”

She continued to dig at the hummus with a slice of pita and with the tip of her finger she dabbed tabouli on top. She took a drink of water on top of it all. A drop dripped down her chin.

“I didn’t even know you were going to see her,” she said without breaking concentration on her plate.

“She called me this morning while I was at work. She told me she had something important to tell me.”

“Another one of her ‘stories’ eh?” Jane laughed.

“I guess.”

Ann did that. She’d call or text and only say one thing, “I have stories!” At first her stories were all about me in disguise. She’d tell me about how she met a boy and he instantly fell in love with her, after sleeping with her of course. And I knew she meant that I should have. Through these stories I saw her change. They stopped being allegories for my benefit and started being about her. Advice she needed. And I dispensed it willingly and honestly.

“Did it end with, ‘and they lived happily ever after,’ this time?” Jane asked.

“I guess we’ll see.”

“I doubt it,” she said.

“Why do you say that?”

“Marriage. It takes up all your time. You should know.”

For the second time that day, I’d had my nose rubbed in the fact that I, me of all people, had been married.

“I’m glad it’s not for us,” she said.

Not for us, but for them. Ann and Joseph. Not for me and Jane. We have better things to do with our time than marriage. Who wants to waste their time in that?

“You don’t think about it sometimes?” I said.

“What? Marriage?”

“Sure.”

“Sure. Sometimes. I know you though,” Jane said.

So it was not not for us. It was not for me. Singular.

“Check please.”