by Josh Stewart
I. Almost Forgotten
I had just finished drinking a cup of coffee, my second of the day, and feeling guilty about it – I was trying to cut down. My headache could have been from caffeine withdrawal, or could have been from another long day at the office, but it was the end of the week, and so I could cruise through the rest of the evening with ease.
I was halfway to the door of the coffee shop when I heard someone call my name in a voice that was familiar, but almost forgotten. A thousand old memories I wasn’t sure I still had stirred in my mind as I turned to the source of the voice.
“Olivia?”
“In the flesh,” she said, flashing a smile that was a bit more wrinkled than I remembered it.
For years, I had seen that smile in daydreams and photographs. I had seen it from across a room and from an inch away. I had known every flicker of every muscle in her face when it lit up that way. For a while, I had almost forgotten what it looked like.
“How are you?” I asked mechanically, coldly. The question didn’t reflect the way that I was feeling about seeing her, but I was rattled by the sudden appearance of one of the people I had once loved – in every different way conceivable.
“I’m good, good,” Olivia replied neutrally, perhaps responding to my coldness, or perhaps equally shocked by my appearance out of her almost forgotten memories. “You?”
“Pretty good,” I said, before wondering whether I actually was pretty good. “Can’t complain. So you’re back in town?”
“Just got in last week,” Olivia explained, guiding me by one arm to one of the few empty tables nearby. “I switched jobs. Media wasn’t working out for me, at least not where I was.”
“What are you doing now?” I asked as I sat down opposite her, with part of myself still wondering what was happening.
“Secretary work,” Olivia admitted, with a wry smile. “All those summers at my dad’s office are coming back to haunt me. It’s just until I can get my feet again.”
“Yeah, I’m sure you will,” I replied. “You always were good at adapting.”
Olivia’s smile, slightly too realistic for me to accept, flashed again. “It’s been a long damn time since I’ve seen you.”
“Must be three years,” I commented. “I guess we’re getting old.”
“As long as I don’t have to grow up, I don’t mind so much,” Olivia said mischievously, and I remembered why I had fallen in love with her once, and why I had pretended those feelings didn’t exist after we broke up, so that we could stay close. “What are you doing these days?”
“I’m a suit,” I said with a hint of irony. Olivia could probably tell that from the way I was dressed, in a cheap but reliable pinstripe. “I work at a bank. Assistant manager.”
“Christ, already? Didn’t you want to experience the world before you got your career underway?”
“I did . . . but I experienced too much of the world of living with my parents, so I got a job. I kept getting promoted, despite my strongest objections.”
Olivia laughed, and I caught a slight scent that pulled me into another time and place. Her bedroom had green walls, red curtains, a mess on the floor, and that slight smell. “You always had a way of making things look easy. Remember how all our professors fell in love with you?”
“I never asked them for anything,” I replied, more defensively than intended, but it only caused Olivia to laugh again. I immediately wished I had a way to record that sound, so that I could play it back whenever things felt out of control.
“It’s good to see you,” she told me, and it was obvious that we’d both transcended the initial awkwardness of running into one another after all this time. We were talking again, without worrying about saying the wrong thing, without censoring ourselves – the way we used to talk.
“Yeah,” I said. “I agree.”
Olivia looked at me. “Do want to go grab a drink?”
I didn’t know what to say.
II. My Sincerest Regrets
I didn’t know what to say.
I had planned on being home at about six, which would have allowed me to make dinner and finish eating at around seven or seven-thirty, in time to catch a movie with my current girlfriend Alice. I technically had some time to spare, because we normally didn’t head to the theatres until nine, but I didn’t want to be in a rush, and I had planned on being home earlier, and I didn’t want to disrupt everything when I was tired and had a headache and wasn’t even sure who the hell I was talking to anymore.
“My sincerest regrets,” I said in a sarcastic, over-emphatically formal tone. “I happen to have an engagement tonight that I simply cannot put off.”
Olivia nodded, her face neutral, but something about the gleam in her eye had faded, or maybe the muscles around her smiling lips had been forced into an unnatural tension. “That’s too bad. Well, some other time then,” she told me.
“Yeah, for sure. I mean, we’ll probably run into each other again some time,” I remarked easily. My imminent escape felt somehow relieving; I would be returning to the comforting world of the expected.
“Yeah. Alright. Good talking to you,” Olivia said as we both rose.
“Yeah, same here. Have a good weekend.”
“Take care.”
“You too.”
With that, I returned to the comforting world of the expected. I checked my watch and discovered that I’d be home about ten minutes later than I usually was – the coffee stop and the conversation had delayed me – but it wasn’t really a significant amount of time. In fact, it was time I’d probably end up wasting anyways.
I took the streetcar for a ten minute ride, which was uncomfortable. It was rush hour, so all the seats were taken and I had to stand (as usual), and the person next to me was neglectful of their personal hygiene, and the teenage couple in front of me were giving each other dumbed-down anatomy lessons, and someone behind me kept coughing into my ear.
I got off the streetcar, walked about a block, and slipped between two buildings that were about as close together as the teenage couple on the streetcar. A door in the side of the building on my left led me straight up the stairs and into my bachelor apartment, directly above one of the many sushi restaurants in the area.
I let myself in, and rummaged through the refrigerator to see what I could come up with. Eventually, I settled for cooking some pasta and warming up some store-bought sauce to put on top of it. My culinary skills were decent at times, but I couldn’t be bothered on a Friday night.
I cleaned up the kitchen, passed some time watching sports on TV, waiting for eight o’clock to roll around, the normal time when I called Alice. When I tried her home phone at eight, no one answered. I called her cell phone next, and waited a ridiculous number of rings before she picked up.
“Hello?”
“Hey.”
“Oh hey.”
“How’s it going?”
“Okay, what about you?”
“Pretty good.” (Was I?)
“Awful day at work today,” Alice commented, and I could hear it in her voice. I was not enthused by the way she sounded. That lifeless tone had a way of dragging the person listening to it down as well.
“Aw, that sucks,” I said, trying to muster up my sympathy.
“Yeah. I’m still here, and I’m going to be here a while more. I’m just going to crash for tonight.”
“Yeah, okay. We’ll see the movie tomorrow, I guess.”
“Sure.”
“Can you call me when you get home?”
“Yeah.”
“Yeah.”
I didn’t know what to say.
“Alright. Well I’m sorry that work is being lame right now.”
“Yeah, me too.”
“It’ll be over soon.”
“I hope. I’d better get going though.”
“Yeah, of course. Talk to you later.”
“Yeah.”
“Bye.”
“Bye.”
I put down the phone, and stared out my window at the busy street. It seemed for a moment like a moving painting or a TV image, something I couldn’t touch.
“One drink wouldn’t have killed me.”
III. Choices I Regret
I didn’t know what to say.
I had planned on being home at about six, which would have allowed me to make dinner and finish eating at around seven or seven-thirty, in time to catch a movie with my current girlfriend Alice. I technically had some time to spare, because we normally didn’t head to the theatres until nine, so I didn’t really have any reason to turn down the offer. Besides, a bit of spontaneity could only be an improvement on what routine had offered me so far that day.
“Yeah, that would be nice,” I said.
“Great!” Olivia said, beaming. “There’s a place just around the corner from here, isn’t there?”
“If it’s still there, yeah,” I replied. “They change everything so damn fast around here. I never know what changes are coming.”
“Yeah. Next thing you know, you’ll be Assistant Manager,” Olivia remarked easily as we exited the coffee shop.
We walked around the block and discovered that the place we’d been thinking of, a small pub, was still right where we’d left it three or four years earlier. There was something to be said for a place with that much loyalty.
We went in to find the place full of serious-looking men, scowling at their glasses. It was not long after the work week had officially ended, so the people who’d rushed from their jobs to their addictions were the ones in the pub.
“Cheerful crowd,” Olivia noted grimly as we took a seat at a vacant table.
“No kidding,” I replied.
We settled in, and I realized that I had nothing to say. Olivia searched the table with her eyes, probably looking for the connection we’d seemed to have a few minutes earlier in the coffee shop. It wasn’t just her; it was gone.
A waitress interrupted our search for words by providing some easy blanks for us to fill in. “A pint of Guinness” was my response, and “a black Russian” was Olivia’s – easy words that could start a conversation.
“You’re not a fan of beer anymore?” I asked.
Olivia shrugged. “We only drank it back then because we didn’t know any better.”
“Yeah, that’s true. The luxury of opinion comes with age, I guess.”
Olivia said, “hmm” thoughtfully, as though I’d said something profound. I’d have loved to ask her what it was, but something made me hold back.
“So how’s life been treating you?” I asked her instead – a question that I normally wouldn’t care to ask, simply because it was vague and put a lot of pressure on the other person to make what was probably a very mundane life sound more exciting than it was.
“It’s been . . . I don’t know. I guess I haven’t really had time to think about it,” Olivia said.
“Yeah?” I asked, surprised by Olivia’s directionlessness.
“Yeah. I keep myself busy, and I guess I have trouble settling down. I’m thinking maybe I should go back to school, because I don’t really like what I’m doing. But I don’t really like school either.”
“That might be a problem.”
“Yeah, for sure it is. But it seems to be the right solution. I don’t know. What do you think?”
“I think you need to decide where you’re going. Sometimes you just need to take a big step back to see what’s going on,” I said, wondering why I was giving her obvious adolescent advice. Was that the only kind of advice I had to offer?
“Yeah. I think I need to do that about a bunch of things. I’ve got these three guys, and they’re all really nice, but I just don’t know which one I really want. And it’s not fair to keep them waiting,” Olivia explained. The smile I’d remembered seemed to belong to someone else.
Our drinks came, which was a positive – every time I had something critical to say, I could bury my face into my pint instead. Olivia proceeded to explain the entire situation, including the personalities of all three of her boy toys (Scott, who sounded very masculine, insecure, and homophobic, Dean, who sounded very shy, insecure, and intimidated by women, and Patrick, who sounded like he had no personality whatsoever, apart from being insecure). I only said things like “he sounds okay”, or “that could be a problem”, or, most frequently, “yeah.”
Olivia filled half an hour of my life with her talk, and I couldn’t even ask for a refund. I didn’t remember her this way, but three years of separate lives had either changed her or given me a better perspective. I didn’t like her very much.
Olivia was the first girl I ever slept with, the first one I really fell in love with, and the last I’d left on good terms with, and it turned out that she could have been anybody. She was anybody, the anonymous person who got picked off the street to fill out surveys about beauty products.
I finally managed to tell her that I needed to leave as she paused in her dictation. I paid the bill, wishing that feminists would finally equalize gender roles, and we stopped outside the pub.
“It was good talking to you,” she told me.
“Yeah, same,” I replied, although I hadn’t really done any talking since we left the coffee shop.
“We should do this again some time,” Olivia added, and insisted on getting my phone number. I didn’t think for a minute that she’d ever call.
“Alright, I need to get going,” I said.
“Yeah, of course.”
“Okay. Take care.”
“You too.”
We walked in opposite directions. I checked my watch, and it was six forty-five. I would have to rush the rest of my evening. I scolded myself for giving in to every random opportunity that showed its head, and for making choices I knew I would regret.