Pas de Deux

Short story exploring intellectual attraction

The black hole between her lungs pulsated, sending chilled ink coursing along her inner forearms' veins, pooling at her wrists, draining her fingertips. Paradoxically, profound loneliness filled her with an intense feeling of presence, a perception of the alien otherness of existence.

Curiously enough, this latest metaphysical funk had been triggered by a gimmick game piece discovered in a snack food package. If randomly instant-winning a Fandango Fig Bars sweepstakes would seem a benison to most -- a sign that the inscrutable but benevolent universe was winking one's existential expectations tacit approval -- to her it became cause for introspection, not enthusiasm.

And what good was a "Hawaiian Dream Vacation for Two" when it only reminded one that one was one, not part of some cosmic coupled unity?

As a fiercely independent university sophomore and self-avowed existentialist, she hated admitting that her depression stemmed from anything so unbearably cliché` as not being "in a relationship." When others gazed into others' eyes and saw themselves reflected there, they were content to stay, mesmerized like Narcissus fixated on his image in the water. When she gazed into others' eyes, all she saw was the Void separating one from another:

'In a relationship...' What a marvelously ambiguous, yet philosophically apt phrase that is: People are never alone, and are always in relationship to the Other; that's the only way we experience existence, and isn't 'to exist' merely 'to consciously experience?' I exist in relation to phenomenological stimuli that signify: this person, this apple, this tree, this cigarette, this breath, this dead animal at my feet. For all of us who experience existence, this relationship is involuntary; it is Being-With-a-Capital-'B' confronting us, forcing itself on us... So many so mindlessly accept this relationship with no apparent desire to rebel against its tyranny. That's what makes me different. It's the futile rage against the rape of involuntary existence.

The espresso machine, a telepath and clandestine optimist, gurgled dissent to her negative thought-process, startling her out of reverie long enough to begin furiously wiping down the Formica counter top surrounding the sink. Shortly, her psyche overtook her practical motivation and her hand stopped in place, gaze fixed on the white, coffee-stained, forest green-striped Herringbone bar rag resting softly resistant under her hand's gravity.

'Vacation?' Shouldn't there be a better word for it? We think about where we're going, not what we're vacating. 'Vacation' sounds more like a hermit crab leaving behind a reject gastropod shell. There are no true vacations before death: We never leave ourselves behind till then. 'Vacations' are basically temporary dislocations of identity, regroupings when one can no longer tolerate the exhausting inanity of life...

"Excuse me," a tallish, thin young man prompted over the counter.

The reverberation of his voice, sudden from behind, slid down her collar and ricocheted along her spine, shocking the inert slump of her shoulders straight. She turned and flashed an upward glance somewhere beneath his black eyebrows, then began visually appraising the orangey-cedar flooring's fake wood-grain pattern.

He was eagerly surprised to recognize her as a reader from a recent poetry forum he had attended.

"I'd like a 24-ounce Americano," he declared, hoping her face would show some spark of conversational interest.

She blinked several times in rapid succession, shuddered minutely, violently.

"Room for cream and sugar?" Her voice issued forceless from the lower ribs.

"Nah, just black. Please."

She deftly plucked the top paper logo cup from the stack, flipped it upright and slipped on a brown corrugated sleeve.

He wanted to talk to her, but her obvious distaste at disruption made him wonder if the intercourse would be worth its awkwardness. (Understood literally, the last several words could be perfectly applied to her thoughts on existence and sex.)

Back to him as she filled the capacious cup, his eyes fondled her wide but taut buttocks' contours with a furtive, playful upward juggle before tracing a gaze up her billowy black polo uniform shirt and over the dermal desert of her bared neck-nape, stopping at dark brown roots of her hair.

She about-faced, holding the steaming cup sternum-high with both hands, took three efficient steps to the cash register, then set down and swiftly white-plastic-lidded the smooth virgin-pulp cup. She punched a five-digit product code proficiently into the register, then realized she had totally auto-piloted the whole procedure without a conscious thought.

"How use doth breed habit in a (wo)man..."

She stared down at the red keypad, the pleasure produced by her secret game of Shakespearean paraphrasing scribing a slight, unconscious smile across her lips.

He imagined that each of her blinks produced a little breeze, perceptible about his cheeks as his eyes felt their way around the circumference of her nostrils and danced through her eyelashes.

He experienced peculiar, inexplicable ecstasy at the visual effect of dark-haired females caught with eyes contemplatively downcast. To him, this spontaneous, Madonna-like attitude of brunette countenances possessed a magnificent Michelangeloian quality.

"Two sixty-five," she said finally, shattering her unintentional pose poetry. She made eye contact for the first time, with disconcerting intensity.

Now it was his turn to look down, fishing through soggy one-dollar bills in the beaten-up black leather trifold wallet he had accidentally machine-washed the previous night.

"Hey!" he said, almost to himself, "Didn't you read at The Sesquipedalian's poetry reading on campus Wednesday night? I really loved your piece about--about..."

A beat passed as he decided on which particular bills to tender out of several Ones, meanwhile marshaling erotic initiative. Extracting and offering three bills that drooped flaccidly over his finger-joints, he determinedly returned a firm visual grip on her algae-green irises.

"...About the seductively delusional futility of our fraudulent concept of 'true love,' and, and, basically mankind's inherent inability to form selfless relationships..."

She accepted the damp currency and tucked it into the cash drawer with an expression somewhere between skepticism and gratification.

"I wanted to read too, but I need to polish my stuff before it'll be palatable to general audiences--even poetry-reading ones. As an English-slash-Philosophy major I tend to write dense, quasi-metaphysical poetry that's under-informed and overly self-referential..."

He paused momentarily to gauge her receptiveness, a little unnerved by her penetrating glance. His right eye twitched slightly as he strained not to flinch, attempting to blink his brain instead.

"Have you noticed how much 'self-referential' sounds like 'self- reverential?' I think this may be ironically reflexive of unacknowledged egocentricity inherent in all human thought and perception..."

"Ever been to Hawaii?" she interrupted, instead of promoting the stale biscotti.