The Rendezvous

A celebration of the simple things in life... Or a celebration of the feel of words...

THE RENDEZVOUS


She saw him. Through the irritation of perspiration next to her spine, the jostling of hurrying humans, the noise of a throbbing city, she saw him. Saw him after three years.

A quick spurt of pleasure touched her nerve-core and she looked at him across the street with a smile.

In a flash the noise, the crowd, vanished behind a transparent sheath as time flipped, and her brain took over the management of the pantomime around her. The transition from a young irritated shopper to an incandescent young woman was like a gasp.

He had changed so little in three years. The same disheveled hair, the same dull coloured clothes, the same absent-minded look. The evening light falling on his face gouged out deep undefined shadows from his cheeks. He was really handsome. His eyes, restless, seemed to make futile attempts to summon a taxi just by will power in this rush hour.

Shifting the paper bag of groceries with its many tumourous juttings to the crook of her left elbow, she adjusted the bra strap, patted her hair and dusted imaginary dust off her jeans, sprucing up mid-stride.

The traffic, cut eel, parted and the green light said, “CROSS NOW.” She crossed in a trance.

She saw him now from thirty feet and a crusted layer of time dissolved. She saw him in college; thin and gaunt, his eyes filled with laughter. The images: blurred, yellowed, tumbled out, bursting the seams of that moment. And woman, lover, she felt a rich stirring in her.

He has put on some weight, she thought.

When he turned idly, looking at the untagged discs of faces he was only trying to divert himself from irritation, so that it took full five seconds for the heavy clay like stillness to set in, when he saw her. There was recognition: full and instant.

Slowly, like a spring uncoiling, he said, 'excuse me', many times over, creating a path through the crowd, making his way toward her. When she saw him coming, she stood still in an instinctive kind of protocol.

At last clear, the man: tall, dark; his eyes: laughing; his face: etched in suffused emotion, looked at the woman: shorter, fairer, her blue-green eyes content, her body comely.

“Hello Madhu” he said with a voice that still had the caress.

“Ravi! How are you? When did you come?”

He, the decision maker from the days they were lovers, weighed things up: she was a now a stranger’s wife, probably he would not see her again, and, not wanting the moment to disappear, said, “Shall we sit somewhere? A coffee?”

She hesitated for the briefest moment trying to remember if she had enough leftovers to skip making dinner but he, hypersensitive, said, “Don’t worry I wont steal you from your husband”

She smiled, shaking her head.

In the mysterious disconnect of a woman’s intuition she knew he had dreamt of meeting her someday. So when she said, “Have dinner with us today”, she was just removing the props that would make him say things he would regret later; props of a rendezvous, her solo company and the not-so-dead memories.

But he was unwilling to share the evening. “No, thanks,” the 'us' in ‘have dinner with us’ had pricked him with the jab of her new reality.

As they walked to the restaurant, she: news-eager, asked him about himself, his job, their college friends and he; carrying the bag of groceries, checking his long strides, answered her questions easily, wittily, so that she punctuated their conversation with uninhibited laughter. People looked at them incuriously, as people in big cities do.

Their relationship, she thought, half-listening to him, was always like this: he eager, enthusiastic, imaginative, wild and she: patient, pragmatic, caring, and, only rarely carried away by his zeal. I was the circumference, she thought and she smiled at her own definition.

She suddenly felt the end of a sentence near and was in time to catch “… so here I am for three days.” A weight as if someone was leaning against her was lifted and in so lifting, scraped her with sharp edges of guilt.

At the restaurant, she chose a corner table so that she could quarantine him away from others. When the excuse of looking at menus and ordering was exhausted, they looked at each other. The million questions that throbbed to be asked were mutually abandoned: their answers a guaranteed excoriation.

The inevitability of the situation was gently thrust upon them and experts at understanding each other accepted the finality.

“So” he said after a pause, “You look different”
“Yes” she said with a smile, “I am pregnant”
 

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Paintist

Reviews

[Philosophile. (Maddy)]

This was well written. The descriptions you put in are really powerful and your writing style is amazing. I really felt sympathy for Ravi, and I can't believe she would tell him that she was pregnant. I know she wanted to destroy the prospect of hope in regards to a relationship with her, but that was harsh. It was obvious that they were attracted to each other.