Klaus, walking briskly along 41st Street heading towards Bryant Park, nearly tripped over one of his shoelaces. It simply wasn’t worth the rush if he was going to get there early but with a bruised face from having landed face first on the sidewalk.
The Peculier Pub is not particularly peculiar in any way other than how it has a large number of incredibly delectable beers on tap yet somehow manages to attract a myriad of people who come in to spend their money on watered down commercial American swill, the sort that would generally be found in large kegs at parties with people all around it doing hand stands and trying to drink as much as possible without getting alcohol poisoning.
Klaus blinked. It was another few minutes before he would even open his mouth to speak, but he quickly shut it again. This wasn’t surprising to Jean-Michel. What was surprising was that a woman had gone as far as to write down her name and contact information in Klaus’ notebook of poetry. He imagined that under different circumstances, Klaus would have been rather unhappy that somebody had written in his notebook. This kind of writing, though, just about anyone would have been happy with. Klaus stuck out his hand, not even looking at Jean-Michel. Jean-Michel responded by putting the notebook in his hand.
Either the service was slow here, Felix thought, or there wasn’t service at all. He thought he had seen someone who resembled a waitress, or at least a person who for fun decided to dress up as a waitress. Hopefully in this case it would be the former, as a person dressed up as a waitress couldn’t get him anything to drink. How was one to get the attention of a waitress in a polite manner? Certainly one could not just yell out across the room to the person. That would be particularly bad if it was just a person who was dressed up as a waitress for fun – unless part of the fun in dressing like a waitress came from having people yell across the room at you.
Okay, so this was going to be something different. Klaus normally wrote all of his poetry in the solitude of his apartment, in a specific place, in a certain chair, sometimes even in a particular position and with a particular drink – one could almost say that Klaus had things that he was rather particular about. Today, therefore, was an entirely different experience for him. Not only was he not in the normal place in his apartment, in his usual chair in the position he liked to sit in, and with his favorite drink, but he wasn’t in his apartment at all!
Central Park was astounding in the fall. Perhaps this was obvious, Jean-Michel thought, as it was beautiful the whole year round.
“Felix?”
“Sandy?”
It was Sandy. Sandy, to whom he had not talked in about a month or two. What was she doing calling him on his home phone, when he had only recently installed this line and hadn’t even gone about giving the number to anyone? Maybe he really had told the phone company to leave a message at the old line informing people of the new number? No, that would make too much sense – why would he do something so incredibly sensible? Nevertheless, here was Sandy on the other end of the phone, expecting him to say something, possibly something intelligible, and he was sitting there thinking about how she could have possibly gotten his phone number. That was very clever of you, Felix. Now stop thinking so much and just talk already.
The following afternoon, Jean-Michel was sitting in a small café finishing a cup of Ceylon tea. He drank it with a bit of milk and two teaspoons of sugar. It was a small café, perhaps seating ten or twelve at most. Fortunately for Jean-Michel, there were not too many people in the café. The decoration was light, with an emphasis on light blue colors and geometric figures. One could interpret different images through the figures, as one might when looking at clouds. Jean-Michel had seen a pair of people figure skating – or was it a dog looking at a thin tree? It could probably be either, to whomever wanted them to be so.
As he walked, Jean-Michel tried to think of the last time he went out on a date. When was it? A year ago? Surely it couldn’t have been more than that. Indeed, it had been; nearly a year and a half, unless he was mistaken. It was a blind date, set up by a friend of his he no longer talked to as much, though not because of how the date had gone; sometimes friends just grow apart, over time, if they are separated by distance. In any case, the date did not go nearly as well as Jean-Michel hoped it would; he was so terribly distraught that he swore to himself an abstinence from dating. Was he still abstaining? What had been so terrible? Nearly colliding with a homeless man wearing a garbage bag caftan, he reflected on the events of that evening. She had come to his apartment to pick him up.
The pace game was one at which Felix was beginning to get exceedingly good. Back, forth, back, forth – the interior of his apartment was all too familiar to him as he had gone over it several thousand times in the last few days, or so it seemed.
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