She was a foreign journalist, assigned to interview me. One of my books was coming out in her country. We met a restaurant here in Brooklyn at five o'clock. We sat a table on the sidewalk. It was late May, beautiful weather. She was beautiful. She had thin elegant arms that I wanted to grab.
She also had green eyes, a misaligned front tooth, dark brown hair pulled back, a full ass, nice legs, a long nose, a thin face, a lovely neck. She was about five-six, almost tall for a woman, and she wore a yellow skirt, a white blouse and tan sandals with a bit of heel. The blouse had maybe come undone by one button too many. Not that I minded. I caught a glimpse of a fragile white bra.
Her English was flawed but charming. She was from the capital, ______, working for her country's most famous magazine. It was a six-month assignment, covering New York, and she was heading home soon. I was one of her last profiles. My novel was
coming out in June, two years after its publication here in the U.S. We talked about the book for an hour. She had two glasses of white wine. I had a cappuccino. I don't know if it was the coffee, but I felt something in my chest, a tightening of sorts. I'm half-dead inside, but I had the thought: "Have I fallen immediately in love?"
There was nothing more to say about the book. She put her little European notepad away.
"Want to go for a walk?" I said, not wanting to lose her yet. "The light is so beautiful right now."
"Yes," she said. There was a slight husky quality to her voice and something sibilant, probably because of the front tooth.
We walked and I bored her with conversation about Brooklyn, then I said, hoping to rally, "I don't know anyone who lives in Manhattan any more. Manhattan is the new Queens."
It was a stupid remark, one I had used before, an attempt at wit, but she didn't quite get the real-estate humor. I'm not sure I get it. She said, "I'm going to miss New York. I love it. The lunacy. There's no lunacy in my country."
Lunacy must be a word that is common in her language and I admired her use of it, and love sounded like 'loave'. I looked at her neck. It was a beautiful neck.
She lit a cigarette. We walked slowly, and we didn't talk. It was nice to just be in the perfect light and the perfect air. She was twenty-eight but a woman. I'm forty-two but I'm a boy. I don't feel like a man. It comes from being an American and being a writer. I've never had money. Living half-broke for twenty years retards your growth. You're never quite yourself. You're always waiting to grow into your life, but you never do.
And there's something about the American character that also keeps you from maturity. I don't know why this is, but it feels true.
We went to a little park. Sat on a bench. There was some grass and trees with white flowers, and mothers with children, a last bit of playing, and there was that end-of-the-day light that even in the twenty-first century makes you think the world is all right. I played a man sitting on a bench with a beautiful woman, a stranger from another country.
"I liked our walk," she said. She was sitting very close to me.
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"Thank you for walking with me," I said.
"I liked our walk," she said. She was sitting very close to me. I shifted on the bench and put my hand into her lush hair at the top of her neck, and then taking her hair in my hand I turned her toward me. She completed the turn and looked at me with those green eyes. I saw shock and acquiescence, and then I kissed her.
Our lips met right, and then her mouth opened and she tasted of wine and cigarettes and something sweet and it was a beautiful kiss. We kept at it. She crawled on my lap and I buried my face in her neck and then kissed her in the opening of her blouse, smelling delicious perfume. We kissed again, hard. Then we parted. We looked around. There was a child crying, having fallen. A little girl in a little dress. A beautiful child. I thought of her growing up and sitting on a man's lap on a bench. The mother gathered up the child. The journalist said, "I want to go to your apartment."
She put her arm through mine and we walked to my apartment, hardly talking, but stopping twice to kiss and for me to pull her tight against me. I'm six-foot and she folded into me nicely, perfectly.
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