Coyle's Dream

Coyle was wearing a tweed suit and a strained grimace as he slogged from the restroom to his table for two.  It was draped in brown cloth, veiled in pale sunlight, embellished in the center with a frumpy beige tulip drowning in a shallow plastic vase of green water.  The table was propped up against a window looking out onto the Plaza and was set up such that he could peer morosely out at the streets without looking like a recluse, so he would seem momentarily miserable without looking like a long-term loner.  He wanted to come across as ditched, stood-up, not as some freshly divorced deadbeat drunk nobody.

He threw down a slug of wine and watched the dopey men in ties and creased pants pass by the window arm-in-arm with their flowery-skirted wives.  Everyone was summery.  In July, this place stayed the same midwestern shithole it always was, but people satisfied themselves with the delusion that the growl of traffic was really the soft whisper of the ocean, that the blue-black grackles wobbling overhead were really seagulls.  No way to live, Coyle thought.  You have to face the facts.  Some things were just never meant to be.  Kansas City would never be a coastal paradise.  Maybe after millions of years of tectonic drift.   But nobody would be alive to see it.  Coyle winced, then grinned at the thought that nobody would be alive in a million years.  Not the ex, not Coyle, not nobody.

“Some more wine, sir?”

Not even you, toots.  Coyle gazed up at the waitress.  Not even you will live to see the Kansas City Beach.  He didn’t say this out loud, of course, because then she’d probably think he was a nut for sure or would at least stop bringing him wine.  He nodded yes.  She smiled.

She’d been flashing him that same sickly sweet smile all night.  It put Coyle ill at ease.  He no longer trusted advances from women.  When he was married, he relished them, used them as little vehicles to break the monotony.  But after the divorce, he learned a few things.  Women never wanted you.  They wanted your job, your money, the passenger’s side seat of your luxury sedan.  It was all just a game.  He understood: he was just a rung on someone else’s ladder.  A stepping-stone.  

But this waitress wasn’t half bad.  She was a little younger than Coyle, forty, forty-five, maybe.  She had a toucan face, but he thought it was sort of sexy.  He didn’t think it was bad for a woman to look like a bird.  And her body was appetizing enough: slender, big hips, long legs, smallish breasts.  The small breasts didn’t bother Coyle because unlike most males, he thought, he didn’t exclusively like big boobs.  He cherished all boobs equally.  Her skin was tough and weathered, and she had a strange little lump in her neck, like an Adam’s apple.  These were strikes against her, but her hair, he had to admit, he loved her hair, streaming down in long black coils, swaying as she walked back to the kitchen, dangling down over her back like a hanging garden he’d never seen in his life but could imagine so clearly.

Coyle pretended not to notice her when she returned with his wine.  He was watching the window like a TV when she leaned in to set the glass next to his drooping tulip on the table.  He waited an instant, brooded with a look he thought reflected fathomless depths, and turned his eyes on the waitress.

“Need anything else, sir?”
“No.  Nothing.”  
“Well, then,” she said, clicking her heels together in a way that Coyle found at once irritating and slightly arousing, “you stay right here and I’ll be right back.”
“You’ll ... be right back …”

What the hell did she mean, stay right here?  Were they kicking him out?  He’d downed his share of wine, but he hadn’t been unruly.  Maybe they thought he was an eccentric, a loner, some kind of bum.  Maybe they thought he was a nut.  Coyle thought that maybe they had good reason.  He guzzled the rest of the black wine in a fury.

When he saw her lanky form making its long-legged way towards his table with a yellow scrap of paper dangling daintily from her left hand, he understood.  They were cutting him off.  You’ve had enough, sir.  You’re starting to enjoy yourself, sir, and lord knows we can’t have that, sir.  She slid the paper onto his tiny table and pulled up a chair to sit right across from him.  Even sitting down, she was much taller than Coyle.  He was on the level of that little apple of hers.  He stared at it.

“The bill,” she explained, flashing a few of her off-white teeth.  “I’ll cover the rest if you’d like to have a few drinks.  On me.”

“Oh.  Um,” Coyle said.  He squirmed in his seat and rested his hands in his lap.  She laughed and asked his name.

“Steven,” Coyle said.
“Is that with a P-H or –”
Coyle stared blankly.
“Sorry,” she snorted through her nose, “do you spell it S-T-E-P –”
“No.  It’s Steven.  V-E.”
“Well, Steven with a V-E,” she said, “my name’s Claire.  With an A-I.  Not C-L-A-R-E like some –”

Coyle sighed pointedly.  He drummed his fingers on the table.  Claire cleared her throat.  The wine hummed in Coyle’s head.

“So, Steven – what do you do?”
“I work.”
“I mean, where do you work?”
“What’s it to you?”
“Just curious,” she said.  “It doesn’t matter.  Just asking.”
“You really wanna know?”
Claire thought about it.  
“I do,” she said.
“Wastewater.”
“Hm?”
“Wastewater.  I work at the goddam water treatment plant.  By the river.”
“Oh,” Claire smiled, “Well, I bet you’ve got stories.”
“Yeah,” said Coyle.  “Full of ‘em.”
Claire clasped her hands in her lap.
“So, do you –”
“Look,” Coyle said, resting the icy tips of his fingers on his forehead. “What are you trying to do ... here?”
“I’m sorry?”
“What do you want?” he asked, pointing at her. “What’re you selling?”
Her apple tensed.
“No.  I just want to, you know,” she paused, “get to know you.”
“Well, fine.  Get to know me if you want,” he said. “but I won’t buy whatever it is you’re trying to pawn off on me.”
“Hey –”
“Let me ask you, are you some kind of whore?  Is that what this is?  Do I look desperate to you?”
“A whore?  I just came to talk, I –”
“Talk?  Listen, I’m a helluva conversationalist,” Coyle said, “but I don’t want no damn sympathy, I don’t want no damn pity party, and I don’t want no damn person I’ve never met feeling sorry for me.  You understand?”
“No, I don’t,” she said.  “Look, I’m sorry.  Would you like me to leave?”
“I’d like that.”
She picked up Coyle’s bill.  
“No,” Coyle snatched it back from her.  “I’m paying for this.”  He sat up in his chair to fumble for his wallet.  

She rose from Coyle’s table and swallowed resignedly, her apple rising slowly before dropping back down into her neck.  Coyle kept his eyes fixated on a spot two inches in front of him on the tablecloth, like a child denied dessert.  She turned away and left him.  When she was halfway across the room, he looked up and followed her with his eyes.  A grimace dried across his face.  As she walked, Coyle imagined giving those swaying black locks a little tug.  

. . .

That night, Coyle had a dream in black-and-white.  He was at the same restaurant he always went to but it looked better without all those ambivalent beige and brown colors.  He was sitting across from a girl in a little black hat with a thin dotted veil draped over half her face.  He couldn’t tell who she was.  Whenever he saw her face, he forgot it instantly.  But he felt like maybe she was the waitress, Claire, or maybe his ex.  Really, she could be anyone.

The girl’s face was pure white and Coyle’s hand, holding hers, looked a darker gray by contrast.  Some soft, dissonant piano jazz was playing somewhere.  It sounded like that crazy Monk guy Coyle had learned about in school a long time ago.  And as Coyle told her about this lunatic genius Monk, the girl gazed at him, not sympathetically, but with the bewildered eyes of a blind, illogical love.  When he was done, she squeezed his hand and, without sneer or irony, asked him what he did, you know, for a living.  His mouth moved but he couldn’t talk.  Her face grew hazy with moisture and the room coalesced into grayness.  He was crying.  He tucked his chin into his neck and the tears rolled down his chest.  His body heaved in a sad, slow rhythm and he could feel her firm, strong hand squeezing his shoulder, the ghost of her menthol-choked voice whispering, “It don’t matter, baby.  Baby, it don’t matter.”