The lack of a note or text. That’s what has upset Alicia about David, her fiancé, the man she loved, the man who (she thought) loved her. This morning she woke up in a new city, Eugene, Oregon, alone at his parents’ house. No note, no text. He did not even bother to wake her with a kiss. She has tried texting him, but he has not replied, even now. His parents are also gone, and they have not replied to any of her texts either. She has had to call a poet-friend, ask him what to do, and gain courage from him to shower, dress, grab her keys, lock up the house, and walk down the steep hills to the little city’s downtown bright with strange trees and murals.
So here she is at the Lichen Café, sipping her iced green tea while a very large, weather-beaten, balding man with a worn backpack and too many layers of clothing for this sunny day talks to her. (She, on the other hand, is wearing a sleeveless linen maxi the color of summer leaves.) Even though this man might be homeless, she feels relieved, sipping the mouth-puckering tea and not following what he is telling her. The small café, busy with tables with unmatched tablecloths, plates, bowls, and cups, young and old people at laptops, two harried servers, the scent of strong coffee, and the sound of Andean flute music, somehow calms her. She is happy not to be alone in an empty house whose glossy white walls, floors, and furniture hurt her eyes even on foggy mornings. She is happy not to be alone there, waiting for the man she loves to fail to text her.
“Pretty lady, why were you crying?” the homeless man who has been talking to her suddenly asks, looking at her, not past her, with pained blue eyes.
She dabs at her eyes with a red cloth napkin and wonders how she can deflect him. If she can deflect him. No, she can’t.
“I think my fiancé has left me. No note. No fight. No squabble. He just left me.”
“My wife left me almost twenty years ago. My brother told me to forget about her, but I can’t.”
She wants to pat him on the hand or shoulder somewhere. He smells clean, like harsh soap, maybe Dial soap. Perhaps he is not homeless, just laid off or retired too soon. Without knowing for sure, she pulls back. Still it’s a relief to listen to other people’s problems. Not to brood on her own. Anyway, she has been silly to fall for David, to think that his eyes are kind, that the touch of his hand is electric, that he can protect her, that he loves her. Oh, she could start crying again.
Before she can cry or the homeless man can speak again, David’s mother, a tiny, dark-haired woman in a pink sweatshirt and sweatpants, bustles up to the table.
“Alicia, we’re waiting for you in the car. We’ve had a hard time finding you. You should have called us. You know that texts are too small for us to read at our age. Art said you’d text. All young people text. So, finally, I checked my phone. I had to pull out my magnifying lens to read what you sent me. Why didn’t you call us, Alicia?”
She thinks it’s better to say nothing as she gracefully rises and leaves her half-drunk iced tea. She smiles at the man she has been talking to and gestures that he can have her food, the hard-boiled egg and red grapes that she hasn’t even touched. Then she walks outside with David’s mother.
“Don’t talk to the homeless,” she hisses. “All they want is money.”
“We have homeless people in New York,” Alicia states as she crawls into the back of the two-door sedan.
“Then you should know better,” the older woman snaps as her husband begins to pull away from the café and Eugene’s quirky downtown. “We are going to the coast. It is beautiful there. So much more appropriate for you to see. I don’t want you to get the wrong idea about Oregon.”
Alicia supposes that she should ask where David is. Instead, she pretends to fall asleep in the back. She is small, and the dress she is wearing is a maxi, so it is easy for her to kick off her sandals, curl up like a child, and drift off while the elderly couple in front lapse into private conversation, perhaps even another language. Once they have long left the city, she sits up, checks her purse for her tiny poetry journal, and finds that it is still there. Relieved, she lies down again. Once again, a man has disappointed her. Maybe her friend could have told her how to be luckier—or smarter with men.
David doesn’t come back until later that evening. Or at least Alicia doesn’t see him until after she returns from the Oregon coast and its gift stores. She is packing away the pastel t-shirts, sweatshirts, and sweatpants that his mother has encouraged her to buy. At home, her stepmother’s church collects clothes for the homeless. Perhaps some ladies in New York City would appreciate these candy-colored outfits just as they have appreciated her bright dresses with birds and flowers on them, the dresses she has had to give away to please David. Those dresses gave him headaches, he said. But then, as if he has just been out in the yard, no further, he ambles into their bedroom.
“Where were you, David? Did you get my texts?” She tries to catch his hazel, once-kind eyes. Now they seem blank to her. Now he smells of sunburn and sweat, not green tea and rice, an aroma that once comforted and aroused her.
“Out. Walking.” He lazily vaults onto the futon bed, knocking off a pile of clothes. “Mom took you shopping?”
She nods to keep from crying or shouting at him.
“I like you better in green,” he says, reaching out to stroke the fabric of her linen maxi, not quite reaching beneath. The dress being sleeveless, he strokes her arm as well.
Despite herself, she lies down on the bed next to him and rests her head on his chest, on his sweat-stained beige t-shirt without words or even pictures. At least it is soft, made from organic cotton.
She wonders how long they will stay together. She knows he doesn’t like to live in her world of words. She knows she should have said something else, maybe about wanting to walk with him, wanting to see the trees and rocks and flowers in this part of the country that is so new to her. She could write about nature, even if it was just a tree that shaded their path or a blackberry bush along the creek. She will not write about the coast that, for her, was made up of gift stores, clammy fog, and a restaurant where she played with lukewarm pasta and crabmeat. She wishes that she could have come here with her father and stepmother, before his oxygen tank. Even with a cane, even with fog, her father would have walked on the beach, pointing out the birds, the stones, the shells, the stacks wading in the seawater. Even now she misses the cats and pigeons he used to draw on the notes he left for her.
But she doesn’t tell David this. She can’t even tell him that she loves him as she usually does when they fall asleep together. Somehow it seems too needy today. The words ring false. All she can do is put her arms around him and wait.
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