He is standing nearby her. The notebook is heavy in her purse, heavy and its empty pages hungry. He will do. He is very tall, she notices, with the light, soft brown curls that are invariably associated with romantics. His shirt is grey, but it is the grey of an afterthought; it hangs on his body as though he has not noticed it. He notices nothing; he is watching an explosion of color on a screen. Nevertheless, when she turns to him his eyes flicker away from her form.
They speak. His voice is the quiet kind, not speaking a native tongue, a fact evident only in his shy syllables and English accent. When he talks she can see the unconscious crookedness of his teeth, out of place in such a gentle face with such dream-soft eyes. It did not occur to him to get braces; his manner is uncertain but he has never realized that the way he looks is part of an interaction, and he does not smile with his lips closed cautious shut. He is very tall. She has to bend her neck to look up at him.
The video game on the screen in front of them wheels and spins in a bright simulated swirl of acceleration. They stand in a music store, an ancient behemoth fighting off extinction with the great tusks of the commercial nation, its true soul buried in DVDs and clothing lines. The CDs lie unnoticed on its shelves and the video games glisten at the eyes. (He is a musician, but he was standing in a music store watching a child race video game cars.) Now the little boy has stopped playing the free fifteen minutes that drew him in, wandering away to plug in somewhere else. His watchers have not noticed; older than he, their eyes slid from the screen at the first touch of human interaction and they are talking. She is prompting. She is listening.
They speak. She is smiling sunshine; he is smiling shyness. Behind her grin, her mind fragments him into sentences, and her notebook licks its chops. He is from France. He has come to this shiny city for the dream of everyone else: recording a nameless record. (Nameless yet, everything in LA is always yet.) It will be Pet Sounds, like Pet Sounds, he is like Brian Wilson only unnoticed, it is his music and nameless but it will be God. His English fails him; French syllables are dancing on his tongue to describe the subtleties of his sounds, but he does not say them, he does not know that she will understand. She does not tell him that she knows his language; he reveals everything and she sucks it inside her mind and stores it all away, a black hole hiding behind an affectionate smile. She observes everything. He does not notice things. (Except me, she remembers. He noticed me.)
He does not play video games. He reads books. He reads poetry. Shelley and Keats and she knew it, it was described in the soft romance of his long loose curls and the gentle angel angles of his hands. I should tell him, she thinks, that I will write of him when he is gone. She smiles at something he says to reassure uncertain sentences. She says nothing of her secret.
They speak and though they do not talk of time, he looks at his watch and she knows he is waiting. She lets him go with an incline of her head, watching him walk away on quiet feet, angled hands unconsciously in pockets. He is very tall, and slender through his afterthought t-shirt. His hair is a villanelle’s wave, a sonnet’s softness, iambic pentameter.
He deserves to be written in poetry, she thinks.
She writes prose.
BB
