She Says She Needs Me

Fiction. "This is for all the lonely people..."

I wrote this fiction piece in one take two days before the publication. After writing the first paragraph the idea I initially had for the piece fell apart. After the second paragraph, a new idea emerged. It is this story… Writing is a curious endeavor, a draft evolves with each key stroke, the story builds without a plan…

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The man had a round face without a chin. It was not a weak face. His prominent forehead and eyebrow ridge gave it strength. The green eyes, set deep and wide apart, shifted across the bar patrons, pausing for an instant on a face, or a body, or a dress, or a shirt, then onto the next person. At the end of the bar, the eyes jumped back to the start, like a typewriter at the end of each line, then advanced across the faces all over. With each person, his face took on an expression of his thoughts: judgment, condescension, hostility, pity, desire, curiosity, dismissal. The crowd of regulars in the bar, just people. But the man did not like people.

They did not like him either. He sat alone, always, in the far corner of the square bar, away from the door.

The vestiges of years accumulated on his sixty-year-old face. Saggy neck, large ears with tufts of dark hair poking from the inside. The form, the fitness, the youth surrendered to the sedate office work and stress, now in the past, expunged from daily routine. Only his hair survived from his twenties. Expansive and styled, the dark mane moved each time the fan rotated past his seat. The regular patrons in the bar and the bartender called him ’The Hair’. Never to his face, but he overheard it a few times on the way to or from the bathroom. The Hair. He liked it. It was good to have a bar name. It made one an institution.

A door swung open, and he followed a woman walking across the bar to a seat close to him. Three seats away and past the corner, yet close enough to talk. Too close. She was about his age, maybe older, but skinny and frail.

“Always late,” she mumbled, “sit and wait. Again.”

The Hair clenched his jaw. That’s how they start, mumble to themselves first, then in your direction. Hard to ignore them, those kinds of people who need to capture you in their grumbles, need you to agree and nod in indignation at the injustices the universe dispensed on them and them only. He ignored her. She grumbled again.

“A narcissist is what he is. His is the most important,” she mumbled.

She waved a veiny hand at the bartender. “Make me a gin and tonic, with Gunpowder gin. That gin in a ribbed bottle.”

The bartender smirked, grabbed the bottle off the third shelf. He set the drink in front of the old woman.

“Two limes, maybe.”

The bartender slipped the second lime over the rim of the glass and walked away.

A door swung open, and an older man, rotund and slow, ambled into the seat next to the old woman.

“Waiting for you again,” she grumbled.

“I am two minutes early,” he said. It was two minutes to six.

“So, did you talk to them?” She asked.

“I did not talk to them. They were not there.”

“How could they not be there? They are always there.”

“They were not.”

“Where were they?”

“How would I know?”

“Did you ask anyone?”

“Why would I do that. Anyway. What did the doctor say?”

The Hair halted his typewriter routine. He looked at the couple, not staring but glancing between their faces and his own full glass of stout. Each movement elicited a new expression: contempt, curiosity, satiety. He was married once. But no more. Because of the arguing, like these two, just going at each other. His wife just could not stop, go on and on, until he shut her out of his mind, looked at her but heard nothing, instead thinking of work, equations, and chess.

“What did the doctor say? What he always says.” The old woman shook her head. “Too much coffee, too many gin and tonics, not enough walking. A broken record, she is, that doctor. I should find another who lets me live.”

“She might be onto something with the gin and tonics. Are they good here?”

“Yes, when they give me what I ask for. Always have to ask for the second lime. They just don’t listen.”

“What do you need a second lime for? It is just hanging on the glass, doing nothing.” The old man snorted.

“What do you know about drinks? You drink cheap crap and know nothing.”

“It is just hanging there, the second lime, doing nothing,” he snorted again.

“I squeeze them sometimes. Let me be. When are you going to talk to them?”

“I’ll call them tomorrow.”

“Don’t call them. See them. They can’t say no then.”

“Yeah, worked well today, ah? And now you hassle me. Why do you want them to come anyway? You don’t even like them.”

“I like them. They were…” she trailed off.

The old man patted her on the shoulder. They went quiet. For a breath, then back with the back and forth.

The Hair listened but no longer heard. He picked up his beer, then sat it down. When his own wife left him, she said he was too much, and he was not enough. What part of him was what? He asked, and she told him in a litany of angry statements and tears. He did not react much then, and she told him that was also a problem. The main problem. The emotions that sometimes were not there. But she was blind in her view of him, looking for emotions on his face and never seeing behind the calm front into the turmoil of his mind. She did not care to do the work to understand. He thought. But he never made an effort to open the door. He conceded.

After she left, he hated his placid face. Disconnected, a face not his own. So what? How to show what he felt is just a new thing to learn. He shook his head and rejoined the bar. The old couple still talked — long, bickering back and forth.

“I must move along,” the old woman eventually said. “Talk to them, and I will see you next week.”

“Okay. If I am out of town, I will leave you a message. It was good to see you again,” the old man waved.

She left. When the door swung closed, the old man shook his head. He glanced across the corner and nodded at The Hair in greeting.

“She is a handful,” the old man said.

“I thought you two were married. The way you talked.”

“Argue like an old married couple? No. Who can handle that?” The old man snickered.

“Why do you do it then?”

“Do what?”

“Stay friends with someone who treats you like shit.”

“She does not. She is just lonely,” the old man shrugged.

“Time is a lot to give to someone for abuse in return,” The Hair ran his fingers through his mane.

“Maybe I need company too. Don’t you?”

“I am good. I am happy in my head.”

“Why are you here then? In the bar?”

The Hair opened his mouth, tilted his head sideways, closed his lips. He nodded and smirked. “Company? No, don’t think I like people.”

“We still need them. To listen to us or just see us. How do we know we are still living otherwise?”

“Are you a philosopher?”

“Just old,” the old rotund man shifted in his chair, turned a bit. “That woman, the cranky one, she was my wife for twenty-five years. We divorced about ten years ago. I mean, who can handle that badgering. Except, maybe, me now.”

“Why now is okay?”

“I have not seen her for seven years after we split. Could not stand her. But we lost our daughter to a bad disease three years ago,” he shook his head. “A parent should never bury a child…”

The bar quieted.

“It brought you back together?” The Hair prodded softly.

“In a way. I can’t stand her ways, but sometimes, when we argue like an old married couple, it is a glimpse into how things used to be when Victoria, my daughter, was healthy.” He suddenly laughed, “She asked, my daughter, what you asked, how could we stand each other? Well, I don’t know, but I need her now, that old wife.”

The old man ambled out of his chair and dropped a ten on the bar. “She pays but never leaves a tip,” he smirked. “Maybe I will see you next week. Yes. I think I will. Nice hair, by the way.”

The Hair ran a hand through his mane, “Maybe you will.”

The door swung closed.

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