She knew why her back was aching. It was her bag. She'd been dragging that ridiculous novel of mine all over Europe, on every walk, to every café. It was stupid, but somehow she couldn’t bring herself to just leave it in the hotel. It was the one thing she had that was pure me. She pulled it out now and set it on the table next to an enormous bowl of latte. C. had been caught in sudden storm coming out of the bank. She'd turned up a side street beside the canal and run along the cobblestones for some distance. She'd run stiff-legged the way people do when it rains and they are trying not to splash in the muck. She hadn’t realized that she was hungry until she saw the apronned man darting into the rain to pull in the tent-boards before the specials washed away in a series of chalky rivulets. Although the café's front window had steamed over, she could still make out the rotisserie behind the glass. Suddenly she was famished. The captain held open the door and she scooted in out of the rain. The room was long with heavy wooden tables tucked irregularly into one side or the other so that they formed a series of semi-private booths. Behind the counter another man swung back a little wooden door vested in metal and shifted several loaves of thick bread away from the coals with a long wooden spatula. He nodded in C.'s direction and mumbled something pleasant in French. Bon jour, she whispered, but with a growing confidence for the language. It's even better the second time, she thought. The last time she'd been in Brugge she'd had Katie and since Kate spoke French C., regrettably, fell in her shadow and became dependant. This time she had no one. In fact, her only crutch was a tiny English-French, French-English dictionary of mine, and she hadn't used it since Paris. She was proud of that.
At the table she ordered duck and French fries. After that a cheese plate. C. always craved salt around the time of her period. For the first time since college it felt good to be on her own. It is what she always wanted, what as a younger woman she had envisioned for herself. That was before she'd met me. She touched the cover of the book beside her. She still thought it silly that I'd had it bound and put that plastic cover on it. But she was grateful too because there was no way in hell she was going to drag 200 loose sheets of an unpublished manuscript around Europe and then she'd have nothing of mine here with her and suddenly she became sad. Why hadn't I come after her? I was in so many ways a simple man, yet in all the years we'd spent together it frustrated her that she didn't have me locked down, not as in captured, but understanding. Now it was making her mad. Really, who the hell had she married? And what had gone wrong in our marriage that we could be on different continents for no reason other than one of us left and the other had let her go? It made her mind numb.
After a long bout of staring C. got up to check the weather. She poked her head out the front door. Still spitting, the man behind the counter said in French. He could tell that she was American. He liked Americans. His words confused her but she didn't become flustered. Instead she made a face that conveyed her disappointment with Belgium's lack of sunshine on this 22nd day of March. Minutes passed. C. smiled awkwardly. She knew I was better at this sort of thing. She hated to make mistakes and couldn't bear the way I just bumbled through. That got her nowhere, or at least not anywhere in any classy-type of way. She was having these arguments in her head a lot lately, she even had them out loud. Maybe the loony bin wasn't far off, but she wasn't there yet, so why torment this poor man with her type-A neurosis. Say something! She could feel her mind stretch, the elasticity of it, as a river full of words, mostly verbs and nouns, pushed against the muscles that worked her tongue. She wondered how she'd gotten by in Paris without pronouns. She would have liked to tell him that she thought it very fashionable the way his stubble matched the white of the apron he wore, very European chic, but…forget about it, even if she'd known all the words she wouldn't have been able to put that sentence together in any timely sort of way. Instead she opted for something simple.
What is it, she asked, having noticed for the first time that the animal on the rotisserie was not a chicken.
Lapin, he answered. C. nodded. Lapin, she said, making a mental note to look it up later and walked back to her table repeating lapin, lapin, silently with each step to memorize it. She didn't see any reason to go back outside. Perhaps she'd read. Carefully pushing her bowl of latte to one side, C. sat back down and slid Cara Reina into position in front of her. She put her elbows on the table to either side and stared down at the cover. It had been a long time since she'd read my book. Uh, she grunted. I'd subtitled the book a short romance. Could it be that she had simply never noticed that before? Doubtful after all the blood she'd sweated editing the damn thing. C. stuck her thumb underneath the plastic cover and turned the page. Then she took a cigarette from her purse and lit it, exhaling a misty cloud of recycled Camel smoke across the table; it covered the page, hiding parts of the first paragraph. She remembered the birds, tons of them, all different kinds and colors and tweets. I put the birds in the book for my mother. She liked that, that I still did things for my mother, with her in mind. Again it struck her that this book was the only thing of mine she had brought with her. She hadn't read it in years, but had a vague notion that she could discover something new about me that she had missed before. Or at least that's the way I imagine it.