Eleven Couples
The trio played. We held hands across the table while I listened to the piano and wondered what kind of man I was.
She looked around the room with that particular stillness she had, the one I’d learned to wait out. Then she leaned toward me and said she had counted eleven other couples in the place, and she would bet her life not one of them was married to each other.
I looked. She was right. You could tell by the attention they were paying. Marriage teaches a kind of inattention, a permission to stop watching. These people were still watching.
Eleven, I said. I hadn’t counted.
That was the thing about her. She noticed everything and filed it away, and sometimes she showed you what she’d filed and you understood it was about you.
The math went somewhere I didn’t follow and I turned back to the music.
***
On Clement Street a patrol car came up behind me with its lights on and I pulled to the curb. I had not done anything wrong. At least not recently, and not anything a cop could write a ticket for.
He was big and unhurried. He rested his arm on the roof of my car like we had all night.
He said it wasn’t a moving violation. He wanted to tell me something.
A few months back, he and his partner had taken a call about a prowler over on 4th Avenue. They found the man in the side yard with a gun. Looking in the window.
The husband, he said. His own house.
He waited.
They had let him go. Technically he hadn’t done anything. But they kept an eye.
I thanked him and he nodded and drove off.
I sat there for a while. I thought about a man standing in the dark in his own yard, armed, watching the lit windows of his own life. What he had expected to see. What he felt when he saw it.
There was a question underneath that I didn’t examine too carefully—whether the man had gone there to do something, or whether watching was what was left to him, the only claim he still had on any of it.
She had counted eleven. There was something in that—the precision, the need to establish that this thing we were doing had company, had a whole dark room full of precedent.
I thought about eleven people at home.
And maybe one or two in the back yard, prowling in the darkness.
Then I drove home to the suburbs and parked a little way down the street.
Dale Scherfling is a former National Guard and Navy journalist and photographer. His work has appeared in Third Act Magazine. Does it Have Pockets Magazine, Lost Blonde Literary, All Hands Magazine, and Pacific Crossroads.