The Face of Days
I looked up and glanced at the myriad forms appearing and vanishing elsewhere on the wall, and felt a familiar chill.
“Jenson,” Jacqueline said. “You don’t mind I’m married?”
“And to Beni,” I said. “It’s a mystery about him, isn’t it?”
She shrugged. Despite the weight of the topic it seemed a truthful gesture. “He’s been on the edge for a long time.”
“I guess I didn’t know.”
“I’m glad you called.”
“I am too. I don’t know what made me throw away the rest of my flight ticket and get off here. Memories, I suppose.”
“You knew him when he was younger, and better. You remind me of what he was.”
“Except I’m older.”
“Doesn’t matter,” she said.
I gazed at her, enchanted. The folds and creases of skin around eyes tell much of a person. At least I have found it so. As I sat, regarding Jacqueline for the second time in the space of twenty-four hours over a glass of wine—we had shared a bottle together in the afternoon, making conversation in the absence of Beni—I found myself regarding not her eyes but the skin around her eyes.
She’d enjoyed both good times and bad, I could tell from those lines. Neither had she been entirely lonely in life, nor had she found full satisfaction, whether in family, friends, or lovers. Yet she was capable of much—of dealing with the unhappiness of others, or the happiness, and turning it toward the benefit of her own emotional state. Not a bad way to be.
Lines around eyes tell less than everything, however. I regarded her lips, which sat in a half-smile after having pursed to drink the wine. The wine deepened their redness. I wondered how recently they had touched Beni’s.
I noticed her hands were smaller than mine, but not disproportionate to her body size. They moved sometimes swiftly without nervousness. They adjusted strands of hair that fell across her forehead though not so frequently as to distract.
She appeared only modestly vain. You meet few who are not vain about something. Meeting those who are not overly vain, or at least not vain about trivial things, is enough.
I realized that about Jacqueline, looking at her over a crystal of wine: that she was enough. I am not a special human. My needs are not of anyone extraordinary or unusual. My needs are of a person lost in the world just as most people are lost. I have seen neither home nor family in many years and cannot state that either still exist, at least with enough certainty to believe myself if I did. The transitory nature of the cosmopolitan life—and we are all cosmopolitan, even those of us living poorly off chemical-burnt and sun-scorched lands in the Sahel or the sooty waste of the Black Forest, so long as we have felt the dislocations of time and space created by technology and technological media—that life of the cosmopolitan has diffused me and made it impossible for me, as with others, to escape the sense of loss, or the knowledge of being lost.
And being lost as are all others, I could be content with a woman like this.
She knew about leaving family behind, about leaving places behind, about leaving times behind. She had known men and had loved and hated, and found rapture and despair, and had probably discarded youthful hopes for interpersonal grace, to embrace the cosmopolitan theory of life on earth, that all people are dust only faintly stirred by the divine breath of nature.
I certainly believed it. Too much accident plays into the affairs of humanity to make any other faith possible. Humans are not special creations. It took religion thousands of years to convince various erratic portions of the world that the falsehood of special creation was so; and it took another thousand for the idea to grow so diffuse that people could start seeing through it. Once such an idea grows thin, and grows transparent, it must be denied: humanity and the process of special creation do not intersect, not in the universe of the big bang and red-shifted stars. They intersect only in the fantasies of rebirth after death and the second life hereafter, a saccharine idea promoted by robed scholastics who hardly achieved the first life.
Did Jacqueline evaluate me in these same moments? Wine is an opener. To drink it is to open the liquid, and split its essences free, making them available to the senses. And to open yourself. You open to things and people outside yourself. You listen with a different ear, see with a new eye. You touch with different skin and feel air move against hairs new and re-sensitized. A charge enters the mind and alters its orientation within the supple contours of the brain; it registers facts and fancies and sensations thus, rather than so.
I judged she did. That in itself comforted me. We were alike in that.
