She's been found out at last. He must have followed her, tracked her down the back alleys to her lair like a club-footed Victorian priest stalking a vampire. In his navy blue blazer he looks as out of place at the poetry reading as he would rising reborn from a coffin.
On those Tuesday nights when she creeps down to the coffeehouse, she tells him she goes to women's club meetings. To reinforce the illusion of her housefrau-ness earlier in the day she makes peanut butter brownies. She feeds them to him with his cup of black coffee when he comes home, morsel by morsel, on a blue china plate while wearing her pink lace apron, and he kisses her forehead, and she doesn't mention that she plays Eliot's recitation of "Prufrock" while she bakes.
He was a mathematics major. She couldn't expect him to understand, and she didn't really want him to. It was something for herself alone, like the love letters tied in twine hidden in the back of the pantry, behind the flour and in front of the salt. Everything safe and secure in its proper place.
She kisses him goodbye at eight o'clock standing in her pearl necklace and high heels, clutching the brownies bundled together in a scarlet tablecloth. She walks down the stairs, quietly, and out of the building, quietly, and quietly all the way up to the next block until she reaches a window box where a woman is growing gladioli, at which point she kicks off her shoes and runs, and runs and runs. The brownies she scatters to the homeless, like birdseed. The tablecloth she drapes around her shoulders, and as she moves it billows out and makes her look like Little Red Writing-Hood. When she's gesticulating about Ferlinghetti, she can spread it out from her arms like bat-wings, its threads straining in a thousand quavering sinews.
The coffee shop does not smell like her kitchen, despite its conveniently bite sized five dollar brownies. She's glad. She loves the embery paradoxes mixed with cigarette smoke, the homey sweet predictability of overripe rhymes (said, bed, led, dead), the backdrop of willowy aspiring muses simmering and shimmering in silver turtlenecks. The metaphors stain the air like black cherries on white linen sheets. She could devour the whole scene raw.
Later in the evening, after people have come and gone, talking of Ginsberg, men with small goatees and big, sad eyes that are doomed and restless as Dracula feed her cigarettes and compliments. She slips her pearl necklace back on, as if it was a collar, and says, "thank-you-very-much" and crumples up her cofee cup and tosses it in the waste bin.
When she comes home, he's asleep, and his leg trails out from under the quilt like a comma. He has all the appeal of an unfinished sentence, or a cake half-baked.
And now, he sits in the front row, and listens as she recites a poem about something unkind he said to her years ago, which she never forgot and certainly never forgave, and which she takes perverse pleasure in resurrecting. His glasses trickle down to the tip of his nose, and he gives off the aura of being a very nice man. She slips out the back way, and does not feel like a very nice girl. She feels as though she could spread out her tablecloth shawl and fly off to fuse with the city's wordy shadows, ink dripping in great globs from the corners of her mouth. But then she pauses, caught under a streetlight, and suddenly wonders whether or not she left the stove on. She should probably fly home to check.
When she does, she walks into the kitchen and sees that the pantry doors are flung open and the twine about her letters has been unknotted. One letter, caught in a violent blast of wind has fallen into a pot of soup she left on the stove. When she goes to examine it she finds that all its lines have blurred. It's an inextricable merger of rhyme and household minutiae. She touched the letter's corner and realizes that there's no longer the potential for a clean division. So she picks up a spoon on the counter, dips it into the soup, and licks the tip. It's not bad.
