Tristan and Joni: The Morning After

She curled like a cat on my ratty, old sofa, in nothing but her panties and a Pretenders t-shirt.  My space heater’s broken, so she had to be freezing, and I found myself falling, tumbling slowly into the depths of her bright blue eyes, with my spinning hands tickling and feet brushing her arms and the slick, smooth pebble of her cheek on the way down.  I braced, we both braced for the splash at the bottom.

She stretched out her limbs, vines sprawling over the sofa, when I walked by.  I could hear her bare feet scrape together.  She sighed, and her skin seemed to ripple like a silk blouse on a clothes line.  Her lips slipped apart, so I thought she was about to speak, but she never did, and I could tell she didn’t quite know what to do either really, but at least I had a goal.  I wanted orange juice.  I stepped past her.  The refrigerator hummed.                               

         Last night, we played an exhausting two hour set at the Athena, this dive bar with a trap door in the stage that goes nowhere, and Joni was standing three rows back, pressing herself up to the stage.  And she was so tall, towering over the other girls, the steeple of the shadow Cathedral I could make out through the blur of the stage lights.  And that angelic hair of hers, all sparkly and frayed like a firework.  I had seen her before somewhere – I can’t remember where exactly -- but last night, after the show, she came up to me, shyly, lurking on the edge of my conversations, quietly waiting her turn.  Her ankles cracked. 

         “Hi,” she said simply when she gathered the courage to speak.  She was just a little girl in this stretched-out body, like she had been flattened – like she had some sort of spell cast on her.  Her voice was soft and musical.  Her lips like a baby doll’s.  Her skin like silk.  But her eyes -- I felt like I was swimming in them. 

I wish you could have seen her last night after we ran back to my place in out of the rain.  She was a portrait of wet paint still dripping, and I wish that picture of her could rise in blinding color with every morning sun over the drab gray and brown brick skyline across the street: her head tilted, dipping her cheek to her shoulder, her eyes wide and round and rippling. 

         So I found the orange juice in my mostly empty fridge and drank half the bottle at once.  I put it back.  It sounded lighter.  Then I didn’t know what to do either, but I was in no mood for games.  Why do things have to be awkward sometimes?  “Pretty Woman” ends when the girl walks back, and we don’t get to see all the awkward moments that followed.  It’s misleading.  But last night, nothing was awkward.  We had a strange grace together like we were dancing.  This morning I felt like we were trying to talk through two Styrofoam cups and a twenty-mile piece of string, and we were walking toward each other on a tightrope spanning high above the street.  Last night was effortless and natural like Mozart.  This morning is more like Beethoven. 

“I made coffee,” she beamed, finally pulling herself up off my couch.  The springs whined.  She walked to me on her toes so lithe and graceful I got a boner.  But it was like a counterfeit boner.  It was nothing but lust.  The emotions from last night seemed so far away, like we were just actors now trying to conjure up a love story written five centuries ago.

         “I see,” I finally said, crossing my legs to hide my lust.  “Are you a dancer?”

         “Yes.”  She twirled barefoot over the floor toward my crooked, swively-armed lamp, and a melody sparked into my mind all at once.  She looked like a music box ballerina.  I couldn’t get that melody out of my mind – one simple line over and over and over like a mantra to the rhythm of her feet spinning circles over the cracked wood floor.

         “But I think I’m going to quit,” she said finally, pouring herself another cup of coffee.  I had to blink and shake my head, because I could still hear that whispering shuffle of her feet.  She was beaming a smile at me, and the coffee was about to overflow.  The pitch was too high.  The coffee pouring into my mugs always hits a certain pitch when they’re full.  I usually stop at a B flat, and she was already a semi-tone too high when she finally stopped pouring.  I didn’t say anything. 

“I’m too tall,” she said, scrambling for the paper towels to soak up the spill.             

         “So…” she said, once again springing around my apartment like a fairy, her coiled hair bobbing and stretching like slinkies.  “I thought today maybe we could go to the park and then there’s this, um…”

         I said, and I believe this is pretty much word-for-word lunacy, I said, “Break-up songs are just so much better than love songs.”  I was totally on some cold, distant moon ringing around my own remote planet.  Then I’m pretty sure I called her Janey.  Her name is Joni.  I knew it was Joni, but I called her Janey got a gun anyway like I was purposely trying to sabotage her.  But I wasn’t.  I’m a douchebag.