Jesse knew roughly, but not exactly, when she had first met Peter. She was living in the city for the first time, which meant that she must have been twenty-eight. She had bought a car from a guy who lived down the block, a little green Ford with a driver’s seat that was wrenched sideways and a radio with a volume dial that leapt up when you turned it. It was spring and she was driving out to the beach most days to sit and listen to the ocean while she drank her coffee. This was the center of the day, even though it happened early in the morning. No: the fact that it happened early in the morning reshaped the rest of the day. What happened at the other end of it found her in a state of weakness, from which she wondered if she would ever recover, and it was not until the next morning, the next cup of coffee that she drank as quietly as possible so as to most clearly hear the surging and subsiding of the surf, that she found herself again. “Or maybe it’s more a matter of allowing myself to be found,” she said. She was certain of nothing except that she was speaking to the man who was helping her start her car. She gave him a ride back to her neighborhood, also his, during which they fell in love. When spring ended, they had parted. Keeping in touch struck them both as hopelessly bourgeois. The next time she lived in the city, she looked for him everywhere but to no avail. She met and married another man. She must have been thirty.
©2020 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas
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