11.2

He saw exiguous women like her with terrific teeth lounging their way through stores, always seeming to be standing in a doorway or elevator. Their clothes clung to them for fear of being left behind, somehow, out of the glow of her existence. Once, he saw seemed he saw her at a restaurant and thought to stay; he took a corner booth and bought an Irish coffee. The waiter looked at him hard. It was three in the afternoon and the glancing sun motes of sobriety illuminated his two-day stubble. She, in her loose mink, sat at a table in the seeming center of the room. Her bright red lipstick spoke volumes to the color of her soul, he thought. She drank nothing. She ate nothing. Her reason for being in the restaurant seemed only only to be drawing his attention. She didn't do anything for a half of a meagre afternoon hour, his impatience slowly deepening into wrath. This one wasn't his Caroline.
Two weeks later, he still hadn't shaved the hair that crept out of his skin like it was ashamed of being there. He coaxed himself into a coat and went to the library. There, in the regimented stacks about napoleanic and civil and world wars, he seemed to see her struggling with a book that was clearly too large for her. Her arms pulsed as she tried to pull the tome from between fourteen others compiled from scholars prone to overexaggerating just how much information was available about Little Big Horn. He slipped down an adjacent aisle and watched from between two books about Amazons. She took the book down and used her whole self to lug it over to a table, where she used it to prop up her Vogue so she could read without needing her hands for the task, leaving them free to manicure her perfect nails. He stood until a bookish man in brown twill passed him with three small children in tow. The smallest, a small brown blob of boy, looked askance at his voyeurism and he felt so much shame he took The Myth of the Amazon. He felt--so strongly--the opprobrious glare that even after the child was long gone, he checked the book out and read it within the week. That was the affect of her on his consciousness, that, looking at a woman who was not her and judged by a child, he read an entirely dry book about women who had this same affect on men.
It was three months after the last time he saw her that he finally cleaned his mane into a pleasant shape confined mainly to his face, set his jaw into a look of grim determination by means of a vise, and set out to meet destiny. He knew where he could find her. He had always known, of course, since the first time, but he wanted to be on his turf, among street vendors and blocky tenements overhung with windows like a face from myth. He wanted to be out where he felt the most of his power, the closest to Odysseus or Heracles, his minute heroism manifesting itself in Irish coffee and The Myth of the Amazon. He wanted to be in his place of power, but he slunk into hers. The tapestry of sound met him in the street outside. Had he missed showtime? Only by minutes. He could sneak in. Time. He was wrapped in it and sound and a woolen overcoat that was too worn at the edges. He pasted himself to the edges of the room and
in
through the door.
There she was, center stage, larger than life and smaller than he remembered. The door swung shut with a terrific hush, accented in his ears by the subito piano and the crecendo of his heart and the oppressive choking sound of a woman who sees the man she did not expect suddenly entering her performance hall. There she was: Caroline. Take her or leave her, there she was. He left her and the perilous strength she represented and walked to the nearest bar and ordered a stiff pint of Irish brown to drown his new mustache in.