6.25b

It's a hot day, and I've sweated in my clothes already. My beard is scruffy and my pants legs stained at the knees from kneeling in the grass. Yet, I feel very little shame in looking at her, though perhaps I should respect the distance between us, socially. Her dark hair goes all to ringlets at the ends, and her dress is light and airy, an almost-long affair that scoops up to showcase her knees. Her face has a sharpened quality that contrasts with the lines of her bare arms. I reassess the catastrophe sitting on the grass before her. I've got no reason to chase her and no chance to catch. I'm married. She's married. But she's magnetic. I have to know if she's worth wasting my mind on. I look at her with the same scrutiny as I would a sunset or a herd of deer standing in a mist-filtered valley, their attention not on me yet, but somehow getting closer and closer until I can see the muscles beneath their fine coats ripple as their heads snap up, they realize what I've been doing, and they bolt.
She's only now walking my way. I can see all of her for the first time, no tables or trees interrupting, nobody talking to her, and she has a matter-of-fact gait, a firm assurance of where each foot has got to go. I don't like it. Somewhere, deep within, there is a stir. I make a connection I don't want, between her and myself. She's a piece more human in this second, and I shudder to feel it.
As she gets closer, I can see her more clearly. She has the face of a girl who was pretty when she was young. Her father could look at her and predict it maybe when she was only five, only six—a terrible gift, to worry for a decade what will happen to your child when she finally realises the same. She has the face of a woman who's put her realizing long behind her, who's had suitors since boys wore suits and not just some button-up their mom picked out: the face of a woman who knows she's beautiful. It's not just me, this time. She knows it, too. Sometimes, you find someone so peculiar to your taste that only a very few people have gotten to tell them first what kind of delicacy they truly are, but this girl is ice cream, is chocolate. She's a lucrative industry that generates thousands of admirers from moment to moment, and her advertising campaign is the same dependable perfection that built the empire in the first place. It's the shape of her cheeks, maybe, just full enough to remind you she's young, but not commanding attention. Maybe it's the slight lift to her nose, or the way in which it has the most definition of all her face, as if it knew its job was to build upon the softness of her without distracting. Maybe it's the pigment on her. I hope not, but my hope has the misplaced yearning of a badly-informed art critic, a man who looks directly at the painting and wants there to have been one draft, one grand effort with a single vision made reality by a single hand, not realizing that the painter has drafted this same image a thousand times, leaning into the mirror and making a face to stretch out the canvas, her paintbrush a dependable tool on an every day notice with an everyday demand: perfection. Her eyes are dark from her ministrations with the brush, but she's gotten the wrong fish with this bait. I barely look at them. I'm more interested in the weave of the canvas, of the shape of its frame, of the light in the room, of the building it's in. Skin, bones, tone, body. I have to ask, though: am I only looking at the museum because I know the artist has been laboring? Does the prestige of her eyes make the vessel that carries them important, or would I want the same tour of the grounds if the building was a home, only, and not a public institution? She's the only one with power to run the experiment, and she's not willing to go without her mask, so perhaps we'll never know. Either way the truth lies, I look off as she walks by. I hope nobody has noticed I've been staring.
For a time, I wait to hear her. I want a sensory memory that spans the available possibilities. I have a hunger that sight won't satisfy. But the longer I wait, the more I know, even without getting the song of her voice. I'm frustrated. Her laugh isn't a cascade of cold water over smooth, round rocks. Her voice isn't the mountainside morning before the sun hits the tops of the trees. Her voice may be intoxicating to others, but either I'm inured to the poison, or just not drinking it. I want to check. I need to know. I shift and actually address her: a statement that turns up at the end to invite her to finish the thought as though it has been a question all along. Something a person says when they're not afraid of alerting the subject that they're being scrutinized, worshipped. She responds, and I don't hate her voice, but she's missed the actual question I've asked. I'm slowed for a moment.
What?
But the lethargy lapses and I'm already drawing conclusions. Why, if she's pretty, doesn't she also have a powerful mind? Why, if I've spoken to her once, do I feel the sinking in my gut that reminds me of disappointment? Why have I judged her when I don't know her?
It's that initial taste of the gait she uses: solid, everyday, dependable. It's the realization, fair or not, that I love the makeup on her eyes. It's the three sentences she dribbled out to me. She's only pretty, nothing more. (How can I say that!? She's gorgeous in a way I know I'll remember later. Am I minimizing its effect on me? No.)

I no longer stare. I literally don't see her again, even though she's ten feet away over my right shoulder. I now know if she's worth wasting my mind on. I rock back in the grass and start forgetting her, start focusing on what I will take from this day—friendships, exhaustion, scrapes on my hands from climbing a tree, but not her. Her husband is back there with her, a man who looks lucky when you first see him, but might be cursed, when you think about it, because I have a choice of whether or not she comes with me in my mind. But she's going home in his car, and he has to live with stolid, plodding, physical perfection, a trait other men will talk about, from which he gains no benefit now, only headache and worry, and from which there is no reprieve. She certainly can't give it to him. And when the paint can't draw him to the museum anymore, when the building crumbles at its foundations, what is left inside? The artwork of a master and a doddering docent who's dumbfounded at his piercing questions. But maybe she's as cursed as he, and her decline will reveal nothing: he will always be the admirer and never the critic, and her carefully manicured grounds, the stately columns, the marble façade, the curling stairways and graceful arches will all decay, and he won't question "wasn't there more," because he's too enthralled by the artifice and forgets to question the art.
I crumple the blueprint I've been drafting of her and discard it. She's not my wife. My wife is in Oregon. My wife is a refurbished flyswatter factory, all exposed ducts and brickwork, overlaid with murals and neon. She's a nightclub that reminds you of industrial decline until you see inside and the weight of the wrought iron trembling bass drum clubs your chest and you're left suffering to the beat of loud music, unable to escape or unwilling to, drawn to press yourself against the crowd until you find your hands outstretched against the very stage itself, your voice hoarse from screaming you forgot, the outside of the building forgot, the neighborhood forgot, the borough forgot, all is this moment, all is one, until the music flares and the crowds escape, and you're left standing in the ankle-deep refuse, weeping, willing the band to return, begging the crowd to assemble, beating at your chest because you know the moment has passed and you're left with a factory again, a bare concrete floor and a slowly crumbling smoke stack. My wife is not anything like this woman, and I envy her husband the slow decline of his art museum. I wish my explosion could have outlasted the night.

[The first line of the final paragraph used to read "I crumple the mental portrait I've been drawing of her," which isn't fitting.]