She’s first to arrive at the macaron shop. The café isn’t full, but she takes a table outside, under the awning, away from the drizzle. She’s wearing a long flimsy dress and sandals and has neither coat, nor brolly, nor shades (as they call them here). A long dress will convey grace and decency. The bright clumped sky makes her squint.
Tourists gather at the entrance of the shop to take photos. There would be nothing to stop a vehicle from careening off the road into them. Lately, Lexi’s usual apprehension about the demise of everyone she loves has graduated into a broader and vaguer fretting over the deaths of animals and people unknown to her, long gone, online, fictitious even. Sabrina, the girl she’s tutoring, laughs at her for being a mushball. Her friend Eoin, who experienced a lot of grief early on in life, says that Lexi was haunted by her previous luck. For years and years, she won without trying or deserving it. Then the inevitable turn. Now she’s spoiling her own existence by anticipating the many more losses to come.
Lexi has seen this shop — its kitschy, spearmint dollhouse storefront — in other Manhattan neighborhoods, and in Knightsbridge, Le Marais, New Cairo, Dublin city center, even in airports, though not yet in the North of Ireland, where they treasure sugared cream buns. Why would you take a picture of yourself outside a shop that’s everywhere, just to appear like everyone? While waiting for him to arrive, as arranged, less than an hour after the latest atrocity of which she’s aware, she glances again at his profile, twitching through the images. Generally, they are strong photos, alluring, except for the magazine cover in which he appears in full combat apparel, looking like a G.I. Joe doll, a caricature. That one’s nauseating. The headline above the image says NEW ENLIGHTENED AMERICAN WARRIOR.
Having been a bystander to soldiers throughout her childhood and adolescence, she ought to be inoculated against their presence. They aren’t exotic. How does a person get to be so compliant and brutal. Intruders, she never dared talk to them at home. They’re still kind of scary. “You’re toying with disaster, girl,” Eoin would tell her if he were here. But he’s in Australia.
If these photos are to be believed, Mike has a pleasant accident of a face, balanced, no feature protruding or receding to excess, not a single element out of whack. He’d have been far too handsome when he was young, impervious. The light would have pinged off him. Look at those even, confident teeth. His beauty has smudged with age, but he’d still appeal to most women, even those without taste. That bothers her.
He’s about fifteen years older than she is, if he’s telling the truth, which he isn’t. Even if he’s not saying everything, in his messages he sounds like he knows who he is and what’s what. He carries his experience lightly, suspiciously lightly. All Lexi knows is what she isn’t, and that’s only a theory that hasn’t been tested under extreme pressure. Some tweet she read called now a “prewar era.” It is for her, anyway.
During their final exchange last night, Mike wrote:
Do you burn or do you like the sun?
I prefer to stay pale, she replied. I like to be all one color.
Oh, I see.
You prefer tanned, like you?
Not particularly. There’s a chance that tomorrow we may make it to a rooftop pool.
Love swimming but not on a first date.
OK. Not sure what we can do that will preserve your porcelain skin but would like to do something with you.
She’d never claimed she had porcelain skin. I have a sun hat. What’s your schedule?
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