Hard Rain

Phillip Shadely — lover of the dimly lit, lonesomeness.

There was a hard rain outside, but Phil was not yet ready to leave, anyway. He was very nervous about the meeting his friend had arranged and had already tried to think of a way out of it. None of the excuses struck him as believable and he had finally decided he would have to go through with it.

He drank his coffee slowly. He had been stopping in the cafe every day of his vacation in New York and was starting to feel at home there. There was a waitress whose figure he admired greatly and he was curious about the young man who decorated the pastries, a stout dark-skinned man who looked as if he could snap two by fours over his knee. Phil would read a few sentences out of the magazine then look up at the waitress or the frosting squeezer again, or at the other customers, and he never got past the second paragraph of his story.He would see someone new and think, “So this is another kind of New Yorker” and try to make mental notes about the person, but then he would be remembering the arrangement again, the meeting that was supposed to take place within an hour in Soho. In the picture his friend had shown him, the girl had looked very pretty, although a little plump. It wasn’t the plumpness that bothered him, though. It was the prettiness. That and the fact that she was a New Yorker and therefore, it seemed logical to assume, urbane and extroverted. His friend assured him that she would find him interesting, but he could not believe it, could not imagine it. He felt obese and oily and stupid. He wished he had tried harder to lose weight and that he had read more novels set in New York City.

He should have told his friend he preferred to wait until he actually moved to New York to start meeting people. He was being pushed into this thing with the girl before he was ready. People were always doing that to him.

He got up and stood beside the counter, waiting for the pastry decorator to look at him. The clerk was looking past Philip, scowling and speaking hostilely in a foreign language, leaning on one large, dark arm. Philip kept glancing back at his table to guard his things and finally looked to see who the clerk was arguing with. In that part of the room there were only two empty tables and a wall.

“Excuse me, sir,” said Philip. The clerk spat some more curses at the tables then turned and picked up a plastic pouch, which he squeezed and began painting delicately on top of pastry. “Excuse me sir,” Philip repeated. The man was was still muttering. “Do you have the time, please?” Philip asked.

“Wa?” said the man angrily.

“The time.”

The clerk looked at his watch without pausing in his work and said “Ay fih.”

“What?” Phil asked.

The clerk slammed his frosting pouch on the metal counter, making some tableware jump, and without turning, with exaggerated patience, extended one large arm. Phil glanced at the wristwatch quickly and said “Thank you.” He returned to his table thinking, “Stupid ethnic asshole” and concious that he was blushing radiantly.