100 Waitresses

Monique was inconstant.

She loved many people, most of them more than me, and my love was cloying and imperfect. I lost her many times. Days, weeks, months later she would return without tears to my shabby and crooked apartment on Coloniale. And I would attempt ferocity and steely eyes, but I was powerless before her. Oh, Monique in new pants, Monique skating at Carre St. Louis, Monique opening a tin of tuna—each moment an act of singular and irreducible beauty.

Her dreams took on the form of divine revelation. Each morning she woke up astonished, unable to grasp the portent of her nocturnal wanderings, but certain of their implicit significance. They became puzzles to solve, ghosts to tend, arrows to follow.

Watching her eyelashes flutter and knowing at that precise moment she was dreaming, I imagined them taking form and floating like mysterious cave drawings in the dark above us. I wanted to pluck them from the air, to preserve them so we could study them later, but even in my mind’s eye they eluded me, curling away like smoke and then disappearing, a trail of phosphorescence reabsorbed into the ocean.

After she left in the morning I would put on the sweater she had been wearing. Intoxicated with her redolence I would wander the streets breathing her in. Everything shining.