Nude Men

minutes. A woman enters the coffee shop and waits in line behind me. She’s in her late thirties and looks perfectly nice, normal. Two minutes later, the waitress tells me there’s a table.
    The woman behind me touches me and asks, “Are you alone?”
    “Yes,” I say.
    “Would you mind if we shared the table?”
    I visualize my lunch spent sitting in front of a stranger. It would be hell. Her eyes would be resting on me while I read. She might even want to talk: “What are you reading? Do you work around here? It’s unusually cold today, but they say it’ll get warmer by evening. There’s so much noise in this place. I asked for tuna salad, not egg salad. I can’t eat this, I have high cholesterol.”
    My first impulse is to mumble, “It doesn’t matter,” and rush out the door to my old coffee shop.
    What I do answer, very distinctly, but with a slight grimace to soften the blow, is “I’d rather not.”
    The woman and the waitress stare at me with more surprise than I expected. I try to think of a justification for my response and come up with “I... have to eat alone. But you go ahead if you want.” I gesture toward the empty table.
    “No, no, you go ahead,” she says, touching my arm with more familiarity than I like.
    I sit down, making sure my back is turned to the woman I have just rejected so that she won’t be able to observe me. She has ruined my lunch. Even though I’m alone, I won’t be able to concentrate on my novel because I feel like a villain. I have never done anything like this before in my life. I eat my grilled cheese sandwich, unable to read, furious, not making eye contact with anyone. How dare the woman do that! I order Jell-O to cheer me up.
    I glance furtively at the customers around the room. I’m curious to know where the woman ended up. I look at the people seated at the counter. They all have their backs to me except for one, at the end. She is turned in my direction, her legs are crossed, her elbow is resting on the counter, and she is looking at me fixedly, with a slight smile. At first I think she is my rejected woman, but when I look again I see that she clearly is not. This woman is beautiful, sexy, late twenties. She has a very thick upper lip, which gives her a pouting, capricious look, an air I simply adore in women. Like the actress Isabelle Adjani, my fantasy woman.
    She seems like the feminine type, the romantic type, the Sleeping Beauty type, blond hair, the type my girlfriend would perversely say looks jaded because she happens to have a charming face and laugh lines on either side of her mouth.
    I am not absolutely certain that she is looking at me. I don’t have terrifically good eyesight, so although I was able to notice her plump upper lip, I might be mistaken as to where her pupils are directed. She could be staring out the window next to which I am sitting. Or she could be looking at the businessman at the table in front of me, or at the secretary behind me.
    I decide to take a risk anyway. I don’t know why. It’s not like me. Perhaps because after having bluntly rejected a woman for the first time in my life, I need to bluntly accept one too. I gather every ounce of courage in my body and smile at her, sort of unconsciously sticking out my upper lip so we have something in common.
    She pays her bill and walks over to me. Her stomach softly hits the edge of my table as she slides into the opposite seat, making my three cubes of green Jell-O jiggle.
    I am racking my brain for something to say, when she says, “I like your mouth.”
    “The feeling is mutual,” I answer with a James Bond tone. I am amazed at the good fortune that made her mention my mouth, giving me the opportunity to come up with this ultimately seductive answer, which surpasses any I have ever heard in movies.
    To my great chagrin, she seems annoyed by my response. “I didn’t mean it that way,” she says. “I study people’s features, and your mouth is simply aesthetically satisfactory.”
    “The feeling is mutual,” I want to repeat, but don’t dare. “Thank you,” I say instead.
    With my spoon I scoop up a big green cube of Jell-O, but it jiggles so much from the shaking of my hand that, halfway to my mouth, it plops back down into the dish.
    “You should have cut it in two,” says the woman. “It’s too big.”
    I try to figure out if there’s an erotic insinuation in that comment, but I’m not sure.
    “Yes, I should have,” I say, and put down my