A New York Romance (6 page)

He turned back to the couple not wanting to miss the extraordinary moment. Julie stayed seated, but still somewhat panicked with her restless palms on the table ready to jump up and save them.

“So you’re not trying to kill them, right? I don’t have to rush over there and stop them from drinking it?”

“No, Juliet,” he replied without looking away from the couple. “It is quite the opposite of trying to harm them. People often associate obsession with love, a need to possess the other person. Some people even feel angry when they feel love because love has hurt them in the past. What I gave them paralyzes all those memories and their emotions for the moment and lets them see the true love that is already there, without conditionings or the hindrance of fear or self-cherishing emotions.” Charlie paused and then said, “There it is. Look at them now. They’re just staring into each other’s eyes without saying a word, resting in complete relaxed comfort. They’re completely free, with nothing to hide from the other. Like open books, they love each other completely and fully, with every breath throughout time collapsing into this one moment. They feel what each other feels and it is good. There are no flaws in their love now. It is perfection.”

Julie stared at the couple and she thought she saw what Charlie meant.
A unique and extraordinary moment in the universe? Here is this homely café?
She wasn’t sure. In some sense, this event that Charlie considered ‘very unique and extraordinary’ in the universe, seemed so ordinary. She watched as they stared into each other’s eyes without fear, embarrassment, or shyness, without the slightest nerve twitching to turn away. They were completely and utterly in each other’s presence, without the slightest sense of imperfection. Even their flaws seemed to be laid out like an open book for the other to observe without judgment. Something was different about them.
Perhaps it was perfect love
.

“Who are you?” Julie asked this strange young man across the table from her, more determined to get an answer now that he was not so preoccupied by the couple. “How did you know they would be here? How do you know so much about love? Or care about the love between two strangers you’ve never met?”

How would anyone who spends so much time alone know about love?
she questioned.
He’s probably never had a girlfriend,
she calculated, as she looked at his brown corduroy jacket, as if it alone would keep the girls away.

“I am not comfortable telling you the truth yet, but I don’t want to lie to you either.”

It was an honest response.

“I understand,” she nodded, noticing his ability to look into her eyes longer now. She also felt the twitching in her nerves, the need to look away or say something to end the awkward silence between them, “I think you should at least speak to them.”

“No, no, just observe is what I do,” Charlie said.

“You can’t live your life all alone, afraid to get close to people, Charlie. Come on,” she insisted. She stood up from the table pulling Charlie behind her and approached the couple’s table.

“No, Juliet,” he insisted, to no avail.

“Hi, my name is Julie. We’re from out of town and I wondered if you might mind telling us what’s around here,” she looked back at Charlie and said, “We’ll pay for your lunch.”

The couple looked at them with a strange kindness, reminding Julie of the seemingly insane smile of the limousine driver last night.

“Nice to meet you. We have to leave now.” Charlie gently grabbed Julie by the shoulders and guided her toward the door.

“What’s wrong, Charlie? Why can’t we just talk to them?” she asked as they stepped outside the café and began to walk along the sidewalk.

“I just never interacted with the ones I help. There is no need for it,” he answered.

“Why does there have to be a need? Why can’t you just talk to them because they’re nice people?” Julie asked. “Maybe they would like you, Charlie.”

“It just never worked that way before and I’m not going to change it now just because I’m in this bah…” Charlie vaguely explained then sought to change the subject, but Julie did it for him.

“Well then, you’re going to have to go shopping with me until you’re ready to tell me your big secret. Let’s go in here and get some new clothes for you,” she said, tugging at the corduroy jacket. “The way you’re dressed they probably didn’t believe you’re a tourist anyway.”

She laughed at her own joke.

Charlie didn’t get it.

Inside the stone-gray building, appearing as if it was built in antiquity, rested many department stores, lined along the edge of the busy open hall. There were jewelry shops, women’s clothing stores, a men’s clothing store, candy shops, chestnut stands, and even a cotton candy stand nestled between a jewelry cutter and a country western store specializing in dingo boots. Julie watched Charlie walk through as if he was oblivious to it all, as if he walked down an empty street in his mind without a care in the world. He was focused—she could tell that much, but on what?

The Victorian carpet paved the way to the marbled courtyard. Like ancient colonnades in a modern indoor plaza, stone pillars reached up to a painted ceiling with images of angels looking down. Beautiful plants rested around the pool of water-covered pennies with a glorious fountain at the center. Children made their wishes as they flung their parents’ change over their shoulders into the water in front of a backdrop of Chinese food, pizza, pretzel, and snow cone eateries. Others twirled their fingers in the water, scattering the array of goldfish waiting for breadcrumbs. A mother gently rocked her stroller back and forth with one hand while she shared an ice cream cone with her oldest daughter in the other.

Charlie remained with a strange gaze on his face then suddenly, he came to a stop in the middle of the court and said, “Listen!”

“What’s going on, Charlie?” Julie asked.

“Do you hear it? It sounds like the gods of Olympus singing to the mortals. Where is it coming from?” he asked.

“I don’t hear anything but the crowd, the water falling, and the music overhead,” Julie replied, thinking he heard something extraordinary.

“Yes, that’s it! The music overhead!” Charlie yelled with a schizophrenic excitement to the crowd, “It is them! It is them!”

“You mean the Air Supply song on the radio?”

The strangeness that he was never ceased to amaze her.

“Yes, Air Supply! The greatest band to ever share their music and voice with the world,” he answered, as if lost in the tone of the melodies and entranced by the words.

“You’re not serious, are you?” There was a bizarre look on his face that said it all. She whispered under her breath. “Oh my God, you are serious.”

Charlie did not answer. He was awestruck by the beauty of the music and started singing out loud:

“
Now the night has gone.

Now the night has gone away”

As he started singing Julie felt a pain she had never experienced before. It was as if someone was using a jackhammer to break through the eardrum
of her soul
. The sound of his voice made her fingers and toes clench with tension. It was the most horrifying thing she had ever heard, but he only continued louder. As Charlie sang everyone in the court turned to locate the source of the appalling sound. They began to cover their ears, dropping their food and shopping bags where they stood. Julie watched him wide-eyed with her hands over her ears as he belted out his obvious love for Air Supply’s music. Eventually, she had enough.

“Charlie, stop!” Julie yelled out over the cries of babies and children while their parents carried them away, racing with strollers in hand. But he kept singing. The store workers huddled in the corners and back rooms of their stores. The brave ones ran to the front of their stores and closed the gates with their iron rods. Everyone prepared themselves as Charlie was about to go into the chorus, and to their great fear, he did.

“Charlie!” Julie screamed over his appalling voice.

The lyrics slowly faded from his lips. He looked around, wondering where everyone went. One by one he saw the store workers slowly pop up from behind their desks and iron gates, the shoppers peering out from behind the plants and benches, and Julie standing with her hands over her ears.

“What happened here? Did I miss something?” he asked, clueless, as the security guard rose up from the fetal position behind the garbage can with his gun in hand.

“No, Charlie,” she said hesitantly. “Everyone just thought they heard…
gunshots
and they got scared. You probably didn’t hear them because you were singing.”

“Oh! Well as long as everyone is alright.”

He turned and calmly continued walking through the court.

“I take it you’re a fan of Air Supply?” Julie asked.

“Of course! Who wouldn’t be a fan?
You
enjoy them, don’t you?”

“Well I’m sure everybody enjoys their songs, but I’m not a real big fan,” she admitted. “Are they gay? ‘Cause a lot of times it sounds like their singing to each other.”

“I’m not sure if they’re gay, not that anyone where we come from cares about such things.” He hesitated as he considered his secret; who he was, where he was from, and who he was talking to. Then he said to change the subject: “One thing I do know is that Graham and Russell know what love is.”

“Graham and Russell? Who’s that? The guys from Air Supply?”

“Yes,” he nodded slowly, as if dumbfounded that she didn’t know their names.

“You even know their names?” she questioned to herself out loud then mumbled privately, “He really is a fan.”

“Of course I know their names. Everyone knows their names: Graham Russell and Russell Hitchcock. They both wanted to be called Russell so they compromised and one took it as the first name and the other the last name,” he said suddenly feeling like he said too much.

“Ah Charlie, not everybody knows their names and weren’t they just born with those names? What do you mean they
wanted
to be called Russell? Where do you come from anyway? Did you time travel here from the early eighties?” She was not expecting an answer. She could tell she hit the point where he would not reveal anymore, as if she knew that part of him by now, where Charlie ends and the mystery of Charlie begins.

Then she asked, “If they, Russell and Russell, know so much about love, then why are some of their songs so sad?”

“Because humans make love sad, don’t they?”

His addition of
don’t they
hit her like a punch in the gut, pointing out the pain she felt because of love in her past relationships, especially with her mother.

Julie thought to herself that love was a wonderful thing but yes, Charlie was right. Humans did make love a sad thing, attaching feelings of obsession, lust, and even anger to it. She saw the faces returning to the open hallway and stores and realized that some people could not even experience love without feeling loneliness. But Julie did not need to look in the faces of strangers to know this; she only needed to look within herself to feel love’s tangled chaos.

Charlie, sensing the change in her emotion asked, “How does something so simple and beautiful as love become entangled with so many negative emotions, like a rose growing in the midst of a garbage dump? Lost in the chaos of emotions and mental judgments, love’s wonderful scent and simple beauty cannot fully be nourished, enjoyed, and expressed. The true love we witnessed at the café is indeed unique and rare in the universe.”

Julie said nothing. In one single moment she felt the question resonate in her deeply, echoing through the memories of broken relationships. When she thought of her mother she felt the flower in her heart wilting from the smoke of negative emotions, struggling to breathe or find any sense of redemption and worth, among all the anger and resentment. When she thought of love from a boy, she felt the anticipation as well as the danger. She felt the need to guard her heart with a wall of impenetrable emotions and hide behind her sarcasm and witty smile. The memories of love were cluttered with lost lonely nights, and feelings of abandonment.

Love brought her such little joy over the years, except the love of her father. In that love she felt safe enough to open her heart and be fully exposed without fear of pain, judgment, or suffering. She hung on to these warm memories of her father when she needed to feel safe again, but even their warmth was now tainted with the coldness of his passing and the realization that she could not make new memories with him.

After her last failed relationship with Brian, love came to such a point that she claimed she never wanted love again. She remembered slamming the door after screaming, “I never want to see you again!”
How could love turn into such a horrible, painful thing?
she had thought in the moments of their breaking up. Then there was her mother, the root where all love and pain intertwined as one indistinguishable sentiment. She could not think of her mother and the need for her love without the feeling of abandonment, sadness, and even anger.

But Julie did not want to think of such things. She was finished with love for now. The walls were built around her heart to keep others out. She put it on a shelf, out of her mind and continued shopping the stores with her strange friend that she met on a bus. He seemed safe to her, as if the tangling vines of love’s pain would never get hold of her through him.

“Come here, Charlie.” She pulled out a pair of jeans that any young hip teenager would like. “These look like they will fit you.”

Charlie, a little reluctant about the style, agreed to buy them. He grabbed an ordinary blue hoody from the rack. Julie grabbed a black one for herself along with socks and a couple of hip t-shirts for each of them. Then she brought him to a shoe store across the hall to replace his worn-out shoes. However, Charlie stood still in the hall as he spotted clothing in the store next door that looked like something that an upper class European man from the 16
th
-17
th
century would wear and said, “I remember when people dressed like that. It must be coming back in style.”

“I don’t think so,” Julie said.

“But it’s on display in the window. Don’t they put all the latest fashions out front?”

“That’s a costume shop,” Julie laughed as he noticed the witch, disco queen, and cave-girl outfits lined up next to the one he liked in the window.

“Well, I like it,” he replied.

“Then you should get it. Just be who you want to be, even if that means wearing clothes that have been outdated for over two-hundred years.”

She pulled him into the shoe store.

After they browsed the shoe store, Julie said, “We have one more stop to make.”

“Where is that?”

“I need some underwear,” she said as she wrapped her fingers around the inside of his arm above his elbow and led him straight to the lingerie store. Bras and panties were laid out on the tables and hung from racks on the walls. Sexy lingerie was draped over the window-front mannequins catching the eye of almost every man that walked by.

Charlie stopped before the entrance.

“I’ll wait right here.”

Julie could see his obvious discomfort and let go of his arm.

“Alright, Charlie,” she flashed a flirty smile.

He turned toward the nearest bench. Sitting on the benches were the seemingly bored, antsy faces of other men, waiting for their wives or girlfriends to finish shopping, as if hoping they might make it home in time to catch the second half of the football game. But there was no game today.

Charlie joined the men. They were in a deep discussion about the Jets’ last losing season and their predictions for the next. Charlie didn’t know much about football. He just observed how all the men suddenly became psychics when it came to the outcome of future games, laying their guarantees out and putting their reputations on the line. However, the interest of their conversation could not keep them talking when their wives or girlfriends approached, telling them they were ready to leave with a simple look.

One by one each of the men were dismissed from the bench, like a player waiting for their coach to tell them to get on the field. Charlie noticed how well or not so well they each knew the face of the woman they vowed to love. He could feel the years of built up tension between them, or the dull routine that their relationships had become as they walked silently away. He could feel the men pretend to care about the ‘great deal’ their wife or girlfriend found on new clothes as he glanced at the other beautiful women walking by.

Suddenly he saw Juliet come out of the lingerie store. He stared at her pretty face with an emotion he could not define. He ignored any facial language she was trying to convey to relieve him from the bench, and simply stared at her.

“Are you alright?” she asked.

“Yes,” he replied, as if suddenly waking from a dream. He turned to the other men still sitting on the bench and silently wished them a happy life and healthy relationships. Then he stood and turned his attention back to the pretty, young woman that walked at his side.

He felt close to her in that moment, perhaps because he was observing the togetherness of others and the fact that of all the people there, she was the only one he spoke to and vaguely knew, and she was the only girl he really noticed.

“Where are we off to now?” Charlie asked.

“I’m going to get ready to go back home. New York is more expensive than I thought. I don’t have the money to stay here longer,” Julie answered.

“Let me get you a room. I’m going to stay a few more days and I could use the company,” he said nervously. “You already know more about me than anyone else on this planet.”