Arms folding, closing her posture, Natalie looked straight ahead, head tilted slightly forward, staring past her clenched eyebrows with skepticism. The cafe buzzed around them, scattered people contending with the complexities of their own lives and paying little mind to the somber couple in the corner.
For years it had been this way, alternately trudging or running across the peaks and valleys of their relationship. The quiet Isaac, contemplative to fault, bubbling over with some slight he’d been holding onto for weeks. The impatient Natalie, compassionate but lacking the language to show it, prying information from her boyfriend and fumbling for the words to soothe him. He always fidgeted when he had something serious on his mind.
“I’m not trying to say any one thing, and maybe that’s the point.”
His shoes were a wreck, his pants baggy from six days of wear. He usually didn’t care which black band tee he wore, but today’s was special. First tour. Purchased from a sweaty, ponytailed merch guy with cocaine under his fingernails. The real deal. Natalie never much liked their music.
“Well I can tell you’re trying to capital T talk to me.”
She’d showered that morning and could tell he hadn’t, her sundress adorned with lilac blossoms on fabric the color of cornsilk. They both shuffled their feet under the table, sitting across from one another as they’d done in innumerable haunts and through countless conversations, some more serious than others.
She stabbed at strawberries in her white ceramic fruit cup as he took a long, slow drink of his cappucino. She knew he hated the coffee here, but had agreed to come anyway. He set down the impractically large cup and drew a breath.
“Do you ever get the sense you could go anywhere? That you could settle right into the shit and navigate this trash heap world from the ground level? Don’t you ever get tired of pretending things are okay?”
Natalie, whose tennis bracelet glinted with her family’s wealth, couldn’t help but laugh. She’d spent the better part of her adulthood, few though the years may be, funneling dollars toward grassroots charities and volunteering in the trenches of a needle exchange.
She wondered sometimes if Isaac was an extension of the work, and had grown familiar with supressing the thought with justifications rooted in the convenience of companionship. She resisted the sardonic giggle and let him speak.
“I don’t know. Life’s too easy, and way too hard at the same time.”
Isaac’s idealism was tantamount to paralysis. He hated his station and everyone else’s, and often lamented the vast gap between the haves and the have nots, of which he was decidedly neither.
His uniform of dissidence was both intentional and inadvertent, and he couldn’t remember a time in his life that he felt anything close to contentment, save for a few fleeting, early morning moments wrapped in Natalie’s arms.
The foam in his capuccino was dissipating, and he took another luke warm slurp, locking eyes with the only woman that made him see shreds of goodness in the world. She spoke softly at first, each word elevating with intensity.
“The life you want to lead doesn’t exist, and even if it did, there’s no room for me in it. You can’t, in one lofty breath, dismiss my work and care how important it is. You can’t die in the muck and live in the clouds. You can’t be a martyr if you don’t actually have anything to say.”
Isaac’s heart sunk. He felt a known wound open and spill across the cafe table, the guts of his ambigous convictions laid bare. He faltered, wordless, and drummed his fingers against the ridiculous mug between his palms. She could always cut him right down to size, and sometimes the pruning was too painful to bear.
“I think I’ve gotta get out of here.”
Natalie rolled her eyes, and for the first time, recognized her man as a coward. All spleen and no spine to see things through. A weakling ethos of complaint without solution. Whatever he was wistfully hinting at, her interest disappeared along with the last remnants of his coffee froth.
“I guess I’ll see you later, then?”
Isaac stood and did the awkward slide from their booth. He too, in that excruciating moment, knew that she’d never look at him fondly again, that his latest vagary had pushed their partnership over the precipice.
“Yeah, I guess we’ll see.”