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Gut symmetries

From GUT SYMMETRIES
by Jeanette Winterson

She and I would be approaching the place from opposite ends of town. I imagined her, angry, confident, ready to match me and beat me at my own game. This was the big fight and Jove the prize. When I told him she had written to me he had decided to visit friends for the weekend.
I had her letter in my pocket. The careful handwriting. The instruction to obey. 'I will meet you on Wednesday the 12th at 6:30 p.m. in the bar at the Algonquin Hotel.'
Why had she chosen here?
Here it was.
Five minutes to spare. The cruelty of time.
I had dressed as a warrior: black from cleavage to insoles, hair down, fat hoops of gold in my ears, war-paint make-up. I had a twenty-year advantage over my opponent and I intended to use every month of it.
She would be greying, she would be lined, she would be overweight, she would be clothes-careless. She would be poetically besocked and sandalled, her eyes behind glass, like museum exhibits. I could see her, hair and flesh escaping, hope trapped inside. I would drain her to the sump.

No sign of her. The bar was a chessboard of couples manoeuvring Martinis, and waiters high-carrying chrome trays. I moved in black knight right angles across and cross the lines but apart from a few appreciative businessmen there was no one who seemed interested in me.
Of course she had not come. Of course she would not come. It had been a nerve war and I had won. I noticed I had a terrible pain in my neck. I ordered a drink and collapsed under a potted palm.
'May I sit here?'
'Please do. You must be English.'
'Why?'
'Too polite to be an American.'
'Aren't Americans polite?'
'Only if you pay them enough.'
'The British aren't polite no matter how much you pay them.'
'Then you and I must be refugees.'
'I suppose I am. My father used to come here. He loved New York. He said it was the only place in the world where a man could be himself while working his shirt off to become somebody else.'
'And did he?'
'What?'
'Become somebody else."
'Yes. Yes he did.'
We were quiet. She was looking towards the door. I looked at her. She was slim, wired, a greyhound body, half bent forward now, shape of her back muscles contouring her shirt, white, starched, expensive. Her left arm looked like the front window of Tiffany's. I was not sure how a woman could wear so much silver and sit without a lean.
Her hair was dark red, dogwood red, leather red with a suppleness to it that is part gift, part effort. I guessed that the look of hers was as artful as it was artless.
'Are you waiting for someone?' I said.
'I was.' She looked at her watch. 'Are you staying here?'
'No. I live in New York. I work at the Institute for Advanced Studies. I came here to meet. . .'
To meet: to come face to face with. To become acquainted with. To be introduced. To find. To experience. To receive. To await the arrival of. To encounter. To encounter in conflict.
'I came here to meet. . .'

There was a wind in the room that tore the drink out of the drinkers, that scattered the bar bottles like bottle tops, that levitated the furniture and smashed it into the tranced wall. Waiters and waited on blew in rags out of the door. There was nothing left in the room but she and me, she and me hypnotised by each other, unable to speak because of the wind.

She gathered her things and together we left the destroyed room. I had to follow her as she twisted the pavements under her feet. I lost sense of where we were. The grid had buckled. The city was a bent alley and she was the better rat.
At last we arrived at a small diner in a beaten-up part of town. She swung inside and we sat at a menacingly nice checked-cloth table with two carnations and a few rods of grissini. A boy came out with a carafe of red wine and a bowl of olives. He handed us the menus as if this was just an ordinary dinner in an ordinary day. I had fallen into the hands of the Borgias and now they wanted me to eat.
I looked at the menu. FOOD TASTES BETTER IN ITALIAN.
'This is where I met him,' she said. 'In 1947 on the day that I was born . . .'
 



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