The tent was on the east side next a big carnival swing, in motley orange and violet. I had told myself about the ancient acacia tree in the middle of the road with the branches doubly-weighed with scraps of impaled paper. They bore whatever—silly poems, Hi moms from the ages—a gallimaufry of impulse scribbling. The grass in front of the tent was stamped brown. The tent itself was big, with four corner-points and swags that led up to a pennanted tent-spire. Inside it was smoky-golden lit. At the far end an erected plywood stage floating on crepe paper gables, and leading up to it masses of chairs. They looked to have been initially set up in some regular quadrilateral but subsequently mussed up. A few dozens were milling about the seats, molesting playbooks. I’d never been here yet before, but of course I knew how it would all look—or at least I had imagined it. The fit of the view in the stocky jig was forced at best. I had not imagined, for instance, the faux flambeaux light fixtures, nor the lazy rolling pitch of the ground that made the chairs undulate like dead fish on a sea. I thought the staging would be more dramatic, but the background was just the far tent wall, and the actors were collected about the left side drinking beer among the groundlings. I wandered among the seats wondering whether to bury myself in the back. I saw one of the actresses, short with black curls, and thought of sitting up front. Was aware of the smell of stale popcorn and damp dirt. Came up front and sat down at the end of an aisle.
I hadn’t looked while walking up because that’s not what I did. But I knew she was there across the aisle. I felt something rattling loose inside me. I was sweating hard. Looked casually around to the right—to the left—she was there! My Sarah, my one-and-only Sarah. She looked right back at me with a suppressed smile. I smiled back. We both turned to the actors mounting the stage.
I had dreamed about her for years. I met her, actually, back on the first trip—anyway, the Sarah on her seventh visit, some years after our affair—and had been smitten, then. I told myself about the affair, her beauty, all the good parts. Later I told myself about the bad parts, the breakup. I think it was only as I matured I was able to understand finally about the lasting friendship.
She was unlike other girls. She was short, compact, with little stubby hands. Her eyes were shaped like almonds and set as a master sculptor sets his gems, when by long practice he can do it perfectly and without effort, though no one else could do it so well even with prolonged calculation. Moreover, the eyes were a staggering, living brown like enriched lacquer. The cheeks were clean and smooth. Her lips were not buxom; a lip-soft pink, delicate mouth.
She never minced for a smile. Always the mouth was nearly neutral, and if she were content or amused, the corners might be crooked imperceptibly up, or maybe it was just the tone of the upper lip seemed tenser. Likewise when upset you would only see a slight extra fullness of the lower lip. That was it; her eyes, which brightened as certain novelty rings do with her mood, either shining or shuttering with her spiritual sun, broke any ties.
She was in a brown shirt and what she called her “hippy” jeans and her hair was drawn back in a black scrunchie.
The play went on. It was existentialist; one guy stood apart in a small blue-taped circle of stage and watched the others, who interrupted their too-witty repartee occasionally with too-solemn asides accompanied by bad minimalist compositions, interact. It was called “Packed Circles” and was written by a guy Sarah knew and I think sort of pitied. Every so often I looked back again to the left and looked at her. Sometimes I just saw her face in profile; sometimes I caught her looking back. After a few occasions of that, I puffed out my cheeks and swayed in my chair like the ponderous lead. She saw and laughed her closed-eyes laugh. I balled up my fist like the curly-haired actress making her soliloquy count. She mock-shot me and I covered my wound.
It was hard waiting through the play. On the one hand, I liked to look at her and make her laugh. I especially liked looking and seeing her looking back. Remembered what I told myself about some moment when the incidental music ostinatoed up to a forte and c above middle c, then started coming down, and how I looked and met her eyes and had the irresistible urge to go whisk her away, just walk away with her hand-in-hand. The beginning of any true romance you can make a hundred different lives for yourselves and some of them are dire but the joy in some of the others is always enough to drive you to start feeling among them.
That moment came and I felt it all, just like I said it was like. But feeling it was something else entirely and if I’d fooled myself I knew what was going to happen because I had a set of words that corresponded to it right then I was disillusioned. Though in a way there was never again a time I was so shaded by illusions and false hopes of every kind.
I wondered did I betray any of this and looking for that effect I just looked deeper in her eyes—and saw her doing the same. I think that her slight-crooked smile actually opened then and we both took a little breath, almost a gasp, and made eyes at each other only furtively the rest of the play.
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