Pilgrims by Garrison Keillor

Author:Garrison Keillor [Garrison Keillor]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9780571252442
Publisher: Faber & Faber
Published: 2009-09-05T04:00:00+00:00

BEAUTIFUL MAN

Vacation days! Free to go where you please. She was in high spirits all day and the next. Carl and Daryl wanted to go on a double-decker bus—Fine! Go!—and off they went. Eloise collapsed into bed and so did Clint and Irene. Okay for them. Let the sleepers go sleep, she could sleep when she got home. Weariness is only a feeling, you don’t have to obey it. Sleep can be postponed. There’s coffee. That helps.

She visited the Keats-Shelley house, a tiny shrine with a lock of Keats’s hair, a pair of his socks, a box of his shoes, two letters from Byron, a teacup, a golf club, a 5-iron.

She and Maria had planned to meet for coffee at a café near the banks of the Tiber. She walked and walked toward where she thought the river was, but didn’t check her map, for fear of looking like a tourist. Finally, she saw the coffee bar and stepped through the open door into a beehive of people coming and going. A narrow room. A pleasant aroma of coffee and oranges. She took a deep breath and felt a buzz in her head. No lounging around. Customers stood at the long bar of granite and stainless steel and ordered their coffee from the barmen bopping back and forth between the espresso machine and the cooler, a hundred bottles of booze on shelves against a mirror, and when your coffee came, you downed it and out the door you went. There was room for a few loungers at three small tables along the wall. Next to a cold chest full of ice cream. Photographs on the wall of Rome in horse-and-buggy days. From the radio came a throbbing baritone singing about his broken heart. A box of breath mints by the register. She took a pack and put down a ten-euro note and ordered her coffee and, bing bing bing, a tiny cup was set down in front of her and her change, and she dropped two breath mints into the coffee and stirred it. The man next to her was studying her but he said nothing. She drank the coffee in one gulp and it wasn’t bad. It could’ve been worse. She ordered another, and then her phone rang. It was Maria saying she couldn’t make it because her mother had taken a turn for the worse.

She looked around and thought the man next to her was on the verge of talking to her. He was looking at her in the mirror, through the rows of liquor bottles, and when their eyes met there, he looked down at his drink. It smelled of licorice. He was a beautiful man in his thirties with black hair slicked back, tortoise-shell glasses, a black jacket, jeans.

Her coffee came and this time she didn’t put breath mints in it. She sipped it. Bitter, but in a good way. The man next to her ordered another drink. Maybe he was getting up his courage to ask her to go somewhere with him, come to his home and see his etchings.

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