The roof is dark tonight. The light over the door is broken, and the light from the street below climbs the walls, but seems to fall away before cresting the wide slab of granite that tops the waist-high wall around the edge of the building. I stare at the stars scattered across the sky. In the absence of the moon, there are so many of them it is hard to tell them apart. They are like grains of sand. If I close my eyes, the sound of a car in the street below sounds almost like a wave. The moon is new tonight.
The way the sky was the night I met Brandy, full moon shining amidst the clouds, making them look darker and more sinister, I thought Halloween was already here. It was the perfect sky for a night of evil. That’s what I thought the night I met her. That’s what I thought as I stood on the roof of my four-story apartment building, watching the people scurry along the sidewalk, bundled tight against the cold night air, rushing home to their space heaters or electric blankets, or whatever they used to shut out the cold world.
I leaned on the granite ledge that surrounded the roof of the building and looked down on those people. My limp hair hung straight, framing my face. I felt like a gargoyle, watching over the building, protecting it from demons and other dangers of the Middle Ages. Except that I really didn’t care what happened to the building or its inhabitants.
From behind me I heard the crash of several of the small stones that lined the roof. A footstep. I kept my attention on the thin but steady flow of people in front of my building. A footstep. This one was closer to me. A footstep. They are picking up speed. A footstep, another. I turned to see a young woman standing there in the moonlight, hands in the pockets of a long, black overcoat, reddish-black hair dropping down to her shoulders in thick, elongated springs. Her face was dark, shadowed by her hair. I couldn’t see her eyes, just her red lips. She was nearly as tall as I was. She stood there looking at me look at her, a half-smile gracing her lips.
“Do you come up here a lot?” she said.
For some reason, I thought about James Dean meeting Natalie Wood in Rebel Without a Cause, how calmly Dean handled everything. I nodded. She walked up to the granite edge and looked out at the surrounding city, then down at the people.
“Interesting,” she said. She flashed me a smile, her brown eyes glittering.
“Yeah,” I said. “I like it up here.”
She looked up at the bright, full moon, the clouds scudding in front of it, then back at me. “My name’s Brandy,” she said. “Brandy Singer. Do you want to go somewhere and talk?”
My mother never told me never to talk to strangers. She also told me not to major in English. I didn’t listen to her then, so why would I listen to her now? We went to a small, nearly empty diner a couple of blocks from my apartment. Neon lined the wall near the ceiling, bathing everything in a surreal green. The waitress forced a smile as she poured our coffee. I dumped a load of sugar into the black, steaming liquid and took a sip, all the while looking at the tall beauty sitting across from me, wondering what she could possibly want from me. I remembered hearing about women in New Orleans who would seduce men, drug them, and steal their kidneys. Or was it their liver? Either way, there was something about Brandy that didn’t seem dangerous. She took a sip of coffee.
“Good coffee here,” she said.
“Yeah.”
“Did you know that George Washington was one of the first people to drink coffee in the US?” Somewhere in the back of the diner a glass broke with a muffled curse.
“No, I didn’t know that. I always assumed he drank tea.”
“He did before the Boston Tea Party, then they started boycotting it.” She took another sip of the coffee. “He needed something to drink, and since the coffee wasn’t taxed, he tried it. It’s been an American tradition ever since.”
“Strange that he needed something to drink,” I said.
“Well, we all have something. Some people drink coffee, some people down flagon after flagon of wine. Some people sit in front of the TV all day long.”
“Flagon?” I said.
“Yeah,” she said, smiling. “Flagon. It’s an archaic word, but you know what I mean.”
“Yeah,” I said.
She looked at me over her mug, steam rising around her eyes. “So,” she said. “What’s yours?”
I laughed and looked out the window at a car passing slowly through the narrow alley. Such a scenic place for a window. I turned back to Brandy. Her eyes hadn’t left, the mug hadn’t moved. I took a breath.
“Jazz,” I said. “I love jazz.” I proceeded to describe my collection of music. “How about you?” I said.
She looked at me for a few seconds. “I love people. I love to watch their patterns, what they do and why.”
“An anthropologist,” I said. She smiled.
“What do you do for a living that affords you so much time to stand on the roof of an apartment building and so much jazz?” she said as she put down her cup.
“I write for a local paper,” I said.
“Ah, a reporter out scouring the crime scenes for details?”
I put down my cup. “No,” I said. “Food critic. I’m supposed to go to restaurants and survey the food.”
“Supposed to?” She took a sip of coffee.
“Yeah, I write reviews of places that have closed recently, usually because of some disaster, a fire or something.”
The waitress came back to ask if we wanted anything else. We told her that we just wanted coffee. She breathed a sigh of relief. I watched her walk away and wondered just how long it would be until she snapped.
“Did you write that review of The Black Beauty?”
“The jazz club that burned down? Yeah, I wrote that. It ran right under the article of the place burning down.”
“Sounded like a fun place.”
I stirred my coffee. “That’s what I’d heard.”
Brandy looked up at a picture depicting an old man feeding breadcrumbs to some ducks at the edge of a pond. “So you’ve never actually written a review?”
I took a gulp of coffee, now thick from the amount of sugar I had poured into it and shook my head. “I don’t really need to. My father died when I was in college and left me all of his money – a tidy sum, good investments – so I could live off that if I ever get fired, but my pieces are more filler than anything else.”
“What if you run out of places that have closed recently?”
“It has happened. I just make them up. I see it as making good use of my English degree.”
She took a couple of sips of coffee and stared at me. “Did you make up The Sunny Day Eatery? I can’t remember ever reading that it closed,” she said.
“Yeah, that place never existed,” I said.
“Damn, the chicken piccata sounded incredible.”
“Well,” I said, “That’s actually my own recipe. Some night you could come over and try it.”
Her face lightened, her red lips stretching across her face. There was something very child-like in the expression. It was the look of a child who gets the exact gift, the perfect surprise.
“Nothing is ever as it seems, huh? I’d love to.”
To be continued...
(Read more about this short story here.)
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