THIS IS THE BEGINNING
You sit at a round metal table outside a café, sipping tea and pushing the flakes of a croissant around a thick saucer rimmed in green, fantasizing about the lives of the people around you, about the tall, gaunt waiter with graceful hands (does he spend his evenings at the piano, in a cramped apartment he shares with his mother?), about the elegant woman two tables away who has a little brown dog tucked into her jacket (is she wearing a silk blouse of the same fine quality as her tweed, or does she hold the beast against her bare skin, a secret pleasure she enjoys in public?), about the young man to your left, at the extreme of your periphery - you don't look at him directly; he's too handsome - who is reading the book you read last week (the book you loved, the one you felt was written just for you) and who might welcome a casual comment - he must speak English if he's reading that book; maybe he is English, with a soft, rolling accent - or even invite you to join him because he is not looking for a beauty but a soul mate (someone with astute insights about literary fiction), and it is not until you place your empty teacup in its green-rimmed saucer and turn in your seat to see the man with the book stand up and greet a long-haired fellow in a tomato-red scarf - they do not speak, but kiss on the cheek once, twice, three times - that you recollect the story (prosaic, inevitable) awaiting you in another city on the other side of the ocean, at which point you to stand, drop a few coins onto the table, and stride off, head down, in the direction of the river, forgetting the cotton sweater you had slung over the back of your seat; and though the waiter (whose mother is long dead) calls after you, holding the sweater aloft, you do not hear him - there's a musician drumming on upturned buckets at the street corner - nor do you see the bookish young man (who is mute; he cannot shout, but he can run) pluck your sweater from the waiter's grasp and take off after you, much to the amusement of the elegant woman (who is fully dressed, but not quite sober), and therefore you do not turn around until he taps your shoulder, breathing hard, his face aglow and his eyes telling you what he cannot say.