I watched him disappear among the shelves of books, thinking how odd the encounter was, but that was always happening to me. My whole life I’ve felt I had strange encounters with people, so much so that in school I once made a list of strangers who came up and talked to me or asked me random questions. Maybe there was something important this man possessed in his spirit, manifested for me, but what message was he bringing?
I went outside and sat and waited for Vin to come out. They almost always came outside around this time. I wanted to finally meet him, and I considered, in a moment of excitement, crossing the street and going right up to the door and ringing the bell. Soon enough, though, Vin and Luka came out. They started walking down the block, so I followed them down Main Street to the fall art festival downtown. The festival was on a blocked-off street full of tents and booths, crowds of people, a stage with some teenage girl playing an acoustic guitar and singing a country-and-western song. Poor girl, she wasn’t a very good singer, and not many were paying attention to her. Vin and Luka walked ahead of me, stopping to buy snow cones. They walked from tent to tent, Vin holding Luka’s hand. I trailed far enough behind that I wouldn’t be conspicuous, but close enough that I could see them when they stopped at a craft table. I walked past them, shielding my face behind others, then stopped at the next tent and browsed watercolor prints from a local Cherokee artist, an older man wearing a bandanna. I ran my hand over bracelets and necklaces and saw him glance at me. I bought a threaded turquoise bracelet and stepped away. At the craft table, Vin was looking at his phone while a woman helped Luka make something with colored paper. I wanted to be that woman, to kneel down and help Luka make crafts and color on paper. After a few minutes I left and went home.
I lived in a small house down the road from my parents. I was glad I lived close to them, since Papa was seventy-four and in the early stages of Alzheimer’s. For weeks he had been paranoid about someone watching their house. One night he sat on the deck for three hours, keeping a lookout for a burglar, until he finally fell asleep. I hated seeing him this way.
He never said much to me, even before the Alzheimer’s. Truthfully, we hardly ever talked at all. I wouldn’t say he ignored me, but he was more interested in Edgar, especially after Ray-Ray died. With me, he liked to just sit on his deck in silence and look out at the lake, the moonlight reflecting in the water. He always told me to pay attention to nature because it was usually crying out to us. We watched squirrels run across the grass. We listened to cicadas. Leaves fell from the trees and played in the wind like pale birds.
I DECIDED TO INTRODUCE MYSELF to Vin that night. I was at the Branch, where I had seen him perform several times. This night I felt bolder for some reason.
I sat at the bar and had a few glasses of Tempranillo while his band played their set. Vin sang only a couple of songs and mostly played electric guitar in the band. I would say they were of average talent, though the college kids enjoyed them. When they finished their set, I felt an urge to assert my presence, to make myself visible to him. I am a woman with shrewd eyes and a slender chin, and I felt confident that Vin would like me once he met me. I didn’t mind being older than guys I dated. The French writer Colette was in her forties when she was rumored to have had a sexual affair with her sixteen-year-old stepson. How magnificent she was, a woman who wrote so beautifully about sexual energy and desire, a woman I very much wanted to be like. I wished I could be like her without worry of being judged.
Vin sat at the bar with another young guy who was maybe in his early twenties. Sitting at the other end of the bar, I stared at Vin until he noticed. I waited for him to respond to my smile, to see whether he would react. Sure enough, he smiled and said something to the guy sitting beside him. His friend glanced at me and then quickly looked into his glass and took a drink. Vin kept looking over at me every so often. I can say now that if our attraction began anywhere, it was right then.
For a moment I studied Vin, my throat dry and my body taut with anxiety among all the smoke and people around me. I couldn’t say exactly how I was feeling, though I knew I felt a strange combination of confidence and slight airlessness. This is how you attract a stranger. This is how you show you’re interested, how you smile and look him intensely in the eyes. How many times had this worked in the past? My instinctive response to his smile was to mouth Hi, but instead I turned to the bartender and cupped my mouth like I was sharing a secret. I wanted it to look like I was whispering something, but I really just ordered another glass of wine. I knew Vin was watching, and when I glanced back at him, he was still looking at me.
He began talking to a girl with red-blond hair, clearly someone he didn’t know. How many twentysomething girls approached him after his sets onstage, how many introduced themselves, introduced their friends, pretended they had met him before? I glared at him again, this time with a more serious expression, until he caught my eye and took a drink. The girl was talking to her friend, and they both laughed like schoolgirls. I thought of them texting each other in their anatomy class while their homely professor groaned on about skeletal and reproductive systems. I got a pen from my purse and began writing on a cocktail napkin: Vin likes to be stared at. He requires a lot of attention, like a little boy.
When I finished writing, I looked up and there he was. I turned on my barstool to face him and met his eyes. “Hi,” he said. Or maybe he said, “Who are you?” Or maybe, “My name is Vin.” Well, whatever he said, the music was pulsating around us, and I felt as if we were enveloped in silence. It happens like that, the gravity of the moment. He had this sad presence about him that reminded me of Elliott Smith, such a brooding, youthful soul, and I thought how strange it was that he could remind me of so many different famous people. I thought of how Colette described the men in her books in such ardent, sexual detail, so full of passion. How she focused on her own pleasure. Oh, to be so selfish! I desired Vin in the same way.
I handed him the napkin, and as he read it he smiled, or maybe he smirked, so I said I liked his set and told him he was really handsome, and he glanced away for a moment, looking embarrassed.
“I’m Colette,” I told him.
“Colette,” he said. “I like that.”
“You like my name?”
He held this really intense gaze. I don’t know if he was trying to be sexy, but he didn’t need to try hard with me.
“Colette,” he said.
It was simple, really.
Outside, he put my bicycle in the trunk of his car and drove me home with the car radio off and the windows down. We saw smoke in the distance from a fire on the other side of the lake, and to tease him I leaned in close to him and whispered: “Listen to the fire. What do you hear? It’s telling you something. Do you hear it?”
The fire excited me. Yes, all that smoke and heat rising to the dark sky. Once we arrived at my house, we entered through the back door. I turned on the light, pulled off my boots, and Vin followed me into the kitchen for wine. As I reached for the glasses in the cabinet, I felt his hands on my waist. I let him feel me as I bent forward against the kitchen counter so that my hair fell in front of me. He moved in, kissed my neck. I turned and he kissed me. I bit his lip, pulled away. I kissed him again and put my hand against his jeans. I knelt down, unfastened his belt. Then his hands were in my hair, and I thought about the wildfires outside and all the smoke billowing into the dark night.