One last Favor.

James picked a little open-air restaurant because that was the way he’d pictured the stage in his mind; it was where he wanted to be when delivering his performance.  It also gave him an excuse to wear the long dark coat that he liked; it made him more imposing, more unshakable.  Not that he really needed the help; if his voice and eyes didn’t convince her that he wasn’t changing his mind, then she could justifiably be labeled blind and deaf to the world.

He arrived at the restaurant five minutes before he’d told her to be there, and he sat at a table with only two seats, facing each other.  He sat facing inward, which meant that she would face just the opposite, towards the traffic and the passersby.  The public world that he was forcing her to encounter, a world that would not give her some place to turn her eyes if she just wanted to pretend to ignore.  There would be no ignoring this time.

James laid out a very plain white handkerchief on the table in front of his place, and then set his black sunglasses on top of it.  The edge of the handkerchief fluttered in a slight breeze, then settled down again as the air stilled.  He folded his hands and rested, elbows on the table, eyes cast around the corner of where the paved floor met the side of the kitchen, and the enclosed counter of the restaurant.  His tableau was set.

Catherine entered with an enormous cheesy smile on her face, footsteps on the floor as harsh and invasive as her loud greeting was on James’ eardrums.

“Hi, Jim!”

Her general posture and tone of voice, minute things about her facial expression betrayed a vague discomfort that she would assume James could not see and would undoubtedly express verbally at some point in the near future.  All the same she appeared to pretend that everything was all right.

“Hello, Catherine.”

James’ tone was suitably chill; it gave Catherine a moment’s pause before she sat down and assumed a mildly wounded expression and tone of voice.

“Well goodness Jim, what’s gotten you all annoyed?  I’m the one who’s… well,” she squinched up a side of her face, “irritated with you, to say the least.”

James imagined that he could feel the corner of his eye twitching at her sheer ignorance.  The worst part of the matter was its self-imposition; she was only narrow-minded because she refused to be reasonable about any perspective but her own, which was more often than not a highly unreasonable perspective.

“That you may be, but you aren’t the only one.”  At that tone she settled into her chair, perhaps subconsciously.  James waited for a response; he was about to be doing a lot of talking anyway.

“Well I’m surprised at you Jim; you know that I don’t agree with… well, you know my opinion.”  Eloquent as ever.

“An opinion that you are entitled to cling to until the day that you die,” James responded coldly.  “An opinion is something that every person has a right to.  One that shouldn’t be influenced by outside sources, and you’ve denied people that.”

Catherine assumed a hurting expression, as though James were being unreasonably destructive to her fragile existence.

“What are you even talking about?”

James pulled a folded sheet of paper from his coat pocket and tossed it on the table.  It was folded tightly enough and the breeze was gentle enough that it didn’t blow away, but sat where it had landed with a feeling of finality.

“On the extreme off-chance that you might, do you know what this is?”

“Umm… paper?” She giggled winningly, trying too hard to be funny.

“That’s a printout of an e-mail that I got from Emily.  I believe that it openly describes her opinion better than I ever could.”

Catherine picked up the wadded paper and started to unfold it, raising an eyebrow at James, her voice quiet, hurt, and confused at his apparent anger.

“Would she want you letting me read this?”

“Out of curiosity, did you think about whether or not I would’ve wanted you telling her what you did?”

Catherine stopped unfolding the paper and frowned.

“Oh now that’s not fair, I told you that she was the one that asked me!”

“Catherine, I’m afraid that I am going to have to have to ask you not to give me that shit.”  James paused just long enough to verify that she was shocked out of an immediate answer.  “You and I both know that you intentionally steered your conversation towards that topic, and that you pretended not to want to talk about it to save face as being an implement of the force of gossip.”

Catherine had entirely dropped the façade of annoyance and was buying fully into the pity ploy, letting a false sadness blossom its way across her face.

“Emily and I will probably never be on the same terms again; she was a valued friend to me, and one of the few people who understood as much as she did.  You’ve taken a friend from me, Catherine, and you’ve taken a friend from her as well, with your gossip.  What on earth has made you believe that you are some kind of princess with the right to play with people like that?”

“I wasn’t – ”

“You took away my right to present my own point of view, which will be viewed by her as nothing but an excuse by now.”  He leaned forward, emphasizing his words.  “You planted a little wedge in my life, and pounded away at it with glee until you broke a little piece off of me and tossed it away like you had the right to do so.”  His voice began to quaver with restraint.  “And somehow you have the gall to sit there in front of me and present a guise of irritation that I might possibly feel resentful about it!”

Catherine kept trying to look away, but had to continue the motion back again because she was meeting the gaze of the other restaurant-goers, people who had detected something was wrong and were trying to figure out just what.

“I am the same person now as I was when you became my friend,” James ground through his teeth, “and the same person as I was when I befriended Emily.  If you can’t handle that, then you are a lower person than I ever gave you credit for.  But that’s not all; you took that person from Emily, you took that person from yourself.  I will always be the same; but you’ve ruined that for all of us now.”  His eyes were starting to smolder.  “You might not remember the times that I fucking dragged you out of the sorry pit of depression and self-loathing you used to sit in, or you might actually do me the courtesy of recollecting.  That is the person I am.  All I have ever done is try to help you as best I could.  That is all I have ever done for anybody.  And you know what?  I can never do that for Emily again.  You took away that, too.”

Catherine was staring at the tabletop, hunched up as if to suggest that his words were physically harming her.  All James knew was that letting up would mean her deriving some alternative meaning and making things worse again.  The people at the tables around them had opted to pretend as if they hadn’t noticed something was amiss.
“As much tolerance as I have, as much patience for letting everybody and his dog throw whatever the hell they want at me… well, you’ve finally crossed a line that you’ve been toeing for too long as it is.”  For just a second James let sadness creep into his voice unintentionally, “And that hurt.”

Catherine raised her head in the pause, and on her face was a look of… triumph.  There was a disgusting joy that bubbled underneath her skin-deep mask of pain and screamed her denial to the world; screamed that somewhere she had found a scrap of hope to cling to that James would miraculously yield his argument and that her little fantasy world would suddenly spring into being… That look drove out the last shred of James’ sympathy.
“Do you see those cars passing behind me?” he murmured.  “Do you see those people walking?  All of them?  You don’t know them; I don’t know them.  But they’ve got one thing in common: they’re strangers to me.”  He picked up his sunglass and put them on; the handkerchief sat on the table, untouched by wind.  James knew that the lenses of the sunglasses were like painted coins from her side; he could see the panicked realization starting to emerge on her face as her spine straightened.  “You’ve all got something in common.  I’m closed to you.”

“Jim,” she called softly as he got up and turned to leave; he turned his face halfway over his shoulder to respond,

“That’s James to you, miss.”

She ran towards him as he reached the sidewalk; he whirled and stopped her with a single hiss:

“Don’t touch me,”

Then kept walking.

He reached the curb and started to cross the street, watching her in the reflection of the shop window across from him.  Until he reached the middle of the street she stood, as lost and confused as an animal.  Then she turned back to their table and stared for a moment at the handkerchief.  His hands tightened in his pockets as he kept walking; would she take it?  Or had he really expressed his sentiment?

As James reached the far side of the street the wind picked up, and carried the handkerchief away.  Her fingers might have twitched ever so slightly in the direction of its path… or James might have imagined it.

One last favor… she’d never know
He’d make it easy, letting go.