Outside

It was a cold November night. I was sitting out in the back yard in one of those big white wooden chairs. The kind I associate with beach houses. 

I was smoking a cigar. Now, people say that women shouldn’t smoke cigars. Well, I am a woman and I smoke cigars. I was avoiding the mindless conversations going on inside. Conversations? More like monologues. No one was actually talking with another person, they were all just talking at one another. Loudly, and pretending to enjoy it. They must have been pretending, surely.

I’d been sitting out there for about fifteen minutes or so when John came out. John is an older man with many more opinions than he has questions. He was stepping across the doorway, still speaking to someone inside.

“…things that are made to look real but aren’t. That’s what I can’t stand.”

And he closed the door.

“Hello Jane. Cigar smoker, ey?”

“Like what?” I asked, ignoring his question, or was it an insult.

“What’s that?” He asked, pulling a cigar out of his pocket.

“You were talking about things that are made to look real but aren’t . . . like what?”

“Well,” he said, sitting down heavily on the chair beside me and lighting his cigar. “Those shutters you see on the sides of windows. But they don’t close. You know the one’s I mean? What the Hell are they there for? To give one an impression. A feeling. But they’re as useless as the bastards who so want them. You see? Or tables that people paint and then  rough up to give them a sort of antique look. Okay, so they’re not the same thing. You can use those tables, but still. You see?”

“And what do you like?

“Ey?”

“And what do you like?” 

“What do I like?” He asked and screwed up his face. “Well what kind of question is that?” And he forced a laugh.

“Well,” I said, “you spend so much time telling everyone what you don’t like and can’t stand … surely there must be something you do like.”

“Cigars” he said, after a moment, and took a puff.

“Cigars,” I said quietly, and nodded.

Sitting there with stiff hands and the onset of a headache I began to wonder if it was me who was the problem. Either it was me or them. Maybe it was me. I looked at John and wondered if he had ever wondered if it were him.

About a minute went by, neither of us saying anything.

I was going to ask what his plans for the holidays were. A safer question, I thought. But just as I was about to speak he stood up, laid his cigar on the table and said he was going back inside. Something about it being too cold.

The door opened. And the sound from within grew for a moment. The smell of something good and warm.

I sat there, alone and lonely. Wondering if that was because I was profound and poetic or if it was because something in the deepest part of me was fractured. incurable.

The sound of laughter from inside. A television mumbling frantically.