About Face

I Was Sitting Alone

56 I Was Sitting Alone I was sitting alone in the late afternoon, reading, concentrating on receiving what it was I felt offered, there on the page, when he started talking to me. He cajoled, coaxed, teased and provoked, insisting with his two round, glistening eyes that I listen to what he had to say. As always my ears were open; I believe my ears are always open even when other people tell me they are not. It could be possible that I forget those moments when I am not paying attention to anything beside the rumblings of an impending storm. Then I am only listening to the instinctive shutting of windows and retracing the recovered sequence of linked corridors used in emergencies. He said, “You think you can get away like that? It’s that easy, isn’t it, to slip out and slide away.” And he lengthened the “I” in slide so I would feel my own deceptive character as he experienced it and as he believed it to be. But I was reading, sitting alone in the late afternoon, and wanting it that way: wanting to receive what I imagined the words on the page offered. I told him then that I didn’t want to listen—that I didn’t want him there at all. That I wished he would turn away and stop staring, that I didn’t want to be stared at in that way and that I wanted him to go. I told him he had to leave, that his eyes should recede, back away from their aggressive performance, that I didn’t want them staring at me inquiringly. ...