A sign, hand-written on cardboard, is taped to the door: We will be closed from 5 p.m. 12/31 and reopen on January 2nd. The Far Left Corner Café—referencing location, not political leanings—is a soup and sandwich place, not a New Year’s Eve hotspot, but now in the afternoon, every table is taken. Albie scans the room looking for Muriel. She is seated in the back at the table next to the bathroom. As he makes his way over to her, Muriel gets up to greet him, tucking a lock of her hair behind one ear. Shoulder-length hair. Thick, glossy, ash-brown going gray at the temples. Muriel is from England, and she looks it, like a woman who has a garden that produces prizewinning gladiolas. She is tall, large-boned, and solid. The Venus de Milo but with arms. She’s an attractive woman, if a touch horsey. Her skin is flawless, white and pink like the inside of a seashell. The only makeup she wears is the mascara that draws attention to the color of her eyes, the light blue of sea glass. Albie takes hold of her hands, strong hands. Almost masculine, but her fingernails are incongruously painted cherry red. Albie and Muriel kiss in greeting. A platonic kiss, although it lasts a beat longer than you might expect from a kiss between friends.
When they break apart, Muriel cocks her head like a bird, a parrot, and in a parrot-like way, a British parrot, she says, “Hello darling.” It’s a joke between them. A private joke, one of those jokes where you really have to be one of the players for it to be the least bit amusing. Only when they are seated does Albie remark on the slight stench wafting from the bathroom, along with the squares of trod-upon toilet paper, which lead like a trail of bread crumbs from the bathroom to just beyond their table. If anything is to be gleaned from this seating arrangement, it’s Muriel’s sense of proportion. As a cultural anthropologist, Muriel has seen children with their hands cut off, famine and disease running rampant, elephants slaughtered for spite, all of which keeps a table by the bathroom in perspective. When she says, “It was the only one available. Can you bear it?” Albie nearly swoons over how reasonable she is, how rational, how not crazy.
“You look good,” he says, to which she says, “You don’t. You look dreadful.”
“Not half as bad as I feel.”
“Do I dare ask?”
All Albie can do is shake his head.
“That bad?” Muriel says.
“Worse,” Albie tells her. They have yet to look at the menu, but the waitress is there at their table. Her pad open and her pen poised. Albie orders what he had the last time he was here, what he orders every time he is here, an avocado and tomato sandwich on whole wheat toast, extra mayo. Muriel asks about the soup of the day, which turns out to be lentil soup. “My favorite,” Muriel says, as if the waitress played a part in lentil being the soup of the day.
Albie adds two Dr. Brown’s cherry sodas to their order, and then looks to Muriel who nods, and asks the waitress, “Can you put a shot of brandy in those?”
“We don’t serve alcohol here,” the waitress says, and Albie explains that Muriel was joking, and, as if further explanation were required, Albie says, “She’s from England.”
When the waitress is done with them and they are alone, Muriel tells Albie about her visit with her family, about mass on Christmas Eve and mass on Christmas Day at the Anglican church where her father is a bishop. “Then, of course, there was the huge dinner with my brothers and their wives and masses of little ones. It was perfectly lovely,” Muriel says, “and positively stifling. And yours?” she asks.