He waited longer than was necessary. Then he waited longer than would be expected and stayed past what would be considered reasonable. He was waiting when the ambulance passed and the wailing crescendo and diminuendo of the siren did not distract him from his waiting, although he was staring into the street when the flashing red and white blur sliced through his field of view. He waited until his second coffee—which he forced himself to sip slowly at first but then lost interest in halfway through—grew cold. He waited until he was sure.
He had begun the waiting resolute: after three months of occasional coffees and movies he was going to ask her to dinner. Ask her out on a date. But during the waiting his certainty slipped into hopeful excitement, which transitioned into nervousness, which shifted into anxiety, which in the dampness of errant thought warped into cold fear, which mutated into an anger that smoldered and grew hotter the more his coffee cooled.
When his last hopes finally desiccate and ignite, the anger morphs back into anxious anticipation, which fizzles into a dull resignation, which now rises from the ash as the following thoughts:
She is not coming.
It's just as well.
He is hobbled by his lack of a cellphone. She could have called to let him know she was running late. After waiting 30 minutes he did call her from a payphone outside but she didn't pick up. Then he checked his messages at home; there were none. He waited 15 minutes and called both numbers again. Nothing still. She simply isn't coming. She decided not to come. Perhaps she had heard the twitch in his voice when he asked her to meet him, noted a different tone from his other calls, a hesitance, and she sensed what was coming and was avoiding it. Why else would she not call? The plan was to grab a coffee and walk to the bay. He will continue, as planned. He will walk. On his way out he passes a large, loud man walking in but does not hear the man ask the room:
"Hey, you hear someone fell off a cable car?"
He follows California Street up and over Nob Hill. The climb does him good. When his lungs heave his attention is forced out of the past and his thoughts are pulled back from the future he had imagined there. Exertion eclipses embarrassment. He doesn't pause to catch his breath when he reaches Huntington Square Park at the top of the hill. He keeps walking. He goes faster going down. When he reaches Kearny he does not notice the skid marks and remnants of a flare on the pavement. He does not glance across the street at the Bank of America building and so finds nothing remarkable in the lethargic movements of the flower seller and the crowd still gathered around the kiosk at the corner of the plaza. He misses the TV news vans. As he approaches Montgomery two cable cars crisscross so even if he were looking across the street he would not see the café on the other side, the one with the same name as the one where he'd just spent over an hour. Because he doesn't see it he doesn't go in and doesn't hear the woman behind the counter telling a customer that she was supposed to have been on the a.m. shift but had to trade because her daughter had an orthodontist appointment or otherwise she would have been the one on TV.
He is glad to have walked. He is seeing more clearly now: He sees how it is all in his head. It was nothing, really, she is just a friend. He almost ruined it. Overreacting. He is infatuated with a woman who enjoys his company, nothing more. Why does he have to make it more? What was he thinking? He was waiting a long time. He shouldn't have waited such a long time. Even if she did feel the same way, waiting that long can't be attractive. Or wise. But she doesn't. Feel the same way. He won't call again. He will walk until he doesn't want to call.
A Russian widower whose English is shaky and whose phone number is one digit off from his is hearing this message: "Hello, this is Saint Francis Medical Center. Could you please give us a call? We have a patient here who arrived with no identification except her agenda book. Your name and this phone number are written in for today and circled twice so we're hoping you know her. She could use a friend…"
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