“You know,” George says, “I heard somewhere that living in Seattle is like living with a beautiful woman who’s sick all the time.”
I don’t look at him. I’m too busy trying to keep my hair out of my eyes and the seagulls out of my fish and chips. “Huh,” I say, and wave away another seagull. “Sure does rain a lot.”
“I have to agree with you there,” George says. “You going to finish your root beer?”
George is this funny older guy who lives in my building. When my mom comes to visit she talks to me in hushed tones about how she thinks he isn’t all there, you know, in the head, but because she is my mother and because I am her son I just roll my eyes and wave a hand and brush her off.
She’s right, though. Good old George isn’t really all there, but that’s okay because that means he’s about half again as gracious as anyone else I’ve met in the building. Before I met him I thought chivalry was dead, but he bows to women, opens doors, puts his coat over puddles, gives up his seat on the bus to old people and women and… well, anyone really. He always wears this atrocious green sweater with leather elbow patches and brown corduroy pants with loafers. His hair is thinning and his sight is failing and he’s probably just a year or two out of his midlife crisis — assuming George has ever had anything even vaguely resembling a crisis.
We’re standing on a pier at the Seattle waterfront, the one with the Ivar’s, and I’ve got fish and chips and a bottle of root beer. George didn’t get anything because of his diet, but he and I have a deal where I order whatever I want and then he can have some, because stolen calories don’t count. So if he wants some root beer, then why not? He can go ahead.
“Nah, go ahead,” I say, and he goes ahead.
“My wife’s like that,” George says, staring out over the water and sipping at the bottle.
I look up. “Your wife?”
“Like Seattle,” George says. “A beautiful woman who’s sick all the time.”
I look back down at the water, at the barnacle-encrusted pilings, and think about how I’ve never seen his wife. Sick or not, I’ve never seen her, and I wonder if this is just one of his games.
“I met her,” he says, squinting up at the sky and holding up the bottle like an artist’s pencil, “thirty years ago. Love at first sight. You never forget your first true love.”
“I don’t imagine you do,” I say, leaning out over the rail, my arms folded.
“You don’t,” he says again, and this time he chugs the rootbeer until it’s gone. “Let’s go home before it starts to rain again.”
It’s sunny out but I know George too well to distrust his eye for weather, so we gather up our garbage and walk away from the seagulls and the water and the pier, and towards the apartment building where I’ve never seen his wife.
.
“What do you mean, his wife?”
“I mean his wife, mom,” I say, and roll my eyes, and sigh. “I just wanted to know if you ever met her.”
“Who on earth would ever want to live with that man, day in and day out? He’s a danger, Daniel. A danger.” I can almost hear her pink flowered housedress through the phone, the cat curling around her ankles, the clock on the wall.
“He’s not a danger, mom,” I say, smiling despite myself as I look at my own clock and realize that it’s four pm and she probably still hasn’t changed out of her slippers. “He’s just a funny old guy in my building. And you haven’t met his wife?”
“Can’t imagine he could ever tempt a woman down the aisle,” she mutters, and I hear the sound of her sipping coffee in that judgmental way she has.
I look at the window. As predicted, rain is pelting my window with a fervor not seen since… well, since the last time it rained. I marvel again at George’s supernatural thumb on this city’s pulse.”I was just curious. I’ve never seen her.”
“He’s not all there, you know. In the head.”
“I know, mom. I know.”
George isn’t really mental — he’s just got his weird quirks. He fancies himself a writer but I’ve never seen him with a book. He fancies himself a wit, in league with men like Oscar Wilde and Winston Churchill, but he’s never cracked a joke that made me laugh. He’s a funny old man in a funny little apartment.
I’ve never seen his wife.
.
“She was beautiful,” he says, gesturing with his coffee cup. We’re cloistered in the dark little living room, wrapped in two of his elephantine armchairs, drinking coffee and riding out the storm. It’s not often we sit together in these armchairs, but today is just a coffee and company day, so we talk about anything that isn’t the weather. “She was beautiful, all those years ago when I laid eyes on her first. All… all shiny like.”
I give him what my father would call a Hairy Eyeball and blow gently on my boiling coffee. “Shiny?”
He sits back, half satisfaction and half defeat. “Shiny,” George says, and shrugs. “Still just as beautiful now. Different,” he adds. “A lot different. Louder, more temperamental. Sometimes she probably doesn’t love me like I love her. But beautiful.”
“I’m sure she still loves you,” I say, lying through my teeth and hoping that he won’t suddenly jump up and yell ‘gotcha!’ as I fall for his little trick. I can’t tell yet if he’s tricking me, not yet, and I’m not sure if I want to.
“Wouldn’t still be here if she didn’t,” George says, and smiles quietly, watching his coffee seiche back and forth in the mug. “She doesn’t show it like they show it in the movies, but she does. You can tell, just looking at her.”
We sit in silence for an hour, maybe more, and I sit there thinking that I’m missing something. I’m missing something, but I don’t know what.
In the years following that coffee-filled stormy weekend, George mentions his mystery wife maybe all of four times, each mention more vague than the last, each time with more sadness and love. I’ve stopped thinking this is just a game. George is married, married to a beautiful woman who’s sick all the time. Sick with what? She might be in the hospital. Cancer, maybe. Sometimes at night I’ll think about George and his wife in a hospital room, her thin hands barely contrasting against the crisp white sheets, until I can’t think about it anymore and watch a movie instead.
Three years later George is hit by a bus on 5th. His hair was thin and his sight was failing — maybe failing too much to look before crossing, who knows.
I ask my parents to drive in for the funeral and when they get here my mom asks after George’s wife.
“I don’t know,” I say. “I never did end up meeting her.”
I don’t say any more about it, even though I spoke quietly with the priest before my parents arrived, and know exactly who George’s wife is.
Living in Seattle, George said, is like being married to a beautiful woman who’s sick all the time.
George was never married, but he knew everything about loving a beautiful woman who could never love him back.
