Months had passed. The nightclub where the attack had taken place had been shut down. It turned out that the establishment lacked a special permit to offer entertainment. The process to procure the permit had taken too long; without entertainment the nightclub could not afford to pay wages and so closed forever.
Moonface had escaped. No one ever saw or heard from him again. Perhaps he had been placed in a forced flight to El Salvador after all.
Yesterday, while running my neighborhood errands in the hurried bustle of a summer morning, I stepped into the dry cleaner's. The Korean lady smiled and said that someone had told her that I was an excellent dancer. But she would not tell me who had made this report. Perhaps my invisible neighbors frequented the new nightclub that opened where I whiled away many a weekend evening, often recalling that this is where my father would prefer I be.
I sat at the coffee shop, the awning shading from the brilliant Sunday afternoon. I had scribbled a few lines in my journal of my trip to Paris, my birthday present to myself. It had been a summer of frequent journeys: several U.S. cities, and then my sojourn in Paris. The world had expanded beyond the confines of the little office and the little apartment. In the glare of the summer sun, all spaces stood revealed as larger than we imagined.
Perhaps the Frenchman would come today, I hoped. He was a member of a group of expatriates that met regularly at the coffee shop. We had grown friendly the way strangers who smile at each other for ages grow friendly, first with polite gestures and then polite remarks and then polite questions. Our last conversation had been amusing (though not to him) as he complained to me of his rich ex-wife and the burdensome child support payments that he still had to make despite the utter lack of need. It wouldn't work this way in France, he insisted. I had barely held up my end of the conversation. After ten days in Paris, though, I was prepared to lean on my freshly polished French. But the Frenchman did not appear that afternoon.
An old couple sat down at a nearby table underneath an umbrella, its awnings flapping in the wind. They sipped their iced coffees, the old man laying out a newspaper and the old woman producing a book from her purse. Presently, the old man, in his dun shirt and khaki shorts, looked up at the woman, his wife perhaps, and noting that she was reading returned to his newspaper. A moment later, the old woman, in her stripped summer dress, looked up from her book and seeing her husband at his newspaper, returned to her novel. Neither one of them spoke to the other. The summer wind blew around them, lifting the old woman's hair, and transporting their thoughts to each others' minds. At least that was how I decided that their lives had become: separate branches of the same ancient tree. Perhaps after having said all that there was to say only their physical company sufficed.
After all, what really was there left to say? I pulled out a worn letter pad from my bag and scratched out a title to the last chapter in the story I was writing. "Coda," I would call it.
