Windows

by Lillian Yuan

C.

On the 22nd floor of the Beekman Residences lives a chef. Whether by trade or hobby, Clara does not know. But he is a chef to her, because she has only ever seen him cooking since the Monday he moved in across the courtyard. He leans against the counter, bringing soups and stir fries to his lips. His hair is a curly black S against his face. Clara imagines what it would look like up close—thin, severe, like the rest of his body. Sharp like his knife.

When he is finished, the chef cleans his pots and pans first. He sets them on the windowsill. In the cold, wintry dawn when Clara wakes, she mistakes the pots for plants. They are misleading in placement and size. They make her laugh when her senses finally catch up with her instincts, and she is surprised by the sound. She has not laughed so naturally, all for herself, in a long time.  

J.

      The first time Jonathan notices the woman, she is crying in an orange bath towel. Night is falling, and her apartment is the brightest square on her side of the courtyard. Her body is blurred, separated from his by distance, glass, and wilting plants scattered across her windowsill. Fallen flowers, yellowed leaves. Drooping with her body. 

The woman’s tears sting him. Jonathan touches his own cheek, but they are only damp from humidity. He squints, shifts, edges closer to his window. Long, black locks frame the woman’s oval face. She stands. He sighs, a lonely, quiet exhale. Her towel slips, and he quickly averts his gaze. He thinks of Emma, her body. The only part of his former love that he allows himself to miss.

C.

      Today, the chef is distracted. Clara knows this because he is pausing between vegetables as if he has forgotten where he is each time the knife cuts. He balls his apron in his fist and stares out the window. Not at her, of course, because he does not know that she is watching through the small space of naked window under her drawn blinds. Her body demands sleep, but her eyes do not want to close.

When the chef stands still, Clara can make out the outline of a red logo on his black polo shirt. It is the same work shirt he always wears. Clara tries to remember all the red restaurant logos in New York City that she has seen, but only Panda Express comes to mind. The contents of the chef’s backpack sit haphazardly on a small kitchen table—a set of knives, a bottle of water, a cell phone.

The chef picks up the phone. He fiddles with it, puts it back down. A wider, shorter man trudges into the kitchen. He sways, drunk or sleep deprived. The chef instantly straightens. He hands the other man a fork, nudges him into a seat. Words are exchanged. The chef smiles. Food is served and engulfed in two enthusiastic bites. The chef refills his roommate’s bowl, ruffles his hair like a father to a son. Clara cannot see their features but she can feel their warmth. She rubs the ring on her finger. A wound and a light open at once in her chest.

Clara rolls around, blinking at the expanse of sheets and her neglected kitchenette. She creates a mental grocery list that she is not sure she will ever use, and it is not until she is half-asleep that she remembers she has forgotten to journal today. She opens her laptop, squints at the screen. Five things to be grateful for, unrelated to her late husband.

Her fingers flutter, her eyelids droop. The man across the courtyard spills onto the page.         

J.

Jonathan has not seen the woman for six days. He does not realize this until he sees her again at five in the morning, a time his newfound insomnia chooses for him. He has not seen Emma in six days either.

Today the woman is wearing blue scrubs. She disappears from view and reappears with a plate of indistinguishable food in one hand, a laptop in the other. She takes a bite, types, takes a bite, types. Jonathan winces. He cannot see the crumbs, but he knows they are falling, furrowing into her bedsheets. He wonders what she is eating. Whether there is protein, whether she will be able to withstand so many hours on her feet. He assumes she is a nurse or a doctor. Serious, private, disciplined for the sake of others but not necessarily herself.

The woman eats fast. She is efficient and absolute, sitting with her back straight and swiping any residual food off her white sheets with long arms. Her body is in a state of constant motion. He cannot tell what she is doing, waving her arms up and down in tandem with something white fluttering in her grip. Then, at last he understands—she is opening a garbage bag. She swipes her windowsill of dust, the same way she swiped her bed. She takes entire pots, devoid of green, and empties them into the bag. Spring cleaning in June, late but necessary. Something he needs too.

In the pre-dawn darkness, Jonathan turns on his medium burner. Watching the woman eat has made him hungry. He beats five eggs in a bowl. Feels around the top shelf for soy sauce, because he does not wish to turn on a light. When he glances back out the window, the woman is standing so still that his eyes almost miss her. He steams his eggs to perfection. Studies her silhouette. The woman turns off her lights and leaves the room.

C.

The chef is hosting a party. The sight is a shock. Clara has never seen him with anyone but his roommate, and on most Friday nights, he is leaving for work as she is getting ready for bed. Now he is dancing, laughing, gesticulating. Drinking. No; not drinking—when the amoebic crowd takes a shot, he does not. When a friend pours him a drink, he sets it down when they leave. He is casual, kind. The best type of host.

Clara opens her laptop, but she cannot stop staring out the window. She fiddles with her ring, stands and sits again. She has always had trouble sitting still, but tonight her body is buzzing not with instability but possibility.

She showers, washes her laundry. She moves books from her windowsill until there is a space left wide open. Plants, she decides, are what she needs. Not pots and pans but living things to fill space, cacti, peace lilies, maybe daffodils to signify spring. She will buy them tomorrow, and if their planters are dull she will place them in kitchen pots. 

She laughs, shouts the phrase “potted plants in a pot.” She twirls with an arm extended for a phantom partner, and she spins in time to the muffled music from across the courtyard.

J.

The woman is sleeping, but Jonathan is not. At 2 AM, his eyes are glued to flat people falling into fake love. His brother barges into his room. Let’s go, Will says, tossing over a nice t-shirt. The true love of your life waits for no one.

In the taxi, Jonathan thinks about how the opposite is true. No one waits for the love of their life, or no one should, because if there is too much waiting, there is no more love. For two years he waited. For Emma to move east, for life together to begin. His hopes rose when she arrived unannounced, full suitcase in tow, only to crash with three words: This isn’t working.

The car stops in Midtown. Will leads, Jonathan straggles. They walk up two flights of stairs, knock on a decorated door. The bass is deep and the room is crowded, and a woman Jonathan does not know bumps into him. Her hair falls in a black curtain. Recognition takes hold. She lifts her head, Jonathan ducks his own. He is surprised by his disappointment, his surety. It is not her. 

I don’t know you, she says. 

What is this? he asks. 

A birthday, or housewarming, or mixer, or whatever.

She hands him a drink. Does it matter? she says. Will you drink? she means. Jonathan takes the can, swirls it idly. He considers setting it down, but then he remembers—there is no reason for that anymore. So he sips. The woman cheers. The cool liquid tastes of relief.

C.        

Summer arrives on Clara’s way to her husband. Her friend is driving, the sky is bright, and the air outside her open window is sticky and warm. At the Cedar Grove cemetery, Clara’s neck burns in the sun. 

She leaves a note on the gravestone like she does every year. It is the shortest one she’s ever left, and Clara wonders if her late husband will be happy for her or hurt. I love you, she mouths, but she does not cry, not this time. 

On the car ride home, her friend tells her there is a new, male associate at her desk. Clara asks what he is like. Alice describes his mannerisms. How he is blunt and humorous without trying to be. How he asks good questions but is sometimes too aggressive in the way he asks them. How his mother recently died, and that’s why he moved to New York.

Alice pauses. Clara plays with a loose seam on her shirt. He sounds like Justin, she says towards the sky. Exactly, her friend responds.

Clara says nothing more. Her chest hurts, and she is surprised by the pain of pain dulling. She thanks Alice for the ride, asks to be let out early at City Hall Park. It is a beautiful day. She will walk down Beekman to Nassau to home. A detour, a stroll. If she sees the chef, she will say hi. I think I live across from you.

J.

Jonathan wakes with his limbs sprawled on the living room couch. He feels young, amorphous, full of potential. His head still buzzes with beer from last night.  

He opens his eyes. He has slept for a year or just a day. He holds up a hand. He squints as though he is blinded by light, though the sky is gray. The woman is home today, and in between his fingers he sees parts of her body. Crossed legs between pinky and fourth, a bright blue torso between fourth and third. A shock of hair and an open laptop in the next frame. She must have just come home from work, but the arch of her neck is alert, alive. She is writing again, always writing. The next great American novel or a story about rebirth.

C.

      The financial district is bustling with wide-eyed vacationers. Clara walks slowly, pretending to be one of them. She buys a pair of sunglasses outside Brooklyn Bridge station, a hot dog at the corner cart. A young couple asks her for directions, and she compliments the matching styles of their outfits. Soon, she is only three doors away from the Beekman Residences. This street is quieter. Suddenly, she is nervous.

Clara enters behind a curvy brunette with a suitcase. A man approaches. The brunette smiles, calls out a name—hi, Jonathan. The man leans in to kiss her. His hair falls forward, and it is a revelation, a brutal recognition; a curly black S framing his thin face. 

For days Clara will convince herself that nothing has changed. Then a week will pass, and the shower water will unexpectedly run cold. She will yelp, grab her orange towel, and wait on her bed. She will start sobbing and find herself unable to stop.

***

      It is five PM on the first of August, and the woman is walking out of Fulton Street Station. She is still wearing her scrubs, the blue ones that will need to be replaced soon, and her eyes are open but she comprehends nothing except the music playing in her head.

It takes the man a moment to recognize her. The man is late for his own restaurant’s grand opening, and he is rushing, his left shoe still untied. He has forgotten his apron. He turns once, twice, back where he started because he has no time to go back up 22 floors. He sends his brother a hurried text with many question marks.

The man and the woman collide. An earbud drops to the sidewalk, rolls dangerously close to the gutter. The man only recognizes the woman because of her outfit. Her face is not oval but round, her eyebrows long and sloped in a permanent look of slight concern. She is less attractive but more beautiful up close, and he is too to her.

The man opens his mouth. A red blush creeps up his neck, and he does not know if he has it in him to ask the question yet again, so soon after he has decided to turn a new leaf. But the woman does not give him a chance to decide. For her, this is not a moment of sparks flying but electric shocks. She cannot speak to him. Does he recognize her? Can he see the remnants of pain and embarrassment behind her face?

I will do it, the man decides. His heart swells. Hers constricts. Before he can get the first words out, she is laughing nervously and stepping around him.

Lillian Yuan is a writer and educator based in New York City. Her work has appeared in The New Journal and the Yale Daily News, where she received a 1st place Wallace Prize for fiction. She loves watching videos of cats but doesn't ever want to own one. She is currently working on a psychological thriller.