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Groundhog Day - Part Three

By Arthur Phillips

Whit knows where the cute window-dresser works. He's getting very familiar with the menu at the restaurant across the street. But even though she's the first woman he's felt a spark for since the tragedy, his wife's death still provides the window through which he sees the world -- and through which the world sees him.

He is a pleasant, mildly pathetic joke to himself the fourth and fifth times he sits for that same evening sandwich at the same giant window with the arch of inverted emerald letters, and does not see her. Faint pedestrians roll silently by. Evening six, some teenagers press their noses and mouths to the window and make goggle-eyed, lip-licking faces at his food, drive themselves insane with hilarity before stumbling off, their spit freezing in bubbled tracks on his window.

Winter struts at its bullying coldest for sandwich seven but, directly in front of Whit's window, a relentless street magician refuses to step aside. He performs with his back to the restaurant's glass, displaying a genius's faith in what appears to be only mediocre talent. Back-lit by the restaurant's glow, the bundled, obese prestidigitator fumbles his barely vanishing half-cigarettes and slippery coins. His stinging, fat fingers jut blue from fraying sleeves.

Braving that icy night air, a very small and child-heavy spectatorship arranges itself around the frigid trickster while Whit eats over his shoulder, behind the glass and, without seeing the tricks themselves, learns how nearly every illusion is accomplished: the extra half-cigarette wedged in a plump palm, the spare coin rolling from a sleeve at an angle only Whit can see. He can only guess when a trick has climaxed by the expressions on the faces of marveling children trembling on impatient fathers' knotted shoulders. Although Whit receives none of the usual payoff of seeing the tricks from the front, it is an oddly satisfying performance -- no magic, just the relaxing rhythm of the swaying fat back, pivoting slightly for surprise or secrecy (indistinguishable from Whit's angle), the props which drop or hide, indifferent to their rear-window witness.

A jumpy college kid joins the audience then catches Whit's eye, visibly realizes what the window signifies. He enters the restaurant with a cold waft of alcohol and stands next to the counter, examines events from Whit's point-of-view. "How 'bout that? Dude, he's got an extra cigarette. That's how the hell..." and the young man opens the door and yells out his discovery to no one, everyone: "Yo, he's got an extra cigarette! That's how he does it, look, look, right there he's got -- there -- see? That's not the same ciga--FUCK!" Whit has slammed the door on the kid's hand, and it waves frantically, pulling its grunting owner back into the restaurant. "What the hell, dude?!"

"Don't do that. That's not good," Whit says very quietly. Whit is a large man, with a stage-two-male-pattern-balding crewcut. He can be effortlessly menacing, in the style of ex-military men (though he is not one).

"Whatever."

Beyond the audience's mitten-muffled applause, the brown corner of her building has that permanently stained look of concrete in mid-winter. And -- voilà! That was all it took to conjure her. She looks bored up there this evening, works with less diligence. She pulls a cap off a child's head frame, but just leans against the white wall, stares absently at her reflection, then through it, down onto the passing car roofs, the quivering radio antennae, the crystal-cystic windshields and striped back windows, the jumbo magic-man. Her eyes sweep the shops directly across from her, glide twenty feet over Whit's impassioned impatience. Her eyes descend to the ground floor several stores to his left. He watches her eyes approaching him. He knows well by now what she is seeing as she moves towards him: now the post-holiday discounted soaps, lotions, rough scrubbers, now the pâtés in gleaming aspic, wicker baskets of jarred marmalades suspending spiral rinds, cut-glass petri dishes spotlit and glistening with black sturgeon eggs, now she is entering his restaurant, scanning the unoccupied window-front counter just on the other side of the door, a mere thought away, less than a second, her eyes will meet his over magic-man's head, she will see him and pause, will notice him and promise only some possibility, some reservoir of untapped mystery, new memories he can scarcely even believe in, her eyes rest on the magic show, don't yet penetrate the chubby illusionist...and she is cut loose, turns away from her reverie, tosses high in her yellow air the child's cap she has been twirling and fingering, and, her eyes white and her jaw open, gamely tries and laughingly fails to catch it on her head.

She gets back to work. She unfurls and tacks a pink and yellow banner to the back wall: THINK SPRING!! She strips the tiny shirts from her male colleagues, allowing the canvas toddlers to revel in their fast-forwarded world's seasonable thaw. She checks her reflected hair and is too soon out of view.

He chews again, slowly and open-mouthed. He is stunned by the race of his heart, by the rush of feeling for this out-of-focus stranger. To be clear: he is not an idiot or a mumbling stalker: he knows she is just a stranger, but that is rare enough. She is not a screen to invert and make appealing his projected troubles. She persistently refuses to be a mannequin for his memories. She is just a good-looking stranger, with a certain grace and humor in her actions and approach to her job. She wears lightly a stranger's possibilities and unpredictable uniquenesses, which he did not know until this evening (if he even knows it now) he has been craving.

On the restaurant's wall to his right, he studies her yellow aerie reflected in the glass front of a framed poster. Here her imperative banner reads backwards while the emerald arch of O.B. LEARY'S is double-inverted to clarity.

---

Bleary Irishmen worked their magic on Claire's clothes one day, transforming them into a single blank receipt ("You can fill in wh'tever amount suits your fancy," sang the larger one, a red-bearded giant in plaid overalls who had been, he informed Whit over Guinness in the kitchen, a funeral home director before dedicating himself to this particular charity). For some weeks after, homeless women -- stinking and filthy in Claire's dresses -- visited Whit's dreams and slurred important messages which he could not quite hear.

In a frenzied period of strength five months after she died, Whit took days off work and began divesting of her belongings. After the clothes, he sold her few jewels. Her car and bike and rowing machine went without much struggle. Hauling, giving, selling, burning. Papers and old letters he was smart enough not even to read. Framed dusty diplomas. Books in which he had no interest.

Her mail perversely persisted, the postal service not offering a sufficiently expansive forwarding option. Charities unaccustomed to their friend's sudden chintziness started reminding her of her previous generosity and their urgently mounting need for her renewed attentions. "Miss Berners," they misspelled, "are you aware that the leading cause of death in women aged 30-50 is..." She was easily survived by her medical bills and protracted negotiations with a grudging insurer. The mail was predictable, cruel: "Hey, '81s!!! It's going to be an eighty-'onederful' reunion!!! The kick-off event will be on the patio of the Canyon Café on June 4 at 5 pm, sharp!!! Oh, yes, June is coming, no matter what this snow makes you think!!!"

Paperwork. Phone calls with the apologetic or obtuse. She is no longer taxable. She will no longer be contributing to her 401k. Please stop charging $1.50 for the extra calling card. Please stop sending dental reminders. No, she will not be renewing her membership, but thank you for your call. Because she's dead. That's all right.

He had intended to keep the CDs, but discovered to his surprise that most of them were so memory-logged as to be practically inaudible. He stood and flipped through New Arrivals while a young woman spangled with metallic rings and bars deftly arranged his offering into stacks of $.25, $.50, $.75, $1.00, $1.75, and $2.00 each. He took his $25.25, after showing proper identification, and when he returned home, the bookcase was alarmingly empty. A lot of things were empty. Her chest of drawers could go now, and with it the knick-knacks that had washed onto its top: a tarnishing bowl that once held aromatic petals and golden pinecones, a brain-teaser made of a magnetic base and tiny snowflakes of interlocking metal. Whit realized he would soon have divested himself so well that he would be living in a brand-new boy-bachelor's condo again, sparsely furnished, without any personality at all: a TV and sports-heavy cable, some pans, a computer, sweat pants, scattered spring-loaded hand-exercisers. Without her there was no interesting trace of himself. He scrambled that day to save anything remaining that was sufficiently sexless. The resulting apartment was peculiarly decorated.