Ilse is beautiful because of the angle of her nose, the point it comes to elegantly on her face that is miraculously proportionate. If you were to kiss her, tilt her head to the left with the fingers of your left hand sliding through her hair to nestle her head while your lips move to meet, you will see her left eye closed and dreaming of love to take her and it is assuredly the same on the right, an eye locked down in anticipation. But I have never kissed her, I only daydream about her as I tap my pen to pad, watching her at the front of the office, casually answering phones with a hair raising roll of the tongue that makes my arms all prickly, and my name is Theodore, an infinite delight when she calls me, over the phone or in person. And sometimes, when she is exasperated she curses in English, it is all I can do not to grab her, hold her close to tell me about everything she despises and pepper it with Spanish. But I cannot love her, it is against the rules as she is married now, to a schmuck so schmucky he seems familiar only because he is the embodiment of every schmuck I have known in life. And he gets to love her, to impregnate her–our babies would be supermodels and strong and artsy and passive and loud and funny and quiet and everything else that I observe in us when I should be focusing on becoming a better writer. Oh wait, that is what I am doing with Ilse, when I stand next to her, smelling her and pretending to need something that I could do without but will not because indulgence is a tipping point–the point at which all things hold at a pivot waiting to swing in a wild direction and change what fate lazily allowed, the princess and the schmuck, it is laughable.
Ilse is very smart as well. She told me on a walk once about her father. Ilse is from Cuba and she is friends with Delmy, the two went to school together and are my coworkers. Delmy is sunshine. Ilse told me that as she got older, she was to become a lawyer, it is what her father was and what she too would become. She studied to become a lawyer and for two years made it work before calling it quits. “It is not a life that I would have chosen for myself,” I imagine her saying on that bright summer day when the sun was out on Westinghouse and big trucks and cars passed by on the street. We ducked through trees and she made me smile as she talked. She was a woman, a very pretty woman and I felt lucky to be with her. She can be whatever she wants to be but she would make a beautiful mother to my children and I could never make her do anything that did not make her smile with her whole body.
As I walked out of work yesterday, I was despondent. Things could be going better, I could be happier, I could be better at my job. I should stay late, but the later I stay the more I hate it. And then, from behind me, my name with the ‘r’ that makes the hair on my arms react. And Ilse is there, and we recap and walk to our cars, hers that her schmucky husband probably sold her seeing as he is a car salesman and just schmucky enough to do a thing like that. I don’t kiss her goodbye, I wave, and she waves and we both smile long enough that I pine all the way home.
Ilse, I know a girl named Ilse.
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