The Mahogany Desk

The door to the spice library was heavier than it looked, old oak with a brass handle worn smooth by a century of hands, and I had to put my shoulder into it a little to get it open, which meant I came into the room kind of stumbling, like a man arriving late to his own audition. Inside it smelled like every kitchen in the world at once, cinnamon and cumin and something sharper I couldn't name, and the light was low and amber because somebody had decided that a former stagecoach way station in Mafra, Portugal, ought to be lit like a chapel. I'm Logan, I'm thirty-three, and between jobs as an actor, which is a polite way of saying I'd done one commercial for a mattress company in Lisbon and a lot of standing in line.

I stood there in the doorway scanning the crowd, all these locals and a few tourists drifting between the shelves of herbs and spices, a donkey cart parked outside with old leather tack draped over it like the ghosts of the road were still shopping, and I could not find her anywhere.

Six years ago, when I was twenty-seven and she was twenty-four, Gracie and I matched on one of those apps where you talk for weeks and convince yourselves you're soulmates, and then I got cold feet about meeting her in person and just, evaporated. Vanished. Blocked her without a word, which is the kind of thing a man does once and then carries around like a stone in his shoe for the rest of his thirties. Two weeks ago she'd found me again on a different site, of all the improbable things, and her first message was one line, "you still owe me a coffee," and I'd typed yes before I'd even finished reading it, which tells you something about how the stone had been sitting in there.

And then I saw her hand before I saw her, raised above a shelf of little glass jars, waving at me from the far corner of the room, and there she was, thirty years old now and somehow exactly the way my memory had filed her, dark hair pinned up, wearing a green jacket that made her look like she'd been planted there on purpose. She was holding an enormous wooden object against her hip, some kind of box with hinges, and she was smiling in a way that had a wobble in it, the same wobble I could feel starting in my own face.

"You came," she said, when I got close enough. "I had money on you not coming. I was gonna win."

"I considered it," I said. "For about four seconds. Then I remembered I'd already done that once and it didn't age well."

"Well, look at you, learning from your mistakes six years later. Very mature of you." She shifted the wooden thing on her hip. "Do you want to hold this? It's heavier than it looks and I've been carrying it around like an idiot because I wanted you to see it."

I took it from her and nearly dropped it, because it was one of those folding traveling desks, mahogany, dark and oily-looking, with brass corners and a slanted top that opened up into little cubbies, the kind of thing a merchant on a stagecoach would've used to write letters while the wheels jolted underneath him. "Gracie, this is gorgeous. Where did you even find this?"

"There's a guy outside with the donkey cart, he sells old tack and old furniture and God knows what else, and I saw this and I just, I don't know, I bought it before I'd finished thinking about it." She ran her finger along the edge of the slanted top, and I watched her do it and thought about her hands in a way I hadn't let myself in six years. "The guy said it came out of a house in Ericeira. I'm gonna put it in my hallway and put my keys on it, which is honestly a stupid thing to do with a two-hundred-year-old desk, but that's what I'm gonna do."

"You should write letters on it," I said. "That's the whole point of a traveling desk. Some man wrote a love letter on this thing while his horse was being changed at a station exactly like this one, and now you're gonna put your keys on it."

"Keys are a love letter to your future self, sort of, if you squint." She said it fast, and we both laughed, and the laugh broke some of the stiffness out of the air between us, but not all of it, because there was a lot of stiffness to break.

We started walking the shelves, because you have to walk the shelves in a spice library, that's the whole arrangement, and she pointed out jars to me like a tour guide, cumin from one region and cumin from another that she swore tasted completely different, saffron in a locked case like the crown jewels, a jar of something gray-green that she said was an herb nobody had been able to identify since the library opened. The crowd was thicker near the entrance, families and older couples and one man in a hat who'd clearly come to be seen rather than to smell anything, and we drifted away from all of it, deeper into the aisles, talking about safe things, her job as a registrar at the state bond office, which she described as "being paid to care very much about paperwork," my last audition, which had been for the role of Dead Businessman Number Two and had gone exactly as well as that sounds.

Every safe thing had a hole in the middle of it, though, because the middle of every conversation was the six years we'd both been pretending we weren't thinking about.

"You look good," she said, at one point, in the tone of a person who'd been holding a sentence too long and finally let it fall. "Taller than your pictures."

"You've seen my pictures this whole time?"

"I looked, obviously. Once. Fine, four times. You looked at mine too, don't pretend you didn't, I can tell when a man is lying because he starts describing the spice shelves." She stopped walking, right there in the aisle between the saffron case and a wall of small labeled tins, and turned to face me, and the low amber light caught her face and I understood, all over again, why twenty-seven-year-old me had been so terrified of this exact moment. "Okay. I'm gonna ask the question, because we're gonna keep dancing around these jars all afternoon otherwise, and I didn't buy a mahogany desk to dance."

"Ask," I said, and my mouth had gone dry, which I blamed on the cumin.

"That last night, before we were supposed to meet. We'd been talking for six weeks, Logan, six weeks, I'd told you things I hadn't told my own sister, and then you just, gone. No message, nothing. I sat in that café in Porto for two hours with a book I wasn't reading, ordering things I didn't want." She wasn't angry, exactly, her voice was steady and quiet, but her jaw was set the way a jaw sets when a person has rehearsed a question for a long time. "So. Why didn't you show?"

* * *

I looked down at the mahogany desk I was still holding, which is a thing a man does when he needs a second to find an answer, and the desk did not help me, it just sat there being two hundred years old and full of other people's secrets.

"I got scared," I said, finally. "It's the stupidest possible answer, and it's the true one. Six weeks of talking to you, and I'd built you up so big in my head that I decided the actual person could never survive the comparison, so I, removed myself before you could compare. Which, I now know, is just a coward's way of making sure the story ends on his terms."

Gracie watched me say all of it, and she didn't soften right away, which I respected, and then she reached out and took one of the brass corners of the desk in her hand, not taking it from me, just holding on to it, like we were both holding this ridiculous beautiful object between us in a spice library in a town that used to be the last stop for stagecoaches.

"Two hours," she said. "I ordered four coffees. The waiter started feeling sorry for me."

"I've thought about that waiter. I've invented a whole personality for him."

"He had kind eyes and he judged me, and he was right to." She let go of the desk, and her hand brushed mine on the way back, and neither of us moved away from the touch. "You realize you picked a hell of a place to apologize. I'm holding grudges badly in public, surrounded by saffron."

"I know. I walked in and immediately thought, this is the least private place on earth to have this conversation."

"Well." She looked at the desk, then up at me, and the wobble was back in her smile but lower this time, steadier. "You're here. You came. That's more than I had six years ago, so I'm gonna count it. But you're buying me dinner tonight, and you're gonna sit through the entire story of what that café did to my trust in strangers, and then maybe, maybe, we'll see about the rest."

"Fair deal," I said, and meant it, and then because I was apparently in the business of emptying out six years of things I'd swallowed, I kept going. "I've written you about a hundred messages since then, by the way. Never sent any of them. There was a draft folder in my life with your name on it, and every so often I'd add a sentence and then delete it and feel worse."

"A hundred," Gracie said. "That's so much worse than zero, honestly, zero I could've written off as an accident, a hundred means you were carrying me around in your pocket for six years like a guilty coin."

"That is roughly what it felt like, yes."

"Good," she said, and then laughed, actually laughed, this short startled sound that bounced off the saffron case, and she pressed her hand over her mouth and said, "sorry, sorry, it's just, I spent six years thinking I was uniquely forgettable, that some man had looked at everything I'd told him and decided, nah, and the whole time you were sitting in a draft folder being dramatic about it."

"Dramatic is one word for it."

"It's the polite word." She was still laughing a little as she said it, and the laugh did something to the air between us, took the last of the courtroom formality out of it, and I found myself laughing too, this low embarrassed sound, two adults in their thirties standing among jars of paprika