Eurydice in the Grand Central Oyster Bar

Miles, when I mentioned I had never seen the Oyster Bar, led me inside with loping steps. A scene from a novel I’d read recently took place there. The protagonist was an enigmatic blond socialite, a woman I could only ever dream of being. It seemed she lived in a different New York City; her problems were glamorous, even when she slit her wrists.
I didn’t share this with Miles, who was a few paces ahead. He was always walking in front of me; staring at his back was what I did most in the months of our mating dance, and still, our relationship. Why we were in Grand Central, I don’t remember.
The smell of seafood hit instantly as we crossed into the restaurant. It was a cozy cave of gingham tablecloths, crowded with people—the kind of place I would have been ecstatic to binge drink in, if I still drank.
I was about six months sober, having admitted to myself I could not drink responsibly. One of the last drinks I’d had was an Aperol Spritz with Miles, at a cafe, open late, not far from IFC. After two of these each, and discussion of the film we’d make together (it was not a date), we departed for the same station; emboldened, yet also unthinking—an adjective combo for a drunk person—I let my fingertips trail his back, from his shirt collar to his waist. This was the first time that when we walked together, he left me some steps behind.
In the dark restaurant in the caverns of Grand Central, Miles was looking in a direction other than the way he was going. A waiter was traveling fast across the floor, holding a full tray of beers. There must have been twelve, fifteen, twenty pints (some obscene number) glowing golden, crowding the whole tray. Both the waiter and Miles moved rocket-fast, oblivious of the other.
His path would cross with my boyfriend’s, and quickly. My arm darted across Miles’ chest, stopping him from walking straight into disaster.

 
I remembered this scene tonight, headed home alone. I had been writing at a new, non-trendy coffee shop in a slip dress. The shop’s furniture was the builder’s grade mid-century modern of Amazon sellers, spaced too far apart in too bright a space; my dress, the outfit of someone wanting to be looked at. I dreamt of some passerby outside the window, who might turn around to gaze longer.
This moment at the Oyster Bar was so fleeting, Miles—now my ex—probably doesn’t remember it. We didn’t eat there or have a drink; we just went down to the train, back to Brooklyn.
In a world where I hadn’t stopped Miles’ barreling body, the pints would have crashed to the floor. They wouldn’t fall all at once; the crash-bang would crescendo, loud enough to attract everyone’s attention. Imagining this, angry tears welled in my eyes—like the waiter had been carrying not beer, but everything I’d poured into Miles over our pathetically short time together.
I had believed our relationship was the universe’s divine doing. When Miles told me he loved me after just a few weeks, I shared this with my mother. How lucky was I, I thought all the time, drunk only in the throes of new love. Unaware of a fishy smell.
I trekked the dirty Bushwick streets back to my apartment, with my AirPods in but no music playing (so that I heard a man whistle lowly hooolaaaa as I passed). I raged: in the Oyster Bar, I had saved us from the embarrassment of our lives.
Miles hadn’t been looking where he was going; he never was. Miles was always so unaware and lashing, moving through the world askew, with the swinging, jerking steps of a marionette. Many times I’d watch him stop short in the middle of the sidewalk, in the river of rush hour bodies in midtown, to find something on his phone or whatever. (I’d move with the crowd until I could exit the flow of traffic, and stand by.) He didn’t consider anyone else who had somewhere to be. He certainly wasn’t thinking of me. Often our bodies bumped each other, on the street or on set and in the obstacle course of his messy apartment. I often put my hands up just in time to keep him from body-checking me. Where was his spatial awareness? Where was his sense of direction, and why (I was ashamed to ask but lamented just the same) did it have so little to do with me?
I stepped into the crosswalk. The night’s sobering cold mixed with the dreamy dark of the Oyster Bar, and then, punchdrunk summer: citrus. The chambray of Miles’ shirt stretched between his shoulder blades; his scruffy neck. Look at me, I had pleaded from the jump.

E.F. Flynn is a Brooklyn-based writer and performer whose thesis advisor described her as "fun but also crazy." Her work can be seen in Hobart, The Offing, and Pulse Spikes Magazine, among others.