a polyptych of what may have happened after the Martini in Nancy Wilson's Guess Who I Saw Today
Prologue: On Reflection
Some stories never end - they fade,
spoken softly under lamplight,
where truth enters quietly,
like a draft beneath the door.
This one follows three people
bound by a single evening:
a husband, his wife,
and the woman who loved him elsewhere.
Their lives unfold not in argument,
but in echo - through glass,
through memory, through the long light
of forgiveness.
Each voice stands alone,
yet their silences overlap.
Like light through crystal, the story fractures,
showing not who was right, but who remained.
The Other Woman
He tells me I’m sunlight,
but I know I’m the hour before
the hush that tricks the world
into believing light is mercy.
In the café window,
our reflections hold hands
better than we do.
The glass forgives everything.
He laughs - a sound that spills
like a secret used one too many times.
Outside, a woman passes,
her coat the same gray as weather after hope.
For a moment I think she sees me.
Or through me.
I sip what’s left of the wine.
Each swallow rehearses forgetting.
When he leaves, I stay.
The waiter pretends not to notice.
The room exhales around me,
soft with pity.
I think - someone will love me next
and call it redemption.
But the moon knows better.
It keeps its distance,
bright and borrowed,
lighting whoever needs to lie.
After the Martini
The ice is still whole,
breathing in the glass you left behind.
Outside, rain that delayed you
stands on the porch like a stray dog,
waiting to be let in.
The kitchen smells of gin and lemon -
a clean sort of ruin.
I wash the glasses twice:
once for the lipstick, once for the lie.
No shouting. No broken glass.
Only the clock, astonished
that time still moves
after a heart learns the truth.
I think of the waiter -
his careful hands arranging
two drinks between strangers.
Did he know how love becomes a performance?
Your shoes wait by the door,
two small animals
that have forgotten their names.
By morning,
I’ll fold this evening into the linen drawer,
where no one looks.
The Husband
He lived near the coast,
in a house with too many windows.
Each morning, he made coffee
strong enough to remember things.
The neighbors said he was kind,
though he never stayed long.
He’d smile - hands in pockets -
as if keeping the past from spilling out.
Sometimes he walked the pier at dusk,
watching the tide fold in on itself.
He liked that the sea never asked
where he’d been,
only returned
to erase what was written in sand.
He thought of both women,
but never together.
Memory required distance -
a mercy learned too late.
He still dreamed of the café,
its small, impossible light,
their laughter like coins
dropped into a fountain -
every wish dissolving at once.
One winter he packed a single bag and left,
forgetting to lock the door.
When the neighbors noticed,
the sea had already moved closer.
They said he must have gone on,
but the gulls above the water
still call his name in fragments -
a syllable, a breath,
a man unmade by his own reflection.
The Wife, Years Later
I saw her again today -
the one from the café.
Not in shadow this time,
but under the noon light,
where everything confesses.
She was buying peaches,
lifting each one to the sun
as if testing its heart.
The air smelled of sweetness and dust -
the beginning of wanting.
She didn’t see me.
Or maybe she did
and let the world blur me out,
the way a window forgets its reflection.
I stood beside the apples,
remembering the day
I watched her laugh at my table,
though she didn’t know it was mine.
My husband between us -
a coin passed from one palm to another.
Years gathered since then,
winters of quiet dinners,
of learning how absence
folds itself into the napkins.
Now he’s gone.
Not to her, not to anyone -
just gone.
And still I think of her hands,
careful with the fruit,
how she weighed what was ripe
and what was already ruined.
When I left the market,
I didn’t speak her name.
It wasn’t forgiveness,
only the sound of letting go,
a small mercy
that doesn’t bloom,
but stops the bleeding.
The Meeting
It was the library, of all places -
the hush between shelves,
the dust of words we both had lived.
She reached for a book of poems,
the spine worn thin as an old scar.
Our hands touched the air
at the same time -
a small collision of ghosts.
Neither of us said his name.
We didn’t need to.
It hovered...
like perfume clinging to a dress
you gave away years ago.
Up close, she looked softer,
as if time had traded
her hunger for light.
And I, no longer the woman
who waited by the window.
For a moment I wanted to tell her
how the house is quiet now,
how the garden forgave the frost,
how I almost miss the ache of jealousy
because it meant the heart was still alive.
But she smiled,
a trembling peace
I recognized as my own reflection
in another season.
We nodded -
two witnesses
to what love can ruin
and still leave standing.
Then she turned away,
and I thought:
so this is forgiveness -
the faint closing of a book,
the silence after.
Epilogue: The Glass and the Light
In the end, no one wins.
But everyone learns to see.
The café is gone,
the martinis long melted.
What remains is the mirror each carried home...
a way to know oneself
by what was once shared,
by what could not be kept.
And somewhere,
in that brief, impossible light
before the hour turns,
all three are still there:
the husband, the wife, the other -
reflected, refracted, forgiven,
if only by time.
GBS
2012
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