Romeo & Serviette

The café where I worked as a waiter was unremarkable, with one exception: every morning, like clockwork, the same raven-haired beauty would stroll in and sit at her preferred table. A woman fifteen years my senior.

She often wore fashionable floppy hats, designer sunglasses and elbow-length gloves, and embodied all the glamor of Hollywood’s Golden Age. But, she wasn’t an actress. Not to my knowledge.

And each morning, after finishing her cappuccino scuro, she would retouch her lipstick and then blot her lips on a crisp white serviette. Her perfect lips.

Now comes the part I'm hesitant to share. I regularly pocketed those serviettes and took them home. In my cramped apartment where I lived a bohemian lifestyle, on a small wall in the living room, I pasted the square serviettes like uniform rows of ceramic tiles, until I had filled the entire wall with her lipstick “kisses.” To me it was erotic art.

Then one Thursday, beauty forgot one of her gloves at the café. Our lost and found was a cardboard box filled with unclaimed gym clothes and musty paperbacks. In a word, gross. I decided to take the glove home for safekeeping.

Shortly after dinner, I heard a soft knock on my apartment door. Standing in the doorway was the raven-haired beauty. "The owner gave me your address," was all she said before holding up a lone glove. When my diaphragm unclenched I choked out, "Wait here."

However, after grabbing the misplaced glove from the bedroom, I was stunned to find her standing in front of the wall of serviettes. Dammit. Red-faced, I watched her eyes scan the rows of lipstick impressions.

A moment that could have turned ugly didn't. She smiled and eventually kissed me and peeled off my shirt. We made love pressed against the secret wall, like some risqué performance art piece.

Afterward, I watched her dress and retouch her lipstick. Then she blotted her freshly painted lips on my cheap white cotton briefs and dropped the garment in my lap. A memento for my art project? No. A parting gift. Because she never again visited the café.