Luigi Likes Looking at Beth

Larry “Luigi” Lagui spends his free Tuesday mornings, and just about all his Tuesday mornings are free of scheduled engagements or are made that way by determined effort, sitting on a stool at the far end of the counter down at Murray’s Sterling Diner, slowly drinking a bottomless cup of coffee, intently watching Beth Prentiss, a tall, slender, stick-like woman with straight, jet-black hair half way down her back, a wide toothy overbite revealed by pushed-back, parted lips and what have to be at least 10, double A, white flat shoes that look like the dashed lines of an open highway, the likes of Popeye’s Olive Oyl in sustained overdrive, rapidly walk about in a pressed, almost formal, knee-length white work skirt and buttoned-down-the-front, neatly tucked-in blouse complete with a little white hat stuffed in her hair, a crown of sorts, that always seems at odds with her long vertical lines and lever-like extremities, which are in mixed shades of contrast to the without-pretense, intense but detached expression she carries around no matter if she’s bringing eggs, bacon, hash browns, juice and coffee or taking away plates, glasses, cups and dirty napkins after a customer walks away, even if the tip is little or nothing or 50%, because something else must be operating in her mind that could produce such a disconnect between cause and effect, between stimulus and response, between what she does and how she does it, that produces such an exceptionally confounding perplexity, that keeps him coming back and staying for hours at a time, trying to figure how a woman that he guesses is between 40 and 50, from clues given by wrinkles around her big, dark brown eyes, in the dry baked, tanned skin of her hard face, in the oversized, vein-ridged, hands with deep red painted nails that are incongruously not unpainted, bitten to the quick, and by the clipped cadence she uses when taking an order, could be so utterly removed from her surroundings, yet touch him so completely without physical contact, nor could he imagine what the sensation would be like since her touch has nothing of the sort to do with the welcome contact between sexes or a precursor to friendship but has everything to do with the deep lure of curiosity, saddled together with a companion challenge to take in what she offers in her impossible-to-ignore presence and conduct, so that touch or, better put, grasp, has him focused in a state of pure observation and information filing, while resisting the temptation to say more than his flapjacks and coffee order that actually couldn’t really be any demonstration of self-discipline on his part, for she speaks to no customer, colleague or cook unless it is for diner business, so continual and detailed analysis of her most odd and bold state of being can be contemplated, unadorned, in plain daylight, under the bright lights, with no concern for rebuttal or reprisal, for she seems to lack any self-conscious reactions to anyone or how they act, and that fact affords the unusual, compelling pleasure of staring at someone in an addicting, if he didn’t know better, voyeurism, that satisfies his curiosity so fully that it never satisfies it and what more could he want from this experience, that many others would consider wasted, yet wasted is not how he feels afterwards when her image is sharper than any picture in his mind, than looking forward to next Tuesday in great expectation?