Lillian Bassman, The V-Back Evenings: Suzy Parker, Harper's Bazaar, New York, 1955. Photographs New York.
Lunch with Donna
Written by Gauraa Shekhar
Donna was a summer baby. She believed that the specific circumstances of her birth had come to become her. Perhaps rain had inspired fight; perhaps the definite degrees of Park Avenue Junes determined in her a perennial quickness —a rapid cycling between highs and lows, a tendency to reveal the tender patch of back between her shoulders.
There was, of course, a chance that none of this was true. That it had never been; that Donna was, once again, turning to the fiction of things when it was time to look inward. Did it matter now? Had it ever?
Thursday evening, a box arrived at her door. It was from John, a man who wanted little more than Donna by his side. She tried to resist the box. She placed it behind old shopping bags in the closet. She pulled her winter coats to the front. She had hoped to forget. She established rules for herself. She could unwrap it the next day, but only if she walked to the park and saw ten red cars on her way back. She could read the note, but only after she returned Susie’s calls.
However, John rang on Friday, and to no one’s surprise, Donna’s conditional discipline collapsed at the first sign of attention.
“What do you think?” he said.
Donna reached for the box, cheating herself, curling the telephone wire along her fingers as she undid the white ribbon. A pendant necklace. An invitation to lunch. She excavated a thin chain from packing tissue and held it to the mirror, searching for a version of herself in the largesse of his silver.
“Oh, it’s beautiful, John,” she told him, though she’d caught a small chip in her fingernail. A soft edge lost to the small buckle of a lobster clasp. She wondered if this were a harbinger, a secret message she had failed, somehow, to understand.
“Will you wear it to lunch tomorrow?”
Donna looked outside her window for an answer, some sign to outsource a decision, but it was raining. She had already lost so much that year. Her marriage, her sister. Her willingness to go to the theatre. What harm could come out of one lunch with a nice-enough man?
She said sure, though she felt uncertain at best.
The months following her divorce, Donna thought she would feel a deep sense of loss, some invisible pull, Park Avenue calling her name in code. She’d heard storied accounts of women returning to bad husbands because they missed their buildings. But Donna hadn’t crossed her old street in months. She hadn’t exchanged pleasantries with her old doorman. She wanted to believe there was a powerful simplicity to her dimly-lit walk-up; to living alone with enough closet space for two.
Lillian Bassman, Barbara Mullen aboard Le Bateau-Mouche, Chanel Advertising Campaign, Paris, 1960. Photographs New York.
In the dark of her apartment, Donna fancied herself a movie star. Not Rita Hayworth but Gina Lollobrigida, possibly — a real decision-maker, a woman of admirers and clean divorces.
Donna laid her black dresses on the bed, slipped into them one at a time. Chanel felt good against her skin, she decided. Dressing up gave her something to do: a step that followed another and then another, a neat list of actions that progressed the day into its eventuality.
✺
John arrived at the restaurant early. Donna caught a glimpse of him through the window as she consulted her reflection for smudges around the corner of her mouth. When she arrived at their table, he pulled out the chair for her. She liked that his belt matched his shoes and his shoes matched the décor, and that he remembered her order: vodka martini, pearl onion garnish.
Over appetizers they spoke of films, of Donna’s divorce. And while she admired John’s appetite for her past, she couldn’t stop thinking about the sound of his voice. She remembered it different on the phone. Rougher, maybe. Deeper.
“You’re not wearing the necklace,” said John.
“I am wearing a necklace,” said Donna.
“But it’s not the same one.”
“Oh,” Donna gestured at her neckline. “It didn’t feel right. You know, with the dress.”
Why did he seem so different now? And why did she care this much? Or, did she care at all?
It occurred to Donna that John had been slowly evaporating from the table. First, he was all voice, then a silhouetted suit, and eventually just a smoking hand.
“The dress. Of course,” said the hand. “You know, this dress makes you look like the kind of gal who goes to the jazz club on Thursday night.”
“You know I do,” she said. “And Wednesday sometimes, too. And Tuesday. I go whenever I want, really.”
“As you should,” said the hand.
“No one to tell me otherwise anymore.”
Soon, the conversation went dry, as conversations often do, and Donna found she was getting tired of herself, of John’s fading presence, of the sound of their voices merging together. She wanted to tell him she felt silly being here, that she should’ve listened to the rain. But as she closed her eyes, she wished she could return to the top of the day just so she had something to look forward to again.
When she opened them again, John was gone.
Donna watched smoke bloom from an empty seat. Perhaps, she wondered, she had willed him into nonexistence. She hoped she would never have to understand.
Gauraa Shekhar is the author of Notes (forthcoming from word west press, 2022). Her essays and fiction have appeared in Literary Hub, The Toast, Nimrod, Contrary, Sonora Review, CRAFT, and elsewhere. A founding editor of No Contact, she lives, writes, and works out of Richmond, Virginia. Visit her website to learn more.
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