by Jessica Begans

Harold Barnes panted a little as he entered his apartment. He was trying to take the stairs of late, and he lived six floors up. He exhaled noisily (more panting, really, but he called it moaning) as he shut the door and locked it, and again when he spread his arms to remove his winter coat, which was long, black, well-cut and ten per cent cashmere, and which made him look the perfect gentleman business executive, though he was only an NGO research analyst. Absent-mindedly, he hung his coat on the hook behind the door and pulled off his left glove with his bare right hand. Stuck the lonely leather glove in the pocket of his coat. The first day of spring.

Barnes looked down at his right hand which was splotched with red from the cold and the wind. Some Spring. Stared at the skin next to his nails that was raised, hard and white. A big hand that was hairy at the bottom and scaly and split with red cuts at the knuckles, and hairy at the fingertips again. With purple under the nail bed.

"Goddamn," he said.

He threw the small table next to the door down the hallway, but he was also crying. It wasn't the first time he'd ever done it but the first time in a long time, and he pulled at his nose and tore at his cheeks as if he didn't know what was going on. He knew perfectly well what was going on. He'd known for three months now, since November, since winter started.

He had lost his third pair of gloves.

"A whore," he muttered through the phlegm in his throat. "A whore." He went to the clothing closet in his bedroom where he'd put the box. He hadn't wanted to see the gloves after he'd lost their partners, and he'd put them in an old shoebox in his closet. Kneeling, he opened the box to make sure all the survivors were in there. One black leather glove, one brown leather glove of lower quality - on he wouldn't have missed if she hadn't stolen it from him. One inexplicable ankle boot. He added the mishap from today.

Harold tugged open the bedroom window that stuck. He could still open windows. Cold air rushed in. The box dropped in between two tenement high rises, and past five curious windows. The trash chute would have been the more logical option, but at this point in his life, the man needed some satisfaction.

Harold Barnes was not always the kind of irrational man who throws large shoeboxes filled with mate-less accessories out of high-rise windows. In fact, he was once the most rational of men: an IRS tax auditor. But sometimes crazy things happen to otherwise normal people. He had lived a supremely rational, childless existence with his rational, ambitious wife in Indiana until she moved him to DC ten years ago in hopes of becoming a policy wonk herself. Left to fend for himself in the job market, he became a research analyst. Sheila left Harold two years ago, and now she was the head Democrat lobbyist for a large insurance company.

Left alone, with no spouse, no dog and few friends, Harold gave his car to a favorite nephew and moved to Adams Morgan. He started doing what he wanted to do: going to the theater. A real patron of the arts was Harold. One night in early November he was doing what he liked, going to a show at a small theater called Art Space downtown that was finishing up its run of a modern, vaguely political version of Shakespeare's Twelfth Night.

From the third row he became captivated by the countess Olivia. The actress who played her lit up and burned slowly. She shimmered and her voice was as beautiful as 300 cigarettes. He seemed to recognize the curl of her black hair and the way she angrily pulled up her slight shoulders. This Olivia, more impetuous and queenly than sad, rolled her shoulders at the Orsinio the same way that the girl in front of him in the checkout line at the supermarket yesterday had rolled her shoulders at the cashier who dropped her quarters. Her shoulders had seemed to cut through the thin black sweater she was wearing; she seemed anxious to get home with her carrots.

Sometime in between 9 p.m. and the first intermission, Harold Barnes became obsessed. You could call it love. These things happen. In the dim light emanating from the smoky blue set, he paged through the Playbill, looking for her name, there she was, CARLINA HARDY, Olivia.

He brought the Playbill home with him and thought that would be it. But if that were it, we wouldn't have much of a story, now would we? Her black and white face on the program next to her long list of summer stock accomplishments wasn't her. She had crooked one eyebrow and smiled with only half of her mouth, like the wise mother in a breakfast-bar commercial.

Harold Barnes decided to find her.

He couldn't wait to get back to the office next Monday. He didn't know that a change had taken place. He didn't know why he was excited, or even that he was excited at all. But when Sam asked, "So how was your weekend, Harold?" it felt right to say he'd seen a play, Twelfth Night, at Art Space, and the actress who played Olivia was a real knockout. Harold wanted to tell the world about:

Carlina. Carlina Hardy. Carlina. Carlina. Carlina Carlina.

Harold, alone, lived the life of the mind. He began to see her everywhere. First in his mind. She was with him at lunch at his desk, watching him eat a ham sandwich. In the bathroom she made fun of a mole on his thigh. Later he began to see her in real places. It was bound to happen.

When he finally found her again he had been walking back from the Dupont Metro calmly trying to plan as he'd been trying to plan for two weeks now, how to find her again. And there she was. She walked into Kramerbooks. So did Harold Barnes. In the tall, high bookshelves she disappeared for a few minutes, but he found her again, sitting at a café table, drinking something hot and reading Vogue. He sat down at a table in a corner with a clear view of her head, and removed his binder from his suitcase.

He returned to Kramerbooks every day after work, and became quite an institution. He saw her all the time, at least three times a week, and sometimes, when he'd been a good boy, even more. She drank black coffee - no lattes - and read magazines when she wasn't talking in her gray flannel voice to her friends behind the counter.

Harold saw her and he watched her. Never full on; they were in public. He watched her spin on the low, thin heel of her boot while she waited for a drink. He watched her do stupid things, like scratch her back ungracefully, and do dick-numbingly beautiful things, like gently, slow, slow, slowly run her long fingers through her big, black curls, all while reading the pages of a magazine.

Evenings spent at the café turned into nights spend jacking off, turned into days of feeling himself up in his office. He stopped working and started staring at a paper napkin for an hour. He cut out reviews of her performances (now she was the understudy, performing Tuesdays, of Serafina in the Rose Tattoo) from the City Paper and tacked them to his cubicle. His whole world was arranged with herself in the corner of his eye.

He was a man before, now he was four walls in a room that encased her.

She was a woman before, now she was a disease.

"God is everything. Carlina is everything," he wrote on the edge of B12 of the Washington Post before peeling it out and throwing it away.

At night he talked to her, the same phrases every night, and touched her hair; in December she pinned him to the wall of the elevator in his building and kissed him hard. At work he typed her name endlessly into the various databases and search engines his company allowed him to use for his research. In the evenings he went to the café.

But away from the ecstatic onanism and the post-teenage teenage lust. During which hours of the day is a schizophrenic not insane? Those are the same hours that Harold Barnes was not in love. Very few who have not killed or died for love will understand, so let's move on to something more concrete: mittens.

Harold lost the first glove in December, on the day they first met. Carlina had stopped sitting at a corner table in the Kramerbooks café and had started making drinks behind the counter there. (The Rose Tattoo had closed early.) Now she wore a blue apron.

"Let me guess - a tall Americano?" she asked, already scribbling his order onto the paper cup with a black marker.

Harold was really going to ask for a decaf, but all he said was, "Um! Yes. Thank you ma'am." And slowly counting the change he shook out from his pocket into his gloved hand, everything went soft and slow and he hoped he could live this way forever. He certainly believed he could.

At home he realized his left leather black glove was gone. He was so happy he didn't even care. The black calfskin of his glove was a lamb sacrificed to a generous god.

He lost a gray merino wool scarf with tassels on the Metro when he saw Carlina on the other side of the car stopping at Gallery Place. Harold rose from his seat to follow her off to wherever she was going, when he looked down and realized his scarf was gone. He was so upset that he sat back down. "Careless!" he thought to himself. And torn between injured pride (he lived a simple life and took good care of all the little things he owned; this was something he'd been good at since he was a child) and defensiveness (what had he ever done to her, that she would turn on him and make him lose things like that!) he felt an emerging sense of insanity. He realized it had been months since he'd spoken to his ex-wife and weeks since he'd read a newspaper. He got off at Dupont and walked all the way home in a daze, with a cold neck.

The loss of the scarf sobered Harold a bit, and he stayed late at work writing reports for the next week, and he did not go to Kramerbooks. But on a Friday in January he did not want to make dinner; he wanted an Americano and one of those roast beef sandwiches the café sold. He told himself this was why he went to see her: he was hungry. But Harold knew - oh, he knew - it was kismet and nothing else that had taken him there when she turned up her black eyes to him from behind the counter and asked him, "Been sick?"

"What?"

"Well, you haven't been in for a while. We notice when our regular customers aren't here and we get worried for 'em." She smiled and twisted her shoulders a little. "Did you have the flu?"

"Oh no, no. Working some late nights, you know."

"Sure thing. Americano, sir?"

"Yes ma'am."

What am I to you? Harold wondered. Do you admire the cashmere coat I wear, do you know I have no wife? Do you think I'm gay because I spend my time in Dupont Circle drinking coffee, wearing a cashmere coat and no wedding band? Am I the only man who calls you ma'am?

"Lina, are you going to St. Ex tonight with us?" asked another one of the coffee girls.

"Hells yes my sister!"

"Is Brian coming?"

"No, he's busy."

Harold, for his part, immediately made room in his schedule.

Back at home he ripped off his clothing and did a few pushups. On came black wool pants, a maroon button-down Sheila had bought him in a fit of save-the-marriage, Calvin-Klein-inspired rage, black ankle Beatles boots he'd bought ten years ago and had never worn, and to top it off, a black leather jacket. He rode the metro and got lost twice looking for this bar he'd never been to. A bum directed him toward U Street and a parade of lost-looking and loud blonde women led him to their source: The Saint-Ex.

He took a place by the door and the corner coat rack. Harold was early, now he feared he was too early. Young women, maybe even beautiful women, hugged each other lusciously and flipped their hair at young men; Harold felt the lubrication in his joints dry up, the cheeks of his face grow tough and long, his muscles turn gray and brittle. Never a heavy drinker, he'd forgotten what happened after three beers. He was early, too early, and had nothing to do but sample the Saint-Ex's formidable microbrew selection, interspersed with whiskey sours, for the next two hours. By the time she showed up, in a tight black top that showed the form of her small, delicious breasts, her marvelous hair pinned up, her lips red, Harold was woozier than he'd been in a long time. When she walked in he felt a wave wash slowly over him, but she headed straight for the back with two slinky girlfriends as if she hadn't even seen him. He got to his feet with a "Hey!" then sat back down hard, and started feeling his nose and ears with his hands. "Carlina, Carlina!" he muttered to the faux-leather-padded bar. He had been alone until then; now a man sat next to him.

"Gotta light?" the man asked.

"She's a dyke. There's no other explanation," Harold replied, fishing in his leather coat pocket for a pack of matches from the Capital Grille.

"No shit," said the man.

Harold told the man a little about it. The words came out all wrong; how can a man explain obsession in a few moments? He used words like, "She's beautiful. I mean, beautiful," and hoped the man would somehow understand. But the man, whose name was Pete, had an ex-wife, too, and the two commiserated about that. They really hit it off, and Harold felt like he'd made a real friend - someone who just got it. They'd been talking for what seemed like eternity when a woman in a tight black top that showed her small, delicious breasts walked thickly, angrily to the coat rack. The sunrise in Harold's mind had barely begun when Carlina tripped over his outstretched Beatle boot and gave him a frustrated, no, I really don't hate you but don't be such a fucking loser, look as she caught herself mid-fall and looked behind her at the culprit. She grabbed what was evidently a friend's coat and marched back to the dark, carefully avoiding Harold's gaze and footwear.

Harold crossed seven different city zones in a cab that night to get home. He didn't care. When he woke up, he couldn't find his right boot anywhere.

In February, Harold became a bitter old man with only one pair of gloves and zero merino wool scarves. Realizing that he had a terminal disease, he knew he could die easily or fight. He decided to fight. What that meant, he didn't know, but he knew he wouldn't trust Carlina farther than he could throw her. He wouldn't be taken in again. He stopped going to Kramerbooks. He started doing pushups.

His plan was working marvelously, and on March 20, he felt a little dead and empty inside, like a new man. No desire lit him on fire or made his eyes see things that weren't there. Harold was entirely sober, and the cherry blossoms were starting to turn pink around the Washington monument. He went out for a walk to see the trees. And, as Jung would have it, so did Carlina.

Harold spied his former mistress, hair flowing, in a light spring coat and heels, walking hand and hand with, now embracing, now kissing, now stroking a tall, young man who must have been Brian. Armed with the most potent of medicines - total nonchalance - Harold Harold strode over to the couple without a second thought and greeted them to bemused looks.

"You're Carlina Hardy, aren't you? I've seen you at Kramerbooks," she nodded, "and we might have spoken a few times, but I've never told you that I saw you in Art House's Twelfth Night as Olivia and thought you were marvelous."

Carlina glanced at Brian with raised, perfectly sculpted, eyebrows.

"It's always such an honor to hear from an audience member," she said. Her eyes weren't so menacing in the sunlight, up close. Her lips twisted into an unconscious, unattractive thinking-sneer. Were her ears lopsided? Her nostrils too looming? Harold saw her the way other people saw her: she was an Other Person, not a second thought.

"Will we be seeing you on the Washington stage any time soon?" asked Harold, emboldened, disgusted.

"Oh, no, no. We're moving to London. It's a much more vibrant theater scene there. We're getting out of this city, this country." She gestured broadly at the city. She then pointed her fingers to her stomach. Harold refused to look. "My fiancé is British, and our kid will be, too."

Kid. It was all over, then. It was automatic replies nicely said. Mild-mannered as ever was Harold. Kid. Whore. You child, you whore, won't look at her midsection hidden in a spring coat, won't kid, that whore. More than ever or never at all? It was time to go.

Harold wished them well and took his leave, striding several paces with his eyes closed, breathing out his mouth. Still blind, his hand fumbled to his pocket to pull out two mismatched gloves and he realized that one was not there.

The winds picked up and it started to drizzle. Harold was walking, and he was walking for such a long time that it started to snow, and the snow bit and pricked and fell on one ungloved hand that he wouldn't put back in his pocket.