It's Sunday -- Sunday morning at Scully's, and I am
pretending to read the paper while conducting my habitual
Sunday-morning investigation of my partner across her
kitchen table. All I can see of her over her newspaper is
her lowered eyes, her forehead, and that peach-colored
towel wrapped in its usual precarious turban atop her
head. If I glance down and to my right I will see one
knee protruding from the peach-colored terrycloth robe,
and the shapely calf tapering to the slim ankle, and the
little foot tucked into the fuzzy peach-colored slipper.
She is a study in peach in the mornings, is Scully,
before she dons her armor of makeup and hairspray and
business suit.
She sits with the window behind her, backlit by the
morning sun; I sit across from her, with the window view.
It affords me an excuse, a place to avert my gaze when
she looks up and catches me staring -- I can pretend I
was looking past her out the window, and she can pretend
she believes it. We're both perfectly well aware of
what's really going on, but it's become our own little
silent bit of theatre. I suppose once we had addressed
the great unspoken issue of our lives, we needed to find
something else not to talk about, and my scrutiny of her
over Sunday-morning breakfast seems to fit the bill just
fine.
She sighs and turns the page and and tilts her head
just a little to sip from her cup. I automatically lift
my eyes to check the status of the towel on her head. We
are still in the first act of the little drama of
breakfast as long as the towel stays put. Imagine my
surprise at finding out that Scully, a woman of such
exacting, infuriating precision, had never quite mastered
the art of keeping the towel wrapped around her head
after her shower. At the slight motion of her head, one
corner of the towel has already untucked itself in the
first subtle peach swell of rebellion.
Staring at that towel, I feel her eyes on me. Sure
enough, I've been caught. The single arched eyebrow is
eloquent enough even without the additional authority
lent it by mascara and eyeliner. I just grin and shake my
head, and over the edge of the newspaper that obscures
her mouth I can see the smile in her eyes.
I wonder, as I do every Sunday, why it was that I had
never imagined the mornings after. My overactive
imagination had latched onto Scully almost from the first
day she'd marched into my office in her prim little suit.
Maybe I was just afraid. I had imagined plenty of nights,
but never these mornings, and somehow they've turned out
to be the sweetest part of it all.
Maybe it's the ordinariness of it: just the two of us,
eating and drinking, companionably quiet in the warmth of
the morning sunlight, and of the remembered fire of the
night before. Here, we don't have to uphold truth,
justice, and the American way, or make the world safe for
democracy. Here, I can just forget about the newspaper
and study my whole universe wrapped up in a peach-colored
robe, sitting across the table with a lopsided towel
piled up on her head.
I could use more coffee, but it'll wait -- it won't be
long till the towel will slip and usher in the second
act, wherein Scully will stand up, and start clearing
things away, and wander off to finish drying her hair and
get dressed. The coffee will keep. For now, I'd rather
just keep pretending not to stare and let her keep
pretending she hasn't noticed, and keep hoping that towel
will stay put till I've drunk in my fill of Scully for
one more day.
