THE YELLOW SHOP
a romance of a lifetime
Two people stand outside a shop window. They don’t know each other, and have come upon the place by chance. They smile as they glance at each other and look at the shop. It has grated windows, a floor made of large stone tiles, and a back door which opens onto a courtyard. On the street behind them motorcycles and bicycles stream by. The place has no ethnic identification. Laos or Mozambique or Colombo or Patagonia, unidentifiable. It could be anywhere.
“Are you planning to rent it?” he asks. “I wanted to have a gallery for my pictures,” she says. “And you?”
“I thought I’d put in a computer and write something, put it up on the walls and spread it over the floor, a story.”
“It’s cheap,” she says. “Why don’t we flip a coin and see which one of us takes it?"
They flip a coin and she wins. He goes in to see the landlord with her, and walks around the little shop as she pays three months in advance. They introduce themselves with first names only. It will be apparent later in the story that they each give a false name. She tells him to pop by the next day, and he explains that he is leaving. The landlord suddenly appears and must take her on an errand to a notary or a bank official; they separate hastily, but not before she tells him to stop by sometime and he promises he will.
Months later, he is in the town again, and walks by the shop. She is inside, printing a photo and he knocks on the window. They talk, eat in the square, walk cobbled streets, and kiss all night on the blankets she throws on the stone floor. The shop has a toilet and a small shower. They make love more seriously the next day, and during the sex a gaggle of kids spy outside the shop; he brings a Japanese screen so they can keep the windows open but not be seen from the street.
They meet for fifteen years without schedule, without outside contact. He writes his poems and notes, she looks at her pictures and spreads them over the floor. They know only the names they have given each other, and never talk about the details of their lives outside the shop. Everything is theoretical: If you had a child, if you fell in love, if you got a job with a desk and a dictionary, if you moved into a bigger house or bought a smaller one, if you got sick or had an operation, if you felt sad or lonely, all these things and many others are spoken in whispers between hugs and sex. They are deliriously in love with each other, even if they see each other for only a few weeks in a year. They each find themselves most creative when they are in the yellow shop alone, waiting on their companion. Will she come soon? Was he here a few weeks ago and missed me?
When they arrive at the airport the taxis all know where to go. The Yellow Shop, of course. All the other shopkeepers in the building are proud of the tryst so mysterious but sturdy in their midst. The landlord is happy, since every merchant wants to be near the Yellow Shop. People sometimes stand outside and talk about the place when its occupants are away. But to the occupants, their lives in the shop have become a lifetime secret; they are completely unaware that anyone knows they are inside. They think they are invisible, at least as a couple, even to the other shopkeepers, even to the landlord, even to the taxi drivers who whisk them to the shop without directions.
But she does not come for weeks, in that fifteenth year. She does not come at all. He flies back three or four times and waits and writes until he anxiously returns home. Finally, he leaves her a note and tells her when he will be back next, and of course also that he misses her and wants so much to see her, even if he could not touch her, just to see her walking on the street. He would not follow, but he would feel an enormous happiness, and writing this on a napkin he leaves atop the folded blankets somehow moves him to panicky tears. What’s wrong? Where is she?
He leaves new notes on top of the old notes. None are moved, and another year goes by and another, and his heart is like an anchor never lifting, never lifted. He looks at her photographs for hours. There is no picture of her! He scours the shop but finds no image of her. He tries to draw her face. He leaves longer notes.
The landlord stops by one afternoon. The lanlord is reluctant to mention the rent, but it hasn’t been paid in five years, and the lover quickly pays him and pays him for another year in advance. He asks the landlord if by any chance she has called him but the landlord is surprised: No she has never called, he doesn’t even know her name.
Five more years pass, and the shop is visited twice, and not by her. Another ten years, rent paid diligently, her photos carefully stacked or mounted on the walls, but only a handful of short visits so the lover can leave new notes, long notes, love letters. He notices his hands are shaking, and in the yellow shop one night he realizes he is old, and goes back to his family with a sudden loss of confidence in his step, with a new quiver in his voice.
His daughter comes by the house one day and mentions the yellow shop. It’s been fifteen years since you’ve been, Daddy. Isn’t it time to go down there and close it up? He is outraged. I pay the rent! Don’t tell me what to do. But the daughter brings a cousin and the old man finds himself in a wheelchair at the airport with his daughter and nephew and his hands are shaking so much he cannot hold his ticket. Why is he getting on the plane? Why must he go? It is hot, stuffy, it’s been years since he flew, but he is too tired to argue, too weak to fight, and when the stewards bring him a hot towel he says thank you and buries his face gratefully out of sight. His daughter takes away the towel when it is cold and holds his hand and pats his hand and cries a little bit to see him so frightened.
At arrival they get him a cane and find a taxi. The driver needs directions, and the old man says something but is not understood. The daughter has an address on a piece of paper, and the taxi driver, himself an old man, looks at his passenger in the back seat and claps his hands. Bravo, he says, bravo! And the driver gets on his cellphone as the passenger looks at all the new buildings and the advertisements and thinks he’s in the wrong place, the wrong city, the wrong time, but he can say nothing because his throat is gasping for air. His daughter asks him if he wants some water, but then he sees something he recognizes, and then something else, and he says he is fine, fine, knows just where he is.
When they pull up to the yellow shop there is a crowd. Older people, mostly. Maybe one hundred people, maybe two hundred people. The old man does not notice any of them, sees not a single face, and does not feel the stares or see the smiles. Everyone is silent. He doesn’t need a cane, and he has the key to the shop, a copy of her key, on a small keychain with a wooden turtle, and he starts to put the key in the door until he sees that the door is open.
The old man walks into the yellow shop and she is kneeling on the floor, spreading some pictures. She is elated to see him.
“Where have you been?” she asks. Her face is vibrant, and her skin is the same smooth silk he remembers touching and kissing, tanned or pale, bumped by mosquitoes or scratched by a kitten. Everything is the same, she is still the loveliest thing he has ever touched, and his tongue and fingers swell with sweetness. “Where have you been?”
He holds up a book. The title is “The Yellow Shop.” She looks inside the book and sees her pictures next to his feelings. She kisses him as he closes the door of the shop. Everyone outside is smiling, and he smiles back, nods to his daughter and asks for privacy.
The shop is dark, but she is next to him, lovely, in the same clothes, the same pose as the first day they met. She helps him lie down on the rough blankets on the stone floor. They never brought a mattress, since she insisted on having the shop be nothing like home. She tells him she will be back in a moment, and goes to the shower to undress, and he smells the blankets, closes his eyes and hears her feet on the stone, braces himself for her hug and touch, the boil of her lips against his neck, and just like this, death comes to him exquisite and quick, with her warm breath and soft touch the last thoughts of his life.
And outside, the son of the landlord tells the old man’s daughter to go to the nice hotel in the square, but the daughter is reluctant. He’ll be fine, says the shopkeepers, we will look after him, don’t worry. We have known him a long time, we know how he comes and goes, he is one of us, we will take care of him.
The daughter and the nephew go to the hotel. She feels light and happy. It was a good idea to bring Dad back down. What a beautiful place, she thinks. When she lies down to nap in her hotel room she thinks of her father and falls asleep, smiling.
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The Yellow Shop came to me at a soup kitchen in the town square in Oaxaca, as I told a fairy tale to my friend Abbi. The entire story, as it is written here. I then sent this outline to a movie producer in Canada who told me o get her a working script. I hate working scripts, screenplays; cannot dothe dumbing down process required to get approval at meetings of people who read at a seventh grade level. But I could make a book, and my model immediately was Richard Bach's Jonathan Livingson Seagull. Bach is a hopeless twit, a nutcase, but that book struck a weird chord in the flower power days. The Yellow Shop would turn out to be the woman's pictures, and the man's writings, and the tiny book would be split into three sections: the first being what you have just read, the second a collection of her pictures with his notes to each photo, and the third the stacks of handwritten notes he left for her at the Yellow Shop. I've cast about for printers, publishers, agents, and erstwhile self-publishers, but have found nothing to seal this project into existence.
-- Los Angeles, May 3, 2007
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click on the image below to see a page from the Yellow Shop
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This is the text of one of the notes left by the man for the woman. It is note 53, and was left 12 years and a few months after the last time he saw her:
Another note. I’m sorry.
But if you get this you’ll know why I left it.
I do not know how long it has been since I saw you. I am afraid to check the calendar. But years. Feels like a month, maybe even yesterday, or an hour ago. I just want to tell you something.
I’d like to see you walking on the street. If I could see you in the plaza or outside the terrible pizza place, just walking, just alive, just there, I’d be happy for the rest of my life.
Just one more glimpse.
And if I could choose, you’d be walking alone and away, perhaps looking for me, or hoping to bump into me. You would pause outside a window, or glance across the street, and in that moment in your expression I would see your worry for me. In your eyebrows, on your forehead, on your lips the way you chew them whenever you find me sad. In just a moment, I could see all your love, the entire sky and sea reflected in an instant of light, and I would be happy to walk away, even knowing that I would miss you an hour later, tomorrow, the rest of my life, like a song that never stops playing but breaks my heart whenever I hear it start again.
A moment can be forever. If I could see you for just a moment, what a forever that would be. That is how I feel now, at this moment, when all the times I have ever seen you, every moment I watched you in the street, every moment I walked with you and held your hand, every moment burns me with the shock of your absence.