Outside the Café 

Siamak Vossoughi                      

     They were in a café across the street, and so they had a view of the whole thing. The drunk fellow came out of the bar, and when he saw the red-haired woman, he smiled and opened his arms as if he knew her. It was five-thirty on Saturday evening, and there was a power the drunk fellow had in being drunk at a time when everybody in the street might be going in that direction soon. The young man and the young woman both saw it.

     It all happened fast. The drunk fellow was asking her to come in and have a drink with him, and a fellow coming down the street, who looked like he might be a student, saw the whole thing and told him to leave her alone. The drunk fellow turned to say something to him, and in the confusion the woman walked quickly the other way.

     “A hero!” the drunk fellow said. “You think you’re some kind of goddamn hero?”

     The student began to walk away. He went and stood at a bus stop.

     The man followed him. “Look at this guy!” he yelled to the people on the street. “He’s a real-live hero!”

     “Excuse me,” the young man said to the young woman.

     He got up and walked out of the café. He crossed the street and walked to the bus stop. He looked at the drunk fellow and he looked at the student and he looked at the thing between them, which was something lost and unanswerable.

     “Anybody want to see a real-live hero?” the drunk fellow yelled. “Here he is, in the flesh!”

     “All right,” the young man said.

     The student looked down the street. There was a bus in the distance.

     “Who wants to see a hero?” the fellow yelled.

     “Tell me what happened,” the young man said, even though he had seen it.

     “I was coming out of this place and I started talking to a girl—”

     “She didn’t want to talk to you!” the student said.

     The man smiled. “Look at this guy. A knight in shining armor.”

     The problem with it being five-thirty now was that the man was not in a position to be told nicely to go home and sleep it off. It was early, and he wanted something to happen.

     The young man looked at the student, and he thought that under other circumstances, he would like to know the story of how he became the kind of guy to tell a man to leave a girl alone on the street like that. It would be a good story, whatever it was.

     The young woman had come out of the café and was standing across the street. The young man quickly held up one finger to her, hoping the two fellows wouldn’t see it. The key to any peacemaking was to make it look incidental.

     “I’ve got nowhere to go,” the drunk fellow said. “I should get on the bus and tell everybody you’re a hero.”

     “Ah, they can tell by looking at him,” the young man said.

     “I should tell the whole world about the hero,” the man said.

     “I’ll call the police!” the student suddenly said.

     “The police!” the man said. It was what he had been waiting for. He roared with laughter.

     Everything changed now, because the student had admitted his fear, and the young man worried that in his embarrassment he might actually call the police. It was such an utterly ungraceful solution to the problem, and the young man had set out in hopes of a graceful one.

     He had been having a very nice conversation with the young woman that touched on literature and politics and childhood, and he believed in a graceful solution.

     “Go ahead and call the police!” the man said. He looked very pleased that something was happening. It was only five-thirty, and he had already done something with his drunkenness, while everybody else was still getting ready for the night.

     The student pulled out his phone as a wild stab at something other than shame.

     “You don’t have to do that,” the young man said. He knew the young woman was watching him. He didn’t know if she could see or not that it was the pursuit of something graceful.

     Now the young man looked down the street for the bus. It was a few blocks away. He knew the student didn’t have to worry about the drunk fellow getting on. He already felt satisfied by the interaction.

     But pulling out his phone and not calling the police felt to the student like it would be more ridiculous than calling them, and he did. The drunk fellow roared with laughter again and began walking away, slowly, to show he was not scared.

     “Look at the hero!” he called out.

     The student put his phone away. He stared after the drunk man. All the shame he felt turned into a fury—at the man, at himself, at seemingly any number of things.

     The young man walked up to him and patted him on the shoulder. “You did the right thing back there,” he said.

     The student was still staring down the street.

     The young man crossed the street. He didn’t look back to see if the student got on the bus or not.

     The young woman was waiting for him. She didn’t smile when she looked at him, which he appreciated. She knew he would’ve done the same thing if she wasn’t there.

     They went inside and sat back down.

     “Where were we?” he said, as a joke. It came out sad.

     “Never mind that,” she said. “What were you going to do out there?”

     “When?”

     “Just now. If it had gotten worse.”

     “I don’t know. I thought at first that they both wanted to be seen. So I tried to see them. After that I just wanted to do something to keep the man from getting on the bus.”

     She nodded.

     “It’s bad to be on the bus when you’re drunk like that. It’s best to be somewhere open like the street,” he said.

     “Well,” she said. “I’m glad you went out there.”

     “It’s a funny time of day,” he said. “I feel proud of everybody in the street. When I went out there, I felt proud of all three of them. I felt proud of the drunk man and I felt proud of the girl and I felt proud of the student. I don’t know why.”

     “You felt proud of the drunk man?”

     “Yes.”

     The young woman leaned back in her chair.

     “I did not feel proud of the drunk man,” she said. “I felt proud of the girl and the student, but I did not feel proud of him.”

     “I can’t explain it. I don’t know why.”

     They were quiet, and then the young woman said, “I do not want to go home with you tonight if you feel proud of the drunk man.”

     A sadness rose up in the young man and met the sadness that was already there. “All right,” he said.

     The young woman tried not to show on her face that she had expected him to press his point.

     It was not the kind of thing where either of them wanted to get up and leave.

     “I do not mean that I do not want to see you again,” the young woman said. “But I do not want to go home with you tonight.”

     “All right. I am glad that it does not mean that.”

     Neither of them wanted to get up and leave, but it was difficult to talk about literature or politics or childhood or anything else after that. After a few minutes they got up and said goodbye.

     Walking home, the young man wondered why he had felt proud of all three of them like that. He thought about the way the young woman had not felt proud of the drunk man, and there was something he could understand in it.

     Tomorrow he would call her up and tell her that he could understand why she couldn’t afford to feel proud of him. Maybe that meant that he shouldn’t feel proud of him either.

     What he would have to do though, he thought, was to call it something other than pride, at least until he understood it better. It had felt like pride. But it hadn’t done him much good to feel proud like that.

     Still, he thought, it was pride in all three of them that had taken him outside in the first place.

     He was going to have to call it pride inside himself, and he was going to have to call it something else outside of himself, and there was something eternally lonely about that, but it was the loneliness that was him, and so it was all right.

© 2021 Siamak Vossoughi

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Siamak Vossoughi is a writer living in Seattle. He has had stories published in Kenyon Review, Missouri Review, Columbia Journal, Gulf Coast, and West Branch. His first collection, Better Than War, received a 2014 Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction and his second collection, A Sense of the Whole, was published in November 2020 by Orison Books.