YD6~25 Lost, But Found: Aetheria Puppeteering a Night at Tavern on the Green

 

Description: A man, new to New York City, navigates the unfamiliar streets seeking "Tavern on the Green." He stumbles upon a Jewish singles event and, despite his initial hesitation, finds himself connecting with a woman named Sherry.

Leaving the platform after the train vanished into the tunnel, I’m stirring the underground platform to life, weaving among a few commuters to continue alone eager to find my whereabouts. As the exit stairs carry me upward, and I’m gazing skyward through the squared pitch-black stairwell void. rooftops shadow against the night. Drawing down a patchwork behind me, while raising a left a jagged cliff ridge stretching to oblivion upfront, sketchy craggy architectural random scattered fenestrated. A jumble of shiny cracks across classic striated facades straightened tall, wrapping over my upcoming shoulder. I rise through the edging handrails. Treading over the last riser, facing the leafy canopies’ widespread branches, shadow nestling lanterns’ fluffed out lights. Lining the flanks of a broad stream of glaring headlights. As I walk upstream through the wide, shady sidewalk alongside a shadowy hedgegrown wilderness. confident I’m on course along “Central Park,” The Subway Station I left behind. 

Swift strides across the paved concrete slabs around hefty tree trunks, evanescing into a shimmering blur stretching farther, without me catching up with my destination. I’m growing edgy along the next leg toward my whereabouts. I’m seeking across sparse traffic the strobe facades gleaming architectural plinths. Until I’m breaking away, and step off the curb. I seize the shadowy breaks. Dodging through the relentless headlights. Forging ahead toward the beacon of glazed foyers to stilted and bright barrel-vaulted canopies, peeking out to the curb. As I’m walking up the sidewalk, I approach the beige uniform-manned apartment foyer’s plate-glass doors. Addressing an elderly man dangling tassel knots from his shoulders. “Sorry,” I say, urgency laced in my voice. “Could you tell me where is Tavern on the Green?”

The bellboy’s outstretched sleeve draws my eyesight, to his extended finger. Pointing diagonally across the glaring stream of headlights into the dark woods behind shy lanterns in the dense, overbearing foliage. “Thanks,” I murmur, walking away further along the sidewalk, toward less risky but distant, another long way toward the toggling traffic lenses. Approaching, I gauge my steps, aiming for the red lights upholding the traffic flow. Catch the green lenses to cross the lanes past the patient radiator’s car muzzles clear to the opposite sidewalk and veer.

Walking through the dappled shaded wide sidewalk, I lost the deep peering in the woods, to guess at the slow widening dark crack hinting at a cave opening. Turning into the hollow-out path into the woods. Teetering on the edge of darkness — triggered my childhood trailing a caravan through the jungle, on the ridge of a swallowing void, wasn’t for pacing at cricket’s chirps, to an echo of a wild cat’s kill cries, in fear I stepped on De-P’pa’s heels. Until a left clearing opens in the woods’ star-studded canopy. opposite a sliver of window light shining under an eave run, and spilling across the dirt-beat driveway dissipating apron, toward sleek cars shimmer, chilling in the darkness left by their drivers.

Aetheria’s volition pulsed in the shadows of the wood — ‘_Do not fear._’ Mount a sense of spatial wellbeing, a path meager lit . Until a guttered edged, a roof I can only dream about, in the inky skies. But the eave’s underside glows a run along a cabin, voiceless. ‘_Follow the light._’  at the end of the stripped windows. I turn the corner, to an offside stilted barrel-vaulted canopy, to a door crack. Opening to face a glazed double door, I dampen a self-importance freeze, intimidated, balking an eyesight glides across the airlock to a hallway’s few figures. My force of will thaw to grip the door, before I’m discovered, awkward and ridiculous in front of a closed door. I press the door swing back and am at a point of no return. The next airlock door, closing behind, deflating my ego. I seize up a trio of seated women, to their individual tables alongside the glazed pitch-black night but reflecting the bright interior.

A suit jacket dressed man my age, stands in front of the seated woman at the middle table. My gaze darts from a rambling man. His apparent departure from the end table’s length ahead. Trailing the farthest man, pivoting midway before the stretch hallway to the doorway crack, hesitant, but vanishes to the interior.

A woman bathed in the darkness outside the glazed window wearing a shimmering evening gown. A familiar tune snapped me out of my reverie. Her eyes' soothing, ‘_Don't be ashamed. . ._’ Her voice filled with a friend’s lyrics breaks through my ego. “You’re here for the Jewish singles?” I stop in my tracks, forced to confess. “That’s right.” She ushered me toward the woman at the first table, to face a desktop a metallic nameplate gleamed: “Women free.” Spelling out, ‘_Few are the women attending!_’ As I stand awkwardly tall in front of a tabled woman.

I handed my New York driver’s license across the table to the woman in an evening gown, a flashback to Jerry Brecker’s secretary. When the generous Virgo handed her late model Oldsmobile keys across her desk, for that day’s test drive, after I passed my oral exam.

 In appreciation as an identity document, I watch the woman in her evening gown scribble on a log sheet. I’m handing over two ten-dollar bills, and a fiver. Turning away to proceed in the wake of men before me, to the crack of a door, opening to a hall of wide-spaced wax figures in front of the middle window. The men stand in a crescent facing a single woman. Further right, one-to-one man along the far right-hand peripheral walls — flashback to my late teens at the Fred Astaire Dance Studio, downtown Johannesburg, waiting for our teacher placing a long playing record for the music. ‘_I could have danced all night. ._’ we danced to waltz, Tango, Samba, before progressing to the trendy discotheques. 

As I’m unnoticed by men along the left wall’s steer bar, a hip on the stools, a foot on the bottom rail, and a stretch leg for a leap, with gazes fixated past me. Expecting a woman’s appearance in the light. While, I’m pushing myself to integrate, moving toward a middle gap companionship with a free stool for a drink.

I’m undecided, butt against the bar counter, stretching short of a pitch-black window. I spy on my neighbors as the barman pours doses of strong drinks, with the flips of the bottle, to believe a trend in the city. dispensing spout, another dose to the same glass, exaggerated by a third spout, to slip the rocks tumbler across the counter to the man. The barman shift over. His body pressing on the heel of his hands to the edge of the counter. Leaning over too close, his eyes querying, ‘_What will it be?_’ Distant words echoing in my head, from attending Friday night at a singles club, in Rivonia, to lively rock and jazz music and dancing. ‘_Rum and coke — Makes your breath smell!_’ the waiter’s eyes had warned, ‘_Time is up — Decide._’ The next strong drink apart Whiskey, on Shabbat evening by Jean’s parents, the Whitehorns. Out of options, my mind blurs out, “Can I have a vodka?”

The barman jerks his head up, straightens his torso, a stance hands free selecting out a group of bottles shy on his low worktop, to flourish his skills. With a bottleneck grip and placing a rock glass to view on the raised elbow shelf a spout pout I’m aware isn’t water. Which didn’t suffice for the barman. He pours another shot, and a third.  ‘_Whoa! — these dosages aren’t on demand!_’ I think, surprised. He slides the half-full glass toward me, with a gaze shift toward a man near the entry doorway. 

I grab the clear glass, comfortable at hand, feeling a part of the crowd, after turning around. I step away, curving from the threesome earlier group with a fourth man around a woman. such as a ballroom without music, the middle of the floor deserted. I'm heading across toward the blank wall between two doorways. Reaching the wall, I turn around, facing the peripheral wall’s wax figures. I'm standing, to lean, shoulders blades against the wall, I daren’t disrespect the milieu. lift my foot plant the wall, like a cowboy leaning against a paddock, while my eyes pan out. Discerning wax figures’ body languages, I'm sipping my drink, so unlike water.

while raising a thought. “We’re all strangers here!_’ a shadow’s appearance in the corner of my eye, called me glancing. an emerging petite and athletic woman in jeans left behind her shadow —. 

By justice, I caught her sparkling eyes scouts the hall, to the scene she had dropped out behind the dark glaze. Which her telling mind echoed. ‘_Mother! wait for me!_’ At the family car idling out in the dark. wound down window, word trailed to the interior. ‘_Mother! I have to fly._’ 

The petite woman, bee foraging the wax figures at the bar, diverge with an Irish dancer’s slender legs. She exchanges a few words with paired men. She taps steps across the dark reflective windows, wedges herself, shaking the woman facing the group of four men. She leaps on by wax figures until cornered by the room’s peripheral blank walls. From the bare floor, her eyes sweep, interrupts her thought. ‘_ I’ve done the rounds. . ._’ Only to fall on me, and invigorate her steps, she crosses the room. She’s categoric in her stance, but her voice fiddles the cords. “Hi!” Slew a glance over her shoulder. ‘_Now, I’ve done my rounds._’ We talked to a repartee until I’m asking. “May I have your number?” Pen at hand, she scribbles, tears the page out of a pocket agenda. I glance at the slip of paper she handed me. “Sherry,” Neat in capital letters, underlined by her phone number, as she returns her pen and pocket diary into her little tiny purse. Whisks herself away through her earlier doorway to vanish.

When a woman in her mid-twenties, like Sherry, lackadaisical circles the group of men. Her conversations stretching. She steps up to me, to pause, with a soft voice and inviting smile. “Hi, I’m Erin.” 

I return her greetings. Methodical, she poses questions, she had the knack with words, I couldn’t dare to ask, which leads into talking and edging away. On an inadvertent course through the out to the rear doorway. Stepping to the privacy of the hallway’s cul-de-sac. She gradually sits on the coping of the planter, as I'm left standing tall. Behind Erin, the foliage shied the few treads and apron to a pair of condemned doors. We’re talking Erin rising to her feet. We’re heading along the deserted hallway, through the airlock, out into the night. Heading in the woods' shed a faint light up to a white car. She unlocks her little Fiat Uno, hesitant grips the door, to swing climbs behind the wheel. At the closes of the door, the window winding down regretful eyes. “I can’t give you a ride home. I. . . I’m feeling a little apprehensive.”

‘_I understand._’ I’m reassuring Erin. “No problem.” I voiced. Her little white car pulls away. Although following the pair of red glares, I turn away toward the barrel-vault. I glance back as the blackness sucks the red dots into vanishing. I backtrack, retrace through an eerie silence, earlier in the evening. Like a breath of peppermint to my mind, I thought of ditching a subway platform changeover line. I engaged through the night a meandering path by streetlight filters through the foliage, dappling the ground by an intuitive compass reaching a main road. I veered off. I walk a stretch cross a Bridge overseen an increased intersecting glow, my pathway’s streetlamps perched in the foliage cross a dabbed moonlight asphaltic stream. but soon my confidence to a fleeting comfort as I head west through Central Park, feeling alone. prickle of unease, leads me to step down the curb away from the pitch-black hedging, easing toward the middle of the street, securing myself in a reputable city for crimes. The asphalt’s leading patchy sheen at the foot of oaks. I grew to regret my eyes darted, shifting, my ears strained, pricked. My unsettling figures lurking through a safety circle. ‘_Should any one shadow rise from the deserted asphalt around me, I’m bound to be alerted!_’ I thought until I emerged in trickling traffic through the bright 5th Avenue. Soon forgot my crossing, the open skies vacuum rejuvenating my brain. But aware the city sleeps, my clear mind returns to reason, with nowhere to go, then catch the Metro and return to my landlady’s house. 

The following Monday, my routine beckons heading to Silhouette Dry Walling. I throw a friendly “Hi!” around the office. Greeting the secretary, accountant, and stepping up to the Hispanic co-estimator sitting between a stretch counter bearing another copy of the World Financial Center’s blueprints, I unfurled and the table. As I’m sitting behind a Personal Computer. I keyed in the floor plan internal walls, the data display, for ordering the ordinary and waterproof plasterboard for delivery on site. When I seized myself from procrastinating, the weekend draws close. To raise a thought. ‘_By now Sherry must have processed all her admirers, from the singles’ get-together?_’ 

From my wallet, I pull the pocket agenda page, dialing the number. A bright youthful voice answers. “Sherry!” I ask. “Do you remember me?”

‘_Of course,_’ She exhales. “Yes.” Sherry precises. After a few words, she says. “Can you come over on Friday. . . ‘_That suits me.’_” Assuming I have a car, and indigenous from Manhattan. I scribble in my diary as she dictates the address, with directions. At the end, I underscore the street with the number, avoiding questions jeopardizing the potential date. Hanging up, I tuck the ballpoint pen in the wallet’s spine, fold close with the flick of my wrist.