THE GIRL AT THE SHOP Gunna is still waiting for me. She’s waiting for me there in her white apron, dealing with her clients, patiently, with excellent posture. When she isn’t helping her customers to fresh pies, she has at least one half of an eye open for me. She’s waiting for me to pop in. Maybe I will bring her some chocolates or flowers. Some conversation, jokes, idle chit chat. She wants something else from me. She even said so. Gunna said, “I want very badly for you to make love to me.” I was intrigued by her forthcomingness and straightforwardness and the whole idea. I sized her up in every way. “I just want to know what it feels like,” she said.
I felt a kind of deep shudder pass through me at that moment, one that was hard to describe or put into precise words. It was like a cool breath had passed into me, set inside me, and I was breathing it in and out. There was a mix of excitement and horror, a fear and a wonder. From her toes to her hips. From her lips to her hefty breasts and golden bangs. Gunna was waiting, waiting for me to finally come to her. All I had to do was say yes. Just yes. But I was unsure. “Maybe we should take it slow,” I told her at the register. “Then move on to other things.” Gunna nodded. “We can do other things.” she said. “I’d like to do all sorts of things with you.”
The feeling did haunt me. I imagined how I would arrive one afternoon and she would close up the shop. Then she would spread out a blanket. We would make love between the pies. I suppose I would have to give in. My little war with women had to come to an end one way or another. I couldn’t drag it out indefinitely. I would have to surrender. I’d have to give up. What better place than in the arms of a baker between her sweet-smelling, freshly baked pastries?
Unfortunately, I got involved in a spy ring after that. I had to deliver a document to a drop spot in the Pennsylvania Station in Manhattan. I did as I was told, leaving the white envelope beside an office for the police. As I was walking away, I looked up, only to see Henry Miller the writer in his flannel shirt and flat cap, waving down at me from the top of a glinting escalator, as if to say, “You’ve done good, son!” There was a box of flags next to the police office in Penn Station. One was the American flag and the other was the flag of New York, which features its coat of arms against a navy blue background. The blue of this station flag was faded though, so that it was almost a pastel, Caribbean blue. I picked up the New York flag and began to wave it. From the the top of the escalator Henry Miller also brandished a flag and began to wave it, chanting so that all the commuters could hear, “Excelsior! E pluribus unum!” This is the state motto.
Henry Miller came down the escalator with the flag in his hands next and strode over to me. He patted me on the shoulder. I said, “Henry Miller? You were the spy chief all along? The organizer of La Résistance?” Henry Miller said, “Indeed, my friend. You know it. What do you think, I was just wasting my time in Paris all those years consorting with floozies? Of course, I’m involved in international espionage!” “I see,” I said, looking him over. He smelled of good times, good books, pipe smoke. “But now you’ve got to go back to Europe,” Henry Miller said. “Gunna is waiting for you. I’d go to her, if I was you. She’s about to close up soon. D’accord?”
north! 