Leaning over his desk, Agathe placed the cup carefully on his blotter. Good Mayor Krovic made a heroic effort not to look down the front of her blouse as it gaped invitingly in front of him. He told himself that he had not noticed the unfeasibly tiny, the adorably transparent, underpinnings which he had most definitely glimpsed there and he forced himself to look her squarely in the eye when she said, “This came for you, Mayor Krovic,” handed him the fold of notepaper and wiggled out of the room.
Sitting back in his chair, Tibo opened the note and read it. It said, “I would be delighted to join you for lunch.” He was so astonished that he failed to notice Agathe’s whispered “Thank you” as she passed the town arms on the wall.
OR THE REST OF THE MORNING, THEY WERE too embarrassed to speak to one another. There was a declaration that had been made—whatever it meant—but each seemed to agree with the other that there was nothing more to be said until the cathedral bells declared it was time for lunch.
Agathe’s typewriter clattered, her telephone jangled, the coffee pot emptied and filled again until, far off across the square, the pigeons rose like a widow’s veil over the cathedral and, a second or two later, the burnished, mellow “gong” of the bell reached the Town Hall and Tibo appeared in the door of his room. “That sounds like one o’clock,” he said. “Do you fancy …?” Tibo almost said “me” but he didn’t, he didn’t.
“Yes, I’m ready,” said Agathe. “I’ll just get my coat.”
Tibo was already waiting by the hatstand, her coat in his hands, holding it out to her, ready to ease it up her arms and over her shoulders. A whisper of “Tahiti” reached him as she shivered it into place.
“Colder today,” she said.
“Yes. Much. Yes.”
And there was another frightening moment when they wondered, each of them, if this was what lunch would be like—a string of foolish, empty comments about the weather, an embarrassed shuffle when they had hoped for a waltz and no escape from their shame for a whole painful hour.
Agathe took his arm or Tibo offered it; it hardly mattered now since it was what they both wanted.
“You bought me lottery tickets,” she said as they walked over the bridge and into Castle Street.
“Yes, I did,” said Tibo.
“That was very kind. Thank you.”
“Just a silly nothing. Nothing at all.”
“Why?”
“Why?”
“Yes, why did you buy me lottery tickets?”
“Don’t you play the lottery? Yesterday. I thought you said. Didn’t you? I thought you said you played the lottery every month.”
“I did, yes. It was kind of you to remember.”
“I remember,” said Tibo. “You play the lottery and, when you win—note ‘when’ you win—you will buy yourself a villa on the coast of Dalmatia.”
Agathe could have hugged him for that but he looked down at her with a brisk, businesslike “We’re here” and swung open the big, gilded door of The Golden Angel.
This time, the flicker of recognition that flashed round the room was enough to send Cesare’s dark Italian eyebrows shooting almost to the ceiling. His Honour the Mayor! Twice in one day for two days in a row! And with the same woman! Both days! The shock of their arrival sent the waiters into a spasm. From opposite sides of the room, from all corners, four of them started forward, rising on to the balls of their feet as light and poised as gigolos in an Argentine tango hall. But each one, as he moved, instinctively swept the cafe with his eyes, spotted a brother waiter in mid-tango, sank again to his heels, rose, stepped, glanced silently towards Cesare who stood, unmoving behind the counter, flashing his eyes, secretly semaphoring an eyebrow to this one and then that until each, in turn, stopped, halted, covered in confusion.
It was left to Mamma Cesare to save the honour of The Golden Angel. She stepped forward and, from somewhere below the level of Tibo’s chest, she said, “Table for two? This is way, please.” Small and brown, Mamma Cesare waddled in front of them like a magic toadstool leading two lost children through a fairy story.
“This is nice table,” she said, inviting no discussion. “You like me to bring menu or you trust me to bring what’s good?”
Tibo sat down and smiled across the table at Agathe. “Just bring what’s good,” he said.
“Is nice,” said Mamma Cesare. “You two talk.” And she left.
“So what will we talk about?” Tibo asked.
“Lottery tickets—I think we should talk about lottery tickets. You were going to tell me why you bought them for me.”
Tibo rubbed a hand over his face in an embarrassed gesture. “You don’t mind, do you? I wouldn’t want to offend you.”
“Silly. Of course you haven’t offended me. It’s all right. I’m sorry. It was a lovely present. It doesn’t matter why you bought them for me.” Agathe looked down at the tablecloth and traced the pattern of the weave with the tip of her fingernail until Tibo stopped her by laying his hand over hers.
They were touching again for the second time in two days, the second time in their lives.
“I got you lottery tickets because I want you to be happy. All I want is for you to be happy. I realised, well, some time ago, that I have wanted you to be happy for as long as I’ve known you. If I could buy you that house you want on the coast of Dalmatia I would, but I can’t so I bought you lottery tickets instead. You deserve it. You deserve presents. You deserve everything.”
There was a pause. A moment of silence when nothing was said and nothing happened apart from Tibo’s thumb moving softly and slowly, backward and forward against the back of Agathe’s hand. Pressing there, there, on the padded mound of flesh between her thumb and forefinger, rubbing so gently that Agathe felt as if her skin would shred away under his touch. The feeling came back to her from when she was a little girl, staying with her cousins on the farm and she fell ill. Her skin had felt just that way then, before it happened, before she got sick, all raw and sensitive and open, as if it wasn’t even there and there was nothing to protect her from the world and every touch was like hot coals.
“They’ve given us the window seat again,” he said, after a while.
“Yes. It’ll be ‘our table’ before too long.” And then she wondered if she had gone too far and added a hasty “Sorry.”
“What are you sorry for now?” said Tibo. “Stop apologising. You have nothing to apologise for. Who has taught you to do this?”
“I just thought it sounded a bit presumptuous,” she said. “As if I expected you to take me for lunch every day. As if this was going to be a regular thing.”
“I think I’d like that,” said the mayor. “I think I’d like this to be a regular thing. If you would.”
“Yes. I think I would like that very much. If you would.” And then, after as much time as it takes to swallow really quite hard, she finished with “Tibo.”
The mayor noticed. “You called me ‘Tibo,’” he said. “You’ve never done that before.”
She squeezed his hand and smiled. “You started it. You called me Agathe.’”
“I wouldn’t dare!”
“Yes, you did! That note you sent with the lottery tickets, it said, ‘Dear Agathe.’ I noticed. It’s the first time you’ve ever called me anything but ‘Mrs. Stopak.’”
Tibo cleared his throat and nodded. “Yes,” he said, slowly, “and, would you believe I managed the whole thing in slightly less than a pad and a half of notepaper? Whole forests were cleared so I could write a dozen words inviting you out to lunch.”
They were quiet for a moment, looking at one another across the table and then a door swung open at the back of the cafe and Mamma Cesare came out, carrying an armful of steaming plates. As she negotiated the tables, Tibo and Agathe unwrapped themselves from one another, uncoiling their fingers, drawing apart with a last, magnetic tug until, when Mamma Cesare arrived, they were sitting there, prim and respectable and decent and linked by nothing but their eyes.
; “Spaghetti,” Mamma Cesare announced obviously. “You come tomorrow, you get gnocchi.”
“Today, I’m glad we’re getting spaghetti,” said Mayor Krovic but he never looked away from Agathe’s face.
“Very nice.” Mamma Cesare smiled. She put down a basket of crusty bread and pointed out, “Bread, good bread,” and offered wine and water, salads, oil and vinegar and performed all the necessary sacramental rituals of the Italian cafe, dusting their plates with curls of Parmesan and wielding her pepper shaker like an unfeasibly phallic truncheon.
When she left again, Tibo said, “Tell me more about you.”
“I told you too much about me yesterday. Tell me about you.”
Tibo struggled with a mouthful of spaghetti for a moment until, when he felt it was possible to speak with some dignity, he said, “Nothing to tell. You know everything. The whole town knows everything. That is my great tragedy—to have nothing that is not known.”
“I hardly know a thing about you,” said Agathe.
“I find that hard to believe. From what I gather, there’s nothing much happens in Dot that you don’t know all about.”
“Silly stuff. Trivial stuff. Nit powder and hypnotism. All nonsense. I know you are a good man, Tibo Krovic, and kind and handsome …”
“Handsome!”
“Yes. In your way, very handsome. Quiet and honest and trustworthy and calm and kind but I don’t know the first thing about you.”
Tibo looked at her across the bread basket, a forkful of spaghetti held halfway between her plate and her mouth and he saw things in Agathe that he had never, never seen in any woman before. There had been a time (was it ten years ago, twenty years ago, was it longer?) when days like this should have been a commonplace, when Tibo Krovic, a rising young man of Dot, should have been seen in the cafes of the town, in The Golden Angel or even The Green Monkey, laughing too loudly, drinking a little too much, surrounded by friends, holding hands with some lovely young girl in a shadowed alcove, pretending not to notice as she imagined curtains and wedding dresses, making plans to send her flowers in the morning, making plans to see her sister next week. He should have done that then. There should have been decades of young women, dozens of them, one after another, succeeding each other annually on his arm at the Christmas Charity Ball, a string of willing victims, tangled in his sheets or even, imagine it, one who came and stayed and never staled. Just one. The one. The one who thickened at wrist and waist and ankle, swelled at the hip, moulded the mattress into familiar curves and hollows and plumped and blossomed and fruited, again and again, a whole houseful of fat, pink, clever kids. It would have been right and natural then but not now. Now he had missed his chance. Not even the dedicated gardeners of the Municipal Parks and Recreation Department could produce daffodils in October.
Now, to be sitting here, in this place, like this, now, with a woman like Agathe Stopak, now it was wonderment and a miracle. And yet it was true. Now, with the first frosts just around the corner, after a long, empty summer when there had been no time for armfuls of women, no tumbled, tousled, sheet-tangled dozens but two or, perhaps, a brief three—which is far, far fewer than one—here he was with Agathe. There would have been something to boast about in the dozens, something saloon-bar-ish, something cigar-puff-ish, something moustache-twirl-ish and there might have been something downright heroic about the one, the one and only but there was something pitiful and pathetic and dull about the three—three who never stayed, never stuck, never clicked. Tibo thought of them and he felt ashamed because he knew now—he had known for twenty-four entire hours—what it was to love. He loved Agathe. He was in love with Agathe. The times before—they were a kind of sickness. He knew that. And now he had found the cure.
She leaned forward a little, putting her head above the plate and, as she parted her lips and took the soft strings of pasta into her mouth, he felt his heart rush.
“Sorry,” she said and dabbed her mouth with her napkin.
“No. No. I was staring. Me. My fault. Sorry.” He could not drag his eyes away.
“One thing,” she said, to break the silence.
“Pardon?”
“Tell me one thing about you. Tell me your middle name.”
“I don’t have one. I am plain Tibo Krovic.”
“No,” Agathe said, decisively, “you are ‘Good’ Tibo Krovic. That’s what they call you. Did you know?”
“Yes. Somebody told me once. It’s quite a burden.”
“Mimi,” said Agathe.
“Your middle name? Your middle name is Mimi?”
“Would you believe it was my granny’s name? I know. It’s ridiculous.”
“I think it’s lovely,” said Tibo.
“Good Tibo Krovic is not a very good liar. Now it’s your turn. Ask away.”
He stopped to consider, tearing a lump of crusty bread to crumbs while he looked intently at the ceiling. “All right,” he said, “tell me what it would take to make you happy.”
“That’s not very fair, is it? I ask about middle names and you ask what it would take to make me happy!”
“Sorry,” said Tibo. “Too much. You’re right. I shouldn’t have. Sorry.”
Agathe put down her fork. “I’m not offended. It’s a good question. It’s a question I ask myself and you know, Tibo, I have no idea. I haven’t got a clue. There must be something. There must be somebody.”
“But you have Stopak,” said Tibo. It came out sounding more like a question.
“No,” said Agathe. That was all.
They looked at each other across the table then, so many messages, warnings, desires, pleadings and encouragements in that look, all unsaid, all understood, half believed and half imagined.
“No,” said Tibo.
“No.” She picked up her fork again. “Anyway, the rules of the game are clear, so now it’s your turn. You tell me. What would it take to make you happy?”
“Me?” said Tibo. “I’m happy. I’m perfectly happy.”
“Well, that’s good,” said Agathe. “That’s fine. But I don’t believe you. Oh, don’t look all offended at me. When was the last time you laughed?”
“Just now. Just a minute ago. With you.”
“Before that, when?”
Tibo was having trouble remembering. “It’s difficult when you put it that way. I laugh all the time. I laugh. I do.”
“I believe you do,” said Agathe. “What about friends?”
“Lots.”
“It’s not healthy to have lots of friends—quality above quantity when it comes to friends. And I’m not talking about people who know the Mayor of Dot. I mean people who know Tibo Krovic, people who know how many sugars he takes in his coffee.”
“I don’t take sugar,” said Tibo.
“I know that, I’ve made your coffee for years. Who else knows?”
Tibo made a resentful jab at the final knot of spaghetti on his plate. “I don’t think I like this game anymore,” he said. “You’re too good at it.”
Agathe reached across the table and offered her hand. She whispered, “I’m sorry. I’m sorry.” And then, with their fingers locked again, she asked, “How many sugars do I take?”
Tibo looked ashamed. “I’m sorry, I don’t know. You always make the coffee.”
“See?” she laughed. “You’re better off than I am. You’ve got one more on your list than I have.”
Tibo said nothing.
“You can ask, you know. You have my permission to ask.”
There were so many things Tibo wanted to ask but he decided to go slowly for a while. “Very well then, Mrs. Agathe Stopak, how many sugars do you take in your coffee?”
“Just the one. A flat one. Does that make us officially friends now?”
“I think it does, yes,” he said and he leaned forward to kiss the tips of her fingers but, just then, at the other side of the room, he spotted Mamma Cesare heading towards their table and he released Agathe’s hand with a bad-tempered sigh.
“Everything’s good?” the old lady asked.
“Lovely,” they chorused stiffly.
“Good, lovely, very nice. I bring you coffees now, very nice.”
“I think,” Tibo glanced at Agathe to check, “just the bill. We should be getting back to work. And we can get a coffee there.”
Mamma Cesare snorted her disapproval. “You maybe gets coffee but it’s not so good as mine. I am bringing bill. Tomorrow you are having gnocchi.” And she waddled off.
Outside again on Castle Street, Tibo asked, “Do you like gnocchi?”
“I’m not entirely sure what gnocchi is,” said Agathe. “Anyway, tomorrow’s Saturday.”
For a moment, Tibo was unsure why that mattered. Gnocchi—little potato dumplings—you could eat them any day of the week if you felt like it and then the full weight of Saturday hit him. Saturday. The weekend. Two whole days without coming in to work. Two whole days without any excuse to see Agathe. “Yes,” he said. “Saturday. Have you anything planned?”
“Not really. No. In fact, no.” She was hoping that Tibo might take that for an invitation but he said nothing in reply.
They walked on a little further and she tried again. “How about you? Have you anything planned?”
“Well, don’t laugh but I thought I might go shopping. Maybe buy a suit. Or even two.”
Agathe oooooooohed mockingly.
“Oh, don’t! I said not to laugh.”
“I’m not laughing. Yes, you could probably do with a new suit.”
They carried on down Castle Street in silence, Agathe stepping out beside him with that wide, easy, rolling stride that made men turn and look after her when she passed, Tibo tall and straight and elegant, each of them wondering if the other could read their thoughts.
Tibo did not say, “Damn my suits. To hell with suits. Can you imagine all the things I would like to buy for you? Can you imagine all the things I’d shower you with, every day, if I could? New dresses, new shoes, furs and jewels and underwear, beautiful, beautiful underwear and sweets and pastries and flowers and champagne and knick-knacks and fripperies and trinkets and gewgaws and pointless, silly nothings.”
The Good Mayor: A Novel Page 14