The Stranger You Already Know

She stands in Ancient History. One hip rests against the shelf, and one boot crosses over the other, and her black nail polish has chipped at the edges where she picks at it. She is reading the Fagles translation of The Odyssey. The Penguin paperback is so new that its spine gives every time she turns a page.

Crack. Crack.

She has a dimple in her right cheek. Twenty-three hundred years ago that dimple put you on your knees at Apollo's altar. You pressed your forehead into the stone and swore to the god that you would leave the lyre player next door alone, and you broke the oath before the incense went cold.

The bookstore on Clement Street smells of yellowing glue and the wet wool coat of a man asleep over a Bukowski in Poetry. A kid wails in the children's section. The ceiling speakers play Fleetwood Mac, five people who broke up with each other in a studio and sold forty million copies of it, and the store has turned the whole breakup down until it hums along with the heating. You were on your way to the register with a used Lonely Planet Greece, and somebody has penciled nine dollars inside the cover. It is a guide to a country you have lived in twice. The last time you lived there, the Parthenon had a roof. Your hands tighten on the guide.

Walk away. The trick is the first step. After that, momentum handles the rest.

You don't walk away. You clear your throat, and she looks up. Under the tube light her eyes go from gray to green and back.

"I'm sorry. I thought you were someone else."

"Someone like an ex, or is this more of a restraining-order situation?" She keeps her place in the book with one finger, and the dimple goes deeper.

"It's somewhere in between."

"That sounds like a story." She props the book against her hip. Her finger stays inside it. "You going to tell it, or just keep standing there looking haunted?"

Your right hand goes into your pocket and finds the key ring. The teeth of the apartment key bite into your palm.

"You look familiar."

"You said that already, the someone-else part." She turns the book over and studies the back cover, or pretends to. "Guys usually try the you-look-like-my-ex line over in Self-Help. The guys over there are working through things."

The tube light over the aisle ticks and stutters. In the children's section the wailing drops to hiccups.

"Do I actually look like her?"

"You're identical."

She bites her bottom lip and presses until it goes white. When she lets go, the color comes back darker than before. She did the same thing in her father's kitchen in Bruges in 1673, on the night you asked her to marry you and she said yes. A month later you stood at the altar of Sint-Jakobskerk for forty minutes, until her sister came up the aisle in the dress the bride was supposed to borrow. By then a pepper merchant who owned three ships had your bride on the barge to Ostend. The barge moved at the speed of the horse on the towpath, so you caught it at the first bridge outside the walls. She saw you from the rail and gave you one nod.

"That's either flattering or creepy." Her free hand drums once across the cover.

Tap-tap-tap-tap-tap.

She had that habit in Athens, where she played the lyre in the courtyard next door and drummed on the frame whenever she lost her place in a song. Her fingertips are still callused. You'd guess she plays guitar now, in a band named after a sleep aid.

"It's flattering."

"Sure it is." She crosses her arms over the book, and the thin silver ring on her left index finger ticks against the zipper of her jacket sleeve.

In 1297 you bent a horseshoe nail into a ring for her because you couldn't afford silver. You never filed the cut end smooth. She wore the ring until her finger swelled around it, and then her whole hand swelled, and the smith cut the ring off the same week the fever took her.

"So did this mystery woman break your heart?"

"She did, several times."

"Was it her fault or yours?"

Your grip shifts on the keys, and the cut edge of the apartment key digs into the crease of your palm. "That depends on the century."

She tilts her head. "That's an interesting word, century."

"It's a figure of speech."

"Is it?"

She holds your eyes the way she held them across a fire in the Sahara, when she fed you dates with sticky fingers and the sand hissed against the tent walls. Her eyes have the color of the Aegean twenty minutes before a storm.

"Tell me." Her voice drops half a register.

Your mouth opens, and your tongue finds the back of your teeth, and a small clink comes from the bottom of your pocket, where your hand has let go of the keys.

"I think I went to school with her. We had Intro to Philosophy freshman year."

Nobody ever checks a boring lie. Her shoulders drop the way shoulders drop over a negative pregnancy test.

"Well, she must have made an impression."

"She did."

She opens the book where her finger has been keeping the page. "He's stuck on Calypso's island. He gets seven years with a goddess, and he cries on the beach every day of it."

You know what comes a few pages on. The goddess hands him a bronze axe so he can build a raft.

"I'm Renée."

She was Godelieve in Bruges. She was Margery in 1297. In Athens she was Thais.

"I'm Noah."

She repeats the name slowly, the way people knock on a melon. "Noah is a name for a kid with a juice box."

"I've been told."

"You look older. I mean, your face is fine, it's just." She gestures at your eyes. "It's in there. You look tired in a way sleep won't fix."

The tube light ticks. Joni Mitchell has replaced Fleetwood Mac, and the kid in the children's section has finally gone quiet.

"You want to get coffee?"

She asked you to share wine in Athens, in a courtyard that smelled of olive wood and the neighbor's bread, and you said yes, and you got forty years, and every morning of those forty years you rubbed hearth ash into your temples so the neighbors would believe you were going gray beside her, and she died on a spring night while the dog slept across her feet, and you carried her up the hill and sat with her until the stars went out.

She asked you to grab a beer in the parking lot of Tower Records in Sacramento in 1987, and you said yes, and you got eleven years, and you bought reading glasses you didn't need, and in 1998 a Coors truck ran the red light on J Street.

The apartment key has printed its teeth into your palm. The mark will be gone by morning. Every mark you have ever gotten has been gone by morning.

"I can't."

Her face holds still. She nods once, and it is the nod from the barge.

"Okay, you can't."

She goes back to Calypso's island, and her finger finds its line on the page.

The first step toward the door goes hrrrnk in the old floorboards, and you keep walking with nine dollars of Greece you haven't paid for.

Your reflection slides across the glass in the door. Across the street a man wheels crates of bok choy off a truck, and the crates roll straight through your face.

She calls the name on your lease across the store.

Your left foot is off the floor. Your weight has already gone into the step, and your hand is flat on the door, and the door has opened a few inches, and diesel and wet cardboard blow in from the street, and in the glass, over the bok choy and the traffic, she stands at the end of Ancient History and holds the Fagles shut on one finger, and her finger is halfway out of the pages.