The Face Across the Table

For eleven months I knew Simon by his opinions about maps. He disliked decorative compass roses, distrusted any walking route described as suitable for everybody and could spend an entire evening discussing a path somebody had left off a drawing. I knew the sound of his laugh before I knew the colour of his eyes.

We met in an online group for people who collected old local guidebooks. I posted a photograph of a fold-out map that appeared to lead visitors directly through a lake. Simon said perhaps the town had once offered a more ambitious holiday. We began sending each other ridiculous discoveries, then things that were not ridiculous at all.

I was thirty-six and lived in a city flat above a shop selling curtains. He was forty, lived near the coast and worked for a company that supplied equipment to schools. We both enjoyed finding small places that most travellers passed through. Neither had done much travelling recently. It was easier to plan a fictional afternoon than arrange an actual one.

His profile photograph showed him standing beside a stone wall, sun in his eyes, one hand pushed into a coat pocket. Mine showed my face from an angle I had discovered by accident and never willingly abandoned. We exchanged a few other pictures, usually of books, food or the view from a window. Once he sent his left shoe because it had encountered fresh paint. I felt oddly privileged to receive it.

By winter we were speaking most evenings. He knew my neighbour sang while measuring curtain fabric. I knew he disliked telephone menus and ate breakfast standing up. We had conversations that went nowhere and others that left me awake afterwards, thinking how strange it was to miss a person whose hand I had never touched.

We discussed meeting several times. There was always something practical in the way: work, a family visit, the price of trains. In February he suggested a Saturday in a town halfway between us. There was a museum with an exhibition of travel posters and a café we could both find from the station. I said yes before I could turn the invitation into another hypothetical journey.

The week before, I cut my hair. It had needed cutting for months, but afterwards the woman in the mirror looked unlike the photograph he knew. I took a new picture, disliked six versions and sent the seventh. Simon replied that it suited me. Then he sent a voice message about a parcel delivered to the wrong office. He did not send a picture of himself.

I noticed. I also noticed myself noticing and disliked the person suspicion made of me. We had spoken for eleven months. I knew the rhythms of his day and the pauses before he admitted he was upset. Surely that counted for more than a current photograph. Still, on Friday evening I asked whether the man in the coat was the one I should look for.

His answer took longer than usual. He said he would send a picture in the morning. Then he said he was probably heavier than I expected. The sentence sat on the screen while I considered how to answer without sounding as though I had been asked to give permission. I wrote that a current picture would help us recognise each other, and that I was looking forward to hearing him without a phone between us.

At eight the next morning he sent a photograph taken in a hallway. He was heavier, yes. He was also tired-looking, nervous and holding the phone as though it might object to the work. I liked his eyes. I recognised the corner of his mouth from the old picture. I wrote, Blue shirt, then. Mine’s green. He answered with a relieved joke about having almost chosen green himself.

I arrived first. The café was smaller than its photographs suggested, with tables close enough to make every first date a neighbourhood event. I chose one near the window, ordered tea and tried to read a guidebook I had brought as a prop. After ten minutes I realised I had not turned a page. Then Simon walked past outside, saw me and stopped so abruptly that somebody carrying a shopping bag had to go around him.

He entered smiling. I stood. We had not agreed whether to hug. He held out a hand, I moved towards him and we achieved a brief collision involving my sleeve and his coat. He laughed first, which saved us. His voice sounded lower in the room than through my phone. I wanted him to say something else immediately.

“I nearly walked to the wrong café,” he said. “It’s an excellent start for two people who claim to understand maps.”

I laughed too loudly. We sat down and ordered food neither of us particularly wanted. For the first twenty minutes we behaved like polite strangers impersonating people who knew each other. I asked about work. He asked about the journey. We reached the end of every answer and looked at the menu again.

I began to panic. Had we mistaken the ease of a screen for a connection? Perhaps I liked the man who could be put away when the conversation grew difficult. Perhaps he preferred the woman whose face always appeared at its best angle. Across the table, Simon turned his cup by the handle until the pattern faced him exactly. I knew that gesture from nothing, and suddenly wanted to learn it.

“This is awkward,” I said.

He exhaled. “Thank goodness.”

“That I’m finding it awkward?”

“That I’m not the only one.”

We laughed with relief, and the waiter arrived with sandwiches at precisely the moment nobody needed rescuing anymore. Simon told me he had rehearsed three opening lines on the train. None involved almost entering the wrong café. I admitted I brought a guidebook in case we ran out of things to say. He asked which one. I showed him the cover, and for the next ten minutes we were ourselves again.

At the museum he walked more slowly than I expected. He stopped in front of a poster showing a seaside pavilion and told me his mother used to take him there. She died two years earlier. I knew that, but not the way he held his hands while talking about her. He said the place looked much grander in the poster than it did when they ate chips beside it in the wind. I asked whether that made him dislike the poster. He shook his head. It was nice to see how somewhere ordinary could be imagined.

We went upstairs, examined a cabinet of tickets and disagreed about which designs were easiest to read. The disagreement was small and enjoyable. At one point I looked up and caught him watching me rather than the display. He looked away. I wished he hadn’t. In the next room I stood closer to him than I needed to, and he stayed where he was.

Outside, we bought coffee and sat in a square. He mentioned the photograph without my asking. The old one was from before his mother became ill, before he moved, before several difficult things arrived together. He kept using it because replacing it felt like accepting that the version of himself beside the wall was gone.

“I wasn’t trying to surprise you,” he said. “I was trying not to look at the surprise myself.”

I understood more than I wanted to. My own photograph came from a wedding where I spent half the evening miserable. It showed the six seconds in which I looked carefree. I told him that. Then I said the morning photograph had made me less nervous because it contained a real hallway and a man who appeared equally uncertain about the afternoon.

“That’s not a very flattering description.”

“I find you attractive,” I said, startling us both. “I was trying to work my way towards it elegantly.”

He stared at me, then smiled so openly I felt the answer before he spoke. “I find you attractive too. Even from this angle.”

I threw a folded napkin at him. He caught it badly and we both watched it fall beneath the bench. When he retrieved it, he took my hand. His palm was warm. The conversation we had imagined having for months became temporarily unnecessary.

We missed the first train either of us could sensibly take home. We did not miss the last. Between them we walked by a canal, bought an unnecessary pastry and discussed what we actually wanted next. Neither intended to move. Both wanted another afternoon. We found a date four weeks away and put it in our calendars while sitting beside a waterway no old guidebook had managed to erase.

At the station he asked whether he could kiss me. I said yes and put down my bag before he did, learning something about my own priorities. The kiss was brief, slightly clumsy and far better than anything I had rehearsed. Afterwards he rested his forehead against mine for a moment. I heard a train announcement and did not absorb a word of it.

On the journey home I sent a photograph of my guidebook on the empty seat opposite. Simon replied with his new profile picture: the hallway photograph, cropped badly enough to leave a light switch beside his ear. I told him the switch was distracting. He said it was an important part of his personality. I laughed aloud, and the woman across the aisle smiled without asking why.

Our second meeting took place in my city. He saw the curtain shop, heard my neighbour singing and discovered that I kept far too many mugs for one person. We argued mildly about a route, found lunch and kissed without asking the question again. The third meeting was at his home. His kettle was slower than mine. His favourite chair was uncomfortable. I began to collect knowledge nobody could fit into a voice message.

One afternoon we took a photograph together and neither liked it. My eyes were half shut. His expression suggested he had just remembered leaving something on a train. We tried again, became self-conscious and abandoned the exercise. Later, looking through my phone, I found a picture taken while I was lowering it: two shoulders, half his smile and my hand on his sleeve. I sent it to him. He said it looked like the afternoon felt. I kept that one, without replacing either of our faces with a better version from another day.

By summer we still lived apart. Sometimes the distance was tiresome. Sometimes a call ended badly because one of us was tired and the other wanted more time. We talked again afterwards. There was no perfect route through it. One evening he sent a picture from the old seaside pavilion, his face red from the wind, a paper parcel of chips in his hand. Underneath he wrote, Room for you on the bench, if you’d like.

I checked the trains, bought a ticket and sent him the arrival time. Then I packed a coat suitable for the actual weather, rather than the poster’s idea of it.