KristyWes

Mysterious Beatrice

Looking north on Sullivan Street

V-Bar is a small coffee-shop by day / bar by night in the West Village. It has blue walls that look like water and tall tables made of weathered wood. On Sunday, Tiff and I camped out there for a few hours, post-church and pre-fireworks. A tattooed barista in a black bandana was the lone employee; she kept ducking outside and disappearing down into the basement, returning with buckets of ice cubes for everyone's drinks.

Sunday was sweltering. V-Bar was the perfect spot to hideout from the heat.

If you ever find yourself bored at V-Bar, check out the bookshelf in the back corner where people have left behind reading materials, along with a chess board, Boggle, and a vintage edition of Sorry. After Tiff and I had finished dishing all the dirt there was to dish, I went to grab Sorry off the shelf and a title of one of the books caught my eye:

The Secret Language of Relationships

It was an oversized volume, with a red hardcover held in place by duct tape.  The subtitle promised me a complete personology guide to a relationship with anyone.  How could I pass that up?  Time to learn!

The "science" of the book is kinda laughable - detailed personality assessments (based on the date range in which you were born) inform what kind of relationship you can expect to have with anyone (based on the date range in which they were born).  We each read our profiles (60% of the time it worked every time) and were about to reshelve the book when Tiff noticed this inscription on the inside front cover:

To my beloved Edgar –
If only you’d been born two days earlier,
everything would’ve worked out.
Your loving,
Beatrice

I've already forgotten what the book "revealed" about my personology assessment, but I keep thinking about this inscription.  Wouldn't you lovelovelove to know the back story of Edgar and Beatrice?

I would.  Maybe one day I'll write it - maybe I'll invent a satisfying solution to the mystery of their star-crossed love, now memorialized only in the corner of a book, in a corner of a bar, on a shady street in the West Village.