View from an Apartment Window

I looked through my apartment window. Across the street in a building like my own there was a light on and a lone man cooking a meal for himself. He must have been listening to music because his head nodded and swayed to a beat. I saw him stir a tall pot happily. Pasta? I couldn't know. He stepped back from his oven and I saw him with a smock over his button down, sleeves rolled up to cuffs at his elbows. He tasted the wooden spoon and swayed and swooned a bit, directing an unseen orchestra with the spoon after he had satisfyingly licked it clean. Androgynous. Or was it slightly effeminate?

His hair was groomed close and neat, gray streaks gracing the area above his ears. He laid the spoon on the counter and glided to the sink where he rinsed his hands. Delicately, of course, drying them in a small kitchen towel folded neatly next to the sink for that very purpose. He refolded the towel and put it back on the counter, still swaying, always swaying. He picked up the spoon and directed. I could tell he was humming as well. I couldn't hear it, but I could tell. His lips were pursed and his chest rose and fell every third beat (it must be a waltz).

He took what looked to be a skinned fish and laid it on a cutting board. The countertop was black marble and the fish was white, like thousands of layers of see-through floss white, not alabaster or ivory white. The cutting board was floss white as well and when he laid the fish on it I noticed a slight red streak through the fish's spine that couldn't be seen without the contrast (contrast against an identical floss white?). He filleted the fish with gentle precision, surgical clarity. His lips were still pursed, still humming. Then he halved a lemon, bright yellow. I could smell the citrus by looking at it. Taking a lemon half, he carefully drizzled the juice over the fish. It was all so sterile, that apartment. Black and white. Leather sofas, white walls, flat television on the wall, glass coffee table, white bar stools at the breakfast bar where he was preparing his meal, black lights hanging over the countertop-oven space, black refrigerator behind him, his white smock, his white sleeves, his salt and pepper hair.

A little butter now and what looked to be garlic, but garlic is so small from this distance that it could have been an onion or an egg. No, not an egg. I would have seen the yolk. Do people use eggs on fish? He bent and disappeared as he placed the fish in the oven. Twirling, gliding, swaying, humming. He mixed the pot again and tasted the wooden spoon and nodded. Yes. Perfect. It was red, ragu, a pasta sauce. And with nothing to do but wait, he picked up a memory, or a phantom, and danced. His hands held the air, his right on the invisible waist, his left palm-up shoulder-height. He three-stepped around the kitchen with that memory or that phantom or whatever it was. I wish I could have heard that music. I don't know why, but I would have greatly enjoyed hearing that music.