by Неизвестный
‘We should plan to see the Da Ponte tombstone,’ I finally said. Shop talk better than no talk.
‘Maybe this weekend,’ she said.
Her comeback was too quick, snappy, almost intentional.
‘This weekend is difficult.’
She stared at me.
‘Dinner and things?’
What a sharp and twisted mind she had.
‘Dinner and things,’ I replied.
Any other woman would have scorned dinner and things and held it against me. Instead, she let it slide. In anyone else this silence would have meant I don’t want to cause trouble. In her it felt different. Dinner and things worked for her too – which is why I began to feel something rise within me akin to anger, though it might have been despair, or, worse yet, just sorrow. I couldn’t begin to tell them apart.
More talk of Lorenzo Da Ponte. How I hated shop talk. And yet, one of the reasons I liked her so much was because talk of Da Ponte with her came so naturally. Such a mind, such a woman, why hadn’t I met women like her earlier in my life? Because you never tried to. Because you never trusted, Raùl would have written. Because you wouldn’t know how to go about doing anything unless she took the first step, because you still haven’t learned and will never learn that women make the first move or never move at all, because, my dearest, it wasn’t given to you to meet a woman like her, and when you finally did meet such a woman you were little more than a tangent in her life. Not a stranger, not a lover, not a friend even – a tangent.
‘Pauline Viardot became friends with everyone who was anyone: Chopin, Tchaikovsky, Liszt, Sand, Gounod, Berlioz, Saint-Saëns, Brahms.’ Then, not knowing what else to add, I couldn’t help myself. ‘So tell me about this new man in your life.’ Was I being jealous? Or was I trying to show that I wasn’t?
‘The new man?’ she said, musing for a moment. ‘I don’t want to talk about him yet.’
‘Doesn’t want to talk about him,’ I echoed, trying to be jovial.
‘Doesn’t.’
Her mood had changed. I couldn’t tell why. Our conversation was losing its footing. We were both groping for strings.
Towards the end of dinner, I said I knew of a small place nearby for dessert and coffee. I was hoping she’d counter with an offer of coffee at her place. Sounds like a good idea, she said.
We walked out. This, I knew, was the moment when years ago I’d have put a hand on her cheek and kissed her right then and there, on the sidewalk, in full view of the other diners. I took my time putting on my coat while she was looking for her cigarettes. In the end she produced one out of her pocket but, considering its bent shape, called it a cripple. I said I used to smoke two packs a day once. How long ago had I quit? ‘I’m not going to answer this.’
‘Why?’ she asked. ‘Because you cheat, or because you are afraid to claim you quit?’
‘Do you really want me to answer?’
‘I asked, didn’t I? You’re dying to tell me, anyway.’ She had regained her spunk it seemed.
My answer, after so much hesitation, might give everything away and underscore why I’d avoided the subject.
‘I quit the year you were born,’ I finally said. ‘Does that say enough?’
She looked at the ground as though taking her time to examine her boots. She had lit her cigarette, and was either deep in thought or was inhaling for the first time in more than two hours.
‘Do you still miss them?’
‘Cigarettes? Are we really talking about cigarettes?’
‘I thought we were –’ she paused – ‘but I guess we’re not.’
‘I don’t miss cigarettes, but I miss who I was before quitting.’
This was by way of both compromise and evasion.
She must have sensed, from my hardscrabble confession, why I wasn’t comfortable being clearer.
‘Has this been bothering you?’
Was she still speaking about cigarettes? Or about the years separating us?
I wanted to scream. When I’m with you, I feel I can take what others call my life and turn its face away from the wall. My entire life faces the wall except when I’m with you. I stare at my life and want to undo every mistake, every deceit, turn a new leaf, turn the table, turn the clock. I want to put a real face on my life. So why can’t I speak to you now?
All I said was that no one likes watching time go by. That was abstract and safe enough, perhaps too abstract and safe for the likes of Raùl.
She made light of the whole thing. ‘So, while I’m kicking about in my mommy’s tummy, you’re smoking away in some nameless cafe in Paris. I’m learning to say dada, and you’re busy reading up on Dada. Is that what’s been bothering you, dear?’
‘There’s more to it than just that,’ I said, ‘as I’m sure you know.’
‘I do know.’ She said nothing more.
‘My dearest.’ I knew she’d come out at so critical a moment and throw in a dearest.
She looked at the ground again and began shaking her head ever so slightly. At first I thought she meant: ‘You’ll never let yourself go, and what a pity that is.’ Then I thought she meant something a touch more hopeful, even exasperated, as in: ‘What am I ever going to do with you?’ Finally I made out what the shaking was about: I don’t want to hurt you.
‘What?’ I finally asked.
She continued to shake her head in silence. Then she looked up and I could feel the tension almost explode in my temples. ‘Walk me to my building?’ she asked.
‘I’ll walk you to your building,’ I said.
We were, I assumed, nixing the idea of coffee and dessert. A good sign. Or a very bad sign. I did not say anything. I was trying to keep pace with her as we made our way down Bleecker. Why was she walking fast, why the chill between us, why the mounting fear of saying goodbye the closer we neared her building?
Before I knew it, we were already there. She stopped right at the street corner, not even before her stoop. We were obviously going to say goodbye. She kissed me on one cheek, I kissed her, then she turned to go away, but then came back and gave me a second kiss on the other cheek. I didn’t have time to hold her, nor did she perform what had become a ritual suggestion of a hug or a kiss on her forehead. I watched her walk away towards her house. I thought she looked downcast and deep in thought – dejected almost. She did not look back this time.
Why hadn’t we spoken? Had I perhaps rejected her as Raùl had warned me not to? Had I missed my cue? There was no cue.
As I walked away towards the West 4th station, I had an image of her entering her apartment, dropping her keys somewhere on her desk and finally giving out a yelp of relief. She’d acquitted herself of dinner, it wasn’t even ten o’clock, and she was free to do as she pleased, take off her clothes, lounge in jeans, call her beau: Yes, dinner’s over, thank God he’s gone, it’s the weekend, let’s just go out and see something really, really stupid tonight!
Bold and rakish, like the piano, while I, the trumpet, was plangent and lost.
I had meant to take her to my favourite pastry shop after dinner. I’d known happiness there once, or maybe not happiness, but the vision of it. I wanted to see whether the place had changed at all, or whether I had changed, or whether, by sitting with her I could make up for the loves I’d gotten so close to but had never been bold enough to seize and, in the course of things, lost. Always got so very close, always turned my back when the time came. Hadn’t I learned a thing about love, or about people, or about life and how to live it? My life, my real life, hadn’t started yet, and all this was rehearsal still. I hadn’t changed; the years had changed. Tonight, I thought, relishing Joyce’s words and feeling exquisitely sorry for myself, the time has come for me to set out on my journey westward. St Augustine’s words sprung to me. ‘Sero te amavi!’ Late have I loved you!
So here I was making my way back through the streets just as I had feared a few hours before, remembering now with a cruel chuckle that I’d gone so far as to rehearse an exit line.
As soon as I got home, I opened my email and started typing something very short: We’ll have dessert another time. I had just pressed the ‘send’ button when her email arrived: Dearest, I forgot to thank you for the wonderful conversation, a great meal, a truly lovely evening. A few seconds later, another email from her: I’d like that.
She’s thinking of me.
No, she’s scrambling to say something nice.
No, she’s thinking of me. She’s trying to stay in touch and not break the evening’s spell. Perhaps she was trying to tease something out of me, get me to say those extra few words that I’d been trying to coax out of her and had frequently blamed her for not saying, or myself for not helping her say. Perhaps she was reopening a window I thought she’d closed the moment we’d said goodbye.
So I ventured something light: Work hard. Listen to the Shostakovich. And have coffee with me tomorrow.
She did not reply.
On Monday she wrote back. She’d been out with friends all day Saturday and Sunday. And Sunday night, dearest, was just too horrific for words. But let’s definitely have coffee soon. She wasn’t playing coy, and her deferral, we both knew, was no longer about coffee.
Monday evening I couldn’t resist. I wrote what I considered a layered email about Maria Malibran and her sister: It turns out that Casanova had known Da Ponte in Venice and that he too, like Maria’s father, is alleged to have had Gypsy origins. Could it be, do you think, that Casanova too . . .? Then, quite unexpectedly, as though it had occurred to me right then and there: We should go out for dinner again. It was good to be with you. But I don’t mean to crowd you. I’m leaving things in your hands.
Not crowding me in the slightest, she replied, eventually.
In the days that followed I didn’t know how to reach out to her without sounding either desperate or peevish. In discussing Turgenev’s hopeless love for Maria’s sister, Pauline, I finally let myself go: ‘I understand him completely, I wish I could hold you again.’ I had nothing to lose, and like all those who know they’ve lost already, I was firing my last salvo, no ammunition left, no backup, no water in my gourd. The feckless sputters in my sentence said I had shot my wad.
The silence that followed was more than a simple omission to respond yet less than a gloved rebuke. She had lost interest, and I was losing her.
I would wait another half a day, maybe even a few days, but a week was certainly pushing it. Still, I’d have to struggle to avoid drowning in this. I’d never allowed myself to sink in too deeply for her – that much was good – though I did like her, liked her very much. Liked her on the day she ordered coffee for me. Liked that we had kindred souls. Already knew I liked her when I sent her my two-page, single-spaced rejection letter. Liked her. Liked the sheen on her skin. Liked everything. I even liked the spot of eczema under her right elbow which she showed me on that night at the restaurant once she’d removed her dark blue cardigan with the rounded mother of pearl buttons and could tell I was admiring every inch of her. ‘See this?’ she said pointing at her elbow. ‘It’s new. Do you think it could be cancer? I’ve always had good skin.’
‘I know,’ I said. She knew I knew, every man knew. ‘Probably just eczema,’ I replied. ‘Nothing but dry skin,’ I added. ‘Do you have a dermatologist?’ I asked.
‘Nope’ – as if to mean, Why should I? At my age?
‘Want the name of one?’
‘Nope. Maybe. Don’t like doctors.’
‘Want me to go with you?’
‘Maybe. No. Yes.’
‘Maybe. No. Yes?’ I asked.
‘Yes,’ she replied.
There was nothing I wanted more at that very moment than to put my arms around her, or reach over and hold her hand and say: ‘Put on your coat, I’m taking you to the dermatologist. He’s a . . . give or take friend, he’ll see you if I ask him.’ No sooner said than once we’d stepped outside on the kerb I would have changed plans, taken matters in my own hands and said: ‘We’re going to your place instead.’
I opened the window of my study and let in the cold air. We’re going to your place instead. My unspoken words rang like a promise of bliss that I’d failed to seize but that continued to throb like a dream and a vision long after we’d woken up and drunk coffee.
I liked the cold air. A few nights ago, I had faced the same street, the same view, the same neighbours’ lights across my building and asked myself whether I’d ever miss this street some day. I remembered the young couple I’d seen at the movie theatre a month earlier; they couldn’t even eat popcorn together. Yet, they were going to see plays together, have children together, hang out on rainy Sundays and listen to the Shostakovich and hold their breath when they heard how the bold piano and the soulful trumpet sang each to each of newborn loves and mended lives. Later, they’d head out to eat somewhere in the neighbourhood and then loiter their way into one of those large bookstores where people always end up buying books, when they sometimes don’t mean to, the way I’d bought Da Ponte’s libretto one Saturday night after a movie, unsure whether I was buying it for her or for me, yet almost certain that it would make her happy because everyone likes a gift, because she’d love the book, because it came from me, I thought. I remembered her hand across the table, how doleful it looked as it seemed to beg me to hold it, just hold me, it seemed to say, even if the arm it belongs to has eczema, just touch me. Now, how far did Abingdon Square feel, as though it and she and the restaurant, and Da Ponte, and Maria Malibran, and the rainfall by the flickering lights of Hotel Miramar, belonged to another life, a life unlived, a life I already knew had turned its back to me and was being nailed to the wall.
I would survive this, of course, and grow indifferent, and soon learn to squelch every access of regret. For heartache, like love, like the longing to reach out and touch a hand across the table, is easy enough to live down. There were sure to be more emails with more dearests – I knew this – and my heart would skip a beat and catch itself hoping each time her name floated across my screen, which meant I was still going to be vulnerable, which meant I could still feel these things, which was a good thing – even losing and aching for her was a good thing.
What was sad was knowing she was most likely the last reminder that I’d missed out on so many things and that, perhaps, there was not, had never been, and might never be another go. We would still communicate, and we might still meet for coffee, but the dream was gone, the hand across the table was gone, the square itself was gone. And I knew this because for the first time ever that evening, after shutting my window and turning my computer off, I walked into the living room and told my wife of a brilliant new piece that was soon to be published about a nineteenth-century diva called Maria Malibran. Had she ever heard of Maria Malibran? I asked. No she hadn’t.
‘But obviously you’re dying to tell me,’ she said.
GRANTA
* * *
JULIE
Darcy Padilla
1993- I was working on a project about urban poverty. Every Thursday, I met with a doctor, a social worker and a nurse, who cared for the Aids patients at the Ambassador Hotel, an SRO flophouse in a neighbourhood littered with crackheads and soup kitchens. One morning, I met Julie, standing in the lobby with a newborn baby in her arms, trousers half zipped, her then-partner Jack at her side. They said Rachael gave them ‘a reason to live’.
Julie said yes to being in the project. I hoped that she would let me get closer.
When I knocked on Julie’s door, sometimes she would answer and other times she would say, ‘Not today, bitch.’ Jack was happy being a speed freak. Julie did not want to lose Rachael, so she left him. We would sit on the floor in the lobby or hallway of the hotel and talk about Rachael, Julie’s past boyfriends; she would ask me questions about myself. I wondered if she was lonely, wondered why she was letting me into her life.
Rachael didn’t crawl until she was two, because there was no room on the floor. She was a sweet baby, didn’t cry much. Julie read to her, loved her.
I can’t forget Rachael sitting on the soiled, stained carpet in the lobby of the West Hotel when Julie slapped her across the face, leaving her handprint on the baby’s cheek. I took the photo. Felt like shit for doing so. Rachael cried and Julie clenched her teeth, started to pull her hand back to slap Rachael again. I said to Julie, take a timeout and I will deal with Rachael. I tried to calm her. Julie walked away.
Julie did the best she could with what she knew. Her first memory of her own mother was getting drunk with her at six; then there were years of being sexually abused by her stepfather. They lived in an SRO, blocks from where Julie lived now, in a room divided by a sheet on a string.
1996- Julie gave birth to Tommy. The father wanted nothing to do with them. The next Christmas, she met a man named Paul at the Salvation Army. She moved out with Tommy and Rachael to be with him, to live in the suburbs. I thought the story was going to end here.
1998- In January, I got a phone call. Julie was in the hospital when the cops came and told her that Paul had abused Tommy. He was found with adult bite marks on his torso and legs, covered in vomit and blood. Tommy and Rachael were taken away.
1998- Jack died of Aids. Julie visited him before the end. I wondered if she knew this would be her fate too. We never talked about it.
That same year she met Jason and became pregnant with Jordan. Julie had tested positive for drugs and, afraid the baby would be taken away, she and Jason kidnapped her from the hospital. I told her that she shouldn’t run. Julie and Jason got nine months in jail. They would have two more sons, Ryan and Jason Jr, taken away at birth.
2005- I found a posting on the Internet by someone looking for a ‘Julie Baird, born 10/10/73’. It was her father who had been looking for her for thirty-one years. I told Julie to call. Julie and Jason moved to Alaska to be with him. Weeks later Julie was in intensive care. Mr Baird met me at the airport. We hugged. He was thankful and the tears in his eyes looked like they had been there for years.