Perfection

by Julie Metz

  Paolo was not the kind of man that most women would call beautiful. He was thin and wiry, with ropy muscles, the kind of guy who has to drink high-calorie protein shakes to keep on weight. His hair was already receding at thirty, leaving a prominent forehead patched here and there with a few short, tumble-weed curls on an otherwise barren, tawny desert. His face had a carved quality, with the angular cheeks and down-curved nose of a much older man. He wore a short, dark beard and mustache that tickled when we kissed. When we walked hand in hand, I could feel the bony knuckles of his muscled hands and the bitten fingernails he worried when a cigarette wasn’t handy. His best friend called him “bruttino,” an affectionate form of the adjective “ugly.”

  I looked at his sleeping self with tenderness. This was the man I wanted, this man. I could not have explained why. At twenty-two, I couldn’t truly explain why I did anything. I was old enough, however, to imagine the immediate future.

  Later, in the afternoon, Paolo would take me to the station in Monterosso, where I would purchase the cardboard train ticket I have kept all these years. I would travel back alone to Santa Margherita, pack my bags, take the overnight train to Paris, and fly home to New York. We will never be in bed together again. He would return to Torino, to his teaching job. I would find a job, and we would proceed through our separate lives. One day he would marry his girlfriend in Torino, and maybe I’d meet somebody I loved as much as this man and marry him. I did not want to forget this morning, the last of its kind.

  The sun rose. A shaft of yellow light pierced though the porthole, forming an elongated triangle of yellow on his back. I will remember this triangle of light. I will save this moment in the triangle of light.

  Paolo walked me from the harbor to the train station. We stood on the platform quietly. I saw the train approaching, on time, this one accursed day. He turned toward me, hugged and kissed me.

  I clung to his neck, then released him, unable to speak.

  “Allora, ci sentiamo,” he said, as if we’d be chatting the next day.

  I told him I loved him.

  “Anch’io ti amo,” he said with a smile. His lips pressed against mine, his beard tickled my mouth and cheek.

  Then I was gone on the train.

  Twenty-six years later, the memory remains vivid and well formed.

  There are, in the end, moments from my life with Henry I want to keep, moments, like that triangle of light, that were true. A morning walking to work, a few months after we’d met, when I understood that I loved him and that he loved me. Our walk together across the great Nyika Plateau in Malawi, when all things still seemed magnificently possible. The exhausted morning of Liza’s birth, his blissed face as he held her tiny, perfect body.

  But more and more days pass now when I forget Henry. I find that I think almost every day about other people I have lost through death or parting: my mother, Henry’s aunt Rose, a man I knew in the 1980s—not even a close friend—who died of AIDS, my friend Jim from the island in Maine, and Emily, with whom I have not spoken in several years. In living too much for himself, Henry missed the point of living for others. I am sorry that Henry cannot live through me in an everyday way, that his daughter alone bears that quiet burden. Though for the duration of this writing, Henry has been my frequent companion, watching me, even as I type.

  I never forget to salt the meat. But I am ready to let him go.

  I took a big chance and told Liza about her father’s affairs while we were in Maine this past summer. She listened quietly.

  “Are you happy he died?” she asked. What a question for an eleven-year-old child to ask, but of course it was the obvious question, one that deserved an answer.

  “What happened to your father was a tragedy. He made some big mistakes in his life, and he died without having a chance to do better, to apologize. He did great harm to you and to me, though he loved us.”

  “Do you think you would’ve gotten a divorce?”

  “I don’t think we would’ve been able to stay married. So, I’m happy to have a chance to make a new life for us, but it’s terrible that he died the way he did.” I hoped I didn’t sound like a politician at a televised debate, artfully dodging. “I hope that answers your question.”

  Liza nodded thoughtfully.

  I recently received a letter from a woman named Avery, who met Henry in February 2002, during his traveling research year. I’d made contact with Avery through the friend he’d stayed with during that week in Northern California, who told me that Avery had something important to share with me. Avery and I talked on the phone, and then she sent me an e-mail describing her brief and unusual encounter with Henry at a dinner party:

  The party was delightful, filled with family, friends, laughter and music. I sang “My Romance” and then I sat in the living room to take in the rest of the evening. I sat next to Henry who did not occupy a large space and wore his black jacket zipped all the way to his chin. I remember thinking that this was odd as it was quite warm in the house. Funny, the things we remember when we study our memories for answers.

  We exchanged names and handshakes and listened to the music for a while. He said that he was an author and deeply passionate about food, here to visit with his friend while also visiting restaurants in San Francisco to interview famous chefs.

  I politely smiled and asked questions about his family. I like to know more about a person’s life and family since it is the center of my life. I was at the time and continue to be happy in a loving and fulfilling marriage, a mother of two daughters. He said that he had a beautiful and successful wife and an adorable little girl who was the light of his life, then showed me photographs. We continued our conversation and walked outside, as I was planning to head home early. Henry asked if there was a good place to run in the area. I said that I was planning to run in the morning at the reservoir and invited him to join me. We met at 10 A.M. the next day for a 5 miler. I could not keep pace with him, so he ran around once to catch me on the second lap. It was time for me to slow down a bit, so we walked.

  That is when his story began to trickle out. He asked if he could tell me something and wanted my opinion. He said that he loved his wife, then he added something about not being sure he was a good partner but he knew he was a good father.

  I remember thinking, “Wow, what am I going to do with this?”

  Then he mentioned this other woman/friend in town who had made herself available, who’d never put any pressure on him, with whom he had been having an affair for a quite a while.

  I asked him if he loved her.

  He said, “No.”

  I said something like, “What about a life code…how do people do that and sleep at night?”

  He said that he had trouble sleeping and was trying to leave this woman but, recently it had turned very sour and he had discovered that she was violent, unstable and had even threatened to harm him and/or his family if he stopped seeing her.

  “I feel trapped,” he said. “I am afraid of what might happen if I stop seeing this other woman.”

  I asked if you knew about the affair. He said that he didn’t think so. I told him that no matter what is truth, it was important that he was brave enough to make a decision to change and preserve what was most important in his life, his family. Perhaps he was not brave enough to choose.

  We stopped for a sandwich and I told him that I thought he should tell you everything if he believed that the two of you had something special and strong enough to overcome this challenge. I also suggested that he talk to a lawyer and if necessary, face this woman with legal counsel to protect himself and his family.

  His phone rang a couple of times while we were having lunch. He said it was “her.”

  I suggested that he just come right out and tell her that he didn’t have the energy to be what she needed right now, that it was a mistake and he regretted any pain that he caused, but that he needed to go back to his family.

  Henry said that he was afraid you would not understand a
nd might refuse to take him back.

  I encouraged him to believe in you and that he would not know if he didn’t try.

  He said, “I’m like a spider caught in its own web.”

  He asked if there were any shops nearby, he wanted to pick up something for his daughter. I suggested that if he had time we could drive into town where there are some cute shops for kids. So, off we drove, in two cars. We found something sweet for your daughter and then walked into the Indian Artisan shop next door. Henry handed me a thin silver bracelet with instructions to try it on. I balked but he insisted, thanking me for being an honest friend. Although the clasp broke, I felt that I should not throw it away. I will be honored to send it to you, if you like.

  So, we hugged and went our separate ways. I wished him good luck and asked him to stay in touch. I did not hear from him at all. I suppose we won’t ever really know what happened and I am sorry for your loss. But, if Henry was so torn and tortured in his heart and mind, perhaps his spirit knew that he could not exist that way.

  How sad…to have known him and have been chosen to “see” him like this. Although, I have learned to be a better friend to my friends by asking more questions and demanding truth when they are struggling…

  Please feel free to ask me any more questions. I would like to have been a friend and known you then as well, so that I could have called you, for I felt that I did not want to mind my own business. Perhaps then it might have been a story with a different ending. I often wonder why we are chosen to share pieces of other lives. Thank you for trusting me to share this with you.

  Fondly,

  A.

  Will and I went down to City Hall one Friday morning to become domestic partners. Our reasons were entirely practical. He had good health insurance, while mine was costing me an arm and a leg, and involved monthly arguments with the friendly folks in the Claims Department. Needless to say, the Bush administration was not going to help me out here. However, Will convinced his employer to expand coverage to opposite-sex domestically partnered couples.

  We were directed to the dingy, fluorescent-lit waiting room on the second floor. We filled out our forms, looking up from our task to watch other couples, who unlike us (we’d shown up in our jeans) were preparing for their big moment in wedding attire—white dresses, bouquets, tuxedos, corsages, the whole nine yards. When the clerk summoned us to his little window, we handed over our paperwork. The clerk asked a few questions, looked over our drivers’ licenses and utility bills. He asked us the required question: “Do you have any other domestic partners?” We laughed over that one, signed the forms, and the clerk stamped the forms and handed us an official document announcing our new status.

  “We’re done?” I asked, expecting something a bit more dramatic. “That’s it?”

  “That’s it,” the clerk replied with a smile.

  And yet, I felt surprisingly changed as Will and I walked away from City Hall in search of a quick lunch on Court Street. After a lot of mess and misfortune, I felt lucky. Though it might be, as Will remarked between gooey bites of hot pizza, that we make our own luck and that he himself felt just as lucky. In any event, we’d made a commitment. Now we were a for-real family.

  I heard the subway train singing one morning. As the brakes released on the Number 2 train at Atlantic Avenue, I distinctly registered the first three notes of “Somewhere” from West Side Story, drawn out, longingly.

  Transfixed, I wondered if this performance was just for me, a one-time fluke. None of the other travelers seemed to notice. The next time I rode the train, I heard the song again. I had to smile because that melody could not be more appropriate for me, the prodigal daughter, returned home to the city I tried to leave.

  It’s true that the Big Apple doesn’t exactly roll out the welcome-home mat. I had to develop my urban body shield and reawaken the third eye. Not the one you hear about in yoga class, the one in the center of your forehead. I’m talking about the one in the back of your head. For a few months, I was constantly bumping into people and lampposts until I relearned the refined Manhattan pedestrian ballet. I had to teach Liza some serious street smarts so she could deal with crazy Brooklyn traffic on Union Street.

  But the city and I, we are good friends again now. At the last minute, she threw me a life preserver and reeled me back home. Gowanus might not be as gorgeous as the Hudson River view I left behind, but on a springtime walk home from downtown Brooklyn, the late afternoon sun hits the warehouse windows on Union and Bond, and the Kentile Floors sign shimmers and flares in the distance. Liza and I hold hands as we cross the Union Street Bridge, admiring the improbably lush princess trees in full flower perched over the canal. A lone seagull floats high above us on a salty breeze, squawking and kibitzing. On days like this, I think to myself, this is the place for us.

  It’s Saturday night at Hope & Anchor, a vaguely sailor-themed restaurant-nightspot on Red Hook’s main drag. We are out for a family-friendly night on the town with Liza’s friends and their parents. The kids are finishing plates of macaroni and cheese; we grown-ups are polishing off a jumble of Asian noodle salad and pierogi. I am anticipating an ample wedge of truly evil chocolate cake. I squish the lime down the neck of my Corona, where it bobs like a buoy on a fisherman’s line (as the late, great comic Mitch Hedberg liked to say, I have been “saved by the buoyancy of citrus”). My child is no longer wide-eyed shocked, merely intrigued and delighted by our MC, a cocoa-skinned drag queen named Dropsy, nearly seven feet tall (including the blond Afro wig), busting out of a black spangled minidress, who strides to the microphone in black platform boots to lead us in karaoke. She opens the set crooning “Sitting on the Dock of the Bay” in a breathy falsetto. Our kids—Dropsy calls them the “Hope & Anchor Children’s Choir”—are waiting to sing their recent favorite: Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody.” The audience claps and whoops its approval. The waiter arrives with my slice of chocolate cake. I don’t think it gets much better than this, at least not with a PG-13 rating.

  After years apart, Irena and I live just five blocks from each other. Despite Henry’s earlier attempts to undermine our friendship, it’s almost like the good old days. There was a time, years earlier, when we all lived in adjoining brownstone buildings, our backyard gardens separated by a fence we vaulted using an old kitchen stepladder. In those days, we’d hang out in our gardens after a freelance workday indoors, form spontaneous dinner plans depending on what either of our refrigerators contained. Our cats wandered back and forth under the fence while we organized the menu. Irena’s eight-year-old daughter (now in college) would entertain Liza, who was just an infant. Finally, Henry might grill a steak and rummage for a bottle of wine, Irena might make an expert pasta dish and discover another bottle. A salad might get tossed with the mingled contents of our crisper drawers. Other friends and family might appear. We’d eat here or there, we’d sit around the table till Liza fell asleep on my lap.

  That era when we were young with nothing but time is certainly over. But once in a while, we have idle afternoon hours together. When our new apartment proved too small for four cats, Irena and her partner graciously adopted my old cat Katie, who spent her golden years in the paradise of their elegant apartment, napping on refinished Danish midcentury modern. When I visit Irena, we muse on survival—old Katie cat’s and ours, and the many twists and turns that have brought us back together.

  “No, Mr. Smarty-Pants,” I retort, directing a nicely crisped frite at Eliot’s grinning face, “I am not going to write up the nitty-gritty of our one and only date. And don’t be looking so hurt.”

  Every few months, on a day when my friend Eliot, now happily married, travels to the city for work, we eat lunch together. At a bistro table, everyone is the same size.

  Today, I get to hear about the time he met Patrick Stewart (one of my celebrity crushes), who had finished a voice-over for a company sales presentation. Following the recording session, Stewart invited him for afternoon refreshments—tea, Earl Grey, hot—
just like he did on Star Trek: The Next Generation.

  Eliot listens while I yammer on about the latest book I’ve read. I’ve been rereading my favorite E. M. Forster novels—most recently, A Passage to India. The Marabar caves will always be a mystery for me, though after this reading, I can imagine the darkness in which Adela Quested experiences her flash of terrifying self-awareness.

  Over the last mouthfuls of strawberries and cream, Eliot and I compare notes on our respective partnerships. He tells me about his rose garden, and we share weird pet stories (the time his dog impaled his chin on a bone tops all).

  “So, Jools, can I be in your next book?” he asks.

  The bill arrives, and we split the check with our business cards. I am pretty sure this lunch qualifies as a legit tax deduction.

  Anna and I live just a few streets from each other in Brooklyn. We still share many things, including our handsome dentist (if you have to sit in the wretched chair, at least you should have something pleasant to look at). We call on each other when we have troubles—professional, personal, or, as it sometimes turns out, imagined. Her forceful “I hear ya, sister!” always snaps me out of my gloominess. On in-sync days, we find ourselves in the same yoga class, sipping a coffee together on the bench outside a local food shop, or eating takeout together with our kids at her kitchen table.