The Secret Lives of People in Love

by Simon Van Booy

  In the dreams, the old ventriloquist beckoned Drake to the Greenpoint racetrack where the old man had given his final performance more than twenty years before.

  At first Drake didn’t tell Kristine about the dreams, but then he realized that she was his best friend—and so he thought to hell with it, and told her one night as they shopped for toys at the CVS Pharmacy on Manhattan Avenue.

  The pharmacy used to be a movie theatre.

  A disco ball hung from the rafters.

  Faded posters for Steve McQueen and Natalie Wood gripped the walls behind thin metal shelves crammed with toilet paper and boxes of crayons.

  As she stood in line to check out, Kristine told Drake that he should go to the raceway. “But it’s only a dream,” Drake had said. “That doesn’t matter,” she replied. “It still means something.”

  That night, as they were folding out the couch that had become their bed since the baby kicked, Kristine said to Drake that maybe he was having dreams because Oskar was his father and soon he was going to be a father himself.

  Drake dropped the cushion he was holding and went into the kitchen. He stared out the window into the quiet street without seeing anything. His eyes blazed.

  Kristine followed. Her hands appeared on the drop of his shoulders like two slow birds. Drake reached for them.

  They stood in silence for the first time since childhood.

  Two nights later at the racetrack, tired horses limped the oval to the delight of a few gamblers.

  A short man wore a dark green bird tattoo on his hand. He shuffled inside a long leather jacket. He stood on the concrete floor staring up at televisions suspended by metal braces in flashing squares of nine.

  Occasionally something would happen, and everyone would rush over to a different part of the stand. Then something else would happen, and the attention would turn there.

  People won and lost until the lights were turned off one by one and the stadium was swallowed in gulps.

  The horses nodded quietly in their stables at night like old trees.

  Great fires had once burned in their glassy eyes.

  Drake peered up—up past the arena into the grey windless sky. Dark clouds were merging in the east. When small drops began to fall and darken the world in penny-shaped circles, no one around him scurried for cover. For lonely people, rain is a chance to be touched.

  The whole scene before Drake would have been exactly like the dreams except that he couldn’t feel Oskar hovering at his shoulder, guiding him like some fugitive limb.

  As the rain at the raceway turned cold and pooled on the track, horses drank from puddles and fanned their tails. Drake stepped through the old arches into the covered part of the arena where a uniformed attendant stood outside the toilets selling single cigarettes and plastic flowers. Drake was going to where (in the dream) Oskar had guided him.

  A very old woman sat behind a glass window and took bets. Then the sound of shoes echoed through the great hall as one lucky gambler ran toward the window clutching his stub. Everyone stopped what he was doing and looked with reverence and envy upon this lone figure tearing across the stone floor. But they would not look for long because they knew that as soon as the envelope had been slipped under the window, its contents would be counted and then pushed back inside the booth in time for the next race.

  The raceway had been the site of Oskar’s last performance.

  In the dream, the puppet was in a plastic bag behind a curtain.

  After that last performance so many years ago, Oskar simply disappeared, but no one worried because all his things were gone too. The neighbors asked Drake’s mother if he had paid all the rent before he left. She said that he had paid several years in advance and moved out at exactly the end of his term without saying good-bye.

  In the dreams, behind a curtain in the back bar was a length of wood from a Polish forest near Biskupin that had been carved into the shape of a small person.

  Drake continued up the stairs to the lounge. The track would soon close. Kristine was waiting anxiously at home.

  The stairs smelled of Bruson’s Lime Hair Tonic.

  The bar at the raceway was empty, and the shelves wore sleeves of dust. Three dim lightbulbs glowed. Drake crept through the stale air, casting only the faintest of shadows.

  At the back of the room was a curtain.

  As Drake fingered the drape, he hesitated. If he pulled it back and found the puppet, then his dream would have been some kind of omen. It would be his father’s final performance, a message from the billowing world of apparitions.

  That night, Kristine went into labor.

  Drake got home to find her sitting on the couch next to a green suitcase of clothes. “My water broke outside the Peter Pan Bakery,” she said.

  Her baby was born eight hours later on a snowy Christmas Eve at the old stone hospital. When Drake saw the child, he felt as though he had known her all along and they were merely being reunited.

  He felt they were like two halves of an apple that had never been cut.

  Three years later, it snowed again on her birthday, but this time so heavily that people on the first and second floors of Drake’s brownstone were completely reliant on their third-floor neighbors for news of what was happening. Their windows were almost completely snowed in.

  Then mysteriously in the afternoon, the first- and second-floor occupants lost power. Kristine filled Tupperware bowls with Hamburger Helper. Her daughter slowly carried them downstairs. One of the young Polish boys who had just arrived from Warsaw lit her way with a candle. His blond hair glowed in the flickering light. Everyone thought it was pretty how the two children made slow, soft shadows on the wall. Someone said that one day they might get married. Everyone nodded.

  Later on, when it got dark, the neighbors came up and played birthday games. Then they all watched A Charlie Brown Christmas over and over again.

  The old woman on the second floor had a tin of chocolate hearts. At first, the lid wouldn’t come off, but when it did, the hearts spilled everywhere and people had to grope around on the floor laughing.

  Then they had birthday cake, even though it was Christmas Eve. Drake wondered if other people outside Greenpoint had such wonderful lives.

  After his daughter went to bed, Drake picked up the phone and called his mother.

  She lived in a small wallpapered room in an institution for people with Alzheimer’s, in a place called Plainview, Long Island. The nurses were mostly from Haiti. One of them put his mother on the phone. She said nothing, which meant she was happy. Drake told her about the snow and then the birthday party—chocolate hearts all over the floor. He recited his favorite line from A Charlie Brown Christmas, which was “I never thought it was such a bad little tree. It’s not bad at all, really. Maybe it just needs a little love.”

  She laughed and then said, “Why don’t I feel the way I’m supposed to feel?”

  Drake laughed because that was Charlie Brown’s line at the beginning when he was talking to Linus. It was a cartoon they had always watched together, like a living family photograph.

  After hanging up, Drake imagined the contents of his mother’s life spread out before her like wreckage on the sea. Since becoming a father, Drake had begun swimming out to her more often.

  He even took Kristine and the baby to meet her. The old woman had reached out for the baby almost instinctively. She held her firmly on her lap oohing and aahing. Then she tenderly touched the baby’s cheek and said, “My darling beautiful little Drake.”

  “We named our daughter after you,” Kristine said softly. Drake’s mother looked down at the child in her arms as though it had just appeared.

  “This is me?” She said in horror. Kristine took the baby. Drake’s mother began to shake violently. Drake calmed her down. Then he calmed Kristine down. The only person who didn’t need calming down was the baby.

  The bedroom at the nursing home smelled of milk and bleach. The floor was plastic tile, and there was a low sink
with a cord attached that could be pulled for help. Drake’s mother was wearing slippers that Drake had bought her on Manhattan Avenue.

  Drake wondered how she and Oskar had met. There was quite an age difference between them. Drake wished he’d paid more attention to Oskar. After all, he had lived in the basement, only a few steps away.

  As they drove back to Greenpoint from Long Island, Drake looked at the other drivers on the Long Island Expressway and realized that anyone could be anyone’s father, that anyone could love anyone under certain circumstances, and that life is a museum of small accidents.

  After hanging up, Drake sat for a long time next to the telephone.

  Then he looked up and for a moment didn’t know where he was.

  On the table in the kitchen were the Christmas cookies and the glass of milk left out for Santa Claus. Next to that, an uneven stack of dirty plates from the impromptu birthday party. Drake remembered everyone sitting around watching television.

  He drained the glass and ate a few of the small cookies.

  His daughter’s mittens were also on the table, two tiny wool sacks for two tiny hands.

  Drake boiled the kettle and brewed some tea. He drank it very hot. Kristine had fallen asleep in the next room.

  Drake remembered his night at the racetrack.

  Standing for so long at the curtain, wondering what lay beyond.

  If the puppet was there behind that curtain, then to put his hand inside and walk him home across Greenpoint, past the ships lugging their cargo up the East River, past the glistening men in the tugboat café and the old stone hospital—to give life to the puppet and take up the medium—would have meant total surrender of his own life.

  The more he thought about it, the more he was glad that he walked away.

  On the table lay Kristine’s unfinished tapestry of a man riding a horse that Drake had bought from the souvenir shop at the racetrack.

  It was taking her a long time.

  Drake looked into his mug.

  It was empty but still warm—like his mother’s life.

  Kristine was sleeping on the couch. Drake would have to wake her to pull it out and put the sheets on. He went to the cupboard and ate a few more cookies. Then he went into the room where his little daughter slept.

  The two people he loved most were asleep where nothing could harm them.

  Wisps of curling hair fell down the child’s soft neck. Her head rested on her hand. Her small body rose and sank as she, a tiny vessel, sailed through a dream toward morning.

  And then Drake picked up the fleshy star of her hand and kissed it.

  It was probably going to snow all night, and the heavier it got, the quieter everything became—until the city of Brooklyn itself fell asleep and dreamed it was once a wild, deep forest where owls looked out from trees into windy plains.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I wish to directly acknowledge these people:

  Darren Booy (for knocking on the wall), Joan Booy, Dr. Stephen Booy, Ken Browar, Sandra Buratti, Justine Clay, Christine Corday, Lindsay Edgecombe, Danielle Esposito, Patricio Ferrari, Peggy Flaum, León García, Francis Howard, Lucas Hunt, P.K., Carrie Kania, Dr. Mickey Kempner, Hilary Knight, Bénédicte Le Lay, Laura Lyons, Michael Matkin, Mary McBride, Anne Michaels, Dr. Edmund Miller of Long Island University, Samuel Morris III, Dr. William Neal of Campbellsville University, Jonathan D. Rabinowitz, Sheridan Sansegundo, Paula Sinnott, Jessamyn Tonry, Keith Usher, F.C.V., Lorilee Van Booy, Wim Wenders, Peter Handke, and Jurgen Knieper for Wings of Desire, Dr. Barbara Wersba, and the Russo family of Morano Calabro, Italy.

  I also wish to acknowledge:

  Greenpoint Café

  Humanities Department at the School of Visual Arts, New York

  Musée de la Résistance Nationale, Paris

  Shakespeare and Company, Paris

  Wellspring House, Massachusetts

  P.S. Insights, Interviews & More…

  About the author

  Meet Simon Van Booy

  Hotels

  Tickets and Everyday Life

  About the book

  Voice

  Process

  History of Stories

  The Art of Spying

  Read on

  Have You Read? More by Simon Van Booy

  About the author

  Meet Simon Van Booy

  SIMON VAN BOOY was born in London and grew up in rural Wales and Oxford. After playing football in Kentucky, he lived in Paris and Athens. He is the author of The Secret Lives of People in Love and Love Begins in Winter, which won the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award. He is also the editor of three forthcoming Harper Perennial philosophy books, titled Why We Fight, Why We Need Love, and Why Our Decisions Don’t Matter. His essays have been published in newspapers such as the New York Times, The Daily Telegraph, and The Times (London). He lives in New York City, where he lectures at the School of Visual Arts, and he is involved in the Rutgers Early College Humanities program (REaCH) for young adults living in underserved communities. His books have been translated into eight different languages.

  Hotels

  I THINK TO BE A WRITER, you must be willing to break from your routine. If I were to write a book about the writing process, I would call it A Field Guide for Writers. I think another thing writers should be prepared to do is loll around in hotels. If my daughter, Madeleine, and I are not at home putting on small operatic productions (see Fig. 1 and Fig. 2) or learning Irish kick-line steps for the musical You’ve been like a father to us, you’ll find us slumped over some velvet couches at a nearby hotel, high on tea. Madeleine likes hotels for two reasons: the television and the pool. I like hotels because I don’t have to clean, cook, or worry about stains. I also like them because people there are out of place. No one really lives there, so they’re not at home, yet it’s somewhere they have to stay for a while. It’s like life in a way; some people are born into better hotels than others. I think I was born into a Welsh bed-and-breakfast where everyone loved one another, but nothing worked because of the weather. Ever since I was a child, I’ve found hotels very glamorous. Here are my favorite hotels and why they’re useful to the writer:

  Fig. 1 Madeleine stringing lights for a small-scale production of Cinderella

  Fig. 2 Madeleine rehearsing the opening song, “I really need love”

  Tickets and Everyday Life

  WRITERS MUST HARVEST DETAILS from the everyday. For instance, if you see a train ticket forgotten on a park bench, pick it up. Where is the destination? Who will not be going there? Who went there and came back? Tickets often mean a journey, so save them and perhaps, if you want to write, ask yourself, Why did somebody leave their house at 3 AM and why were they running? If they missed the train, what happened? Is your story only possible because of a missed train?

  Here are three train tickets. Without these three journeys, “Little Birds,” “The Still but Falling World,” and “The World Laughs in Flowers” would not have been written.

  About the book

  Voice

  THE SECRET LIVES OF PEOPLE IN LOVE was the first complete book written in my own voice as a writer. Voice is sometimes referred to as a writer’s style. Finding your voice as a writer is like finding someone to devote yourself to forever. Writing in my voice allows me to untie emotional knots. Finding my voice was the second most wonderful thing that has ever happened to me. Within the previous five years, I had written three books that were not in my voice but which contain moments where my voice is apparent, though not consistent throughout the whole work. These manuscripts sit under my bed like three eggs from which I hatched.

  In a sense, they are the most important books I will ever write because they made me the writer I am now. That was how I found my voice—by writing my way into it.

  Perhaps a writer’s most significant works may not be limited to the more public works of later life—but also those early manuscripts that functioned as a sort of drawing board. It would be interesting to read
an author’s first and last books in the same sitting. In that sense, The Secret Lives of People in Love is the first book I ever wrote.

  Process

  AT THE MUSEUM of the History of Science in Oxford, England, there is chalkboard that hangs behind a thin sheet of glass. It features strange mathematical markings that were written by Albert Einstein. While this set of equations is certainly something to behold in and of itself, it is really only the fruition of his labor—an illusion of success. The most important work probably took place over many afternoons, with hot cups of tea, lots of rubbing out, stopping to think and pet the cat, and staring out the window. Success is really nothing more than the record of failure. To be successful means you must be willing to fail more than anyone else.

  In the same way that Homer’s Odysseus finds the value of his life in the journey rather than his eventual return to Ithaka, so too must the writer savor the process of crafting a sentence, reworking it, and then releasing it into the story like a clump of ice into the sea.

  History of Stories

  THE EARLIEST STORY in this book was written in November of 2000 and is called “Snow Falls and Then Disappears.” I was in the first few weeks of an MFA program, living on the east end of Long Island, where the light is superb for evening walks. I set up a writing desk in front of a window with lamps and fresh flowers. I had moved into a small apartment above a garage where the landlords (a couple) housed their small collection of vintage Mercedes-Benz automobiles. It was the first time since leaving my parents’ home (seven years earlier) that I felt a peculiar domestic bliss. I knew I would be there for several years at least, with money to support myself from a student loan. Having somewhere to live and a small but dependable income was a real luxury after living in enormous, crumbling apartments in Europe, often without heat. The physical hardships of that bohemian life helped me to appreciate what a golden opportunity I was getting when I was accepted into the MFA program at Southampton. Of course, I had applied to three MFA programs the year before and was rejected (see “failure” in the previous section). Those years in Europe also helped me to establish a work ethic. I think it was Henry David Thoreau who said that the best meal is one eaten in the midst of starvation.