Love Begins in Winter

by Simon Van Booy

  I thought about him this morning sipping coffee on the patio next to the pool no one ever swims in. There are leaves at the bottom. This man’s face is like the end of a book, or the beginning of one.

  If I thought I would see him in the park, I perhaps would not have gone. But the urge to see this birdman—another Jonathan. . .or my Jonathan. You never know.

  You understand I had to make sure. Grief is sometimes a quiet but obsessive madness. Coincidences are something too great to ignore.

  When I arrived at the park, I was of course too early. A few people slumbered under blankets beside their shopping carts. I stopped and looked at a homeless woman. The ridges on her cheeks were so deep her face could have been a map; the story of what happened. I wanted to touch it but didn’t. She was somewhere far away in sleep, swimming back to the park through a dream.

  All parks are beautiful when quiet and you see things like a book forgotten on a bench read by the wind. Other things too: Someone must have shed their shoes to walk in the grass and then forgotten about them. The shoes had remained neatly arranged for the duration of a night, jewels at their center. I wondered why nobody had taken them.

  I chose a bench close to the fountain.

  An hour later the birdman arrived. He was much too old to be my brother. And his skin was dark and cracked. His nose was wide and bulged awkwardly from a thin face. The whites of his eyes were impossibly white, but their centers were black. His clothes were beautiful but ruined. How strange that I was actually disappointed it was not my Jonathan. Another way to punish myself, to look behind for someone I feel but cannot see.

  And then I noticed the man across the park. At first I wasn’t sure if it was him, but then he looked at me and I was sure. He was more handsome than I remembered, and there was something serious in his movements—in the way he sat. A person with important messages but who has lost all memory of where he is going. And then I gasped because that was a description of me. Perhaps all my opinions of other people are opinions of another self.

  I don’t know why, but I wasn’t surprised to see him. His legs were crossed neatly as though it were his favorite way of sitting. He didn’t seem surprised to see me either.

  Then children arrived and stood around the birdman. They shuffled their sandals in the dust.

  He’d dropped his box of stones when I bumped into him. I can’t understand how he fell over; I didn’t think our impact was so hard. Perhaps he was off-balance. Perhaps he had been waiting all along for someone to knock him down and allow him to drop the weight he’d so faithfully carried.

  For an hour or so, we both watched the birdman, laughing intermittently. I noticed he had a baguette next to him and wondered if he’d brought it to feed the birds. The birds flew around the children’s heads, seemingly at the control of the birdman. They flew in arcs as though held with strings. The children laughed and jumped. They also looked at one another.

  I glanced over at the man often and he looked at me too. It was inevitable that we meet. Like rivers, we had been flowing on a course for one another.

  And so, at some point I stood up and walked over to his bench. My shoes crunching the small stones. I counted the steps. My heart bursting from my chest. I sat down and looked at his hands. He looked surprised and I wasn’t sure what to do. My hand began to shake and he reached for it. I let him. With his other hand, he took from his pocket a handful of acorns and put them in my palm.

  From my pocket I took a large stone and set it squarely in his open hand. If there is such a thing as marriage, it takes place long before the ceremony: in a car on the way to the airport; or as a gray bedroom fills with dawn, one lover watching the other; or as two strangers stand together in the rain with no bus in sight, arms weighed down with shopping bags. You don’t know then. But later you realize—that was the moment.

  And always without words.

  Language is like looking at a map of somewhere. Love is living there and surviving on the land.

  How could two people know each other so intimately without ever having told the old stories? You get to an age where the stories don’t matter anymore, and the stories once told so passionately become a tide that never quite reaches the point of being said. And there is no such thing as fate, but there are no accidents either.

  I didn’t fall in love with Bruno then. I had always loved him and we were always together.

  Love is like life but starts before and continues after—we arrive and depart in the middle.

  IX

  MY FATHER ONCE TOLD me that coincidences mean you’re on the right path. When the woman who bumped into me at the Beverly Hills Hotel approached my bench and sat down, I didn’t know what was going to happen, and I didn’t care. I only had the feeling that I always wanted to be with her. I had no urge to tell her anything—there was no need; she knew everything she needed to know without having to learn it.

  As we sat side by side in the park, two birds dropped upon our knees. The birdman was looking at us. The children were looking at us too. The woman didn’t move. She just stared at her bird, but her bird was staring at me. The small bird on my knee didn’t seem to be thinking anything. Then he turned and looked at me. He rubbed his beak together and it made a sawing sound. I think he was asking for a seed.

  When one of the youngest children in the group screamed, the birdman whistled and the birds flew from us back to his outstretched arms.

  “Did you know this would happen?” I asked.

  “It’s why I came,” she said. I drank down her voice.

  “Are you French?”

  “The baguette gave it away?”

  She smiled.

  “Would you like some?” I offered it.

  She shook her head. “It looks too precious.”

  I ripped its hat off and she took it. She ripped it in half and gave me some. A scatter of pigeons suddenly swooped down.

  “Where are you from?”

  “The mountains of North Wales.” She bit her lip. “Have you heard of Wales?”

  “Oui.”

  “Good,” she said. “I can take you if you have warm clothes and like sausages.”

  For an hour we sat watching the many people who walked past.

  Then she said:

  “What are we going to do?”

  I liked that she asked this. It meant we felt the same way about one another. I was still holding the stone she had given me. She had put the acorns I gave her into a pocket.

  “I’m performing in San Francisco tomorrow night—will you come?”

  “Who are you?” she said. “Tell me your name at least—I don’t make a habit of following strange men around.”

  We both looked at the birdman.

  “Really?” I said.

  When she laughed, her eyes closed slightly.

  “Bruno,” I said. “This is my name, and I am just a small boy from a French village who can play the cello.”

  She seemed content with this answer. But then said hastily:

  “Maybe it’s the cello that plays you.”

  Then she added:

  “I think you must be a very good cellist—a gifted one even.”

  “Why?” I asked.

  “Because you’re like a key that unlocks people.”

  “I doubt that.”

  “Not just people,” she added.

  She seemed suddenly confused, the way a woman does when she feels in danger of saying too much.

  “What’s your name?” I asked.

  She smiled. “You could ask me that every day and get a different answer.”

  She bit her nail and looked away.

  “That’s not a very good response, is it?”

  “It’s perfect,” I said, and meant it.

  “Well, my name is Hannah.”

  The present grows within the boundaries of the past.

  I asked if she had plans for the weekend. I couldn’t believe I was inviting her to San Francisco—that I was allowing someone to trespass into my li
fe, to climb over the gate and start across the farmland to the small cottage where I had been living for decades with just my music, my stones, my baguettes; a mitten.

  I thought of the woman I had seen in Quebec City behind the icy window, the nun who wrote the word in the glass.

  No beauty without decay. I read that somewhere else.

  Every moment is the paradox of now or never.

  If my brother back in France could have witnessed this event in the park with Hannah, he would have cried for joy. He cries a lot, and women love that about him, but then he can be stubborn and macho, and they love that too. I can imagine telling him about Hannah. He’ll want to fly out and meet her. He’ll want to send her flowers, chocolates, cheese—give her the latest Renault convertible. I can see them strolling the fields of Noyant, arm in arm, my brother picking up sticks to throw.

  “Come to San Francisco,” I say. “Fly up for my concert in the afternoon and we’ll rent a car and drive back to Los Angeles together—this is where you live?”

  “Yes,” she said. “I have a shop in Silver Lake that sells prints, posters, and paintings.”

  “Of birds?”

  “I wish it were just birds—but not everyone is like me.”

  “I think I like who you are.”

  “Well, it’s not what I chose,” she said.

  I felt mild humiliation—as if I were somehow a part of what she hadn’t wanted.

  Then I said:

  “Sometimes I think it’s life that chooses us—and here we are thinking that we’re steering the ship, when we’re just vehicles for an elaborate division of life.”

  “Then why can it end so easily?” she said.

  I wasn’t sure what she meant. I risked an answer anyway.

  “It ends quickly so that we value it,” I said.

  She turned her whole body to face me.

  “No, Bruno, we value it because it’s like that—but why is it like that? Why can life suddenly fly away when those left behind have so much to say? So much that silence is like a mouthful of cotton—but then when it’s time to speak, one is capable only of silence. So much that’s left undone. What happens to all the things a person would have done?”

  I had considered all this.

  “I’m not sure I want to know anything anymore,” I said.

  She bit her lip. I could tell she wanted to know everything.

  We continued talking. Many of the things I said to Hannah in those first, long, heavy days just formed in my mouth without much thought. They formed silently like clouds and then rained down upon her. When we talked, I realized I knew things I hadn’t thought I knew.

  She agreed to come to San Francisco. And we would drive back to Los Angeles along the cliff—the very edge of a country we had lived in for so long.

  Before I walked her to the parking lot, Hannah said she wanted to give the birdman something she’d brought.

  We approached him, and the children stepped back to give us room. From her pocketbook Hannah produced a tattered volume. A book. She handed it to the birdman.

  It was The British Book of Birds.

  “Look inside,” Hannah told him.

  He did.

  It read:

  To our dearest child, Jonathan,

  May the birds you love always love you back

  “See—this book belongs to you,” Hannah said sweetly.

  “No, young lady,” the birdman said. “It belongs to you—but you don’t belong to it.”

  He leaned in very close to her.

  “You belong to you,” he said.

  X

  WE WERE TWO PEOPLE in a car not speaking. I think it was a French writer who said that we perceive when love begins and when it declines by our embarrassment while alone together.

  Hannah flew up to San Francisco for the concert. It took place in the afternoon. There were more children present than usual because of the time. As I drew each note from the instrument, I could sense her out there, watching, listening—biting her lip.

  Anna’s form appeared as always, but it felt far away. When I turned to look, I could see only the outline of her body. She was leaving me, and I wasn’t surprised. I wondered where she would go. I would miss her in a new way.

  We left San Francisco that afternoon by driving in a straight line over hills. The reflection off the water made the light seem golden; many of the houses were red and wore small towers at their corners. People sat in parks and drank water from plastic bottles. A man in a black T-shirt walked his dog and chatted on a cell phone. A girl on a bicycle ticked past. Her basket was full of lemons. Her hair was very curly. The sidewalk cafés were packed. Faces hidden by newspapers. Groups waiting for a table.

  Our car moved forward slowly—it took hours to get out of San Francisco, but we were together, the only two passengers on a journey where the destination was unimportant. Hannah talked about my concert. She said she was the only person not clapping at the end. She said that for her the concert would never end.

  When we turned true south onto the Pacific Coast Highway, Hannah said nothing for quite some time. I thought she was enjoying the scenery. A motorcycle passed us. Then we caught up to an RV and drove slowly behind it for several miles.

  I began to ask Hannah questions, but she answered only with a word or two. I told her about the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York—about the long fountain full of coins.

  “I wonder how many of those wishes have come true,” she said.

  More silence.

  “Do you hear that?” I asked.

  “What?” she said. “I don’t hear anything.”

  “That’s the sound of keys on my ring,” I said. “Sooner or later I’ll find the one that unlocks you.”

  She didn’t say anything but placed her hand on top of mine.

  I took several very sharp curves, and then the road straightened out.

  I looked at the sea. I thought of fish bobbing along the bottom. The motion of weeds.

  Then Hannah said, “I want to tell you about Jonathan.”

  And little by little, his life was placed before me like a map with a small and beautiful country at its center.

  I saw him with his book in the garden, sketching.

  Then a body stretched out in the snow.

  The fist of acorns.

  The severed hand of her father in the shed.

  The dumb hanging ladder.

  Years later:

  The many meals that would sit in front of her mother and turn cold.

  The guilt of her father as he’d laugh at something on the television, then suddenly stop laughing and leave the room.

  One night, Hannah said, he went out in his socks, took the chain saw from the shed, and cut the tree down. Her mother didn’t think it was possible. But he managed it somehow with his right hand and the stump of his left arm. It took six hours. When the tree fell, it crushed the neighbor’s greenhouse. That afternoon they found a note in their letter box. It was from the neighbor. It read:

  I never liked that greenhouse and was going to knock it down this week.

  I’m so very sorry for you.

  Bill

  Then I see my Anna.

  The rainy day.

  The accident.

  A car speeding away.

  The back wheel of her bicycle still spinning.

  I stopped the car and we sat at a picnic table and held hands. After a couple of hours a park official with long gray hair came over and told us we had to pay five dollars to picnic, so we left. It wasn’t the money, but the atmosphere had changed. I started the car with my foot on the brake.

  When we were back on the road, Hannah said she was hungry.

  It had clouded over.

  Fog wrapped the cliff in its thick coat.

  Then it started to rain.

  The swoosh of the windshield wipers was reassuring.

  We turned inland at the first road.

  The fog thinned out.

  There were birds flying in the
opposite direction—away from land. I couldn’t think where they were going. Perhaps to a tall wet rock, far out at sea.

  We stopped at a supermarket in Carmel for food. We held hands as the glass doors separated before us. I went for bread (the staple of my childhood). A few yards away Hannah held up an apple. I nodded. She selected another. I held up the baguette. She nodded. I decided right then that I would never tell her about Anna.

  The man at the deli counter wanted us to try the different things spread before him in shiny bowls. He gave us pieces of cheese and meat on toothpicks. He asked how long we were together.

  “Forever,” Hannah said.

  At the checkout, Hannah noticed a box of kites. They were on sale. She bought two.

  The cashier scrutinized the kites for a bar code.

  “You should get one,” Hannah said to her.

  “I’m not into kites,” the cashier replied.

  “Then what are you into?” Hannah asked.

  The cashier looked up. “Music,” she said.

  Hannah and I spent the night at a Buddhist retreat center in the mountains perched above Santa Cruz. I had heard about it from Sandy, my agent. She thought it might be a nice place for me. It was supposed to be very quiet, with large prayer wheels painted in bright colors. I stopped in Santa Cruz for gas. A man opposite the gas station was throwing bottles at passing cars and screaming. I hoped he wouldn’t come over. I thought about it as we drove away. Hannah asked if I was okay.

  “I’m fine,” I said.

  The key to our room was waiting for us. It was not late when we arrived, but the surrounding forest threw dark nets over all the buildings.

  Hannah stayed in the shower for a very long time. The drops sounded like a heavy rain, which made me fall asleep.

  When I awoke, Hannah was sitting at the edge of the bed drying her hair in a towel. It was hot in the room because the window was open. I sat up and wrapped her in the sheet. She turned to me, so I kissed her shoulders, then her neck, then her cheek, finally her lips.

  My mouth lingered on hers; I tasted her. I felt for her tongue with mine. I felt the blood surging through my body. We pressed against one another.