Who is she?
Just some stupid girl.
In the car on their way back, Carmine held the wheel so hard his knuckles went sharp. They were on the highway somewhere, and there weren’t any other cars, and the streetlamps flashed intermittently like strobe lights, and it felt like they’d been transported to another planet, a strange, terribly quiet place, and even the dark trees along the road seemed monstrous. He looked at his hands and saw that they were dirty, the dirt caked under his nails, and there was dirt on the legs of his jeans, and he slid his hand into his pocket and pulled out a handful of dirt and watched it sifting through his fingers, and there was dirt inside his shoes, and he could taste the dirt, gritty and strange, inside his mouth.
He started seeing this man everywhere, this same individual. He was an older man with gray hair and unsettling blue eyes. A watcher, he thought. Sometimes he had a camera with him. He’d hold it up now and then. It was hard to tell what he was photographing. The old buildings. The shiny black windows. The fucking drug addicts loitering on the corner like zombies, skinny and hunched over and staggering.
He saw him over by the river a couple times in his sailor coat, a skullcap pulled low over his eyebrows, like he was trying to blend in or disappear, take your pick.
Sometimes he thought about his mother when he looked up into the trees.
Rye
Later that afternoon, when the sky suddenly filled with sunshine, he saw Theo. He was standing alone on the corner near the underpass, holding up the sign. Rye started toward him, walking briskly. His chest felt tight, his breathing shallow. His mouth was dry.
The boy turned as he approached. His eyes were hooded. His skin was gray, a cluster of pimples on his forehead under a sheen of sweat. What’s up, man?
You got any smokes?
Theo dug around in his too-loose jeans that were belted with a length of rope and pulled out a bag of Drum and some papers and handed them over to Rye. Help yourself.
Thank you. Rye started rolling a cigarette. He was stalling, trying to figure out what to say. You’re my son, he wanted to shout. He wanted to put his arms around him and pull him off the street. But obviously he couldn’t do any of those things.
When he finished rolling the cigarette, he handed the bag of tobacco and the papers back to Theo, then lit the cigarette and tried not to cough. He hadn’t smoked in ten whole years. The boy watched him closely.
I’ve seen you around, he said.
Rye tried to hide his surprise. Have you?
You’re too old to be out here.
I know it. It’s a long story.
The boy looked at him. You got any drugs?
No, I got nothing.
I’m out here all day. Nobody gives me anything. The cars just—
I got a little money.
Yeah?
You want to eat?
No, I can’t. I’m waiting for someone.
All right, then take this. Rye shook a few bucks out of his pocket.
Theo took it.
You all right?
What?
Out here.
Yeah, man, I’m good.
You can do better than this, can’t you?
The boy looked at him.
You look like somebody who could do better.
You don’t know me.
No, but I see you. That’s what I do. I see people.
The boy stared right at him.
You got a home somewhere?
Theo shrugged.
You should go.
I can’t.
Why not?
I just can’t.
Rye nodded.
It’s just, everything’s different now.
I can understand that.
I screwed up.
Yeah? Everybody does.
No. Not like this.
I know how that feels, Rye said. I’ve made mistakes in my life. You feel like you can’t go home. You can’t face those people.
Theo nodded.
But I can tell you. Based on my own experience. The people who love you want you back. They’d rather forgive you than lose you.
No. I can’t go back.
You can, he said. It’ll be different than you think.
What do you mean, different?
You’ve been out here for a while, he said. You’re stronger than you were.
Theo met his eyes. He was about to say something when a white van crawled toward them along the curb. That’s my ride.
Don’t get in, Rye muttered. You don’t have to.
Theo looked him hard in the eye. Fuck off, man, he said.
The driver of the van rolled down his window. He had long yellow hair curled back behind his ears. Rye could see the girl in the passenger seat. Get on in, the man said to the boy. Today’s your lucky day. I got you a present.
Theo glanced at Rye without expression, then opened the back of the van and climbed in.
The driver looked him over, his eyes twinkling with menace. Then he spit onto the asphalt and pulled out.
Rye watched the van weaving through traffic until it turned the corner and was gone.
When he got back to the room, he called her. He was shaking. I found him, he told her. We spoke.
What do you mean you spoke?
We had our first conversation.
Well, how is he? How does he look?
Kind of strung out.
Oh, God.
Then this van came along and picked him up.
What? A van? She was becoming hysterical. You let him get away?
There was nothing I could—
You let him get away!
Magda. Please listen to me.
She was crying now.
He’s a grown man. It has to be his choice.
All right, she said, her voice barely audible. All right.
You have to trust me. I’m out here for you.
For me?
For us, he said. For Theo.
I’m sorry. I’m just so worried. I’m out of my mind—
I know. I understand. It’s a very difficult situation.
They didn’t speak for a long moment. He could hear the faintest sound of her breathing.
I miss you, she said. So much. I can’t even tell you. It’s like a pain in my stomach.
I know, he said, and said it again. I know.
When they hung up, he called Simone. She answered immediately, her voice tentative, defensive. Where are you? You okay?
Yes. I’m fine. Now he was regretting the call. How to explain where he was, this peculiar odyssey? I’m working on something important, he said. That’s all I can tell you. I might need a few more weeks.
She didn’t say anything.
Simone?
I was starting to think you were dead, she said.
Simone
She’d never mastered his language. That was the trouble. When they were together, they spoke in a broken tongue, imprecise, vague. Her husband wasn’t a person of words, she knew. He relied on pictures, images, to communicate how he saw and felt. But that wasn’t good enough anymore, not for her, not for either one of them.
You should have an ear for the person you love.
The semester was coming to a close. When she wasn’t at the college, she was alone. She had started to write her own poems. She’d sit at the table, drinking wine, writing by hand, the dogs sleeping at her feet.
She went to yoga, which helped. She’d lie there on her mat with her eyes closed, breathing in. Breathing out.
A stack of mail sat on the kitchen table. Rye got so much mail, especially this time of year, that they’d given his assistant the task of opening it all, but now that Constance was home for the holidays, it was up to Simone. She made herself a cup of tea and sat down and began, using a silver letter opener that had been her father-in-law’s. The holiday cards, which celebrated Hanukkah, Christmas, and Kwanza, were addressed to both of them, Mr. and Mrs. Rye Adler, but they were mainly for him, from editors at the magaz
ines, and some of the actors and celebrities he’d photographed over the years. Included in the pile were several bills. Rye always paid them; in truth, she’d never paid much attention to where their money was going. She knew it was the consequence of a privileged upbringing. She’d simply never had to think about it, there was always enough. But she did happen to notice that their Visa bill this month seemed rather high. Upon further inspection, she found a suspicious charge for a night at the Sherry-Netherland Hotel in the city, plus room-service charges, on the nineteenth of December. She sat back in her chair and tried to think. It seemed odd to her, and she feared they’d been hacked, but then it occurred to her that Rye had left on that morning. It was possible he’d stayed there himself. Still, it seemed unusual. It was more than he liked to spend. On the rare occasion when he needed to stay over in the city, he preferred a tiny boutique hotel in the village, where they knew him and gave him a discount. He’d sometimes have a beer in the bar before going up to bed. He never ordered room service. Never.
She tried his phone and wasn’t surprised when he didn’t pick up.
Trust, she thought. She supposed trust was an issue in any marriage. She lingered on that thought a bit longer than she would have liked.
It wouldn’t hurt to have a look in his studio.
She plunged her feet into her Muck boots and put on her coat and tramped through the snow to the carriage house. It was very windy, and the branches glittered with ice. She thought of herself up here all alone in the cold and early dark. She hated winter.
She rarely entered Rye’s studio. He never said as much, but it felt like sacred territory. She didn’t necessarily like him going into her office either. But this was different. This felt necessary. She sat down at his desk and opened his laptop and checked his online calendar, but in truth Rye rarely wrote things down, let alone on his computer. He wasn’t good at keeping track of dates. Often spurned friends and editors would call, irate when he’d forgotten a lunch, a drink. I keep everything up here, he told her, tapping his forehead. You want to know something, you’re going to have to put me under and open me up.
He wasn’t kidding. And opening up to her especially was something her husband rarely did. She didn’t think it was deliberate; when his own memory failed him, he counted on Constance to keep track of things. And now Constance wasn’t here and wouldn’t be back till after New Year’s.
Simone stared at the screen. She wasn’t good at computers. She clicked on his Chrome history for the past month. There wasn’t much that stood out. But then, scrolling down the list, she saw a familiar name. Magda Pasternak.
She sat there a minute just looking at it, her heart quickening.
He’d googled her on December 18, the day after he’d gotten back from Tokyo. It didn’t mean anything, she told herself. Googling somebody wasn’t against the law. She herself had googled people numerous times. Old boyfriends, the new professor, Caspar Ahmadi, his wife the oncologist. It wasn’t unusual to google people you were interested in learning more about. But Magda wasn’t people.
Had he stayed there, at the hotel—with her? Was it possible?
Had they been there together? Were they having an affair?
All those texts! Of course they were!
A familiar anger rushed back to her. She’d known it the day she’d met Magda, and she knew it now, still, after all these years.
She couldn’t bear it. Magda—the fantasy of her—existed in the vague atmosphere of uncertainty that had remained between them like a curse.
Simone shook her head, annoyed with herself. What a fool she was! What did their marriage even mean?
Now that she thought about it, they spent more time apart than together. He’d go off on assignment doing God knows what, and she’d stay home, devoted as a house cat, waiting for the sound of his truck on the gravel.
She went back to the house, climbed the stairs, and got into bed. She was too angry to cry. She lay there, watching the treetops, hearing the wrangling chimes. Was he? she thought. With her? After all these years?
She switched on the TV and stared at it with vague interest. They were showing the melting ice cap. They were showing the fires in the Amazon. The images were frightening, but she couldn’t quite process the fact that this was the beginning of the end. She didn’t want to believe it. The earth had been ravaged. And yet—yet—there was so much beauty.
So much beauty, she thought, and wrote the words on a scrap of paper, entwining the letters with tiny leaves.
When she woke, the room was dark. She sat up, a little disoriented—and then remembered. The department holiday party was tonight, she had to go. Most of her colleagues would be there with their spouses. It was hard to go to these things alone, and she was getting tired of always having to explain Rye’s absence. She thought of Caspar Ahmadi, the last time she saw him in the faculty dining room, how he’d insisted they sit together and had given her a copy of his book, signing it in perfectly legible script—unlike her husband’s impatient scrawl. Rye’s signature could defy detection, a refusal to claim the moment, perhaps, to recognize its importance in the scheme of things, leaving no discernible trace of his authentic self. At this very moment, that seemed significant to her.
She put on a skirt and blouse and a long black sweater and dabbed her lips with gloss. She chose the garnet earrings Rye had given to her on her last birthday and slid on her rings. Standing at the mirror, she wondered if people perceived her differently now that she was going gray. She could still see her old self in her reflection, the clever, seductive, impulsive, powerful Simone. You’re still in there, she declared.
On the drive over to campus, she determined that she had no business feeling sorry for herself. Since childhood she’d lived a privileged life—private schools, country clubs, summer camp in the Berkshires. Her grandparents’ home in Stockbridge. She’d met Rye her senior year at Barnard. They started off as friends. They had similar backgrounds, although her family was more progressive than his. They were both Jewish; his family was Conservative, hers Reform. Unlike some of the other boys she’d dated, Rye liked that she was as smart as him, smarter, he always said. By then she was nearly fluent in two languages. Rye admired her parents, who’d risen from nothing. He liked their brownstone in Park Slope, their famous art collection, which included works by Chagall, Soutine, and Munch. They were philanthropic, devoted to certain causes. He liked that Simone knew the city, people of influence. She knew how to dress, how to eat, how to write a thank-you note. She was unafraid at parties. They’d met that first time at Edmund’s, a dark little bar on 110th Street where all the writers and artists went. She liked to sit alone at a table in the back with one of her poetry books—someone complex and riveting, like Yeats—and nurse a glass of whiskey. Rye and his friends, five or six of them, would stand at the bar, inevitably arguing some obscure photography topic. They had a certain tony nonchalance, with their sly, covert glances, flaunting their cameras like expensive jewelry. Rye stood out—those blue eyes, for starters. He had this aura about him, fearlessly open to life. He would talk to anyone. He was taller than the others and sort of loomed over the bar and wore these great vintage shirts from the forties. When he caught her staring, he walked right over.
I’m pretty sure I know you, he said.
That’s so original.
No, I’m serious. I never forget a face.
Please don’t tell me you’re a writer.
Actually I’m a photographer.
Well, then, you’re forgiven.
They looked at each other a moment.
Is it really true that you never forget a face?
Not one like yours.
She smiled. It was a good line.
I’m Denis Adler, he said, and reached for her hand. People call me Rye.
Like the whiskey?
It’s a family name. What’s yours?
Simone.
Simone. That’s beautiful. His eyes took her in. It suits you.
She’d ne
ver thought of herself as beautiful. She was from a family of intellectuals where physical appearance was less important than the beauty of the mind, but she had what her mother called good features, a good profile, with her thick nearly black hair, her gray eyes, her wide mouth. She had a burning desire to write and dressed like the poets she loved, in black turtlenecks and jeans, heavy strands of amber beads, earrings from India that she bought on the street, pale pink lipstick. Her long hair twisted up in a leather clip.
They talked about their work, their dreams. She told him she was an English major, minoring in French. I wanted to be a poet, she said. But my parents talked me out of it.
That’s too bad.
It’s not lucrative enough to support my habits.
Most worthy things aren’t.
I’ve been doing some translating. I’m kind of obsessed with Baudelaire at the moment. I guess maybe I’m too afraid to write my own poems.
You don’t look like you’re afraid of anything.
Of course I am. Certain things terrify me.
He looked at her with interest but didn’t ask what they were. I’ve never met a poet, he said.
Well, there’s a first for everything.
What’s it like?
Quiet, she said. I do a lot of thinking.
And I can tell you’re very good at it.
She always knew she would marry him. He had the qualities she was looking for. She didn’t want someone hovering over her—she cherished her independence. They dated on and off. She was just beginning her PhD at Columbia when Rye moved to Philadelphia for the Brodsky Workshop. It was a time of growth for both of them, and they saw each other infrequently.
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