Still I said nothing.
And so we went back up.
Up and down the Q line, over and over. We caught the rush-hour crowds and then saw them thin out again. We watched the sun set over Manhattan as we crossed the East River. I gave myself deadlines: I’ll talk to her before Newkirk; I’ll talk to her before Canal. Still, I remained silent.
For months we sat on the train saying nothing. We survived on bags of Skittles sold to us by kids raising money for their basketball teams. We must have heard a million mariachi bands, had our faces nearly kicked in by a hundred thousand break-dancers. I gave money to the panhandlers until I ran out of singles. When the train went aboveground I’d get text messages and voice mails (“Where are you? What happened? Are you okay?”) until my phone battery ran out.
I’ll talk to her before daybreak; I’ll talk to her before Tuesday. The longer I waited, the harder it got. What could I possibly say to you now, now that we’d passed this same station for the hundredth time? Maybe if I could go back to the first time the Q switched over to the local R line for the weekend, I could have said, “Well, this is inconvenient,” but I couldn’t say it now, could I? I would kick myself for days after every time you sneezed—why hadn’t I said “Bless you”? That tiny gesture could have been enough to pivot us into a conversation, but here in stupid silence we sat.
There were nights when we were the only two souls in the car, perhaps even on the whole train, and even then I felt self-conscious about bothering you. She’s reading her book, I thought, she doesn’t want to talk to me. Still, there were moments when I felt a connection. Someone would shout something crazy about Jesus and we’d immediately look at each other to register our reactions. A couple of teenagers would exit, holding hands, and we’d both think: Young love.
For sixty years, we sat in that car, just barely pretending not to notice each other. I got to know you so well, if only peripherally. I memorized the folds of your body, the contours of your face, the patterns of your breath. I saw you cry once after you’d glanced at a neighbor’s newspaper. I wondered if you were crying about something specific or just the general passage of time, so unnoticeable until suddenly noticeable. I wanted to comfort you, wrap my arms around you, assure you everything would be fine, but it felt too familiar; I stayed glued to my seat.
One day, in the middle of the afternoon, you stood up as the train pulled into Avenue J. It was difficult for you, this simple task of standing up—you hadn’t done it in sixty years. Holding on to the rails, you managed to get yourself to the door. You hesitated briefly there, perhaps waiting for me to say something, giving me one last chance to stop you, but rather than spit out a lifetime of suppressed almost-conversations, I said nothing, and I watched you slip out between the closing sliding doors.
It took a few more stops before I realized you were really gone. I kept waiting for you to reenter the subway car, sit down next to me, rest your head on my shoulder. Nothing would be said. Nothing would need to be said.
When the train returned to Avenue J, I craned my neck as we entered the station. Perhaps you were there, on the platform, still waiting. Perhaps I would see you, smiling and bright, your long white hair waving in the wind from the oncoming train.
But no, you were gone. And I realized most likely I would never see you again. And I thought about how amazing it is that you can know somebody for sixty years and yet still not really know that person at all.
I stayed on the train until it got to Union Square, at which point I got off and transferred to the L.
Towering over the east side of Fifth Avenue, between Fiftieth and Fifty-First Streets, you’ll find the majestic St. Patrick’s Cathedral, historically significant as the place where you and Eric sat on the steps and ate frozen yogurt that time.
Should you happen upon this neo-Gothic-style still-active Roman Catholic church, you’ll be instantly transported to that ancient day, several summers prior, when the two of you were finally getting along again, for the first time in what seemed like forever. It felt like old times, this excursion into Manhattan, and you smiled as the sticky-sweet swirl of hazelnut and banana melted down your arm.
At one point, Eric looked at you and, grinning, said, “Hey, you’ve got a little…” and as he reached for your face, you instinctively jerked away from his hand. You didn’t mean anything by it, this flinch—it just happened—but in an instant, the whole day fell apart.
You and Eric looked at each other, in the shadow of that cathedral, and you saw Eric’s face fall, as you had often seen it fall, in that just-so-Eric way.
“What are we doing?” Eric asked, and you shook your head and said, “I don’t know.”
And then the two of you sat on the steps of the cathedral for a very long time without saying anything.
Later, you and Eric went back to his apartment and had sex. But it was too late. The damage had been done.
* * *
—
New York City is full of history. Take, for example, the Waverly Diner down in Greenwich Village. It was at this very spot you and Keith stayed up all night talking over pancakes, after ducking out of Emily’s twenty-sixth birthday party.
There was so much to say to each other, you and Keith. It was right after you and Eric broke up, and Keith was so not Eric. Keith was like the opposite of everything Eric stood for.
If you had been thinking rationally at the time, you probably could’ve guessed that you would end up hurting Keith in ways he didn’t deserve. But that night everything seemed so perfect. You wanted Keith, and you felt like you had earned him somehow. It felt like all your life had been persistently preparing you for meeting this man.
You still sometimes pass the Waverly Diner, down in Greenwich Village, on the Avenue of the Americas, but you rarely go inside it, and you never order the pancakes.
* * *
—
Was ever a city so ruined by history, so smothered in the blood of past conflagration? Once, while haphazardly browsing the Restoration Hardware on Ninth Avenue and Thirteenth, killing time before meeting Boris’s parents for a walk up the High Line, you idly picked up a loose spatula that suddenly reminded you of a fight you’d had two years earlier in Keith’s kitchen.
The conversation had started innocuously enough when Keith asked, “What do you want in your omelet?” and somehow ended two hours later when he shouted, “I don’t think you really love me; I think you’re just terrified of being alone,” and you, gesticulating wildly with the spatula, spat back without thinking, “I am alone; you have no idea how alone I am,” as if that were some kind of comeback.
The spatula you now held in the Restoration Hardware was the same, the architecture of it surprisingly familiar, the weight of it in your hand alarmingly potent, and when you breathlessly explained to Boris the story of the artifact’s eerie significance, he scrunched up his nose and said, “If the two of us are ever going to move forward, at some point, you’re going to have to stop looking backward.”
* * *
—
You’d already started dating Sean when Boris called, late, drunk, and asked if you wanted to go to Staten Island. You’d never been to Staten Island, and Boris had never been to Staten Island, and since Boris was about to move to Philadelphia, this seemed like as good a time as any to visit Staten Island.
Boris had also invited you to go to Philadelphia with him, but that felt too far, too much, too soon, too Boris. Instead, you chose New York. You broke up with Boris, got your own place in Bushwick, and started dating Sean, the cute bartender at Union Pool. You didn’t think you’d see Boris again, but on his last night in New York he called you, late, drunk, to invite you on an adventure.
The truth is there’s not much to see on Staten Island, not after midnight anyway. The boat ride there is awfully romantic, but once you get there…well, there’s the elevator ride up to the top floor of the ferr
y building, and if you’re bored, you can take it back down again.
There’s a fish tank in the ferry building and some reading material posted at the base of it about the logistics of housing a fish tank in the Staten Island ferry building. It’s a very large fish tank, so heavy the floor has to be supported with iron beams. “It’s a big deal, this fish tank; a lot of work went into it,” says the placard at the base, to the best of your recollection (you haven’t been back). “We did this all for you, visitors to Staten Island, so you’d better appreciate it!”
You remember standing next to Boris and reading the fish tank placard. You would have thought there’d be more to say to each other this night before you said good-bye forever, but it turns out you’d already said everything. So instead of going through it all again, you stood side by side in the silence of the ferry building and read the information at the base of the fish tank.
“Welcome to Staten Island,” it probably said. “We hope you enjoy your visit! Maybe if things were different, maybe if one of you weren’t about to leave the city for good, you could come here again sometime. Maybe this could become something special, something bigger than just a thing you tried once because, hey, why not? But on the other hand, it’s probably best not to think about it too much. Just enjoy this for what it is. You’ve still got the boat ride back to Manhattan to look forward to, and if you load yourself up with too many might-have-beens, the ferry will sink under all that weight.”
* * *
—
This area, New York, once called New Amsterdam by its early Dutch settlers and Lenapehoking by its native Algonquin peoples, is overflowing with its own half-buried past. The subway tunnels are nearly unnavigable, flooded by a thousand overlapping adventures. Should you, in your travels, zoom by the Lorimer stop on the L under Williamsburg, look closely at the swiftly passing platform and you’ll see a young woman waiting, hair disheveled, makeup smeared—it’s you during those six weeks when you would stumble home from Sean’s apartment at three o’clock in the morning, high heels in hand, just because you didn’t want to be one of those girls who spent the night.
* * *
—
The town is full of these triggers, and the longer you live here, the more land mines you set. There’s the Gap at Astor Place, the bathroom at the Crocodile Lounge—the odds of stumbling into the lingering smoke of an old flame are staggering, and increasing still with every new significant instant spent with another significant other.
But of all the tributes to the fallen heroes and tragic victims of your fickle heart, a list as long and exhausting as a full avenue block, there remains one place more than any other you know you can never return to.
You know where it is and you go out of your way to not see it, to not be reminded of the thing that happened there. It’s too much, this place. It would swallow you whole, this void, this pit, this unassuming two-story brownstone in Carroll Gardens that houses the one-bedroom apartment a much younger you and the man now listed in your phone as “DO NOT CALL HIM” were ever so foolish as to refer to as “home.”
Sometimes you imagine DO NOT CALL HIM also not going there. You picture the two of you both not going there at the same time and not meeting each other outside on the sidewalk; you not taking the opportunity to tell him all the ways he wronged you, not explaining that even though you were over it now—so, so over it—you just wanted to make sure he didn’t try that shit again with the next girl, for her sake.
“Because you’re such a fucking humanitarian,” he would not say, and you would wonder why you’d bothered to not meet up with him in the first place.
* * *
—
And then there’s the Bronx, which is where people decide to get married—specifically the zoo part of the Bronx, specifically the part of the zoo that’s in front of the Monkey House, and specifically your grandparents, who visited the Bronx Zoo Monkey House after six weeks of courtship and decided to get married.
“How did you make such a big decision after six weeks?” you once asked your grandmother. “You barely even knew each other.”
“In those days, people didn’t drag their feet so much. If you loved someone, you married him.”
“But how did you know?”
“It was easy,” she replied. “I asked your grandfather, ‘Do you think we should get married?’ And he said, ‘Let’s ask the monkeys. Hey, monkeys! You think we should get married?’ And the monkeys were laughing, and he said, ‘I think that’s a yes.’ ”
“That’s it? You got married because the monkeys were laughing?”
Your grandmother shrugged. “I thought it was a sign.”
You took Alex to the Bronx Zoo once—or was it Anthony?—to see if the primates might make some magic for you, but the Monkey House was gone. It had been torn down in 2012.
You decided that was a sign.
* * *
—
In Astoria, Queens, sits a small studio apartment in which Carlos, love of your life for the moment, puts together his applications for grad school. During slow days at work or long rides on the N, you’ll catch yourself daydreaming about Carlos getting accepted somewhere—and you following him—far, far away.
You imagine spending the rest of your life with this man, as you’ve imagined with all of them—not because you think you will necessarily, but just because you can’t help but wonder.
You imagine the kids you’ll have, the family vacations and anniversary dinners, the way you’ll help each other with the dishes, the way you’ll interrupt and editorialize each other’s stories and jokes, the way you’ll promise to never go to bed angry, even if that means—as it often will—staying up all night arguing.
But mostly, you imagine living somewhere else, miles and miles from this cramped and crowded once-thriving capital of the twentieth century. You could live in Austin, you think, or Minneapolis. You hear Seattle is gorgeous and you’ve never even been.
One morning, over breakfast and tea and the weekend Seattle Times in your spacious new downtown loft (or whatever kind of apartment people get in Seattle), Carlos will smile at you and you’ll smile at him, and he’ll scratch the back of his head in that shaggy Carlos way of his, and he’ll say, “Hey, why don’t we plan a trip to New York sometime? We can see a Broadway show, catch up with old friends…”
Carlos will clear the two cereal bowls, part of the brand-new set you bought when you moved here, and on the way to the sink, he’ll kiss you gently on the forehead, the very forehead that’s been so gently kissed by so many men, a marker amid thousands in a graveyard of kisses.
And you’ll smile at this man and wonder if he too, like all those who came before him, will someday be a bittersweet memory, will someday be felled by the same foolish blunder of knowing you a little too well and yet also somehow not enough.
“What do you say? You want to go back to New York, see the sights?”
“No,” you’ll say. “There are too many ghosts there.”
My wife was eleven months pregnant at the time, which always seemed to me an awful lot of months to be pregnant.
Is that normal? I would say,
and Jessica would say: The doctor says it’s normal.
and I would say: I don’t think it is.
and she would say: Are you a doctor, Yoni?
and then I would say: Yeah. I am, actually. So are you. Technically we are both doctors.
and she would say: Can we drop it?
I earned my doctorate in aerospace engineering, but my real passion was always molecular biophysics. When I took the call from my friend and mentor, Dr. Carl Hesslein, I was in the middle of giving a lecture on the philosophy of science to a sparsely attended class of lazy sophomores who’d hoped my course might be an easy way to knock out a gen ed requirement at a mostly uninspiring and forgettable university. I don’t mean to be ru
de about the school in question or its student body; those are just true statements.
I showed the class this slide:
(I drew it myself.)
First, the good news, I said: We’re doomed. Our planet is dying. Our universe is dying. Our friends, our family, everyone we’ve ever known, everyone we ever will know, all our distant progeny who are thousands of generations away from even being born, all of us, are slowly slowly dying dying dying.
I showed this slide:
And then I said: Oh, I’m sorry, did I say GOOD news?
At this point, my lecture notes instructed me to: [PAUSE FOR LAUGHTER.]
Nobody laughed.
I paused anyway.
But there is good news, I continued. And that is this: Science will live on after we’re all dead. Science will survive with or without our attempts to understand it; science doesn’t care.
Like a callous ex-lover, science won’t miss you, and sure, maybe that’s a little scary, but isn’t it also exciting?
My cell phone rang. I knew immediately it was Dr. Hesslein because of the ringtone, Beethoven’s lush and haunting Vienna on My Mind.
I answered the phone: Dr. Hesslein! I’m in class right now.
The students continued to type into their laptops and phones. I entertained the idea that they were now taking notes on my personal phone call, but Occam’s razor would suggest that they had never really been taking notes at all.
Carl spoke quickly in overlapping fragments, as if he, like science, had no particular desire to be understood: Yoni! The grant! The board! Under the direction of! Was established! It’s happening! I can’t even! It’s happening!
Someone Who Will Love You in All Your Damaged Glory Page 4