Enigma Variations

  When had I decided this?

  Now. What I really wanted from our imaginary champagne in some make-believe room away from everyone was for her to kneel next to me naked and, reaching out to her champagne flute, suddenly crack it against the nightstand, and with a shard held decisively between her fingers, make an incision ever so slowly on my left arm and, with the palm of her hand, rub my blood on the wound, on my face, on her body, and then beg me and beg me again to do the same to her. This is what we had come to. If there’d ever been kindness and charity in our love, it was the kindness and charity of Huns. We loved with every organ but the heart. Which is why we stayed away from each other. I couldn’t even find it in me to tell her how much I loved her—scanty, meager, scorched love that I had. To get a reaction now we needed to spill blood. Your blood into my blood, my fluids, your fluids, your muck all mine. Let the snake that bit you bite me back. Let it bite me on the lip. Die with me.

  “I know why you called me,” she said.

  “Tell me, because I still don’t know and I’m dying to find out.” I couldn’t have been more candid.

  “You called to see if I’m willing to give everything up to be with you. And either way I’m damned. If I decide to go with you, you’ll refuse, fearing I’ll never forgive you. But if I say no, you’ll hold it against me and never forgive me either. So, for once in your life, you’re going to have to tell me what you want me to do, because I, for once, am clueless.”

  “All I ask is one weekend,” I finally said. We never could do better than a weekend. Or maybe not even a weekend, just two weekdays, what could be more modest than a measly Monday and Tuesday?

  She smiled, seemed amused by the idea. But she wasn’t laughing. She was accepting.

  “Where to?” She did not wait for my answer. “Let’s go back,” she said.

  I knew where she meant. “People never go back.”

  “We’re not people. We’re another species.”

  I leaned toward her and kissed her on the mouth. With both hands, she cupped my face and kissed me back. When we left the restaurant, we couldn’t let go of our hands and walked hand in hand on Madison Avenue. Neither said anything. We didn’t care. It was one of the most beautiful moments in my life.

  “What will you tell Manfred?” she asked, pronouncing his name the German way without the least trace of irony.

  “Manfred is Manfred.” Then on second thought, “He already knows, he’s always known. And your husband?”

  “Says we’re basically kids.” Then after a pause, “Maybe he’s right. Either way, he’ll live.”

  We’d tell them very little. Just something about a boring talk I had to give. She had to meet an author outside Boston who was homebound after an accident. But if they persisted, we’d tell them the truth.

  The magic of that afternoon left us feeling so happy that without planning it, toward noon the next day I called her. Same place, same time? Of course. We met at exactly the same restaurant and ordered the exact same lunch. Then, seeing lunch ended the same way, we met the next day as well. “We’ve been three days together. Think this ends it?” I asked.

  I was being a jerk, she said. She held my hand and did not let go. I walked her back to her office.

  “Did you tell Manfred?” she asked.

  “Not today, not yesterday.” I was thrilled that she wanted to know. “Did you?” I asked.

  “I haven’t said anything.”

  “We could, if we want, do this for the rest of our lives.”

  “Rituals,” she said. Meaning, Yes, we could.

  “Not rituals. Rituals are when we wish to repeat what has already happened, rehearsals when we repeat what has yet to occur. Where do we fit?”

  Nowhere, I would have added. And she’d have agreed.

  “Star time, my love.”

  “Star time indeed,” I said.

  * * *

  MONTHS LATER WE arrived by plane, not train. The train would have taken five hours, and in th0se hours, anything could have happened between us to spoil the trip. The flight lasted slightly under an hour. While flying, we did not speak about the trip, nor did we exchange more than a few casual remarks on the long cab ride from the airport in Boston to our small college town. We wanted to express neither excitement nor apprehension, for fear of saying the wrong thing. Two misplaced words, even if spoken in sparring jest, and the trip would be ruined; one mawkish comment and we’d snuff out the tiny flame we were desperately trying to coddle between us like a lighted candle in a stalled car on a snowbound highway.

  Now in the cab I forgot why we’d decided to come back. To run away from our lives and be alone together in a town where no one knew us? To turn back the clock? To recover the other, perhaps truer, unspent itinerary of our lives?

  The closer we approached our school, the quieter we grew, each scared to trip the mood or wrong-foot the other, though equally downplaying the kitschy thrill of all return trips. We wanted our arrival plain and ordinary. She kept looking at the lake, while I scanned the fleeting mansions on the other side, both of us silent and partly oblivious, as though our return after so many years were a mindless, uninspired errand. For all the cabbie knew, we were another tight-lipped couple from New York who’d had a terrible row at dawn and couldn’t wait to get away from each other. If pushed, either of us would gladly have asked the driver to turn around and head back to the airport.

  We’d made a point of arriving early on Monday. We wanted to be there just as classes were about to start, not when the day was under way. Perhaps I wanted to step back in time and walk down the same old cobbled alleys on my way to my first class of the day. She had her own habits and haunts she’d meant to revisit, spots of time she held dear and that probably did not include me. Perhaps I wanted our paths to cross at some meaningful point. Which is why, during our first few hours, we walked around town but kept trying to avoid every curb of shared memory. We walked about campus exactly the way jaded, jet-lagged tourists do: without memory or anticipation. There were a few Do you remember this? and Look at the monstrosity they’ve put up where so-and-so used to stand! But these were muted moments. At some point she held my hand, and I held hers. We took pictures with our iPhones. Of her, of me, a selfie of the two of us. She texted it to me on the spot. Behind us rose the ubiquitous steeple. It was only by seeing Yarrow Church and Van Speer Observatory looming in the distance that I realized we had indeed returned and were together here, that all this was real, and that from the look on our faces in our photos, we were actually happy.

  By midafternoon, we gave in. We turned left on the quadrangle and took the sloping road downhill until we spotted the house. The large green sign on one of its glass windows heralded a stark warning of what awaited us at Ole Brit’s home. His house had become a Starbucks. No use arguing, I thought. We stepped in, looked around what was once the foyer, and peeked into the back room where scattered students were typing away on their laptops. In that room we’d all sat on the faded Persian rug and drunk mulled cider. The new setup made us feel odd, like strangers who’d time-traveled and landed home in the wrong century. The stairway to the upper bedrooms had vanished. Looking at all the students sitting around, some chatting by the door, others rushing in and out of the store on their way to class, neither of us could forget we were not one of them.

  We ordered two coffees. I paid with the app on my iPhone. She was impressed.

  “Get with the times,” I said ironically, realizing how thoroughly out of sync both of us were in this house.

  “Do you feel old?” she asked.

  “No. Should I?”

  “I do.”

  Then she remembered Ole Brit’s remarks about Edith Wharton. “She was not ten years older than I am today—kind of late for the wine of life, don’t you think?”

  “Why, haven’t you drunk from the wine by now?”

  It took her by surprise.

  “You’re fishing. Why, have you?”

  “Happens. Maybe. Or so I’d like
to think. But I’m no longer sure. Maybe not, actually.”

  She looked at me as I was putting sugar in my cup, and in her usual manner of fessing up to the very thing she’d been needling me about, she said, “I’m not sure I have either. Or maybe just a few sips here and there.”

  “Sips and maybes is not how one gorges on the wine of life.”

  “Touché.”

  We spoke about Ethan Frome’s love for Mattie, wondering if a love so chaste could exist in today’s world. “No one is that inhibited these days,” I said.

  “Are you so sure?” She was needling me again.

  I looked at her as if I’d been caught fibbing and whispered, “Touché.”

  By the time we threw our empty paper cups in one of the bins along the downhill road toward the town’s Main Street, it was already twilight. I liked the town by twilight. We were just in time to visit the school’s dining commons at dinnertime. Students were flocking in from the cold and standing in line. No one stopped us, no one even noticed that we had almost queued up with the others for dinner. We stood back for a few minutes, just to watch what kind of food they served. Definitely gourmet compared with what they’d dished out in our day. Even vegan, she said, pointing to a sign. But the old wooden tables hadn’t changed, the chairs were the same, the smell of the dining hall—you’d know it in an instant if they blindfolded you, spun you around, and dropped you in Mongolia. Old, filthy, musty, woody smell, adorable just the same.

  Back in the courtyard we finally did the unmentionable. We looked upstairs. Her lighted window was on the third floor. After studying in the library at night, I’d drop her at her dorm’s main entrance, and walking away toward my own dorm, I would look back a minute or two later to catch when she turned on her light upstairs.

  We did not utter a word. We just stood there, not moving. She remembered everything. “In a minute you’ll open the main door, walk up three flights, knock at my door, and say it’s time for dinner. Any idea how I counted the minutes for you to come upstairs? I grew to recognize your footsteps, down to the mood you were in when you reached my door.”

  “I didn’t know,” I said.

  “You didn’t know shit.”

  In the emptied courtyard, we were still gazing up at her window, speechless, each wondering what would have happened had things turned out differently between us—Where would we be? Who would we be?—both equally aware, though, that absolutely nothing might have turned out differently, which made us stare all the more. Perhaps we stared to understand why we kept staring.

  “The joy of shutting my books as soon as I heard the door slam behind you downstairs. I can feel it still tonight, especially now when it’s as chilly as it was on those evenings just before dinner.”

  There was nothing to say, so I kept quiet. We simply looked at each other. We both remembered falling asleep on her sofa the night we stayed up translating the last pages of Orwell. “We woke up curled into each other. Like two lizards,” she said.

  “Like a human pretzel.”

  “Here’s what I find unbearable,” she said as we were starting to leave. She was slackening her pace, as though part of her didn’t want to leave yet. I had never seen her so pensive and hesitant before, almost humbled. “The thought that I could have lived through all the years in between to arrive at this moment on this courtyard with you and still feel I haven’t budged an inch undoes me totally. I’d give anything not to know that the girl who was twenty at the time and who waited for you to come upstairs in the evening would end up having to live through so much nonsense only to find herself back where she started, almost eager to see it happen all over again. It’s as if a part of me had dug its heels in, never left, and simply waited for me to come back.”

  We took a few steps. “My marriage never happened to me. I’m not a mother. For all I know I’m still just a student translating Orwell into Greek.”

  I told her she couldn’t possibly be serious. Her husband, her daughter, her home, and the amazing authors she’d published and made famous—were they nothing?

  “They belong to one itinerary. I’m talking about the other, the one we stumble in and out of every four years. The life both of us get distant, dimly lit peeks at when all else is dark, the life that almost doesn’t belong to us but is closer to us than our shadows. Our star life, yours with mine. As someone said over dinner once, each of us is given at least nine versions of our lives, some we guzzle, others we take tiny, timid sips from, and some our lips never touch.”

  Neither of us asked which was our life. We didn’t want to know.

  Quantum theory is more resilient, I thought. For every life we live, there are at least eight others we can’t begin to touch, much less know the first thing about. Maybe there is no true life or false life—just rehearsals for parts we might never be lucky enough to play.

  On our way through the quadrangle, I spotted our bench. We stopped and stared at it. “If it could speak,” she said.

  “You wanted my spit.”

  She was about to pretend to have forgotten, but then, “Yes, I did.”

  My real life stopped here.

  * * *

  “WHICH REMINDS ME,” she said after we left the courtyard and were seated in the restaurant where we’d made a reservation earlier that day, “are we sleeping in the same bed tonight?”

  That was a strange way to phrase it.

  “I thought this was the plan,” I said.

  “The plan.” She echoed the words with a pinch of irony. “Yes, the plan, of course,” she repeated, as though she too had found the wording just vague enough to justify the humor.

  We were sitting in what was still the best restaurant in town. This was where visiting parents took their college kids. I had dinner with my father here once, she with her parents. One day you’ll have dinner with your daughter here, I said. She almost made a motion to dismiss the comment for the maudlin thing it was. “Yes, one day I may have dinner with her here,” she said. But then, as though not wishing to dispel the sentiment this stirred, “On that day I’ll wish it was the three of us.”

  Why had she said this?

  “Because it’s the truth.”

  I tried to divert her comment with something light and spurious.

  “Wouldn’t she think it was weird?”

  “She might. But you wouldn’t and I certainly wouldn’t.”

  She had caught me totally off guard.

  I reached out and touched her face. We didn’t speak. She let my palm linger on her face and touch her lips. With both hands she held my other hand on the table.

  “Two days,” I said.

  “Two days.”

  What we meant, though neither of us was going to say it, was, a whole lifetime in two days.

  The meal was no good. But we didn’t care. We stared out the window, had dessert, skipped coffee, lingered. Afterward, sensing that not a speck of tension had risen between us, yet always fearing it could, I suggested we take our time walking back to our tiny hotel, finally stopping in a small, picturesque bar that had been a deli in our day. The place was not full. Monday nights were never big with the drinking crowd here. We sat by a window overlooking the moonlit lake. But without ordering, we changed our minds and left. She wanted to walk along the frozen bank of the lake. Why not? I said, spotting a group of college kids scampering across, while farther out, two girls were skating. She wished she’d brought her skates. Did I mind walking to Van Speer to have a look? No, I didn’t mind. Was she trying to step back in time? Or delay being alone in our bedroom?

  But then, after walking along the edge of the lake and heading across on the ice, I felt a surge of emotion on spotting how her back curved ever so slightly. I stopped her, held her tight to me, and kissed her. I thought back to the moment when the owner of the hotel had first shown us to our bedroom. We hadn’t felt awkward then. We didn’t feel awkward now. But I continued to fear we might. We had come looking for the past; now, on the lake, I couldn’t have felt more indiffe
rent to the past. This was here and now.

  Was she happy we had come?

  “Very. Two days,” she said, echoing what could become a mantra of sorts: a gift from the two of us to the two of us. “We belong here,” she said, surveying the frozen lake.

  “On ice?” I asked, careful not to emphasize the joke.

  “All this is us, you know,” she said, ignoring my comment.

  She was right. This was us. The other us was in New York. Manfred and I are watching TV. She and her husband are doing whatever they’re doing—Scrabble, for all I know.

  This was our moment. All we’d done over the years was rehearse it, sensing now that it had waited no less faithfully than Argos the dog waited for his master, Odysseus. We were like people who return to their ancestral homestead two, three, four generations later, slip the old key into the lock, and find that the door still opens, that the house still belongs to them, that the furniture still bears the scent of their great-grandparents. Time had ransacked nothing. Van Speer, where we’d spent so many late hours translating Orwell together, remembered us, seemed to welcome us again.

  I told her about Ole Brit. Almost four decades after having been a student at Oxford, he returned from Peru with his twin sons, who were planning to enroll soon. After giving them a thorough tour of his old digs, out of curiosity, he took them down a narrow lane and was surprised to find his old shoemaker still open for business. The shop had been completely revamped and the young salesclerk he’d once known there was long gone. When Ole Brit told the new clerk that this was where he’d ordered his shoes decades before, the young man took down his name and disappeared downstairs. Five minutes later, the salesclerk came back upstairs with a pair of wooden lasts on which the name Raúl Rubinstayn was inscribed in indelible purple script. “Yes, we’ve kept them. The man who built these lasts was my grandfather. He left us three years ago.”

  At which the old gentleman from Peru couldn’t help himself and burst into tears.

  * * *

  ON THE WAY to the hotel, she held my hand. “I’m happy.”