“When did he tell you all this?”
I looked at her, and without hesitating, said, “When I stayed at his house as a guest for three years after graduating. It happened one night after his seminar when we were alone in the house. His students had gone home, and his wife was away in the city, and we were sitting downstairs drinking whiskey. We had just finished washing and drying the dishes. He was sitting next to me on the sofa and I could tell something was bothering him but was reluctant to guess what it was. ‘Do you believe in fate?’ he asked. ‘Are we still discussing Wharton?’ I replied, almost saucily, to show I was fully aware of his attempt to dispel the uneasy silence between us and to derail what I sensed was on both our minds. Perhaps I was trying to put him on the spot. ‘Are we still talking books? Is that it?’ ‘We could if you wish,’ he replied, evasive and cordial as ever. Then, I’ve no idea why, I reached over to him and held his hand. And because I wanted to make it easy, and because the wine helped, I said, ‘I think you should sleep with me.’ ‘That’s an idea,’ he said, startled yet placid as ever, ‘and when should this be?’ he asked in his typical way of giving a humorous spin to things. But I wasn’t going to let him off the hook. ‘Tonight.’ I’d never in my life been so certain of myself or so peremptory. ‘Are you so sure?’ he asked. Once again he tried to put me off. I found the right words to reassure him: ‘Yes, tonight. I’ll take care of everything, I promise.’ And because a dead silence fell between us, I still remember repeating I promise. He reached over to me and held my face with both his hands and brought it close to his. ‘I’ve thought of this from the very first time I met you. Paul.’ ‘I didn’t know,’ I said. I was more baffled by this admission than by anything I had said to him. ‘Changed your mind?’ he asked, putting a smile on his face. ‘Not at all,’ I said, more scared than I thought I’d be, because I suddenly realized that, despite the hasty, untrammeled sex I’d known, I had never made love to a man before and that this was what he was offering. When I led him upstairs to my room, he didn’t enter right away. I thought he was nervous, but now I think he was giving me a chance to change my mind. I didn’t turn on the light and began taking off my sweater. But he was naked before I was; he embraced me and started to remove everything I was wearing. I lost track of what we were doing. I was far more nervous than he. He ended up taking care of me.
“The next morning at my place at the breakfast table, he had left an envelope. I think you were sent to me. Yours forever, Raúl. No one had ever said this to me—that I was sent to him.
“His wife returned from the city that same afternoon. At the dinner table he could not look me in the eye. But late that evening, before going to bed, he caught me on the way upstairs. ‘I bought you this,’ he said, handing me a small wrapped package. ‘I have one just like it. I wanted you to have the same pen.’”
* * *
THAT NIGHT, WRAPPED tight together in one thick quilt, we looked out at the glaring lampposts dotting the empty quadrangle, and in that quiet hour of the night, all nine of them seemed to have converged to stand outside our window. They understood so many, many things about me and in ways that I might never fathom. And for a moment I thought that they were not just lampposts but a collection of blazing selves shifting about in the cold, no different from nine headlit skittles, my nine lives, my unborn, unlived, unfinished nine selves asking whether they might be invited too or what to do with themselves if their time hadn’t come.
“Why have we waited so long?”
I didn’t know the answer. “Maybe because what we want hasn’t been invented yet.”
“Maybe because it doesn’t exist.”
“Which is why I dread how this ends.”
“Good night,” she said, turning her back to me, while I wrapped my arms around her.
“I know one thing, though,” she said without turning around.
“What?”
“This doesn’t end, whatever happens. Never, never ends.” I tightened my arms around her. “Star love, my love, star love. It may not live but it never dies. It’s the only thing I’m taking with me, and you will too, when the time comes.”
ABINGDON SQUARE
Her e-mails, when I look back, still show how fragile everything was. Brisk and lightly crafted, they were no different from everyone else’s, except for that one overly effusive word that burst on my screen and aroused me every time. Dearest. It’s what she called me, how she started every e-mail, how she said good night. Dearest.
For a second I’d forget how disappointingly brief each of her e-mails was, and how deceptive straight talk can sometimes be. In her attempt to reach out and say something real and close to the heart, she was simultaneously eliding the one thing I craved to hear the most. She wasn’t curt, or shifty, or chatty—that wasn’t her style—nor was there anything bland or tame in her e-mails. Her style was bold. But there never was a hint of something else in what she wrote, no subtext, no allusion, no Freudian slip asking to be mulled over and dissected, no nickel inadvertently dropped on the table for you to raise in what could have been a long-standing game of e-mail poker. Perhaps her tone wasn’t troubled, wasn’t needy or awkward enough. Perhaps she really was the happy, untrammeled sort who dropped into your life as easily as she sprang out of it, no baggage, no promises, no hard feelings. And perhaps the normal mix of anxiety and irony, which trips so many of us when we meet someone new, was so thoroughly airbrushed that her e-mails had the breezy good cheer of summer-camp letters to distant relatives who like to receive letters in the mail but seldom read them closely enough to notice that the unusually large script is there not to help with their failing eyesight but to fill the gaping blank spots in otherwise perfunctory bulletins.
Her e-mails looked like letters but were really text messages running out of breath. She respected capitals, punctuated with fussy correctness, and never used abbreviations—yet everything had an unmistakable air of suppressed haste, meaning I could say more, much more, but why bore you with details, the flip side of which was I have to run but for you I’ll always make time, the whole thing capped and fluffed with a heady Dearest to keep me from seeing that the something else I kept waiting for was not coming this time either. Because there was nothing else.
I had read one of her articles and knew how complicated her mind was; I loved her complicated mind. Her prose reminded me of a warren of arcane, sporadic lanes in the West Village that take sudden turns and are perennially ahead of you. On e-mail, however, she spoke the polished language of the tree-lined grands boulevards of Paris, all clarity and transparency, no hidden corners, no false trails, no dead ends. You could always choose to overinterpret the meaning of so much clarity, but then you’d be reading your own pulse, not hers.
I liked the Lower Manhattan in her. I liked the way she’d sit with me over coffee and confide the intricate patterns in her life and then on impulse change her mind, turn the tables on herself, and say that patterns made for good stories but rarely meant anything—there were no patterns, we shouldn’t look for patterns, patterns were for regular people, not for us, we’re different, you and I, aren’t we? Then, as if she’d taken a wrong alley, she’d back up and say that her analyst disagreed with her. Perhaps he’d figured her out long before she could, she said. I’m totally off track about myself, she’d add, throwing in unexpected zingers of self-deprecation that made me like her even more each time she took herself down, because it made her more vulnerable. I loved the way she’d say one thing, then sidle up to its opposite, because this unabashed tossing and turning with herself promised spellbinding fireside chats in some beloved, cozy corner of our invention.
We divided the world into two camps, Main Street people, who were all grids and cross streets, and us, pedestrian lanes and frisky passageways in the Meatpacking District. Everyone else was Robert Moses. We were Walter Benjamin. Us against them, I thought.
Heidi was a young writer whose article on opera I had turned down months earlier. Yet I had picked up an inflection in her
prose that was at once wry and brooding and, in my two-page, single-spaced rejection letter, had outlined the strengths and weaknesses of her piece. She shot back an e-mail, saying she needed to see me right away. I replied just as quickly that I wasn’t in the habit of meeting people simply because I had turned down their work; in any event, I’d have very little to add to what I’d already written in my letter. All right, thank you. I wished her luck. Many thanks. Our tit-for-tat was over in a fraction of a minute.
Two months later, she wrote back to tell me that her piece had been accepted by a major magazine. She’d used all my edits. Now would I see her? Yes … Would I see her this week? Yes … She bought me coffee in a place on Abingdon Square, just across from the little park, she said, and not too far from your office. Both of us sat with our winter coats on. It had started to rain, and we ended up staying much longer than we’d planned, talking for almost two hours about Maria Malibran, the nineteenth-century mezzo-soprano. As we were saying goodbye and she was getting ready to light a cigarette, she said we should do this again, maybe very soon.
We should do this again, maybe very soon stayed with me as I rode the train home that evening: bold and feisty yet unambiguously sweet. Was she asking me, Maybe very soon? Or was it just a deft, roundabout way of saying, No need to wait two months to meet over coffee next time? I felt like someone who’d been promised a Christmas present in June.
I tried to nip the flurry of joy by reminding myself that her maybe very soon might easily be one of those open-ended deferrals thrown in to cover up an awkward leave-taking between people who already know they probably have no reason to meet again.
Or was it trickier than I thought? Was there perhaps a touch of affected diffidence in her implied next time? Had she already guessed that I’d say Absolutely! the moment she asked but wanted me to think she wasn’t sure I would?
I never asked why I spent so much time mulling over her sentence on the train. Nor did I ask why I reread her piece first thing the next morning at the office or why I kept catching myself thinking of Maria Malibran that night. But I knew I’d been one hundred percent right about her: a woman with that sort of a pen, spirited and glum in the same breath, just had to be very, very beautiful. I knew where this was going. I’d known it the moment I’d spotted her in the café.
* * *
ON THE SAME evening after we met, an e-mail arrived. Dearest, it started. Not Dear. No one had called me dearest in years. I loved it though I knew I wasn’t her dearest. The line of men her age or a few years older with a better claim to the title was surely very long. Everything about her told me she was well aware of this. Dearest was also her way of thanking me for meeting her on such short notice, for helping her with her piece, for coffee, for talking to her about her next article on Malibran. Dearest for being such a dear. There was something so practiced and easy, so surefire in her gratitude that I couldn’t avoid thinking that many had helped her in exactly the same way and become dearest because they’d given so selflessly—at first to draw her closer, later when they were up to their knees in friendship and couldn’t step back to ask for anything else. Dearest was how she spelled the terms of your induction, how she kept you in tow.
In her e-mail that evening she told me it thrilled her to think that only .0000001 percent of humanity knew who Maria Malibran was, and yet the two of us got to meet in this unlikely café in, of all places, Abingdon Square—and with our coats on for two whole hours, she added.
I was smitten. I loved and with our coats on for two whole hours thrown in as an afterthought. So she too had noticed that awkward detail. Perhaps neither of us had wished to show we wanted coffee to last longer than fifteen minutes, which is why we sat with our coats on, not daring to alter anything for fear of reminding the other that time was flying. Perhaps we’d kept them on so as not to show we were actually enjoying this or that we hoped it might last a little longer, provided we behaved as though it might at any moment come to an end. Or was this her way of telling me that we’d both noticed the same thing and that we ordered two refills each because we were still wearing our winter coats, which gave us an alleged out in case we’d overstayed our time?
Dearest. It instantly brought back how she looked at me and returned my gaze as though nothing else mattered in that small café. Dearest: how she made no secret of having read up on me. Dearest: the flattering barrage of questions—what was I working on, what were my hopes, where did I see myself in five years, what next, why, how, since when, how come—questions I’d stopped asking myself but that were being now hammered with the reckless, searching whimsy of youth, tying knots in my stomach each time she drew closer to the truth, which I loved. Then there was her smile, her lips, her skin. I remembered watching the skin of her wrists, of her hands—it glistened in the early evening light. Even her fingers glistened. When was the last time I’d had coffee with someone so beautiful who had things to say that I loved hearing about and who seemed equally riveted by what I had to say? The answer scared me: not in years.
Not to be easily taken in, I forced myself to reconsider Dearest. It probably signified zero interest. It was the kind of over-the-top formula she would never have used on someone her age, and certainly not immediately after meeting him the first time. One used it with friends of one’s parents, or with the parents of one’s friends when they became quasi-avuncular figures—an endearment, not a come-on.
From Germany early the next morning came Manfred’s e-mail: Stop it. Learn to take things at face value. You’re always looking for what’s not there. He knew me so well. This was his response to my e-mail in which I’d managed to wring every conceivable twisted reading of what Dearest could mean. With no one to confide in, I’d reached out to someone who was still close but far away enough not to ask more questions than I was eager to ask myself.
That morning I wrote to her and said we should meet exactly a week later.
Where? flashed her speedy reply. Same place, I said. Same place, same time it is, then—Abingdon Square. Abingdon Square, I repeated.
She arrived before me again and had already ordered tea for herself and, for me, the same double cappuccino I had the last time. I stared at the cup waiting for me on my side of the same table by the window. What if I’d arrived late or had to cancel? “You didn’t and you wouldn’t have.” “How could you tell?” “It’s so good to see you,”’ she said, standing to kiss me on both cheeks, nipping the senseless banter I’d attempted.
Coffee lasted longer than either of us expected. Outside, she took out a cigarette. Obviously two-plus hours without smoking was difficult for her. On the way to where we had separated the first time, we were stopped by two individuals speaking into walkie-talkies. They were part of a film crew. They asked everyone on our side of the sidewalk to wait and remain very quiet. I liked the pretext of hanging out together awhile longer in this kind of induced suspension. It gave our walk a dreamlike quality, as though we too belonged in a film. I asked one of the crew what they were filming. Something from a 1940s novel. Old hotel sign blinking away—THE MIRAMAR—middle-aged couple arguing on the deserted sidewalk, vintage Citroën parked aslant on the gleaming slate curb. At a given signal, there was a sudden downpour. All of us stepped back. Applause seemed called for, but no one dared.
The director wasn’t pleased. They were going to have to shoot the scene all over again. Thank you for your cooperation. We were allowed to cross the street and go on our way.
Did I want to go? she asked. Not really. Did she? No, not yet. Watching them shoot the scene again was just another way of staying together awhile longer. So we stood and waited for the cameraman to start filming again. Blinking Miramar sign, arguing couple, old black Citroën with its passenger door flung open, everyone waiting for the sudden downpour in this twilit setting that made me feel we’d stepped into John Sloan’s portraits of Greenwich Village. Ours was not an incidental, throwaway encounter. There was a script to what was happening, and it wasn’t so difficult to read.
r /> When we separated, it was almost eight o’clock. Next time we’ll have drinks instead, I said. You’re right; it’s way too late for coffee. We kissed goodbye, then she turned around. “Do I get a hug?” she said.
* * *
DEAREST, SHE WROTE. She had started work on her essay on Malibran. I told her I’d once seen a long-out-of-print volume containing Da Ponte’s letters to the young Malibran. She should try to find it. Mozart’s beloved librettist, the much older Da Ponte, living in New York in the early years of the nineteenth century, had helped launch the operatic career of the young Maria García. In New York, Maria would marry the banker François Eugène Malibran, twenty-eight years her senior. She kept his name but then left him to find fame in Paris. The parallel didn’t escape me. It thrilled me.
Our third meeting was no different. She was waiting at the same table by the window with my double cappuccino. So no drinks, I thought. “I like repeats,” she said, as though she’d read my mind, “and I know you do too.” We watched the snow begin to fall on Abingdon Square. This was a gift, I kept telling myself. Learn to be grateful and avoid asking so many questions. Part of me, though, couldn’t help but take sneak peeks at what was waiting around the corner. “Maybe, if the weather changes, we’ll pick a day and visit Da Ponte’s grave in Queens,” I finally said.