‘As his wife, Carolyn, you don’t get to have too much anxiety to deal with his medical care,’ I told her matter-of-factly. ‘You don’t get to opt out. You have to sit by his bed and talk about it all, in detail, with every nurse and doctor who wanders by and glances at his chart. You don’t get to lounge around in the waiting room like a pampered mistress. They put that shit right in the wedding vows, for exactly this kind of situation. Sickness and health.’ I spread out my arms like I was taking in the whole hallway. Or about to take flight. ‘And since you want all that so badly, have at it.’
She looked nervous. Or maybe that was just her version of confused.
‘I didn’t mean that I wanted you to—’
‘Disappear?’ I threw the word at her. ‘Are you sure?’
‘Look,’ she said, frowning – and, I thought, uncertain for the first time in memory. ‘I’m just really tired. And crazy emotional, okay?’
‘I don’t care,’ I said, and it was delightfully, encompassingly true. It was like freedom, finally. ‘That’s his problem. And he’s yours.’ I even laughed. ‘Text me if he wakes up.’
And just like that, I emancipated myself from what remained of my marriage. I didn’t even think twice. If Carolyn wanted it that badly, she could have it. Him.
After all, I had other things to do. Like figure out what the hell had happened to me, and my life. And then work out how I was going to fix it.
And that, I told myself fiercely as I headed for the door and the me I’d left by the side of the road somewhere without even knowing it, had nothing to do with either one of them.
7
Of course, the reality of my supposedly epic journey into my own lost past started off somewhat more prosaically than I might have imagined when I threw those words at Carolyn and stormed off into the night, my righteousness all about me like a great cape.
As these things often did.
That didn’t mean it wouldn’t turn out to be appropriately epic eventually, I assured myself as some kind of pep talk the next morning, clutching a cardboard cup of coffee between my cold hands as I waited in the local train station. It just meant that like most things, this particular journey was starting off small, any epic qualities hidden under a barrage of tiny, insignificant and, frankly, irritating details. Like the annoyingly loud and boisterous conversation two splendidly suited young executive types were having in anticipation of the morning train, forcing the rest of us to listen to their breakdown of some sports event they’d both watched the night before whether we wanted to or not. Or the woman standing next to me on the freezing cold platform whose perfume, even under all of those winter layers, made me think I might either sneeze or vomit. Or both.
Life never allowed any graceful sinking into a convenient montage scene, did it?
I took the train into the city as I had a million times before, packed tightly and resentfully onto the Metro North commuter line all the way south through the pretty and not-so-pretty New York state Manhattan suburbs and then on into Grand Central station. All the black-clad, stone-faced commuters surged from the train the moment we pulled in, scattering into the frenetic December energy of mid-week Manhattan. They had jobs to go to, careers to tend, very important things to do. This was evident in every frown, every carefully blank expression, every impassive stare. I followed behind at a much slower pace, unwilling to admit to myself how hard it was to breathe through all the memories.
I stopped for a moment in the middle of the famous main concourse – taking my life in my hands by obstructing the flow of foot traffic, like all the tourists I’d once despised for getting in my way right here – and soaked it in. The morning light flowing in through the high windows. The restaurants, the famous stairs, the magnitude of it all. I wanted to go and sit in the Oyster Bar again or wander through the Market Hall for hours. I wanted to stand still until the terminal emptied out entirely, then filled up again, to experience the great tide of it. It was beautiful, crowded, wholly impersonal, and somehow welcoming all the same. It made something inside of me swell, then ache.
Tim and I had been commuters like the ones streaming all around me after we’d moved to Rivermark, for almost a whole year before we’d finally opened up our own practice. I’d rushed through this glorious, iconic space every morning, and had so rarely stopped to look around. I’d so rarely stopped at all. Sometimes I’d simply been focused on the day ahead of me. Other times I’d already been embroiled in some or other inevitably stressful conversation on my cell phone as I’d strode down the Lexington Passage and then outside for the quick, brisk walk to the firm over on Lexington Avenue. It seemed like a lifetime ago now. As if that had been someone else entirely.
Today, I had no particular agenda. No meetings to get to, no calls to return, no reason at all to join in with the rest as they charged toward the high-powered and hectic day ahead of them. I walked, slowly, through the passage, past the shops, and then out into the city.
Here I come, past, I thought as I pushed through the doors. It’s high time to fix what went wrong!
But the first thing that hit me was the cold. It was so cold. Bitterly, viciously cold with that special, brutal wind that cut you in half whenever you turned a corner. Or stood still. Or did anything at all. Manhattan in December was an exercise in deep chill. And a blisteringly freezing wind chill, too. I wrapped my scarf more tightly around my neck and pulled the wool hat I was no longer too vain to wear down over my ears. I wiggled my fingers in my gloves and then shoved my hands deep into the pockets of my parka. The good news was I didn’t have to appear in any sort of office today. No one would care if I looked windblown, or if the only shoes I planned to wear were my comfortable winter boots. I wouldn’t have to worry about the effect of the salted sidewalks on a pair of prettier boots, or the necessity of carting around cute shoes to put on once I reached the safety of an office. I could simply walk the city I’d once loved so much it was like it was a person instead of a place, and try to remember why on earth I’d left it for the one town I’d always vowed I’d never live in. Voluntarily, anyway.
I kind of thought there should be something to mark this moment. Trumpets? A choir? Even a Salvation Army bell-ringer would have done the trick. But there was only the screech of brakes and the clatter of trucks, and another stream of invective behind me because I wasn’t moving. I didn’t know what I’d expected, but it was too cold to stand still on a busy sidewalk in Midtown and wait to figure out why I wasn’t getting it. Also, someone might actually bodily remove me from their path if I didn’t remove myself. So I started walking south, toward the part of my past I remembered best.
It was a long, slow walk, along the sometimes slippery and not always well-shovelled sidewalks, and around the piles of snow packed high at every kerb after the last big snowfall. I realized quickly that I’d lost that New York street rhythm that had used to come so naturally to me; that strong walking pace I’d automatically defaulted to whenever I found myself on a city street, charging toward the next WALK sign. I told myself this was different, that I was a tourist today like all the rest who clogged up Manhattan in the run-up to Christmas and that I had no need to fall into any old rhythms, but I felt the lack of that automatic, confident stride. Oh, how I felt it inside of me. It heated me up like shame.
My boots crunched against the salt and the still snow-covered patches where shovellers had clearly grown tired of dealing with the encroaching weather. I had to take care to navigate the deep slushy pits lying in wait at every kerb – the ones that always seemed to be that cruel inch higher than whatever boot I wore, that I’d inevitably sink into when I stepped into the crosswalk and would then have frozen slush and ice oozing all over my poor legs and feet as I stomped my way home. Or, worse, to class or to work, where I’d have to sit there, damply, for hours. I’d experienced that far too many times back in the day to take the possibility of accidental frostbite via slush puddle lightly.
I walked and walked. And as I did, I let my memories of m
y life here wash over me. I did not think about my sister. I did not think about Tim. I let go of hospital beds, ICU waiting rooms, pregnancies, my parents’ limitations, and my own blue blouse, floating in the air. I did. Or anyway, I tried. And I walked.
I wandered down Lexington Avenue, all the way until it dead-ended at Gramercy Park, then I headed east. I took Second Avenue south for a while, then headed east again, making my way inexorably further south and east into the now remarkably spiffed-up reaches of Alphabet City, toward the red-brick-fronted walk-up near Avenue B and East 2nd Street that had been Brooke’s and my home for so many years.
I still didn’t know what I was looking for. There was still a decided lack of joyful music to announce my triumphant return, a notable absence of the Hallelujah Chorus. It was perfectly silent internally as well, if I was honest.
Outside my old building, I waited for some kind of epiphany, but there was nothing in the air but the plummeting temperature, the inevitable car horns, and salsa music from some out-of-sight radio. The place was still as gritty and relatively unwelcoming as I remembered it, with graffiti adorning the mailboxes on the kerb and visible on the edges of most of the nearby buildings, though I imagined the unscrupulous and possibly sociopathic landlord had jacked up the rent all these years later to something I would find laughable now. It had been highway robbery then, when this neighbourhood had been even scruffier and more marginal. There was a scrubby-looking bar at the ground level, a different establishment from the even seedier one that had been there when we’d first moved in. I didn’t know why I found it all so charming, when it clearly wasn’t. Nor had it been back then. It wasn’t just the obvious attempts at urban revival and hipster gentrification, either, though I could see evidence of that everywhere, and had marvelled at how much more accessible and safe the area felt as I’d walked here. It was nostalgia, almost certainly – but it was more than that, too.
Maybe it was because I had to bob and weave to avoid walking smack into the ghosts of all my previous selves, all of whom littered the streets around me in this old neighbourhood I’d once known so well. A hundred different histories lurked on every corner, in every block, weaving around the occasional trees and unwelcoming stoops. I imagined for a moment I could see them all, all my former incarnations, superimposed over a map of lower Manhattan like flashes of light, and had to laugh at the notion. Would I trip over myself if I simply closed my eyes and let myself wander? I didn’t see how I could do anything else. And maybe that would be a good thing – the epiphany I was looking for.
‘It’s here somewhere,’ I assured myself, talking to myself at full volume without worrying if the delivery guy bustling past me on the sidewalk thought that was weird. The ability to treat public space as private space, thanks to the anonymity offered by the sea of people here, was just one more thing I missed. ‘I have to keep going until I find it.’
With that in mind, I headed a little bit north and then west, across East 4th Street toward Washington Square and the heart of NYU, as I had done a million times before, both when I was an undergraduate at the College of Arts and Sciences and later, when I was at NYU Law. The city looked exactly the same all around me, and yet totally different, too. Strangers streamed past me, cars jostled for position as they manoeuvred down the choked-up little blocks in this part of the city, and life went on in its peculiarly New York way, just as it always had. Just as it always would. I didn’t know whether that thought made me sad, or gave me some kind of solace. Both, maybe.
And neither was the answer I wanted.
I had a long lunch that bled into the afternoon in my favourite old café on the other side of Washington Square in Greenwich Village proper, where I had wiled away more afternoons and evenings than I could count. I sat on the gloriously baroque furniture, a bit grimier now from so many years of constant use than I remembered, and ate my way through my favourite obsessions on the menu: a thick French onion soup, a croissant, then, later, a pain au chocolat that I told myself tasted almost as good as one might in Paris, were I ever to make it there. I read my book, losing myself for long hours in the twists and turns of a star-crossed romance while remembering the boys I’d sighed and cried over here, so few of them worth the energy; the complicated nights that had seemed less painful after a few hours lounging on these solid, gilt-edged couches so far removed from their original splendour, which was how I’d always felt myself.
I did not think about Tim. I did not think about Carolyn. I did not let any of the things I’d left behind me in Rivermark infect me here. I told myself that none of them existed here, in fact. That none of them mattered. That this was all about me – the very first thing that had been about me in what felt like much too long.
I let the accommodating waiters bring me new steaming mugs of good, strong coffee as the place filled and then emptied, then filled again around me. If I closed my eyes, it could be any of those half-forgotten lost days of my own private history here, all of them bleeding into each other and around each other, painting the perfect picture of me seamlessly blending into MacDougal Street and Greenwich Village all around me. As if I was one more landmark, here, among so many.
God, I love it here, I thought when I finally wrapped myself up against the cold and headed back out into it. How did I ever leave it?
It was already the inky, full-bodied dark of near-winter on the street outside the heat-fogged café window. The streetlights above and car headlights inching by seemed rounder, brighter, surrounded by so much early nightfall. I stood in the overhang of a nearby bodega as I tugged on my gloves, and felt, suddenly, the full force of everything I’d lost when I’d left here. All the things I’d thought I’d known about myself. All the things I’d wanted. The comfort of so much familiarity, so much history, at every sticky café table. Even the way I’d walked down the damned street.
I shivered as the first flush of the frigid December evening really hit me, then I took a deep breath and finally headed for Brooke’s place, where, deep down, I knew I’d been headed all along.
Brooke had sent me a change-of-address card when she’d finally moved out of our old place. It said something that she hadn’t made a ceremony out of that – and that I hadn’t been involved in her leaving, at last, the apartment that had been such a huge part of us, of our lives, for so long. Had I thought so then? When I’d received the card?
The card itself was one of those pretty, heavy and lushly embossed sorts, the kind that always made me feel that I was playing an eternal game of catch-up in the etiquette games, since I’d only sent out an email to my entire Outlook address book when we’d moved out of the city. She’d written an XO beneath the pertinent information, and then no more than her initial.
I couldn’t remember how long ago she’d sent it. I couldn’t remember what I’d felt when I’d read it. I couldn’t remember if it had crossed my mind to question what had become of us, if that was all the notice and interest either one of us took in each other at that point in our lives. I only knew that I’d filed it away in the old school physical address book I kept tucked away in a drawer in the kitchen, which was where I’d found it last night. And then maybe I’d debated a yoga class, or a pastry, the way I always did. Because that was what my life had always been in Rivermark, before. Neat, orderly. Content. And for some reason, Brooke had had no place in that.
Today, I told myself as I shivered down her street, I wouldn’t dwell on any of that. I wouldn’t mourn. I would only marvel that Brooke had done what we’d always dreamed of doing when we were broke college students with more dreams than sense – she’d somehow moved to a very fancy address in the West Village. The block she lived on was a New York fantasy in every respect. A row of manicured brownstones lined the quiet street, some with wrought-iron railings that trumpeted the prosperity of their very stoops. It might even have been one of the blocks we’d liked to haunt way back when. We’d stuck a bottle of wine in a paper bag and had swigged from it as discreetly as possible on warm, pretty nights,
sitting on the stoops of beautiful brownstones like these and telling ourselves wild stories about the kinds of lives we’d live that would lead to residence in one of these places.
I had given up. I’d left New York, the way so many did, and found other dreams. But Brooke had done it. She’d really, truly done it. I found myself smiling behind my scarf, and told myself that the sting in my eyes was the winter wind, nothing more.
I stared up at her building, and it was as if the moment I stopped moving the doubt rushed in with the swirl of icy cold. What was I doing here? What was my plan? And more to the point, just because I’d had a series of epiphanies on the floor of my closet, what made me think Brooke would be happy to see me? Friendships didn’t just disappear, after all. Both parties had to work at it. What made me think this current state of affairs wasn’t exactly the way she wanted it?
The fact was, I didn’t know her any longer. I didn’t know what the past few years had been like for her. I didn’t even know how she’d managed to afford moving to such a tony address in the first place, a whole world and many tax brackets away from Alphabet City. Maybe she wasn’t in publishing any more. Maybe she’d married an investment banker. Or a prince. What did I know about her now? Nothing. There was no reason at all to think I could just show up and demand access to her after so long, without even bothering to make an appointment. Without even reaching out in some more careful way, allowing her to react however she liked without me standing right there to witness it.
‘Stupid,’ I muttered to myself. Or at myself, I wasn’t sure.
I didn’t look at Brooke’s building again. I turned and started trudging down the street, back toward the busier avenue up ahead. I hadn’t really plotted out what I would do next, had I? I’d wandered around all day looking for something indefinable to rise from the streets and make sense of my life, but I couldn’t keep doing that. I would find a hotel, first of all. I was tired of walking, and very, very cold. I wanted something hot to drink, and a warm place to sit and defrost as I thought through all the glimpses of my old lives I’d sensed around me today. I’d been so certain that I needed to come back to Manhattan, and I wanted to really explore that, if I could, even if I hadn’t found what I’d imagined I would yet. Brooke might be a part of that, but then again, she might not. I’d send her an email, like a normal person. I wouldn’t just show up at her door like some kind of stalker and—