If I were an Elizabethan playwright, I’d seize on this very moment and call it an island, not off the coast of Naples, but an island in time, where one or more shipwrecked travelers are suddenly cast ashore on MacDougal Street and, with spellbound, startled eyes, find themselves suspended for a while at four-thirty between a falafel stand and a pastry shop, between MacDougal as it looks now and as it looked in the very late sixties.
I am also reminded of the fifty-two-year-old Stendhal sitting exhausted one warm day in September 1835 on a tiny bench along a solitary pathway by Lake Albano near Rome. Without knowing it, perhaps, he had picked the spot quite appropriately, for it is located right behind one of the stations of the cross. Here Henri Beyle, a.k.a. Stendhal, a.k.a Dominique, a.k.a. Henri Brulard, a.k.a. so many other pseudonyms, will begin to contemplate the stations of his life. How does one of the most unfortunate lovers in French literature begin piecing together the fragments of his existence? How can someone who has had so much trouble connecting with others connect with his own life? What kind of narrative will he find? Is there a narrative?
One by one, Stendhal begins to scratch in the sand, in shorthand, the names of the women he has loved. This is how he charts, how he connects, the stations of his life, a life lived or rather told under the sign of Venus—even though, in his own words, “with all of these [women], as with others, I’ve always been a child; and I’ve had very little success.” The abbreviated names are V, An, Ad, M, Mi, Al, Aine, Apg, Mde, C, G, Aur, and finally Mme Azur. These are the initials of the women he’s loved. And yet, characteristically enough, next to Mme Azur he writes, “whose first name I forget.” Another, Angela Pietragrua, is mentioned twice (once as An and once as Apg), because the two of them had resumed an affair after a hiatus of a few years.
“In fact,” Stendhal writes, “I’ve possessed only six of the women I’ve loved.” Dans le fait, je n’ai eu que six de ces femmes que j’ai aimées
I was twenty-one when I first read The Life of Henri Brulard, where Stendhal’s list appears, and what baffled me most in his list was its sheer length. Stendhal had loved and suffered for twelve women. I had scarcely loved one. I was intimidated, envious, dwarfed. It would never have occurred to me that thirty years later I’d be standing on MacDougal Street trying to sort out the meaning behind my own list of initials, envying the young man who’d have envied the loves I’ve known.
I’ve stopped outside Caffè Reggio and am looking through the large glass panel. The place hasn’t changed at all: dark, intentionally faded interior, the old brown nineteenth-century furniture that seems lifted from yard sales in Naples and Palermo, the rounded green awning with the inscription Since 1927, the two large glass panels, the tiny one in between, and the little alcove in the back, which presumably must have housed a vintage telephone booth and the glass door which opens with an intrusive squeak that makes everyone turn and stare forbiddingly, as I wonder whether I’ll ever overcome this sense of being mildly unwelcome, of never really being “in” enough or bold enough or old enough to enter this tiny enclave of the happy few—jet-setter, movie-star types dressed in perpetual black, everyone so visibly and yet so unself-consciously, so transcendentally sexual, as though, when it came to these things, it is always I, and not another soul, who has the overly attentive, dirty mind. That much has never changed.
I don’t know why I’m standing outside here, nor can I understand the words I keep saying to myself: Nothing has changed. Nothing has changed. This could easily be 1969, or 1975, or 1981.
I am feeling very awkward, like a boy screwing up the courage to buy a pack of cigarettes, or a jealous man spying on his beloved. A man from a nearby falafel place has come out and is watching me. The waiter at Caffè Reggio catches me staring and assumes an inquisitive gaze. I was here many waiters ago, I want to boast, but it’s nothing to boast about. A man sitting at a table by the window lifts his face and from behind the large pane clearly suggests I’m intruding on his space. I affect the focused expression of a subway passenger trying to look over and behind someone sitting in front of the map. Have I found what I’m looking for? he seems to ask. What I’m looking for has no name, I want to reply, for it’s like seeking a dead person—me, younger—at a cocktail party.
I am, of course, staring at the very last table in the corner, the one cast in a still darker shade of brown. But nothing comes: no revelation, no éclat. Should I, like a high-school student, like Stendhal in the sand, take out a penknife and carve into its old brown surface the coded names of the women I’ve loved?
With each new love, we invent a new way of charting our lives, of realigning our internal calendars. But where one sorrow should bury another, two sorrows coexist instead, face-to-face, like the young queen and the old queen sitting across the dinner table, each wishing the venom in her eyes were in the other’s food—except that the two are in me, and the poison I take, I make.
This is Stendhal’s narrative: at the time he knew A, he had no idea he’d meet B, or that C would devastate his life so thoroughly as to eclipse both A and B. And yet, despite everything, there was D waiting around the corner, D who would truly destroy him and before whom his suffering for C would pale into a trivial skit, so that a few years later, when he did run into C, all he could think was When I lost her and thought life had ended, life hadn’t even started. How can this be? But as it turned out, this brief interlude with C, which was to salve an unhealed wound, proved worse than any injury inflicted by D, and one evening, totally distraught, he found himself knocking at D’s door to forget C.
It would take nothing really for me to open the door to Caffè Reggio, where I haven’t been in at least two years, and step into this island in time, into this bubble. If I’m hesitating it’s not because I’m afraid of slipping into one of the many four-thirties I’ve known on this sidewalk but because I don’t have the least inkling of whether it is an old fantasy I am tempted to revisit, a new fantasy, a memory, or an intricate cluster of unexpiated desires hovering not just over all the coffeehouses I’ve known in this neighborhood but over the evenings I’ve passed by, the films I’ve seen, the women I’ve fallen in and out of love with, down to those I never dared speak to but whose spirit all the same is forever present on the glistening pavements of MacDougal Street.
One of them lived a few blocks from here. For a few months we came to Caffè Reggio every evening. Then she moved to another city, and her table became my table, and I sat there with others, until I, too, moved to another city, and someone else came in my place, and someone after that, and so on, until I came back years later and might as well have been as much a stranger to the last in a generation of lovers as Odysseus returning to Ithaca.
I stare at the place now. What do I really want from it? Whom am I hoping to find here? Or am I afraid of walking in and finding, as in Fellini’s 8½, or Eric Rohmer’s Chloe in the Afternoon, Caffè Reggio filled with all the women I’ve known, gathered in what would of course be the ultimate surprise party from hell?
Or am I afraid of walking in and finding that I care for all of them, that one never really unloves anyone in life but finds others to love instead? Or, worse yet, that I’ve never cared for any and that if I come here it’s because I’m still lured by that vague, beguiling air of possibility which continues to linger for me each time I come to the Village.
Or am I afraid of finding Caffè Reggio totally empty but for one table, occupied by one person, sitting as I had pictured her sitting exactly thirty years ago to remind me that I’ve never forgotten her, that she, too, may have never forgotten me, and that if I eventually managed to forget her and have long ceased to love her, she remains, to use Nietzsche’s words, the “star love” of my life, the quasar that lost its light but continues to exert silent gravitational pull on every planet I’ve encountered?
Or is there another reason behind my fear: which is to walk into Caffè Reggio and find that, despite the years and my attempts to crowd them with people, the room is totally empty,
because that, too, is how it feels when I look back, seeing that, for someone enamored of the past, I’ve never, ever kept in touch with the past but have let it drift almost as though it weren’t my past, because what was mine, ultimately, was not others but my dreams and fictions of others, which is to say, that what truly mattered was not their love but mine, mine despite theirs, me without them, the lonely me, the me that never goes away, the me who has no shape, no voice, no age, but who remains forever a wanting, angry, beseeching me, because I can never think of me except through others and am therefore always attached to something else, someone else, which is why I’m never in one spot, never in one person, never on one page or on one side of the street or one side of the table, but scattered in time as well, the way my West Village and Caffè Reggio is made up of scattered dates and scattered faces, where love, this would-be beacon punctuating the course of most lives because it subsumes so much hope for a better life, is itself nothing more than a trajectory without direction or purpose.
I decide to walk in.
I sit at the old familiar place. I order Earl Grey tea. I take out a sheet of paper. I draw up a list of names. I list the films I remember seeing near here and the number of times I’ve come here with someone and ordered Earl Grey tea. I play with numbers, with dates, trying to discern a pattern. I might as well have been making a list of stops on the Broadway Local.
Faced with the “bizarreness”—his word—of his life with women, Stendhal, who was as interested in tactical seduction as he was in romantic bliss, had come up with some kind of ideological compromise: if you love someone, you will find it very difficult to speak your heart; but speak from the heart you must. If you cannot speak, behave candidly, frankly, and naturally—and so long as you do this, you may succeed. Stendhal, an ex-mathematician, was also shrewd enough to catch the unstated term here: willed sincerity is just another mode of seduction, perhaps the most cunning mode of all. If, therefore, you are to be truly sincere, you must do the opposite of what you think you should be doing. That is, if you love someone, be cold. Froid is one of Stendhal’s busiest adjectives. As Thomas Mann once said: The emotions are best served chilled. Nothing could have served Stendhal worse. Ultimately, we are as disingenuous with ourselves as we think others are with us.
And yet, even though I’m not an Elizabethan, and not a nineteenth-century man, this disingenuousness, this counterintuitiveness, speaks to my experience of life and of love just as it does to my experience of literature.
Toward the very end of that summer, I am working late one night when someone buzzes downstairs. I ask who it is. “C’est moi,” I hear someone say. I can’t for the life of me place the voice, though it’s not altogether unfamiliar: someone who speaks French and clearly knows me but whose familiar voice I can’t place at all. Without thinking, I immediately discount the very first person who crosses my mind. She didn’t know a word of French. Besides, since I’ve often caught myself thinking I’m hearing her voice, hoping it is her voice when I know it can’t possibly be hers, I’ve trained my mind—counterintuitively—to spot itself playing tricks on me. I ask again. Through the static the exasperated voice finally blurts out: “Me, I said.”
It’s only after thinking a second that I begin to suspect it might actually be her; but the thought seems to be coming the long way around and from so very far away, like a plane that lands in some abandoned airfield in far-off Australia after many refueling stops along the way in Europe and Far East Asia on a long journey back to America. But this can’t be. Only then did I grasp—counterintuitively again—why I’d failed to recognize it; the voice wasn’t really speaking French; it was merely imitating someone speaking French She was—it took me a few seconds to realize—imitating me, assaulting me with exaggerated familiarity to hide her awkwardness. And this, her awkwardness, was what finally told me it could only be she and no one else.
A woman steps out of the old elevator. Had I merely been pretending it wasn’t her so as not to be disappointed? Or—more counterintuitively yet—was I pretending it couldn’t be her only to heighten the surprise, the pleasure, the miracle?
Her very long black hair is matted on her face; she’s all wet, and I can’t tell whether it’s from the rain or from crying. “Come in.” I give her a bathrobe. She undresses in front of me. Then she goes to the linen closet and removes a large towel to dry her hair. In her place, I’d have pretended to forget where anything was after a month or so. Was this a good sign: I’ve come back, let’s start all over again, I haven’t forgotten anything? Or—counterintuitively (and I won’t use the word any longer)—was this a bad sign: Don’t go getting any ideas, I’ve got other worries on my mind?
I take her wet clothes, open the heat vent and hang them, light the stove, make tea. She’s all white, shivers, sits on a chair, and gulps down the tea in hasty sobs. “He’s thrown me out, you know.” I rub her feet with alcohol and put wool socks on them. You’ll sleep here tonight, we’ll talk in the morning, I say “He’s thrown me out, you know,” she repeats. Revenge is never kind, I think. This is the woman I would have done anything to kill. Now I’d do anything to kill the man who’s taken her from me and done this to her.
Still, I try to nudge the talk my way, to days when I’d look for the slightest pretext to skulk by their window each evening, finally getting caught by the very man who had given her back to me now. “But would you have stood outside his window the way I did?” I start to ask.
She instantly shoots me that old, embittered stare: “Why else do you think I’m soaked?”
She talks until very late. At one point I ask if she wants some brandy. She says she wants Valium instead. Do I still have those pills I’d taken because of her?
I do. How many does she want? The whole bottle, she says with a smile. I’d gladly give it to her, except that I want one myself tonight.
When it’s time to go to bed she says, “I don’t want to sleep alone.”
She came to me to forget him, she says, just as the pills I had taken to survive her loss would now help her survive my rival’s.
Two days later she brought over her things and moved in, the way I’d moved in with her. At night, when she slept, she’d mutter his name, or sometimes start with his, ending with mine.
Within weeks, she managed to run into him again and sleep with him, reporting to me—hoping to please or appease me—that she’d called him by my name at night.
I feigned exaggerated jealousy, perhaps to conceal that I was jealous indeed. Let’s end it right now, I said. She did not argue.
Now I must go to him to forget you, she said, almost sheepishly, seeing the irony and making light of it, which was her way of suffering. We made up. Besides, I would soon be moving to Boston. Did I still want the apartment? No, she could have it back.
I remember our last evenings in a crowded Caffè Reggio in the fall of that year and how sad we both were, neither in love with the other and yet thrown together like opposites who’ve finally understood that opposites seldom attract. She had lost the man she loved. And I, too, had just lost a girl I’d met earlier that same summer. We would speak about both, at once pleased that we could and yet piqued that each had someone else, each finding that a heart can ache in two places at the same time and still spit venom and its antidote without skipping a beat. She desperately wanted him to catch us at the back corner table, and I desperately wanted to be seen by my summer flame. It brought us together, and as we walked up and down Thompson and Sullivan, I’d force an arm around her hips, and she yielded, thinking, perhaps, If he wants to so badly, then let him, mistaking it for passion, not knowing that I’d already second-guessed her kisses to be no different from my own. They were third-party kisses; we kissed as we loved, with our eyes open, locked in a counterfeit embrace which, perhaps, still counted for something.
We said goodbye near Washington Square, promising to write or call. But I never heard from her again. The last time I saw her handwriting was on an envelope she had forwarded to my
address in Boston. It was a letter from my previous girlfriend asking why I’d disconnected my phone.
There must be a meaning to this pattern, but I don’t know its name.
One night in the sixties I caught sight of a beautiful girl in the library who looked quite familiar. When our eyes met again, she smiled, I smiled back, and, without thinking, finally mustered the courage to speak. I know you from somewhere. Yes, you look familiar, too. We dropped a few names: friends, places, teachers, courses, parties. No, no one in common, nothing in common, totally different tastes. It was only as we were talking that I began to realize—and from the look in her eyes it seemed she sensed it before I did—that we knew each other from having stared at each other one day on a subway platform and again a few days later, and again that very morning, and that if, in speaking to her, I had now crossed a line my own shyness should never have allowed me to cross, it was only by mistake, which is how I always ask for the things I want in life, whereas she, by thinking I’d had the gumption to pretend I’d forgotten where we’d seen each other before, had, by another twisted process, made a corresponding mistake. Had I figured all this out before opening my mouth, my life would have taken an entirely different turn. I wouldn’t have spoken to her, wouldn’t have known so much heartache, wouldn’t have learned to read life inside out, wouldn’t have lived it as though it were a downhill slalom studded with buried obstructions and perilous counterturns.