Cities I've Never Lived In: Stories Read online

  After seeing him in the market buying apples, I found that I wanted to tell him how I had cared for this person Eli, who had shown me a painting but had disappeared. About how lonely I had been in Jonesport. Saying it simply so that he would understand. Yes, he said from time to time, I see.

  Really, I said, it was difficult for me. It became less difficult the day I saw the painting. I had felt, sometimes, like a bird in between windows, not able to get out, and not understanding why. Yes, Franz said, that’s something I can understand. I said, In Eli’s painting, the bird stood on the boy’s finger. The bird means soul, mortality. If it’s on the finger, then the person is alive, but if it lifts … it’s not really an explicit symbol for mortality, like a red light means stop and a green light means go, but a symbol of fragility, a reminder that at any moment this beautiful thing can fly away. And the beautiful thing isn’t the child itself—there wasn’t that perception of children back then—and not life either, but something possessed by … belonging to God.

  After a time he wasn’t listening to the words, but watching the way my hands came off my lap and moved through the light.

  In the museum, he checked the coats, then found me in a room filled with canvases of children. I sat on a bench near the center. There were windows on one end, with a transparent film over them. He sat on a bench next to mine. The children stared without making eye contact. There was a quality of suppressed noise, as if I felt noise but I couldn’t find it. I went to the window. For a while I stared at the rooftops. Then the light brought me into just the light. I felt that these things—the paintings and light—were doors not entirely made.

  I’m trying to guess how it went by watching you, Franz said afterward, but I’m finding I can’t tell.

  Oh, yes. Sorry. I forgot. Yes, these were like Eli’s.

  He reached into his bag and gave me an apple wrapped in a napkin. The train was coming and he looked as if he wanted to give me something besides apples, but that was all he could think of, so he reached in his bag and took out another one.

  Over the phone, I told Gretchen that I wanted to take measurements of her building before she left. I told her it was for my research. She didn’t seem to know who I was. I’m so sorry about Paige. I always wanted to tell you that.

  Yes, she said, there were so many cards.

  She peered through the crack in the door. Oh, she said, it’s you. Her hair had grown out and the ends were brittle, curling and lifting from her back. It made her look less in control, but also prettier. Her face was like that, too. Some skin had sunk a little, making her look more exposed. Come in, she said, no sense memorizing the hall.

  She led me to the sofa, which was nearly obscured by boxes, then hollered from the kitchen. I only have Folgers, is that okay? I always drink the coffee at the restaurant.

  That’s fine.

  He’s doing well, you know. Eli—he’s really doing well. He’s working at a gallery, and they have him doing the photography for the promotional stuff.

  In the kitchen, she was flipping through a pile of mail. There was a postcard, she said, that he sent. The art is so strange, but that’s what they’re doing these days, he tells me, millions of dollars people spend on that stuff. It’s of all these heads projected against a wall. Things I see in my dreams that I don’t want to be seeing. Spend a million dollars to see something like that all the time, no way.

  I miss him, I said.

  Yes, well, he sent a postcard. The refrigerator, you’ve noticed, is unplugged. I don’t know, I got a head start on defrosting it. She pointed to a towel wadded on the floor. And the pickles can’t possibly be good anymore, she said, except they’re preserved, so they must be okay.

  Standing at the bay window, I waited for her to appear below and round the corner toward the restaurant. I lifted the cigarette she had left burning in the ashtray. There was a peach smudge at the tip. I put it back, and then locked the door and took a butter knife from the drawer.

  Eli’s room was empty. I climbed the ladder in the closet, only to find the attic cleared out, too. I had expected to find it the way it had been, with the macramé, the open boxes.

  Inside the crawl space, the painting was gone. I reached around but didn’t find it. At the end of the space I saw another door, similar to the one I had just gone through. It also had knife marks. This door opened onto a staircase going down. At the bottom, a door opened inside a cabinet. I climbed through and found myself in the back of the antiques shop.

  At first, I thought it was just a secret stairway, and that everything else was ordinary, but the light was different. It had been overcast when I watched Gretchen leave, but now light diffused through the room, as if the building had been covered in opaque plastic sheets.

  I sat at the piano, and played as I had in high school. Then I stopped playing, and wandered through the aisles of furniture. At the end of one I saw a painting: another child done in the same manner, this time a little girl in a white dress. She looked like me as a child. Her hair was like a bird’s, chestnut colored, spare at the temples. Everything had been painted still and flat except the eyes. They were brown and filled with worry. I sat on the floor near the painting, feeling close and knowing I wouldn’t get any closer.

  When Eli finally came back to Portland, I told him what I had found. He asked me which way I’d left the shop. The way I came in, I said. It hadn’t occurred to me there was another way to leave.

  He shook his head. He had gone a different way—out the front door and up the steps. It was a mistake, he said. He explained that he moved forward in a way that he wasn’t meant to.

  He asked about the apartment: When I got back in after being in the shop, what did I see there? I mentioned the ashtray where I had put Gretchen’s cigarette. He said little things like that were going wrong. The cigarette would still be burning. He said he had tried to thread back, going through the cabinet, up the secret stairs to the attic, and down into his closet. But then he no longer understood which way he should go to undo what he had done. When he realized this, that he was lost in a way he couldn’t understand, he threw a book against the wall. Later, the dent was gone.

  I could have walked out the front door, but I didn’t. I left the painting in the shop and climbed the stairs, went through the attic, down to his room, through the hall, down the stairs, back to the street, threading through the house the only way I knew how. I ended up in the middle of the sidewalk, in front of the shop I’d just been in. Henry stood outside, setting out a chair. He waved me over.

  His face looked softer, like worn cotton. When I asked if he remembered the piano, he said, You were hardly Mozart.

  You remember.

  He sank into the chair. You weren’t Mozart, Eli wasn’t Ansel Adams. Then he waved his hands. What does it matter, Mozart and Ansel Adams, the way you guys were back then. Better than Mozart. I should have kept the piano. I sold it to a couple in Acadia and I kept, what, probably something pewter. I don’t even know what I kept.

  Does that answer it? he said. Did you find what you needed to? I would have kept you, too, as it were.

  Kind old man, Eli said. Sometimes I think he was put there just for me. And what good did it do?

  Eli had been back in Portland a few months. I had seen him working in an open kitchen and drinking at bars with friends, but this time I arrived to find him drinking by himself. We sat at a table near a window covered with a brocade curtain. The window looked over a grassy triangle; the paths were lit with lamps.

  When I told him about going into the building, he leaned back in his chair and traced the top of his glass. He nodded, asked questions, circling the glass the whole time, but his composure began to break when he asked which way I had gone back. Then he sounded like a child asking and aware of that; another part of him sat there watching the vulnerability from a distance. Once, when we were in high school, he had walked in on my mother standing over the dining room table, yelling. My little brother and I sat there, quiet. There was a d
ish of peas with pearled onions at the center of the table. Butter was melting over the top. One of our tarnished spoons stuck out of it. I reached for the spoon and my mother threw the bowl against the wall. Then she turned to Eli and asked what he was looking at. Most people, when anger is directed at them, will shift in response to the anger, but Eli stayed with me, that same look on his face.

  He said, I made so many mistakes. It was as if I was a different person watching myself make mistake after mistake.

  We went out to the green across the street, as if the space—the low light, the fog, the shelter of the trees—made us invisible. We walked past a statue of a man on a horse. Eli sat on the top of a bench and got out a cigarette. I leaned against his legs and said, Henry still keeps camera parts for you.

  In high school, things changed, he said. I needed money to get somewhere. So I went down and took a few things, small things, and sold them in New York.

  No, he said. Many things, I took many things. Not from Henry’s shop. I never stole from Henry. But the other shop. I kept taking things.

  Mostly Henry dealt with reputable vendors, but sometimes he had to deal with other people. Eli went through Henry’s records until he found one of these people. He called him, said that his grandmother had died and he had some jewelry. His mother was waitressing that night, and his sister hadn’t left her room. He took an empty backpack, went up to the attic then down to the shop. From under a glass display, he lifted hundreds of dollars worth of jewelry.

  The man in the city had eyes like marbles. He paid in cash. He inquired politely about Eli’s grandmother. Eli tried a second time; when he went down to the shop the case was full again. He took the batch to the city. The man said, The pieces you gave me last time were worth more than I’d thought. I should give you a little extra. They were sitting on opposite sides of a desk. From the drawer, the man took out a stack of bills and slid it to Eli. Do you have more? the man asked. All the jewelry was spread in front of them. Eli didn’t understand the precariousness of his position until then. Eli told him he had a painting he would consider selling. Quite old, he said. He described the painting. The man was interested. Eli walked out intending never to talk to him again.

  But one night the man called the house, though Eli had never given him the number. Eli recognized his voice at once, the way it layered and withheld. I am inquiring about the painting, the man said. If you decided to sell it.

  No, Eli said, my family decided to keep it.

  I have to admit I’m disappointed, the man said. I had wanted to see it. It sounded intriguing, and potentially quite valuable. It could be worth more than the jewelry.

  There is a family attachment to it, Eli said, almost whispering, trying to keep calm. He could hear his mother in the kitchen, talking to a friend. She had just brought home pizza. He hung up the phone, standing in the dark of the foyer, his hand still on the receiver. She came out of the kitchen, Is that you? What is it? Is everything all right?

  He told me that he left for Europe the next week. That he left the painting in the crawl space. That when he returned for his sister’s funeral, he found—as I had—that it was gone.

  The man, I said.

  Eli shook his head. There were those knife marks, he said, even before me. Someone knew about it. It might not have been him at all.

  I remembered the vague light through the windows. The emptiness outside. I thought of someone coming in from that. For a moment I believed him; then I noticed he couldn’t look at me.

  We went back to his apartment. He said, Just say it.

  It wasn’t yours.

  It was a picture of me.

  It wasn’t yours, I said. I found a painting that looked like me, but I didn’t take it.

  Well, I regret it, he said. I took it and regret it, if that’s what you want.

  That’s not what I want.

  He touched the side of my face, my cheeks rashy from the cold. I tried to move but he held me. You just need to stand here, he said. It’s okay, just stand where you are. That’s all you need to do. He brought his face in and kissed me, gripping me as if holding me up.

  In the bedroom, he didn’t turn on the lights—I didn’t even see a lamp, just a bed and nightstand—but he kept the door open. He stood over me as I sat on the iron bed. Studying me, trying to figure out how to go about it. I wriggled my jeans off and sat there in my wool sweater and underpants. We lay down. He slid the sweater to my armpits. I was bare underneath, with small breasts and nipples scratched red from the wool.

  The hall light caught the cream of my legs and the sweater at my armpits. He leaned over to pick up his drink. Cold drops landed on my stomach. He drew a finger connecting them, then we kissed, kissing so hard that it seemed wrong, the way he still held his drink to his side. He paused to take a sip. Stop that, I said.

  Teasing you, he said, holding it out for me. As I drank, he pulled down my underwear. He still wore his jeans, and he climbed on top of me so the fly of his pants rubbed into me. He took the drink from me. I took it back, drained it, and put it on the table.

  I could do with a cigarette, he said.

  Are you going to take your clothes off?

  You could take them off for me.

  I could, I said. Or you could just do it. Which would be easier.

  That’s sexy.

  I’m just saying.

  I pushed him away. He undressed. First the shirt, shaking his head when it came off to get his hair out of his eyes. Then the pants, down to his boxers. Sitting next to me, pulling them down to put on a condom, then climbing back on top. After so many years of waiting you wouldn’t think I would have noticed so much about the ceiling, that there were places where it flaked, and blooms of moisture. I even worried there might be serious water damage, and I almost asked, but his eyes were squished, and there was a lot of focus. A lot of the bed hitting the wall. And all that sighing I did when I lifted my arms to clutch the bars and he clutched my arms. To show my pleasure, I lifted my knees to cradle him, because he was about to come, and I wanted him to be cradled when he did.

  After, we sat together, still naked on the bed. My knees tight to me. His arm around me, his lips in my hair. Why the fear? he said.

  How much did he give you for it? I asked.

  Five thousand dollars.

  And you regret it?

  I regret it. Anything else?

  No, that’s all.

  After that, we kept meeting at the bar, drinking and going home together. Sometimes we’d stay in the living room, me straddling him on the sofa, his head rolling back and forth. Other times me propped on the kitchen counter with him behind, both of us facing the Frigidaire, the dish towel looped on the handle.

  We stayed up late in bed, looking through art books. Wrapping the sheet around me, going into the bathroom to wash up, sleeping next to him in the cold room, waking up too late, the shock of cold from the faucet, running into my classes un-prepared, still with the smell of him on me.

  One morning, as I was coming out onto the steps—looking down at the old houses of the West End, slipping my arms into my coat—Franz walked by. My hair disheveled, short strands poking up, my face blotchy. He held his violin case, and wore the thick wool coat I always told him made him look Eastern European. The case small in his hands. He stood under a tree; its roots made the sidewalk rise. He walked up to me and, without any harshness, said, You’ll have to decide at some point.

  We walked through the streets, past the trees with circle fences, the bottoms of our coats flapping open then closed with our steps. I don’t mean between the two of us, he said. I’m not an idiot. But here, he said, patting a hand to his chest, with you, you’ll have to decide. Do you understand what I’m saying? I think you’re making a mistake.

  Let me do it then, I said. Let me do what I’m going to do.

  The answer wasn’t for Franz, but for my mother, many years too late. Once, when I was a child, she took me to a mental health clinic. She knew one of the doctors an
d wanted me examined. Afterward, the friend let her walk me through a set of doors and down a hallway. The hallway ended at a cube, with windows and children in bright clothing. There were many children, some drawing, some sitting against the wall with dark circles under their eyes. Some crying. My mother behind me, hands on my shoulders, keeping me there, until at last she turned me and we went back.

  When we opened the outside door, you could feel the air all hot and open; it’s what freedom would always feel like to me. That’s what I once told Franz, what freedom always felt like to me: like school being let out for the summer and seeing all the school buses in a row ready to take you home. My mother opened the passenger door and waited for me to buckle before closing it. She got in and buckled her belt but stayed with her hands on the wheel, not putting the key in. We were going to drive without keys. I liked that. She stared at the parking space ahead as if concentration was necessary to avert disaster. She said, This is what happens. Did you see those children? Did you see them in the room? Please, Anne. What good does this do any of us?

  While we drove, I waited for the ocean; sometimes we would stop and feed the seagulls from tissue-thin bread bags, the bags tumbling in the breeze, floating and sparkling.

  Eli eventually moved away. After a few years, I learned from a friend that he had married a painter, a Swiss woman, and was living in Cambridge. I found a picture of him online, taken at a gallery opening, and I almost didn’t recognize him, he looked so happy, so much at peace.