Cities I've Never Lived In: Stories Page 7

  That day, after realizing I was lost, I was sitting on a bench and reading a newspaper, trying to orient myself, when the man walked by. I followed until he went into a restaurant called Delmonico’s. He sat alone before a middle-aged brunette in a blouse and skirt joined him. She had smooth dark hair that shone in the light. The restaurant had white tablecloths and lanterns on the tables and windows that must have opened to the street but were closed then. I stood outside watching through the window until I finally went inside for a glass of wine.

  Something in them moved me. They didn’t seem romantic—he didn’t try to touch her and didn’t lean toward her—but sad, as if they had come to an end of something, but didn’t know what it was. After their meal they left together, but they separated at the subway. When the train came, I got on with her. She closed her eyes, her body swaying with the movement. I sat close, closer than I should have, but I found I wanted to be near her.

  The next day it rained and I crossed to the diner and found a table near a window. I read a novel about a woman who loved a priest who also loved her, but mostly they were kept separate, and she spent years alone on the prairie. When I returned, my boss said there was a woman who had asked for me but left without waiting for me to return. I felt it was the woman from the restaurant and was upset to have missed her. She had seemed like a gentle person.

  Someone had once taken a chair from my table at a café. I had stood to get another chair. The change—the unexpected loss of the chair—had upset me, but then I was upset at myself for having to wander the café for another chair, while the others sat in a happy group, playing chess. After, I had used the chair to rest my feet, as if to explain my behavior. Do you feel this way? I would ask the woman. And, if she seemed kind and gentle enough, I might have asked her if we had to continue on. How long do we do this? I would ask, thinking that, if there was a set time, it might feel possible.

  The security guard’s name was James. He was young and overweight and dressed sloppily. His Polo shirt was stained by the Big Gulp he kept on the counter, which was surprising in the austere museum. I first met him when a man came in who resembled a known art thief, and I was taken back to the room and shown a tape of my interaction with him. I couldn’t remember the moment, but there it was, replayed for me. James told me that I didn’t move much. He pointed toward the screen that showed the empty chair, the counter, and said there was a time when he had turned the monitor on and off because he thought it was broken, but then I had thrown something away.

  After that we hung out from time to time. We would sit at the diner and talk about movies we had both seen, and sometimes I would watch tapes in the security room with him. I found it comforting that my time there had been recorded, that there were no lost moments, that I could think of a moment and find it again. Yet, when I played the tape from the day the woman came in asking for me, I didn’t recognize any women in the footage. I kept playing the tape, searching. James pointed and expressed appreciation of the skirt that I had worn that day. You don’t understand, I told him.

  One day, after work, I found frames behind the museum Dumpster. One still had a painting in it, so I took it and crossed the street with it. The diner waitress was outside smoking. What is that? she said, bending down, her hair falling across her face. She said it reminded her of a print she’d had as a child. It had been over the sofa. It was washed-out greens and pinks, the colors of Monet, but even hazier. She looked back into the diner to see if anyone needed her, but there were only a few tables, everyone with head bowed.

  I hung the painting in my apartment and found that other people repeated what the waitress said, that it reminded them of something they’d had as children. Eventually, I learned it was a print of a children’s book cover, while I had begun to think we had all gone somewhere in a dream together. Her gaze had gone soft looking at the painting. She didn’t seem to want to look away, in the way that shy people can have while examining things at parties. Is that why shy people are so curious? A life spent looking at things until the things themselves become interesting, until you have to see the bookshelves at parties, the small paintings outside bathrooms, all these places feel forbidden, but in fact everyone is right around the corner, and when someone passes you smile and try to leave, or they try to leave. But what other choice do we have? Sometimes that is the only consolation, that there’s never been another choice.

  Carrying the painting, I ended up at a bar in a neighborhood I didn’t know. The streets were soft and tree-lined and narrowed to horizons that you could never reach. It was the kind of day when bars had drink specials listed on chalkboards outside, and this one also had large windows made of colored glass. Inside, there was a man from Peru who spoke faintly and several times pointed at the windows, asking me if I saw something. I didn’t know what he was pointing at, whether it was something that had just passed the window, or something that was outside that was interesting to him, or whether he liked the windows, the colors of them and what they made of the world outside.

  I remembered other cities I had visited. How difficult it would have been to live in those places, and how difficult it was to be a stranger in a city. When you travel it is the same—first you know one street, then you learn another, then you go someplace else, until the city unfolds in your mind. I didn’t take steps to learn how to find the bar again and didn’t remember the name. Perhaps I like the magical qualities of not being able to find a place again. The Elentine or something. The small elephant.

  I was worried back then, not that something bad was about to happen, but that it already had only I hadn’t realized it yet. I rode the train on days when the museum was closed. I watched women—thin, spare, alone-looking women who were older than me, always carrying parcels, bags, overstuffed leather purses. The light did something to their faces, laid them bare. As if on trains they wore the faces they had when alone. One day I saw a woman who looked like the one from the restaurant. She was standing on the platform. But I couldn’t tell, and I worried I was losing this, too. Losing my ability to identify a person. She stayed on the platform when the train arrived, watching it depart, made smaller by the distance we traveled from her.

  During my last week at the museum, we put in a tape labeled “Gallery Five.” I had never seen this gallery before. The tape showed a badly lit space. It was so dark that you couldn’t see the art, only shapes on the wall and people walking toward them. On my third time watching, I identified the man and woman from the restaurant. I had overlooked them at first, as they were younger in the footage. The man had been wearing a hat and the woman was slimmer and moved in a lighter way. The man was animated in a way he wasn’t when I’d met him, and I wouldn’t have been able to place him had I not taken out a recent tape to compare. What are you doing? James asked, before turning back to watch another monitor. He had little interest in what I was doing. The older version of the man, there he was, looking much like a man lost in a dream. That might have been why he had reminded me of my father, who would watch my brother and me playing on the floor, or by the woods, or near the sea with the same look, as if he had already left us.

  The younger version of the man wasn’t like this. He moved quickly and reached back to help the woman move through the crowd. He turned from time to time to speak to someone, lean in, shake hands. And then an image made me pause the tape so abruptly that James looked over. I saw, in the way that we always know ourselves—even in a photograph from an age we have no memory of—myself as a child.

  I was only visible for a few seconds as I walked toward the man, touched him to steady myself, then walked back, not haltingly, or in any way lost. This certainty was so perplexing that I doubted if the child was really me, in the way that we sometimes wonder, when in love, whether this might be a person we don’t love at all. It was only that I so rarely walked toward something without fearing it would disappear or prove not to be the thing I thought. On the tape, I walked like those people always passing me by. What had filled me with such
certainty? When I, for all I could see of the footage, was so alone, little more than a speck, there for a moment, then lost for eternity, neither going somewhere nor coming from somewhere?

  You could see all of us—the woman from the restaurant, the man who had reminded me of my father—all of us altered by what had happened, and yet there was no way to know what had taken place. All that was left was a man, surprisingly nervous and eager, sharing a smile with a woman who was not in any way memorable, missing the sadness—the way she had watched the train depart as if watching what she wanted most in life move away from her—that had made her so beautiful to me.

  MAUREEN

  Or another Portland story, one of those heard and almost forgotten, told late at night, when no one has anywhere to be and you’re not sure if anyone is talking. Maureen had been the bartender at the Regency Bar for nearly twenty years. The place was under the highway ramp, and had dark wood, torn covers in the booths, and old lamps, though this wasn’t lovely in the way this might suggest, just generic. Most of the men drank Bud from bottles and sat for a long time, and sometimes, on slow nights, Maureen would lean over and talk to them. She had been beautiful when she started, and most of the men could remember that. One night she told them about being at the beach with the man she had once been married to and their baby daughter. It was easy to see a younger Maureen on the shore, wearing a stretched-out bathing suit and cutoffs, her long hair greasy but shining. Already some of the weight gained, but it would have looked good on her. There would have been something sympathetic in the thickening under her arms. And her husband, thin and bare-chested, a mustached man spread across the blanket, with their baby playing in between. The two of them drinking cups of beer, and afterward walking barefoot through the parking lot, teetering on pavement embedded with small rocks. The shock of the hot car, then lifting the baby in and buckling her, careful not to clip the fat of her legs.

  That baby had died later, a few years later, in a car accident. Maureen had been newly divorced when it happened. She had just moved into the apartment and her ex came on Saturdays to pick up the girl, Clarice. That morning Maureen could tell he had been drinking, but still, she helped her daughter into her coat and went back upstairs. She enjoyed the empty apartment. She would do nothing—pick up laundry, smoke a cigarette, take a bath. She had been lying in bed, watching the curtain, smelling her shoulder, when the phone rang.

  After that time, she felt there was something wrong with her, that she was empty in ways she shouldn’t have been. That emptiness prepared her for what she saw on the town green one day, years later—a little girl who looked like her daughter, in a group with other children, being led down a path. She looked to see if anyone else noticed, thinking perhaps they were an imaginary thing that had come to fill the space. But other people, too, saw the children.

  The next time, she followed them to story time at the library. She stood outside the children’s room in the basement, watching the kids, then went to the information desk and asked if she could read. Well, the woman said, it’s usually the librarian or someone at the senior center, but we always like help here. So on Tuesdays she put on her good dress, a thin spring dress she had owned for years, and brushed her hair while watching the old man in the garden out her window, the old man working his tomato patch in a green hat, moving over the earth like a delicate animal. She didn’t look at him when she backed out of the drive, but felt he knew.

  Afterward, after reading at the library, she would smoke by the fence and try not to get too close to what was happening. She felt if she moved smoothly enough, without sharpness or rise in her voice, if she didn’t pay attention, or look closely, only watched from the corner of her eyes … The few times she approached the girl were an allowance. Did you like that book? she had asked her. What she must have seemed to the little girl, with her off-voice and stifled insistency. She wasn’t in control, but felt if she moved slowly, almost crept, that nothing would startle and break loose.

  When her ex-husband appeared at her door one day, she thought it was a harbinger, the very thing she was trying to avoid. It reminded her of the Saturdays when he had picked up their daughter. Opening the door was like that, too, except he was older and it hadn’t done well for him. It was as if they had agreed on this play, but their aging and lack of reason made it a pitiful thing. She looked past him to see if the man was in the garden, but she didn’t see him. What do you want? she asked her ex-husband. He held up his hands, Just to talk to you. She asked him to wait while she put on shoes. Upstairs she tied her raincoat, put on flats. She looked out the bathroom window for the old man but still didn’t see him and wondered if that was a bad omen.

  They walked to the corner bar, slipping inside the door. They stood near each other. It was midday and nearly empty. He was more lost than she was. It occurred to her that he was drunk, but she couldn’t tell. Do you still drink the same? she asked. He offered to get it, but she thought he might not have money, and said, No, I’ll get it, find us a seat. He picked a booth along the side wall; tinted windows showed a yellowed version of the empty street. She bought one drink and sat at the edge of the seat, sliding it to him.

  I’m sorry, he said. I didn’t think of what I would say. He wrapped his hands around the glass. Instead of looking at his face, she looked outside. It was raining, what looked like yellow rain on a darker yellow sidewalk. I’m getting married again, he said. We’re going to move to Florida. I’m going to start up a bar there. He waited for her to say something. She said that she had to go. He reached for her, but she slid from the booth.

  On the sidewalk, she put a hand in her purse and fumbled with her cigarettes. She lit one, threw it down, walked back to the bar. She stood in the entryway. There was a man in the far booth where they had been. He was tall, lanky, dark haired. She took steps toward him, but his features aligned into those of a stranger’s.

  During her shifts she often smoked to steady herself. You could see her out there, holding her sweater closed with one arm and turning away from the wind. She looked like those women you find in rural areas who have kids, do the cooking, and work, who have no femininity in them, but also nothing hard, it was just that life had brought them to having no extra gestures.

  NASHUA

  When I travel, I often visit another town nearby, someplace I wouldn’t otherwise go. Nashua, I think, was like that. It was after Christmas and I was watching, for a time, a teenager and two dogs for a family west of Boston. I rarely saw the teenager, except to drive her from place to place, but I let the dogs out and walked them and picked up the garbage they had strewn about. I cooked meals I found in the freezer—shrimp, individual-sized lasagna. The house was large enough that cleaning people came every few days, and, when I couldn’t find something, I always thought that the cleaning people had moved it when I had probably just forgotten where it was. One night I drove to an old, unheated cinema to watch a musical. It involved driving unknown roads in the snow and then driving back, hoping I would find the teenager at home, chasing the dogs, trying to get them in their cages. There was, as always, the relief of living within a life that wasn’t mine, of raising the heat and walking barefoot across the bathroom’s stone floor.

  Around this time, I realized I had fallen in love again, this time with a man who was a drinker. I remembered a story by Alice Munro in which a woman, sensing she is falling in love, and fearing what had happened the other times, gets in a car and starts to drive and keeps on going. It was a snowy day when I thought about this and I sat in my bedroom and imagined waiting it out, how long it might take. Outside there was the scrape of shovels. But for what other reason are we alive? I thought.

  I had driven to Nashua from Boston to look for farmhouses. I was researching abandoned farmhouses and wanted to find a part of New Hampshire with both rural and urban poverty. Once there, I bought a bottle of whiskey at the tax-free shop, then found the Salvation Army. I bought fabric to make curtains and asked the woman behind the register about direct
ions, but she knew the roads by different numbers than were listed on my map.

  As I drove the hills, the sun hit low across an apple orchard and it was so striking that it didn’t surprise me to see an abandoned farmhouse—just like that, just what I was searching for—at the top of the hill. I pulled over and started to walk. There was a neighborhood watch sign nailed to a tree, and I thought of the neighbors watching me in the snow.

  Through the window I saw furniture, not arranged to make the room habitable, but grouped together as if to be taken away. It wasn’t a beautiful farmhouse—it was in the style of a musty-looking ranch—or I would have felt the desire to go inside. I was glad the desire was less than it might have been. Still, it was hard to leave, and below the hills I stopped at a church. The door to their secondhand shop opened, but the woman inside said that it was closed, that I would have to come back the next day.

  There was a time in my life when several poets I knew gave me their poems, and one man—who I didn’t think was a very good poet otherwise—gave me one that I still have. He wrote about being in a hotel in France and never going out, and overhearing the woman in the neighboring room telling her lover about him, saying that seeing him was like seeing a man at the end of a long tunnel. Some people, I took the poem to mean, are lost already.

  I thought of this poem when I went to Poland to find the village my grandparents had emigrated from. I never made it to the village and instead stayed a week in a small hotel off a village square—my room overlooked it—and I would sit in the window and smoke and watch pigeons. In the afternoon I’d go out for a doughnut and a cup of tea and walk around until it was time for an early dinner, and then I’d return to the hotel to read and drink from bottles of wine I had purchased near the train station. It was bad wine and I didn’t drink much of it, but the wine in the hotel bar was worse.