Cities I've Never Lived In: Stories Read online

  I cried some nights as I wanted a child back then and I was almost past the point of being able to have one. I imagine that’s why I was in Poland, because I wanted time to think about these things, such as this man and the poem he had written, and the little girl I might not be able to have. Seeing a ghost, having your own ghost, being the man at the end of a long tunnel, makes you into a ghost, too, separates you from the people around you. This town in Poland turned out to be a destination for schoolchildren, as Copernicus had once lived there, and his house had been made into a museum. The children came in packs. The streets near the museum were narrow and stone and winding, and I would come upon them, fifteen or twenty children in their winter coats, and always one or two tall, thin women behind them. They would pass and I would spend the rest of the afternoon walking, sometimes stopping at a café to write a letter. I was thinking of Warsaw, of going back to Warsaw, of avoiding the reconstructed city and instead walking the old streets outside of the center, but I never left that small town.

  Though I feared I was falling in love with this man, the one who was a drinker, little happened between us. The nights we were around each other would softly fade out. He wore, all spring, winter, and fall, a caramel-colored wool coat with a belt around the middle that he wore untied. He was tall, with sandy-brown hair he kept at his chin. But it was the coat you remembered. I once, when waiting to board a bus, stood behind an older black woman. Her coat was a lot like Ansel’s. It looked as if she had owned it her whole life, as if she had never been without it. She was not stylish—she wore sweatpants and a pair of walking shoes and a polyester scarf around her hair. It was as if the beauty of the coat had happened by accident. She tied it snug to her middle like a bathrobe.

  Where did you get your coat? I asked Ansel once. We were drinking midday next to the window in an otherwise dark bar. A wood bench ran the length of the room. He waved his hand in the air, as if to say, who knows. The sun came in and I touched the wool. The question dropped in the way most did back then, not that the effort wasn’t worth it—the effort of conveying information to each other—but that the moment had changed and the question wasn’t there anymore.

  Perhaps much of what drew us together was the way life felt to us. My memory was poor, and I had developed the habit of writing the names of things in a small notebook. I had put off doing this, as I worried it would become obsessive, but it got so that I couldn’t remember a book I had just read, or an art exhibit, or a movie that touched me. A friend had screened a beautiful art film with footage of a snowy cabin north of New York. It alternated with shots of the city. Afterward, I couldn’t recall the name of the film or the artist. Or another time, I was talking to a student and asked if he had seen Sans Soleil, and then, seeing nothing register on his face, I asked in a flurry—But that’s a movie, yes? As if I had become worried it was a cleaning product.

  Ansel’s memory changed, too. When I was with him, I knew he would remember the moments differently the next day, but there was no way to know in what way, or what his consciousness—when drunk—what his consciousness felt like. I thought of that forgotten art film, with that clicking of a reel running, of the lights flickering at the end, of the moments when two films played over each other.

  One night, after being at a bar with Ansel, I dropped him off at his apartment and he tripped on the stairs going up. It was painful to watch so I looked away. I drove from there to a diner on the corner that had recently opened and sat with a cup of tea. The waitress kept asking if I was okay. She was a kind girl whose parents were from India. Her shift was thirteen hours, from 8:00 p.m. to 9:00 a.m. Few people came in during those hours, and fewer people were likely to come, as the owner had fired the night cook earlier that week.

  Ansel had wanted me to tell him about the diner, so I paid careful attention and tried to think of what I would say. It was a desperate thing being there. At a certain point I started to cough, bent over at the table. I must not have looked well. I hadn’t taken my coat off. The waitress had teased out the jobs I held, and they were good jobs. She must have wondered what had brought me to such a place at three in the morning.

  I never understood why Ansel drank like that. He would drink until he was falling down. In a sense I was magnetized, drawn in, and he must have known that. It seemed the cruelest thing to ask, so I never did, but I wondered if he knew that he did it, and if so, if he understood why. For some reason I had his apartment in my imagination, in the sense that I was able to picture it even though I had never been inside. We used to describe things to each other—details about our furnishings, the style of blankets we used, the layout, how we had set things up. There was one night—in all the time I knew him—when I went home with him. I thought I knew the tradeoff I was making, but I later learned that I was wrong, that I hadn’t known what would happen or what it would feel like to be inside his apartment, or even what his apartment would look like.

  After that, we rarely saw each other. It happened slowly. At first because he avoided me, and then later because it was too difficult—almost impossible—to have a drinker like that in your life. That summer my mother visited me in the city. We were walking down the street when a man who looked like Ansel walked by. I said his name, once, twice, and then, just when I was about to give up, my mother said his name more sharply. Still, he didn’t turn. At the stoplight, he rounded the corner, and I walked into the crosswalk to try from there, but this man held his body so that I never saw his face. Later I decided it was both him and not him. My mother would sometimes bring it up. She wanted me to ask, but since I felt both versions were true, there was nothing to learn from asking him. It was a way to hold something—the memory of him—lightly enough so that all possibilities were true, and to not crush anything by asking if I loved him or not, and, if I loved him, trying to understand why.

  STRANGERS

  The only grocery store on the island was closing. It had been closing for a while, but no one said much about it, because no one saw a point in guessing at what you couldn’t know. That’s what people said if someone brought it up, mentioning how the shelves were nearly empty, or what someone had overheard someone else saying. Doesn’t do much good guessing at it, someone would say. When what’s going to happen is going to happen anyway. Some people on the island had given in to it, but others understood the beauty of those shelves winnowing down. That what it required would be nothing short of the New England stoicism so little required now.

  Gene toed a box aside. He put items carefully in his basket. He didn’t get too close to the rotting vegetables. At the checkout the woman told him it was official. I guess we’ve been figuring that, he said, bagging while she checked.

  We’ll have to get groceries on the mainland now, she said.

  Suppose that’s the only way, he said.

  He paid, then handed the plastic bags to his grandsons to carry to the truck while he went around back to see if anything had been thrown out that he might want, but the Dumpster was nearly empty. The kids were already in the truck when he returned, so he got in and started it. He liked to look over while he drove—at the way the wind went through their hair, at the broken-down toughness of the truck—but he never said anything about it. What they must have thought of him, though they probably didn’t think much about him, probably just thought of him as a permanent thing.

  It was a Thursday so their mother was coming the next day from the mainland. He tried to think of what he hadn’t found at the store to tell her to pick up, but it always seemed they got along just fine. Though she’d notice and say, There’s no orange juice for them, and what could you say to that? Seems they’re doing fine without orange juice, he’d say. She was always tired, seemed to him nothing was needed more than anything else.

  At home the kids stayed outside and he put the groceries away, putting the plastic bags under the sink to use as trash bags. Kneeling, he found it hard to believe that there would be an end to these bags. He had been using them for as long as he could
remember and thought they were always going to be there.

  Their mother came over on the afternoon ferry. You look tired, he said when she got in the truck.

  I’m fine.

  I’m sure you’re fine, but that doesn’t mean you don’t look tired.

  She turned, the light hitting her hair in a soft way, changing the amber to pink. I had a hot dog before the ferry, she said. It was terrible. Sort of wonderful, but terrible, too.

  He liked picking her up when it was just him. He remembered when he used to wait for girls when he was young, and if they were beautiful, and you were sitting by the ferry, and there were boats and birds when they came, it felt full of hopefulness. He told her the boys were next door at Bea’s. They like it there, she said, the horses and chickens. We should at least get them a cat.

  She had missed the morning ferry because she had fallen asleep after breakfast in the attic room she rented on the mainland for half the week. She wondered what was becoming of her. It wasn’t what she had anticipated when she took the job the month before, the way she felt in the morning with the window open and the ocean, seeing a sliver of it in the distance. It was the foghorn that woke her to find she had missed the ferry. She had a little rice and pickles, and ate on the kitchen floor, then called Gene. That’s fine, he had said. There’ll be some quiet for you. I’ve had so much quiet, she said. Everyone thought of how exhausted she must be and how she would need time to adjust, but they didn’t think of how she was alone in a room most of the time. The week before she had gotten a library card and taken out a stack of movies. She watched two the first night, liking how a movie lights a dark room. She left the popcorn bowl on the floor, and in the morning sat on the sofa, which was a wool plaid that gave the back of her legs a rash, and ate the popcorn with her coffee, then smoked a cigarette.

  When they reached the house, Gene got her bag from the truck and she went inside to wash up, then they had a drink on the patio. Angelo’s is closing, he said.

  I guess it will be easier for us because I can bring stuff over, she said.

  Her back had a slight bend to it, and her shoulders hunched forward. She wasn’t quite so beautiful as she was quick, the way her thoughts carried her forward, even though you didn’t know what she was thinking most of the time. She pushed her bare feet in front of her and leaned back in the chair. They watched off in the distance, but different distances.

  After the drink she changed into her bathing suit, then walked to pick up the boys while Gene went inside to think over dinner. He thought of how there weren’t vegetables and he was going to have to do a good job of covering up this fact. He had tried to grow a garden several years ago and found he was ineffectual, that he was only good at immediate things and that the vegetables, when not grown yet, were difficult for him to worry over. He walked down the street to the stand for corn and tomatoes. When Meghan and the kids came back he had the corn boiled and the tomatoes sliced thin on a plate with salt and pepper on them.

  When Meghan returned to the mainland, she changed quickly after work then went to the Wharf, a restaurant along the pier with an outside bar. Women there were not very pretty, though there was something to them, with their skin so tan you felt if you pressed your finger the mark would stay for a long time. She wondered if their breasts were the same color. They wore cheaply made clothes that might not have been inexpensive, thin white pants, tank tops with straps that braided and crossed in back. Oddly straight hair. What this place must require of you, she thought. Her shoulder-length hair lifted and curled in the humidity, and she’d taken in her clothes herself. She looked the same as she did ten years ago. There was no style at all.

  She kept her handbag at her feet, thought of the beauty of the island and wondered why that wasn’t enough to make you want to stay. When she took the job, people thought she’d find another husband, and then would move the children to the mainland. She looked at the men at the bar and imagined one of them as that husband. It seemed a funny thought now, even though she had thought, at first, that it was likely, as she would be working at the hospital. But she had found that the men at work had wives, or there was something off about them. She hadn’t accounted for the hardness in the people who were left, like her, without someone.

  She sat near a wood column at the corner of the bar. It was made of driftwood. There was a net-and-driftwood design here that wasn’t on the island. There was no need there to remind yourself you were living on the water. A man put his hand along her back so as not to bump into her. When she turned, his face was hard, and he had the same skin, and his hair was lightened by the sun, and he had on a collar shirt. They all looked as if they had gone golfing, or like they had become middle school teachers because that’s the job you could find and it meant summers off, though their imagination hadn’t given them much of an idea for those summers.

  There was a group of men who looked like teachers, and women in white pants across the bar, drinking heavily, and after a time one of the men separated and sat next to her. She thought she had come this time to start something with one of them, but when the man talked to her, she pressed her body back against the wood column.

  She liked waiting for the ferry, liked the people waiting with coolers and old nylon packs that they’d been using for years. When the boat came, she stepped on and took a seat near the bow.

  Gene was waiting on the island with the kids. The two boys were sitting on the bench together, and he stood behind. She gave him the paper bag of groceries. All her things fit in a second bag. He asked that she start getting plastic for the groceries so they could use them as trash bags. They talked quietly of household things.

  The next day they woke, had breakfast, then cleaned the house. They opened the back slider and she took out the chairs and looped curtains over the rods. He swept while she scrubbed the kitchen, scrubbing with her hair falling from its elastic, wearing yellow plastic gloves and a loose dress. He wore a flannel shirt and soft pants, and when he passed she could smell him. She had grown used to living with this gentle man.

  They settled on the arrangement after her husband, his son, had left, and it was just her and the kids. Gene was living on the other side of the island. He could have been angry with her; he could have judged her. Everyone else did. They acted as if what happened belonged to the island, and wasn’t something private. What had happened was almost nothing like what it looked like, but people never realize this.

  When they had decided, not long after everything had happened, she had been in her living room. Gene had come over to the house. He sat down and asked if she wanted to stay on the island. She hadn’t thought about it, and he said that she would want to think things over, that it might feel soon, but that she would need to think about it. If she wanted to stay here, then one of them would need to work on the mainland. He said that he would do it, and she could look after the kids, if she’d prefer that, but that it would probably be easier for her to get a job. He had talked quietly to her that day, and much of what they decided on ended up being exactly what they did, though at the time it hadn’t felt real to her.

  She had looked at Gene that day. He looked younger, different than he had looked before, when he was simply the father of the man she had married. He was a man who had become suddenly necessary, and that changes them. She said then, Do you want to know more about anything, for me to talk about anything, so that you know? Maybe another time, he said, that might be what happens, but right now we should focus on the smaller things, these things that are going to have to happen.

  Now, months later, after they had cleaned the house and after the kids had gone to bed, they poured second drinks. Have you made any friends? he asked her.

  God no, she said, and tried to explain how it was there. His shirt was rolled to his forearms, and the fabric was touching the wood of the table, and she thought this was what the table had been expecting all along, him to sit there.

  Maybe it would be better if they lived on the mainland, too, he said
. With you. If you all lived there full time. We want to keep this certain kind of life, but maybe after a while it just does harm.

  She didn’t understand his change, and said, I think that we should keep it this way right now.

  She stood to get the radio from the living room. She plugged it in in the kitchen and turned the game on so low they could barely make it out. He continued with what he was saying, which was the intelligence of considering the mainland in not too long, six months, a year.

  I don’t want to think past this right now, she said.

  Gene had, when his son left for college, never expected him to come back. When Shaun came back with a wife, and they had children, Gene realized that he was trying not to get close to them. He expected them to leave, so there had been a lot that he had missed, that maybe other people had known before him, because he had been thinking of his own survival. He had imagined them both there and not there, so he would be able to continue on without them, and felt he had to understand that they could go and do what’s often done—send Christmas cards from Connecticut with pictures of the kids, or those postcards people are always putting on their fridges. The realization of his daughter-in-law’s inner life had been slow to materialize, had not really started until four months before, on the day she came up his drive alone. He had come out of the house, wiping his hands on a cloth. She wasn’t one for agitation, and she looked around as if she had misplaced something. He was thought commendable in the way he handled the situation, but he knew how useless he had been, trying to preserve himself as if he were anything to think of, when he was just an aging man inside his house, trying to fix a sink. A braver man would have been willing to sacrifice his happiness before that point, seeing as his happiness, and himself, were the slightest things.