Cities I've Never Lived In: Stories Page 9

  She had fallen in love with another man, and her husband had disappeared with the kids. She thought they were still on the island, though, as the ferry captain hadn’t seen them. This is a lot to take in, he had said to her. Well, what should we do? he said. It was uncommon to be standing there, united in this sudden way. We could go over to Matt’s, he said. Matt was the island manager. No, she said, let’s not do that. Why? he said. Just not him, she said. Anyone but him. I see, he said, thinking that it would have been easier if the man she had fallen in love with wasn’t also the man in charge of the island. Well, he said, we’ll go, and you’ll stay in the truck.

  Matt’s office was in a low cinder-block building, with the ferry office to one side and the administrative offices on the other. Matt had thick black hair, was himself a thick, strong man. Gene thought of what loneliness could do to you, that Meghan had been lonely in ways no one else had thought of, but this man had.

  If he had to pick between knowing all this and not knowing, he would pick the moment when he was fixing his sink, insulated from them, thinking of how he would get cards from them, and that he would grow older alone, that you couldn’t guess at how isolated the self was, and that was what getting old could sometimes be, that it becomes quiet enough to hear it in yourself. But during the ride to Matt’s he learned that his son, who worked in a school on the mainland, had found out about the affair and gone desperate with love for his wife. Gene didn’t understand this way of taking things and wondered where his son had discovered it. Gene would have left his wife and met someone else in time. There was comfort to find everywhere. Gene wondered if it was love for her or just desperation with life. They always looked so much the same. Why do we think we can’t live without a certain person? Then there are others who don’t think this way. He couldn’t begin to understand why his son had taken the children. Maybe he thought if he ran away by himself no one would try to find him.

  After talking with Matt, Gene had driven with Meghan to the World War II bunker facing the open ocean. They parked near the scrub, then walked through the dunes, then stood there, listening. He jumped down and she came after, and they stood in the space with the sudden surprise of windows overlooking the water. She looked out the windows, as there was no sense in looking further for the kids. It was clear enough they weren’t there. Well, you learn quickly when looking for something that it isn’t there, and that you’re going to the very places you won’t find it. For instance, if you lose something in your house, you’ll search the same place over and over again, because it has stopped mattering where you look.

  They looked next in the abandoned cottages, then went to the homes of people they knew.

  On the second night they went home and she fell asleep on the sofa while he waited up. If she had been awake when the kids appeared through the front door, she could have greeted them while he ran to find his son, but in that moment when he had the choice, he picked his grandsons, picked to lower himself so he could see their eyes and try to calm them. Then she woke and he went outside but it was too late. They had spent two days looking even though they knew they wouldn’t find them; this time he admitted there was no sense in trying to find his son. Gene put the front light on and went back to his grandsons and daughter-in-law.

  He had been with them since, been with her, except for when she was on the mainland. This had unintended consequences. You grow to love a woman, seeing her that way, the way she comes through the back door in her bare feet, or the way her cheek looks when she turns and there is a soft slope. If you live closely and there’s peacefulness between you, and she has something pretty in her features or movement, you’re naturally going to feel love for her, or want to protect her. He had understood this. But he hadn’t expected what it would feel like when she was away, that the feeling of everything else went away, too, or how he would try to practice, during the days she was there, her going away, so that it wouldn’t come as a shock, or hurt when it happened.

  Sometimes when he went back to the house he thought he might find his son as he had been, not toward the end, but before the kids, a distant man puzzled by his surroundings. Island life didn’t prepare you for any other life, and there had been the breakdown in college. Gene had gone to Boston to visit Shaun. He remembered his son slumped on his dorm bed, his legs sprawled out, with no determinate shape to his tall, thin body. Gene had sat at the edge of the bed, unsure of what to say. Breakdowns were not in their vocabulary, and he had not thought of it that way, though the knowledge of it had come later, that it wasn’t going to come back again, how his son had been. It’s true, there’s something broken afterward, no matter what everyone says. On the island mostly it was alcoholism, which he wished Shaun had been able to muster instead, as he would have been able to survive in that way, he would have been able to hobble along with some degree of cheer, but this fragility left him no match for anything. Gene sat at the edge of the bed. Are you telling me you won’t go to your classes? he asked him. When Shaun didn’t answer, he said, Well, what do we do then? I guess we withdraw you from school, and then you and I go back? I’d rather stay here, his son said. Gene decided to go to the market to get things for the dorm fridge, which then involved cleaning out what had gone bad. He bought apple juice and poured Shaun a cup. I’m having trouble understanding this, he told his son, I’m trying, but I’m having trouble.

  He woke to his son shaking and didn’t understand at first that his son was trying to cry without making a sound. Where does your roommate go? Gene asked him. To his girlfriend’s. It was a series of things that he didn’t think would affect the future. It hadn’t occurred to him that it would last inside his son. Shaun had come back and spent the summer landscaping on the mainland, and the work had been good for him, slowed him so he was able to finish school the next year, and he stayed in Boston, and met his wife, and they came back to the island and had children. When his son had disappeared after taking the children and returning them unharmed, Gene was able to tell Meghan about the time in college. He told her about holding Shaun’s hand. He rarely touched his son, but after three days he’d found himself so exhausted that he reached for him. He said that what she did with Matt would have been painful, but that it hadn’t been the reason Shaun had left, that it had come out of another time, from events that occurred before Shaun had met her. And you have your sons and this is your life now, he said. If Gene hadn’t understood him that week in Boston, years later at least he was able to understand that it was sad and that was all. I can’t get over it, Meghan had said. We stop trying to think that way, he said. We think about what we’re going to do instead.

  Now his son wasn’t at home, and Meghan was on the mainland again. He had the kids wash up, then he read to them. After, he sat in the living room with a beer. Bea came over, and they sat on the front step. They had been romantic, but this had stopped months earlier. At a certain point he hadn’t wanted her to come over, so he had been going to her place, but that had stopped, too. She had come over that night because she knew Meghan was gone. Bea had pale, thin skin, and soft white hair. She grew herbs that she made tea with. During the times when he had gone over, she would drink tea while he drank beer. Now the field below was lit with fireflies, though not as many as the month before. Beyond that, you could feel the sea. She said, It seems that you’re not coming over anymore.

  It’s been a while, he said.

  Anywhere else, she said, that would be how it was, there’d be little sense in mentioning it. But here, she said, we get so few chances at anything, and so I wonder why. He thought of the isolation that she, because of him, would now experience, but didn’t feel it. Not in any part of him, not sympathy in any part of him for her.

  And then I knew why, she said, and I wondered why it had ever seemed important to me to know why. Why had it?

  When she left he watched her walking in the thick air, her white blouse lit by the moon, like she was a spectral thing moving away from him. But what good is there in keeping the things
you don’t want, simply because they are something?

  He turned off the front lights, put his glass in the sink. Went to the hall so he could see into the kids’ room, see that they were still there. He had held himself together and what good had it done? For whose benefit had he held himself together? Certainly not for anyone else’s, but not really for himself, either.

  Gene remembered his exaltation when he finally left his son. How he’d fiddled with the radio in the truck to get a song, and rolled down the windows, and stopped for a nice dinner off the highway, then slept in his truck until the ferry came in the morning. It had been good to be home, to have slipped out from under something. He had called his son and felt stronger talking to him, more able to help. If we leave someone and feel better, we let ourselves think we have done the right thing. Of course it’s not true, he now knows, taking off his boots, lying on his bed, the blankets with their moist smell of the island.

  In the morning he took the kids to Bea’s. She had put out stuff to make boxed muffins. She had done this with them before, and they had liked how inside the box there was a can with blueberries. It was a simple thing to have liked, but they had liked it. He stood there while they went down the hallway. Eventually they would leave, or he would leave. They couldn’t stay like this forever. The night before on the steps, Bea had talked about his son. We weren’t that close, our families, she had said. But still, when he was young, and I would be on my porch at night, it must have been after your dinner, I could always count on him coming out the back door, and the minute he got out, he always started to run, usually down the field, as if it was something just being outside. It was a terrible thing, what happened, she said. The way he disappeared. I didn’t know what to say after. I wanted to tell you that. That I wanted to say something but didn’t know what to say.

  She had spoken quietly, in the dark, while they had both looked ahead at the field. He lay in bed afterward trying not to think of it. He thought of how they had found the house where his son had taken the kids, where they had stayed for two days. How it was small and brightly lit, and there were blankets there still, and a few of his son’s shirts.

  CITIES I’VE NEVER LIVED IN

  During the trip, the lover I had left behind in New York had stopped calling. I was glad to be traveling, for the movement it gave me, but I was uncertain how my life would be when I got home. I didn’t want another period of instability, and I felt the suspension you feel when you’re fine, but you’re worried it won’t last, and there’s nothing you can do to make it stay.

  I had come up with the idea years before—when I first became interested in soup kitchens. I made the plan to travel the United States, going to small interior cities and going to kitchens there. I had volunteered in kitchens in the past and had found it comforting. I would work for a few hours and then would sign my name and get in line and eat, scrunched over, not poor enough to eat there if I hadn’t worked, but not a volunteer doing it out of goodness. Lost, probably, in ways that made me more comfortable in places like those—the church halls, the Styrofoam plates, the trays, the gentle feeling of caretaking and cafeteria lines—and lost perhaps in ways understandable to those around me.

  I didn’t get far in the trip, however, before I became unsure why I was doing it. My first city was Buffalo and I arrived late, by train, taking a taxi to the hostel. The next day I walked to a mobile kitchen that was supposed to be parked outside the library at 7:00 p.m., but it was already gone when I arrived. I decided to stay an extra night so that I could go to the kitchen the next day, at the time the kitchen now arrived. The next day I stood in line to get the plastic bag that held dinner. A woman carried a box with more food—Baggies filled with granola bars and crackers—and people took those as she passed. When she came to me, I said that I only wanted the food there, pointing to where dinner bags were being passed down. I was surprised to hear my voice, that vulnerability that was of such little help usually, but it was honest in that line, honest and understandable. No, it’s okay, the woman said gently, this is food, too. I took the bag of snacks, and, when it came time, took the plastic bag that held dinner.

  I carried the food into the library. Holding the bags changed how I felt about myself. It made me feel more vulnerable or exposed or fragile. For a number of years I had been struggling to hold myself together, though I had worked to disguise this, and now carrying the thin bags made this visible, made people look at me. I walked around the library until I found the café. I asked the man working the register if I could eat there, and he said yes. Dinner was bland macaroni with tomato sauce and meatballs. There was also a turkey sandwich and cookies for the bus the next day.

  After, I stood in the foyer. Windows overlooked the street where the mobile kitchen had been. It was gone now, and I felt the loss of it, as if I had not done it properly and wanted to try again. Others waited there. An older black man asked if I was waiting for a bus. No, I said. He then assumed I was waiting for a ride. No, I said, I’m just here.

  I walked toward the hostel. It was overcast, rainy, and cold. The streets were mostly deserted. There was much about Buffalo that was difficult to put into words. It felt like a city that had been deserted and then, years later, been repopulated by the poor. Or maybe the poor had been in the city all along, but had waited to emerge. The main street was being ripped out and a metro ran through the rubble. Though the streets were deserted, there were always people in the metro car when it passed, so it felt like they, too, were leaving. All the metro stops—and there were many, every block or so along that street—piped music, and at first, walking the street, I didn’t know where the music was coming from. Then the metro passed and disappeared under the street. One man on the sidewalk said to his friends, There goes our metro to nowhere.

  What struck me most were the decorations: a sweeping arch over one metro stop, a gold globe on a roof, the opera hall sign that lit up six stories into the sky. This had once been another place. And the signs made me lonely because they were built for another time and for someone else.

  I thought of the cab driver who had picked me up from the train at one in the morning. He said I would know him by the dice. His name was Ed. Ed’s taxi service. He never turned around, just talked and drove facing forward. Blue light hit the sharp line of his cheek. I’d found that people who worked those jobs—the picturesque and hard jobs of the cities—were aware of what they were and were aware of what you were after, and often told stories as part of the service.

  All drugs in here, he said as we drove through a boarded-up neighborhood. Last week a taxi driver, he said, in one of those white taxis you saw waiting by the train, was found murdered. It won’t be solved. What someone does—someone who needs money—is hail them—the taxi drivers or pizza drivers, because they have cash with them—the drivers need to be making change, so they’ll always have cash with them.

  I imagined, as he talked, the fragility of those men, of Ed coasting through the quiet early morning, lit in blue. Got robbed one night, Ed said, then I became friends with a couple of black drivers to learn the tricks. Now you think about who to pick up, who not to pick up. He showed me where they were building the new houses, the new developments. All the old houses are past repair, he said.

  Later, I read about the cab driver who had been shot and left in his backseat. Most articles were the same—giving the details of the death, and then the details of the funeral—but one writer interviewed several taxi drivers, calling them a close band of brothers. One man had rushed to the scene thinking it was one of his drivers, but it had been a different company. Another man talked about the additional security that people were calling for. He said that you could put in cameras, you could track the people, but in the end, the man in the article said, I walk in faith.

  All day I sat in the lower bunk in my hostel, the only one in the room. A heating vent blew and from time to time I heard the sound of rain. Otherwise it was quiet. It was a relief whenever the vent turned on.

 
In Detroit I took a picture of a man on the street. I thought a lot about this. I wanted to take pictures of what I was seeing, but it didn’t feel right. Poverty was everywhere and was overwhelming. People lived in this poverty, and this life was filled with details that I wanted to hold on to, but I found it was passing too quickly. I walked the outskirts of Detroit, and black men wandered past as if drifting or lost in the landscape. I sat and waited for buses and people came up to me. They said simple things—good day, or don’t get hurt, or would I like a bag to sit on. Or they would ask if I knew where the Salvation Army was, or if I knew where the Greyhound station was.

  In Cleveland, I was walking down a street filled with bistros and shops when a man hailed me. He was selling beauty products from a plastic bag and walked a block with me. He said he was from Detroit, but he meant Detroit Street in Cleveland. I bought bodywash for five dollars—a bottle of expensive, local bodywash—then he walked away. It occurred to me that I could have taken his picture. He had sadness deep in his face, but the surface of his face was buoyant, lit. It was too much to have the moment and then have the moment pass, and to be the only one who saw that face.

  It was that way in Detroit when I passed a row of abandoned apartments near the hostel. Two long buildings faced each other across an empty field. White children played in the field, and parents stood in a sliver of doorway watching them. I wanted to take a picture, but I didn’t want to disturb the quietness of passing them.

  When I finally took a picture, it was of a man begging near Slows Bar BQ. I had eaten and was carrying leftovers. A man sitting in a lawn chair on the sidewalk told me to be careful, to not bump into the garden. He was in front of a brightly painted wall, and before I could ask, he said, You want to take a picture? He moved out of the way. At my hesitation he said, Or you want me in it? You in it would be nice, I said. As I took the picture, he energetically held up his sign. I wanted to tell him that he didn’t have to do that, but instead I gave him change and asked, Do you mind that people take your picture? He said that he didn’t. People want a picture of the homeless, he said. Then it was clear that he wanted me to move along.