Cities I've Never Lived In: Stories (10 page)

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.

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.

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 directions, 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.

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.