Cities I've Never Lived In: Stories (14 page)

I sat on the grass near them. It was nice to tilt my face toward the sun. But it was more than that. I hadn’t asked for the story, and, given it, wasn’t sure what to do. Increasingly, the sadness of the people I met was creating the fabric around me, and everyday life was beginning to recede, to lose meaning. In this world that was gaining meaning there were also churches. They were everywhere and grew in number as I traveled. I wanted to have faith so that I could go inside the churches, hoping they could balance the story of the fire, to be the other side of the story, but mostly I found the buildings beautiful and liked to look at them. I liked best the ones with other buildings attached, so that they went further, deeper into the unknown, creating a cluster of buildings like a small village. Then you had windows and buildings and courtyards to look at.

At the Salvation Army soup kitchen in Iowa City, a man invited me to attend church the next day to hear him play guitar. He wrote the church’s name on a tag that I had ripped from socks I had just purchased. It had been difficult to keep socks clean. We were eating turkey tetrazzini. It was terrible. The man across from us said, The only entitlement you need is to know the god that loves you. I left quickly, while they were in conversation, not wanting to be drawn in, thinking I would see the man the next morning, but it would have meant walking three miles, and a cough kept me up much of the night, and so I didn’t go.

It was a lonely time, and my trip had slowed enough so that I felt it. But what could I do? I couldn’t continue on so fast, doing one city every few days. There weren’t enough cities in the world to make me happy. My lover still wasn’t calling. I was tired of soup kitchens. I wasn’t sure what I’d ever wanted from them, but they were like the cities—simply the same thing, one after another. Sitting upstairs in the library in Iowa City, I looked down to see the homeless walking around the block holding signs. People passed without looking. The woman whose sister had been burned in the fire walked laps with her sign fastened around her neck as if she were a child, and there was something childlike in the roundness of her face. I thought of what it felt like to be near a shelter or kitchen in a city when food was about to be served, and suddenly people emerged, coming down alleys, moving out from behind buildings, walking slowly, in a drifting way, to that one spot, and they seemed sometimes like the dead, or people who had seen the dead.

For several nights I dreamed someone was lying close to me. In one dream, a man lay near me at a concert. In another, I was doing yoga in a crowded room and a man stretched behind me. In these dreams there was the comfort of the activity and then the presence and warmth of a man. This was in Omaha. My mother was with me. It was as if she had brought the dreams. Her close to me, and my desire for the kind of love you’re supposed to have once you’re no longer someone’s child. There were jobs I wasn’t getting, learning about them, uncertain of what I would do when I got back, and then walking Omaha with my mother. She drew close to me when we neared the homeless shelter. A woman rose from where she was sleeping on the sidewalk and walked in front of us. She kept looking back. We were making her nervous and I felt sorry. We passed a fenced-in courtyard with a man screaming. We continued past the shelter toward a church. It was a humble wood church with red trim. There was a door under the stairs with a sign that read Only One Lunch Per Person, Open 10–12. It was closed, and the next morning we were driving to Kansas. There was something in the places I kept leaving behind. I imagined staying and going inside, imagined the room I would enter. It was as if the rooms and my desire for them were gathering in me as I traveled.

In Kansas City, I went to the St. Paul’s community breakfast. We ate in a sunny, high-ceilinged hall. Afterward, I looked through the doors into the church. Blue stained glass windows rose above the altar. Behind me, the breakfast line kept growing. It had been a good meal. A man came up and asked if he could talk to me. I thought that he might be involved with the church and, seeing the way I stared inside, might try to talk about God, but he was only asking me to dinner. Dinner seemed a fine offering to make to a woman eating breakfast at a soup kitchen, but I was leaving the next day.

Outside someone asked, Where is your man, where is your boyfriend?

I went to an exhibit on hunger at a county art museum in a Kansas town. The town’s soup kitchen was in the center with a large sign that said Welcome to All. Many soup kitchens didn’t have signs and weren’t at the listed address, were instead set farther back, behind another building. In the exhibit in this town, the artist had taken pictures of people who had gone hungry and interviewed them. They had talked about their lives, about what the experience of going hungry had been for them. The artist had traveled for years working on the project. There were forty or fifty black-and-white portraits, each with the person’s story told through headphones. I couldn’t listen to all of them, so I picked people based on their faces. They talked about their lives, how they had become homeless, what that had felt like to them. I wanted to find someone intelligent, someone who would tell me something about being poor and lost. It was nice when they simply talked. Mostly I put headphones on to hear a voice, and to hear how they told a story, how they summarized an experience that must have been chaotic and something that still hadn’t ended for them.

Afterward, I tried to explain to my mother that I was happy I went, though I didn’t think it was effective art, as it was too compassionate. Can something be too compassionate? she asked. I said that art can end up being compassionate—because you’re trying to communicate to people and that’s a compassionate act—but making it is often unkind. Artists take images and stories from people without telling them, and artists are doing it for their own ends, or for the ends of art. Even if they have morals or set limits, they are still taking from people. Their interest in another’s life is often for themselves. This artist didn’t want to do this. He wanted to portray these people as they were, and, in that way, it was a good study, but I wanted more. I wanted to know how he saw these people. I wanted him to forget who they were.

The question started to become what was effective art about the hungry or the homeless, and there wasn’t an answer. I took from everyone on the trip. I took meals and stayed for free with friends and strangers. I was patient and present with the poor—the people in the kitchens and on the street—but I was shut off with most others. I was tired after the kitchens. My openness meant someone always talked to me. There was a woman no one would go near. She sat next to me. She didn’t touch her food. I kept eating. You’re hungry? she said. The food is good, I said. When I stood, she hugged me, feeling her hands along the sides of my body.

I wasn’t doing any good, I knew. I had liked the artist at the county museum, his description of hunger and his project, but I didn’t think he thought he was doing good, either. He could have done more had he not been so faithful. They were only people after all. When you travel you see how many there are, how they fill whatever place you go to. It was hard to see the children in the lines. It wasn’t hard to see the adults, but it was hard to see the children.

Later I dreamed that I was teaching again. That I was in a classroom with a circle of students. I hadn’t been able to get a teaching job that year. In interviews I was vulnerable, scared, and trying to disguise this. I missed teaching. Missed being alone in a classroom with students, trying to do my best for them, which was, in the way those things often worked, never enough. When I got to St. Louis, I let myself into the apartment of a stranger who had hidden a key for me. I curled onto the iron bed in the spare room and called my lover. I told small stories about what I had packed, and about looking in the thrift store for a pair of lighter shoes and another shirt. It wasn’t like me to repeat stories, but I kept repeating those. My mother had left the week before and I was more afraid than I had expected. He wanted me to come back. There were times when my stubbornness, my ability to press on, made life harder, when it would have been better to let things fall apart, to go home, and I wondered if the trip had become this.

I was thinking of King’s bookstore in Detroit. How, when I walked in, the woman behind the register had said, Oh, you’ve been here before. When I said it was my first time in Detroit, she said, There’s someone who looks just like you then. Hours earlier, when I was in the street, looking at a ruined theater, a man had stared at me, and said, You work at the restaurant? No, I had said. So I asked the woman behind the register if she knew anything about my double. Does she work at a restaurant? I said. She didn’t know. She felt that I had been in many times before, and so hadn’t explained how they organized the books.

I looked for the authors I always looked for, but they didn’t have them. Instead, they had authors with the same last name. Looking for Denis Johnson—trying to find the old edition of
Jesus’ Son
—I found ten other Johnsons, many of them women. It was the same with Walser. It was as if the famous authors didn’t exist, and there were only the unknown versions. I found an old edition of a Thomas Bernhard novel and so I selected that.

I passed a clergyman leaving with a pile of books. The pile went up to his chin. Later I saw him again, walking down the aisles. I even went to the religious section for a moment, but couldn’t understand which book to buy.

The woman who looked like me remained a stranger, as I left the city the next day. I retained an interest in secondary authors, the ones with the same last name as the people I was looking for, and bought, in one bookstore, perhaps I was in St. Louis then, a pretty book called
Two Views
by a German named Uwe Johnson.

In St. Louis I sat outside a Laundromat while my clothes washed. A man approached. He was looking for his phone and needed me to call a friend. I called and said that I was with Robert and that he wanted to know what his phone number was. The woman on the other line asked if I was a friend of Robert’s and if he was okay. Yes, he’s okay, I said, I’m here with him at the Laundromat. She started to ask more. I was worried she would ask to speak to him. I didn’t want to give him my phone, so I said thank you, and hung up, and handed him the number I had written down. Thank you, he said. After that I walked to an apartment where I was staying with people I didn’t know. The windows were closed and while outside it had been sunny, inside it was cold and quiet. I curled on the bed and called my lover. We spoke for some time. I think mostly I talked about my fears.

The most peaceful moment of my trip happened in that city. I was on the train to East St. Louis. It was across the river and its own city; there was no reason to be there unless you belonged there. The train went across the bridge from Missouri to Illinois. It was sunny out, only a few people on the train. Only a few people ever seemed to be on the buses or trains of those cities. Two men, one sitting in front of the other, began to sing. They sang so their voices alternated; you heard one and then the other. The moment had happened by accident. They had begun a conversation, one learned the other could sing, and so they had started up. They stopped as easily as they had begun, trailing off, one saying to the other, You are good, you ever sing at your church? No, the other one said.

When I got off the train, I went into a thrift store and bought a dress and a blouse. They came to two-sixty. Then I went around back to a half-open door that went into the soup kitchen. The few people in the room stared at me. Their eyes were harder than they had been in other places. I stood in line but the food looked bad, so I only asked for a cup to get some water. Later, when I kept going to cities—Louisville, Cincinnati, Columbus, Pittsburgh—but didn’t go to the soup kitchens anymore, it was East St. Louis that I thought of. I thought of St. Louis and East St. Louis, and of that thin, light-filled train that took you from one side of the river to the other.

I stayed in Memphis for a while. I didn’t go to the kitchens, but I still walked around. I gave a dollar to a man on a bicycle. He was asking for money for food. He said the last man he asked gave him a cigarette, telling him it would dull his hunger. The next day he bicycled past me and tried again. I gave you money yesterday, I said.