Cities I've Never Lived In: Stories (9 page)

At work they told him a woman had come in and asked for him. He understood then that he was simply waiting. When Sheila found him working in his garden, he went inside for drinks. They sat in camping chairs near a tree where the moss was so soft she slid off her shoes. She took out a half-smoked cigarette she then had trouble lighting.

They went to a show downtown. She wore one of his cardigans. They sat in the back corner, against a record bin, both of them pulling their legs close. Her breath smelled like the alcohol they were sharing, and what she had eaten, and also a little of flowers, though it might have been her hair. Do you like the show? he asked between sets.

This is what you do? she said. This, and your garden?

And I wash dishes, he said, most nights. I just have tonight off.

You left a lot to be able to do this, she said.

I try not to think of it that way, he said.

How do you try to think of it?

I couldn’t really say, he said.

She walked home with her hands in the pockets of his sweater in a way that he liked. He thought about kissing her, thought that her breasts would be small. In the apartment he turned on the lamp, took out his bedroll. She stood in the kitchen. You’ve been here the whole time? she said.

Except the few nights I slept in my truck, he said, but then I found this, and she let me stay even before the first of the month.

Is that the woman I met that one time?

Yes. Lena.

He asked her if she needed anything else, anything to sleep in, but she said she was fine. He went to the bed he had made in the kitchen.

In the morning she was up before him, sitting in the garden with a book from the nightstand. She read out loud from one of the poems. When she finished he said, I don’t have to tell you what it was like for me, what it’s been like, do I?

She said, I had to find your wife. I had to tell her that you had left, and she came and took your daughter while I stood there.

There’s nothing I can say, he said. I’ve tried to think of something all this time.

Later in the day, a man started to work on the foundation where the house was sagging. When Paul looked out the window, he could see Sheila talking to the man. He wondered what they were talking about, and he remembered that about her. They had once gone to the grocery store together, and she had started talking to the woman looking at the produce, and with the fish guy and the checkout bagger, ordinary conversations about the weather, or what the catch was like, or which fruit was in season.

She came inside. I’m going for a walk, she said.

He said, I’ll probably read and then go to work. Do you think you’ll be back before?

She wasn’t sure, and walked around for some time. She went to the thrift store and tried on skirts and boots. She went to the deli and sat there. When she walked back the sun had lowered and no longer hit the garden; the man had stopped working on the foundation. She thought of the line of mail-boxes and the woman who told her that she didn’t know Paul. Well, we should all find some way to be protected, she thought. We should all find ways to protect ourselves. She unlocked the door with the key Paul had hidden. He had left the lamp on, with a note that there was food in the fridge. She found a plate with chicken. She put it on low, then took her clothes off to shower.

It was a slow movement they made over those weeks, Sheila sitting with her skirt sliding up her legs, Paul drawing while she smoked. If she stayed for a long time she would go through volumes of poetry and not remember the authors’ names but would remember the sense of spaciousness it gave her. It reminded me of a time before I met my husband, when I lived in San Francisco, in an apartment with rooms full of people I barely knew. We used the kitchen to arrange food, cut bread if we had any, putting the knife in a sink overflowing with dishes and going down the hall where the rooms branched off.

The light in my room came in strong and spare. I had tried to grow herbs on the sill. The wood floor was as dusty as the hallway but faded by sunlight. I slept on a mattress on the floor and there were boxes and piles of things everywhere, including beautiful clothes that belonged to a friend who was traveling. Some of the books and records were hers, too, though others I had found that summer, going through used-book stores and thrift stores. I read with my head on the mattress and took breaks to smoke out the window, full of what I had read. What had I read back then, what had made me feel that way? I had a volume of Rilke and Saint Augustine and early Hemingway stories. I must have left them in the room when I moved away.

For a time, I worked at a small museum on the Upper East Side. It was a museum most people had never heard of, located at a college most people had never heard of. The museum was in a low concrete building. You could easily miss the entrance when walking by. There was a rail, a door, and the name in silver letters. Inside, the windows were above your head. The doors opened to a foyer, where I sat behind the desk and gave out stickers and offered to put people’s coats in the closet behind me. In the galleries were mummies, pottery, and miscellaneous art. At noon my boss took over while I ate in the park across the street. I watered the plant in the corner and ran weekly admission reports, but mostly I sat there, feeling vacant, and it was during one of these shifts that a man came in who reminded me of my father.

He was older but attractive, and he appeared successful, though it’s unlikely that my father would have aged into any of these things, but it had seemed possible to me then, sitting in the foyer, which was off-white and taupe and underground. The man draped a sweater over his shoulders and moved through the museum absently while guards sat on high black chairs. Soon the man would be gone and it would be me again, as though in a tasteful underwater tomb. When the man paused between galleries, I asked him what he thought of the collection, though it wasn’t my habit to speak to people I didn’t know.

He said that he had once worked for the museum, and had been in charge of raising funds for its construction, though he hadn’t ended up liking it, and he took some responsibility for that. He no longer reminded me of my father, but I was struck by this, that a man who reminded me of my father had turned out to be the man who’d created the building where I had sat for so many hours. When I went into the bathroom, I found myself wishing I had asked his name, and I felt the loss of him, that we might never see each other again.

I saw him a week later. On my way home I had wandered off track and gotten lost. I did this often—I would leave the subway and walk in the direction opposite to where I was supposed to go. Sometimes I imagined a person watching me from up high—starting off in one direction before taking another, my misdirection gradually turning to panic—and imagined how different I must look from the other people on the street.

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.