Once More With Feeling (12 page)

My boots crunched against the salt and the still snow-covered patches where shovellers had clearly grown tired of dealing with the encroaching weather. I had to take care to navigate the deep slushy pits lying in wait at every kerb – the ones that always seemed to be that cruel inch higher than whatever boot I wore, that I’d inevitably sink into when I stepped into the crosswalk and would then have frozen slush and ice oozing all over my poor legs and feet as I stomped my way home. Or, worse, to class or to work, where I’d have to sit there, damply, for hours. I’d experienced that far too many times back in the day to take the possibility of accidental frostbite via slush puddle lightly.

I walked and walked. And as I did, I let my memories of my life here wash over me. I did not think about my sister. I did not think about Tim. I let go of hospital beds, ICU waiting rooms, pregnancies, my parents’ limitations,
and my own blue blouse, floating in the air. I did. Or anyway, I tried. And I walked.

I wandered down Lexington Avenue, all the way until it dead-ended at Gramercy Park, then I headed east. I took Second Avenue south for a while, then headed east again, making my way inexorably further south and east into the now remarkably spiffed-up reaches of Alphabet City, toward the red-brick-fronted walk-up near Avenue B and East 2nd Street that had been Brooke’s and my home for so many years.

I still didn’t know what I was looking for. There was still a decided lack of joyful music to announce my triumphant return, a notable absence of the Hallelujah Chorus. It was perfectly silent internally as well, if I was honest.

Outside my old building, I waited for some kind of epiphany, but there was nothing in the air but the plummeting temperature, the inevitable car horns, and salsa music from some out-of-sight radio. The place was still as gritty and relatively unwelcoming as I remembered it, with graffiti adorning the mailboxes on the kerb and visible on the edges of most of the nearby buildings, though I imagined the unscrupulous and possibly sociopathic landlord had jacked up the rent all these years later to something I would find laughable now. It had been highway robbery then, when this neighbourhood had been even scruffier and more marginal. There was a scrubby-looking bar at the ground level, a different establishment from the even
seedier one that had been there when we’d first moved in. I didn’t know why I found it all so charming, when it clearly wasn’t. Nor had it been back then. It wasn’t just the obvious attempts at urban revival and hipster gentrification, either, though I could see evidence of that everywhere, and had marvelled at how much more accessible and safe the area felt as I’d walked here. It was nostalgia, almost certainly – but it was more than that, too.

Maybe it was because I had to bob and weave to avoid walking smack into the ghosts of all my previous selves, all of whom littered the streets around me in this old neighbourhood I’d once known so well. A hundred different histories lurked on every corner, in every block, weaving around the occasional trees and unwelcoming stoops. I imagined for a moment I could see them all, all my former incarnations, superimposed over a map of lower Manhattan like flashes of light, and had to laugh at the notion. Would I trip over myself if I simply closed my eyes and let myself wander? I didn’t see how I could do anything else. And maybe that would be a good thing – the epiphany I was looking for.

‘It’s here somewhere,’ I assured myself, talking to myself at full volume without worrying if the delivery guy bustling past me on the sidewalk thought that was weird. The ability to treat public space as private space, thanks to the anonymity offered by the sea of people here, was just one more thing I missed. ‘I have to keep going until I find it.’

With that in mind, I headed a little bit north and then west, across East 4th Street toward Washington Square and the heart of NYU, as I had done a million times before, both when I was an undergraduate at the College of Arts and Sciences and later, when I was at NYU Law. The city looked exactly the same all around me, and yet totally different, too. Strangers streamed past me, cars jostled for position as they manoeuvred down the choked-up little blocks in this part of the city, and life went on in its peculiarly New York way, just as it always had. Just as it always would. I didn’t know whether that thought made me sad, or gave me some kind of solace. Both, maybe.

And neither was the answer I wanted.

I had a long lunch that bled into the afternoon in my favourite old café on the other side of Washington Square in Greenwich Village proper, where I had wiled away more afternoons and evenings than I could count. I sat on the gloriously baroque furniture, a bit grimier now from so many years of constant use than I remembered, and ate my way through my favourite obsessions on the menu: a thick French onion soup, a croissant, then, later, a
pain au chocolat
that I told myself tasted almost as good as one might in Paris, were I ever to make it there. I read my book, losing myself for long hours in the twists and turns of a star-crossed romance while remembering the boys I’d sighed and cried over here, so few of them worth the energy; the complicated nights that had seemed less painful after a few hours lounging on these solid, gilt-edged couches so
far removed from their original splendour, which was how I’d always felt myself.

I did not think about Tim. I did not think about Carolyn. I did not let any of the things I’d left behind me in Rivermark infect me here. I told myself that none of them existed here, in fact. That none of them mattered. That this was all about me – the very first thing that had been about me in what felt like much too long.

I let the accommodating waiters bring me new steaming mugs of good, strong coffee as the place filled and then emptied, then filled again around me. If I closed my eyes, it could be any of those half-forgotten lost days of my own private history here, all of them bleeding into each other and around each other, painting the perfect picture of me seamlessly blending into MacDougal Street and Greenwich Village all around me. As if I was one more landmark, here, among so many.

God, I love it here
, I thought when I finally wrapped myself up against the cold and headed back out into it.
How did I ever leave it?

It was already the inky, full-bodied dark of near-winter on the street outside the heat-fogged café window. The streetlights above and car headlights inching by seemed rounder, brighter, surrounded by so much early nightfall. I stood in the overhang of a nearby bodega as I tugged on my gloves, and felt, suddenly, the full force of everything I’d lost when I’d left here. All the things I’d thought I’d known about myself. All the things I’d wanted. The
comfort of so much familiarity, so much history, at every sticky café table. Even the way I’d walked down the damned street.

I shivered as the first flush of the frigid December evening really hit me, then I took a deep breath and finally headed for Brooke’s place, where, deep down, I knew I’d been headed all along.

Brooke had sent me a change-of-address card when she’d finally moved out of our old place. It said something that she hadn’t made a ceremony out of that – and that I hadn’t been involved in her leaving, at last, the apartment that had been such a huge part of us, of our lives, for so long. Had I thought so then? When I’d received the card?

The card itself was one of those pretty, heavy and lushly embossed sorts, the kind that always made me feel that I was playing an eternal game of catch-up in the etiquette games, since I’d only sent out an email to my entire Outlook address book when we’d moved out of the city. She’d written an XO beneath the pertinent information, and then no more than her initial.

I couldn’t remember how long ago she’d sent it. I couldn’t remember what I’d felt when I’d read it. I couldn’t remember if it had crossed my mind to question what had become of us, if that was all the notice and interest either one of us took in each other at that point in our lives. I only knew that I’d filed it away in the old school physical address book I kept tucked away in a drawer in
the kitchen, which was where I’d found it last night. And then maybe I’d debated a yoga class, or a pastry, the way I always did. Because that was what my life had always been in Rivermark, before. Neat, orderly. Content. And for some reason, Brooke had had no place in that.

Today, I told myself as I shivered down her street, I wouldn’t dwell on any of that. I wouldn’t mourn. I would only marvel that Brooke had done what we’d always dreamed of doing when we were broke college students with more dreams than sense – she’d somehow moved to a very fancy address in the West Village. The block she lived on was a New York fantasy in every respect. A row of manicured brownstones lined the quiet street, some with wrought-iron railings that trumpeted the prosperity of their very stoops. It might even have been one of the blocks we’d liked to haunt way back when. We’d stuck a bottle of wine in a paper bag and had swigged from it as discreetly as possible on warm, pretty nights, sitting on the stoops of beautiful brownstones like these and telling ourselves wild stories about the kinds of lives we’d live that would lead to residence in one of these places.

I had given up. I’d left New York, the way so many did, and found other dreams. But Brooke had done it. She’d really, truly done it. I found myself smiling behind my scarf, and told myself that the sting in my eyes was the winter wind, nothing more.

I stared up at her building, and it was as if the moment I stopped moving the doubt rushed in with the swirl of
icy cold. What was I doing here? What was my plan? And more to the point, just because I’d had a series of epiphanies on the floor of my closet, what made me think Brooke would be happy to see me? Friendships didn’t just disappear, after all. Both parties had to work at it. What made me think this current state of affairs wasn’t exactly the way she wanted it?

The fact was, I didn’t know her any longer. I didn’t know what the past few years had been like for her. I didn’t even know how she’d managed to afford moving to such a tony address in the first place, a whole world and many tax brackets away from Alphabet City. Maybe she wasn’t in publishing any more. Maybe she’d married an investment banker. Or a prince. What did I know about her now?
Nothing
. There was no reason at all to think I could just show up and demand access to her after so long, without even bothering to make an appointment. Without even reaching out in some more careful way, allowing her to react however she liked without me standing right there to witness it.

‘Stupid,’ I muttered to myself. Or
at
myself, I wasn’t sure.

I didn’t look at Brooke’s building again. I turned and started trudging down the street, back toward the busier avenue up ahead. I hadn’t really plotted out what I would do next, had I? I’d wandered around all day looking for something indefinable to rise from the streets and make sense of my life, but I couldn’t keep doing that. I would
find a hotel, first of all. I was tired of walking, and very, very cold. I wanted something hot to drink, and a warm place to sit and defrost as I thought through all the glimpses of my old lives I’d sensed around me today. I’d been so certain that I needed to come back to Manhattan, and I wanted to really explore that, if I could, even if I hadn’t found what I’d imagined I would yet. Brooke might be a part of that, but then again, she might not. I’d send her an email, like a normal person. I wouldn’t just show up at her door like some kind of stalker and—

‘Sarah?’

I hadn’t paid attention to the figure who moved past me on the dark street – I’d been far too busy scowling at the shovelled sidewalk in front of me – but I knew that voice. I would know that voice anywhere. I stopped in my tracks. It felt like it took a long time to turn, and then there she was.

We stared at each other.

I could hear horns in the distance, and the ubiquitous sounds of emergency vehicles racing somewhere in a hurry. But this little side street was quiet and still, and there was only this. Only the two of us, staring at each other across so many years, so many memories.

Her hair was longer, and spilled out from beneath the hat she wore to scrape below her shoulders. I thought she looked particularly stylish in a smart black peacoat and a bright patterned scarf. Almost French, which I knew she would take as the highest possible compliment. She had
a couple of briefcase-like bags slung over her shoulder and a plastic Duane Reade bag dangling from one gloved hand. She looked elegant and accomplished, sure, but she also looked like Brooke.
Brooke
. Those impossible cheekbones. That wide mouth that I always thought of as laughing uproariously, never the way it was now, still and serious. Those dark, far too incisive eyes of hers that had always been able to read me much too easily.

Meanwhile, I felt like I was moulting. My hair was no longer in its professional bob, and so was sneaking down my cheeks toward my shoulders. I was unlikely to be confused for a French person in my puffy parka and snow-boots. I didn’t look anything like the upmarket corporate lawyer I’d been when I lived here, or even the lawyer I played in Rivermark. Next to Brooke’s gleaming perfection – and her address – I felt nothing but scruffy.

For a moment the gulf between us seemed so wide, so vast, that the fact she looked so familiar actually, physically, hurt me. I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t know what to say. I couldn’t even imagine what look must have been on my face.

‘Brooke,’ I whispered.

Just her name, and it was so little. It was so much less than what I should have said, what was careening around inside of me, bursting to push free and light up the winter night all around us. Or maybe make it tremble.

But her eyes shone with something like the heat I felt in mine, and her mouth crooked into that familiar smile
that I knew better than my own. And she threw out her arms as if she’d been waiting for me, for this, for a long time, and then she hugged me on that cold street as if we’d both come home at last.

‘Jesus, Sarah,’ she whispered into my ear, her voice thick with emotion and her free arm slung tight around me. ‘It’s been way too fucking long.’