I also loved the fact that New York is full of ridiculously attractive women. There are women who are so beautiful that it’s physically painful to look at them. It’s my theory that every small town in America produces one perfect specimen every generation or so. Many of them come to the city, where they often try their hand at modelling or acting. A few of them succeed; most of them give up, only to be replaced by the next wave. The result is a never-ending stream of astonishingly attractive females. I fell in love a hundred times a week, sometimes as I was simply walking down the street. None of it was real love, and none of it lasted. That didn’t matter. What was fun about it was the falling.
There was an art to dating in New York. It seemed like the goal was to go along with the idea out of sheer boredom. The last thing you did was let someone know you might be deeply attracted to them, even when things became intimate. Everyone was always holding out for a better opportunity. You really never knew who you were going to meet in the city, after all. It could be a movie star, or an investment banker, or a singer, or anyone. You had to keep your options open in case something better came along. That was the dark side to New York’s energy – half the people I met were sick with ambition, and seemed willing to sell their own mothers for a shot at whatever it was they wanted.
I was young enough that this game had not grown tiresome yet. But I was old enough to realize that there was something stirring inside me, something I hadn’t felt before. Put simply, this was the urge to find someone to settle down with. I’d dated a lot of girls in my life, but with precious few exceptions, those relationships had turned out to be disasters. Most of that was my fault. I was always either running toward someone or running away from them. I still had some very naive ideas about the kind of person I was supposed to be with. I believed that I had seen her in my dreams once, when I was a boy – not a physical vision, but a premonition of how she would make me feel. It was a feeling that had never quite left me, and since then I had often attempted to recreate it, but it always eluded me, the way childish ideals always do.
I was very confused about love, and about relationships, and about women, and about everything, really. Previously, I’d often tried to find love where it could not exist, and I tried to make it flourish where it could never grow. It was like planting a rose on bare rock. This had been true ever since I was a teenager. For most of my life I had felt lonely and vacant, and I’d always thought I needed someone to fill it. Only recently, since I’d published one book, been asked to write another, and finally felt that I was some kind of a success, could I relax enough to realize that I didn’t need a woman to make me into the man I wanted to be. I had already become that man by myself. To my surprise, I found that I didn’t really need anyone. I could be quite happy on my own.
Naturally, that was the moment I met her.
It was a sweltering June night, of the sort for which New York is infamous – no breeze, the air as thick as syrup, every surface warm and damp to the touch. I was at a party on the Upper West Side. I went to a lot of parties in those days, so I can’t remember exactly where it was. I had gone there because one night a couple of weeks earlier I’d met a girl who I liked, though not in any deep sense, and we’d had a good conversation. I thought if she was there I might have another good conversation with her, or possibly something else would happen – and if nothing happened with her, then maybe something would happen with someone else. I never knew what would take place, since my nights were filled with lots of booze and food and impetuous decisions, and always beautiful women everywhere. I didn’t plan my evenings. I just went places and rode the wave.
In the apartment where the party was being held, I saw someone leaning in a doorway. I was struck by her silhouette, because that was all I could see. I couldn’t even make out her face at first. Her hair was soft and dark, and it fell around her shoulders. She was petite but erect, feminine but forceful. I could tell all this just from her posture. There were men around her, three or four of them, all trying to talk to her at once. I could tell she was used to dealing with this sort of attention. She appeared completely at ease. She handled them the way a press agent handles annoying reporters, dishing out answers that were kept as short as possible, obviously impatient with their clownery.
I was very full of myself then. I decided I was simply going to ignore the other suitors and talk to her as if they weren’t there. So I headed for the doorway where she was holding court. As I did so, I caught a glimpse of her face. In a city of beautiful women, she made me catch my breath. I nearly turned around again and walked away. Then, through a brief rift in the tsunami of noise that is all New York apartment parties, I overheard her say something that led me to believe that she worked as some kind of counsellor. So, intending to impress her with my perception, I presented myself before her and said, “Oh, so you’re a counsellor?”
“No,” she said, and that was all the time she had for me. She went on with another conversation. I had glanced off her armour like a poorly aimed bullet.
Well, that’s enough of that, I said. I had taken a shot and failed. Dating is a game of odds, after all. You can’t expect to win every time.
I decided to go up on the roof for a while and see if I could catch a breeze. This being New York, there were already a hundred other people up there with the same idea. They were all standing and sitting around, talking, laughing, drinking, and smoking. The spires of the Twin Towers were just visible over roofs of the nearest buildings. The light of the city reflected off the low clouds and drowned out the stars.
I felt like sitting by myself for a while, not because my feelings were wounded but because I had been talking to a lot of people, and talking wears me out. I’d already forgotten the incident downstairs. One doesn’t grow to be a man without learning to deal with rejection. I sat with a drink and a cigarette. I don’t remember what I was thinking, but I was probably pondering my next move: whether to stick around here, or go to another party, or go to my favourite bar back in Brooklyn, or go home to my empty apartment and fall asleep.
Then I saw her again, standing right before me. She had appeared out of nowhere.
“Mind if I sit down?” she said, and she promptly did so, fully aware that no man in his right mind would ever say no to such a request.
With something like delight, I realized she didn’t remember me from downstairs. I had been just one more face in the throng. But here, on the roof, she had decided on her own to approach me, as if the whole thing was her idea. Perfect, I thought. Let her think that.
It was about ten o’clock. We sat and talked – about what I don’t remember now, and I probably wasn’t even aware of it at the time, either. It didn’t matter to me what we talked about. I just wanted to be in her presence. She had a kind of Mediterranean glow about her, though she was actually Canadian, I soon found out. She was in town with a girlfriend for the weekend, simply having a New York adventure – like tens of thousands of other people that night. And I was lucky enough to be part of it.
One hour became two, and two became three. Other people gradually became included in our conversation, and we talked about travel and poetry and lots of other things. A bottle of absinthe was produced. She didn’t take any. I certainly did. I ran out of cigarettes, and said that I needed to go to the store. She came with me. There was a moment, standing outside the building, where I knew I could have kissed her. But if I did, something told me that would have been it. I would ruin things by moving too fast. I had no urge to ruin anything, or to make time with her, or to turn this situation to my advantage in any way. What I wanted, though I had known her only a few hours, was never to be apart from her again.
Back on the roof, we talked until the sun came up. By then it was already too hot to be outside, so I put her in a cab back to the apartment she and her friend were borrowing. We locked eyes for a long moment as she pulled away. I felt as if my entrails were tied to that cab’s rear bumper. I went home in a frenzied state to try and sleep a few hour
s. I knew that I needed to see her again, that very day, before the spell of the previous evening was broken. I was terrified that she would go back to Toronto and forget about me, and I would spend the rest of my life wondering what might have been.
When you feel that your life is incomplete because there is no one to complete you, when you feel that you need that special someone to help you become the person you want to be – that’s when you cling to people as if you were drowning and they were a lifesaver. Sometimes you’ll get lucky and meet someone who is also looking for a life-saver, but then you’re just two drowning people using each other to stay above water. You cling to each other as you go down, watching the sunlight disappear overhead, grateful that at least you’re not drowning alone.
It’s only when you feel that your life is complete, and that you don’t need anyone to make you into who you are, that you’ll meet people on their own terms and not try to use them to stay afloat. You will simply welcome them into your life, and they you into theirs. And whatever happens after that, it will be perfect, because you simply allowed it to happen.
What happened next was that I did see her that day, and that night. The day after that, she got on a plane and went back to her life in Toronto, which was where she had been born and raised. I called her that evening. I called her every evening for the next week, and that weekend I got on a plane and followed her up north.
Over the course of the next year, we repeated this pattern. We spoke on the phone every night. I went to see her as often as my schedule allowed it, and she made more trips to New York. By then it was a new century and a new millennium, and many things had clicked into place for me. I was thirty years old. I was done dating. It was time to either take the next step or let it go altogether, and I knew that I would rather die than let her go.
The easiest thing was for me to move to Toronto. She had an office job, but I, who required only a laptop and an internet connection to work, was mobile. So nearly a year to the day after we’d met, I piled my things into a moving van and arrived in the Big Smoke.
Toronto struck me as a cleaner, more organized place – New York as if run by the Swiss, so the joke goes. I had never lived with a woman before, but it came as naturally as falling out a window. Time passed very quickly, the way it does when everything is going right. Two years later, we were married and buying a house together – not in Toronto, but in Nova Scotia, a place we had visited on vacation and realized was perfect for us. We were both done with big cities. Now we yearned for clean air and open spaces, quiet days and nights together, a house we could afford. We wanted a dog and a garden. We were getting ready for the next natural step: children.
All this seems like it happened a thousand years ago to different people. I believe this is the sign of a full life. Now, as I write this, it’s March 22, 2014, our twelfth wedding anniversary. Alexandra is not here. She’s on vacation in the Caribbean with our two daughters, who are aged ten and eight. They’ve been gone nearly a week, and it will be two more days before they’re home. It’s been a difficult week for me. I no longer enjoy living alone. I barely even remember being a bachelor in New York. When I think of who that person was, I wonder if he would even recognize me, were we to pass on the street. If he did, he might be horrified. Or he might be vastly relieved. So things will turn out all right for me after all, he might say. I don’t know what I would say to that version of me to convince him things would work out in the end. Chances are he wouldn’t listen no matter what I said. He never was terribly good at listening to anyone. I might even avert my eyes and pretend I didn’t know him.
My life now is that of a husband and father, and of a Canadian. My accent has probably changed. I’m forty-three, not twenty-nine. I don’t smoke or drink any more. I haven’t stayed up past midnight in years, not even to watch the ball drop on New Year’s Eve. Just the thought of it makes me want to take a nap. I live in a house that rings with female chatter and childish laughter, as well as the antics of our five animals – two gerbils, two cats, and a dog. These sounds have woven themselves into the fabric of my being so thoroughly that I don’t even hear them anymore. But when they’re absent, it feels as if a piece of me is gone.
Since that day I packed up and headed north to be with Alexandra, we have scarcely been apart. Sometimes I look at her in awe and say, You’re just some girl I met at a party somewhere, and look at us now. The world has changed a great deal since we met, in the final year of the last century. We’ve changed, too, of course.
I haven’t been back to New York in a while. I imagine it whirls on just the same, teeming with young people who are out looking for something they can’t quite put their finger on, hoping that whatever they dream of will happen for them someday. There are things I would like to tell those young people, and also that younger version of myself, about life. But I know they wouldn’t listen to me any more than I would have listened when I was that age. They need to live their lives, to experience their experiences, to feel their feelings.
And so all I can say is that I hope they realize they don’t need anything to be who they want to become, but that they can just be that person. When they do, that’s the moment they will find their girl on a rooftop. And then, if they’re a little bit lucky and are willing to open their eyes to what is right in front of them, they can unpack the gift that is the moment they live in and realize that the excitement of the city is contained in a million other small things throughout existence, everywhere, and that nothing ever ends, but just keeps on whirling in a different direction, never stopping, never standing still, and that everything, including them, is already perfect, and is just the way it’s meant to be.
The Vagabond Lover
Carol Bruneau
The following story is inspired by the life of a beloved relative of Carol Bruneau who really did live to be almost 107.
At the bedside, clutter would easily crowd out the book – Styrofoam cups, straws in paper sleeves, those tiny boxes of hospital tissues jockeying for space, these and the disconnected phone taking more room than it deserves. It’s not like she’ll be calling anyone, with the crispness of outdoors creeping in, creeping through – Dolly can feel it penetrating the window that faces the sea. The ferry cutting a path through sea smoke on its way to Newfoundland: this she pictures. Hardly needs to see to do so, or to feel the hard frost pulling the last leaves from the maples. The world in solemn stillness lay. A kind of carol rings in both ears, ears not much good for hearing anymore but with a new acuity, one all their own.
Her chest lifts and falls. The book’s safe, that’s something. Never mind it’s missing its cover – a mishap at a caregiver’s hands. No worries; its gilt lettering stays in her head. “My treasure,” she tells the nurse, who swabs her lips. The tiny pink sponge on a stick she calls a mouth mop. The book a sort of bible, pressed leaves and flowers crumble between the pages – dust – and a typed-out verse tucked there too. Cut from the Herald, “1927” jotted in her hand, the same as the inscription: To Dolly Cutler from Jimmy, Xmas 1935. Penned so she wouldn’t forget.
So much room to forget; and who knew all this would take so long?
Blind to the clock’s face and the nurse’s, her eyes distinguish only daylight from dark.
“What’s the hour? What, only ten o’clock – not noon? Gad, is he on Cape Breton time, on pogey, the Reaper?”
More deaf that she’ll ever be, the nurse squeezes her hand. “Hang on, darlin’. You’re soon having a birthday – did I read that right?”
Her 107th:: who in God’s acre needs reminding? A ridiculous, ridiculous age.
“No fuss, do you hear me? I won’t want any fuss.” Being polite, she coughs up a laugh.
You can’t take it with you, they say.
But like a treasure in an Egyptian’s tomb, maybe the book will follow her? The cover, adrift somewhere, lost perhaps in a stack of magazines, is or was rust-coloured cloth. Graven in her mind: Bliss Carman’s Poems and a laurel wreath in gold. “Our poet la
ureate,” a voice prods through the brightness, enough to give her a charge.
Bliss’s lines brim in her mind: ants. They crawl over the whiteness of walls past the ceiling. Wherever they empty into is grey-green: the ocean?
The nurse’s shout is tender: “Pain, Nana? Are you having pain?”
As ridiculous as living so long, being called “Nana.”
Cold tea held to her lips. The fumbled straw.
“Allergies, darlin’? Ever been allergic to anything, hon?”
Her soul pulses. Words come from her throat: None, nothing, except to marriage. A flutter: numbness. The same feeling as in her fingers, the nerves hushed as if she’s wearing furry gloves.
“I could’ve, might’ve, should’ve married him, I suppose.”
He couldn’t wait to give it to her, hot off the press, an utter surprise – the nicest gift anyone could’ve thought of. No ribbon, no wrapping besides the paper it was shipped in. He had it there at the station when she returned from one of her jaunts. Home from Halifax, Toronto, Quebec?
Never could sit still, could you, Dolly? No grass grows under your feet.
She was twenty-nine, just turned. Come back to find everyone she knew married, on to their third, fourth, even fifth child.
Nova Scotia Love Stories Page 3
