WhatamIdoinghere?WhatamIdoinghere?
I know it’s too late and I’m too tired to drive home, but for a few minutes, I actually think about getting in my car and doing it. Telling A, It’s your turn to follow.
Which is not something you should be thinking about telling someone who wished you a sincere good night.
I try to quiet myself down, even though everything around me feels loud. The only way to sleep in this place is through pure exhaustion, and eventually I get there. But once I get up, way too early, there’s no going back to sleep. I email A to say I’m awake, but don’t get a response.
I can’t wait here. I pack up the few things I unpacked, check out of my room, and head to my car. I don’t know where I’m going, but I know this hotel isn’t the answer. I map out Manhattan and figure I’ll go to Central Park, which is the thing in Manhattan that’s easiest to find. It’s dead early on a Sunday morning, so there isn’t really traffic. I’m grateful for that. It’s strange enough to be driving toward that skyline, to enter into it. I have no place here. I have no sense of anything.
I find a space right against the park, and have to check the street signs three separate times to make sure I’m allowed to park there on a Sunday.
Then I get out and walk. Only the pines are offering green against the sky at this time of year, but the bare branches speak to me more. I find a path where they meet overhead, crowning the space I’m in. Most of the people around me are walking dogs, although at this hour it looks more like the dogs are walking the people. I never stop being aware I’m in the middle of one of the biggest cities in the world, but at the same time, I like that the park is big enough to put the city to the side. I’m hungry and I probably need coffee, but all the vendors are still asleep. I walk twisted paths where the people and dogs disappear, and I wonder if I’m safe. I walk back to a more open space, a gigantic expanse dotted with empty baseball fields. I walk until my feet hurt, and my phone buzzes, and I find out my next place to be.
A
Day 6133
Rhiannon and I sit on a bench overlooking a particularly steep hill on the east side of Central Park. I’ve brought her coffee. As she sips it, I look at her lips and the way they touch the lid. I’ve missed this.
I am telling her about this morning. The telling-her is something I’ve missed, too. The feeling that something I’ve experienced isn’t complete until it’s shared with one particular person.
“So Arwyn’s apartment is only about a block and a half away from Tyana’s father’s. Which sort of proves something I always thought—that the more people there are around, the less distance I have to travel from body to body. Just think about it—if I lived here, I could live in the same neighborhood for months. Maybe years. I might never leave Manhattan.”
“That would make life easier,” Rhiannon says. “But not really. You’d still be changing.”
“I know, I know.”
I hadn’t been saying it as an argument for what we should do. Not this time.
Rhiannon gestures at my body. “So tell me about Arywn.”
“Honestly? There’s a lot I’m not sure of, since they’re not sure. So let’s just call them questioning, about pretty much everything.”
“You’re saying they and them.”
“I kinda want to do that now. If I don’t know for sure how they identify. Makes sense to me that way.”
“It didn’t before?”
“I didn’t have to talk about them before. You know, to anyone else.”
“Then I came along,” she says, cozying in.
“Yeah,” I say, cozying back. “Then you came along.”
I think that Central Park must be one of the only places in Manhattan that doesn’t feel like it’s owned by anyone or named after anyone or making anyone a profit. It’s this oasis of pure existence in a realm of sustenance and maintenance. Because of this, I’ve already decided it might just be my favorite part of the city. Not that I’ve seen much of the rest of it yet.
I’m lost for a second, looking at the park, imagining it within the city. Rhiannon’s gone quiet, too. And I think that’s okay. No, that’s good. Even after being apart for so long, we don’t feel we have to rush our lives together.
We are acting as if we have time. Plenty of time.
RHIANNON
I ask myself, What if this were our bench?
I imagine it. Every morning, we meet here. Some days, A might be walking a dog. Other days, A might be on the way to work. I would probably be on my way to work—at a coffee shop, or a bookstore, or at a coffee shop in a bookstore. It won’t open until ten—no, eleven. I’ll have time to spend on the bench, sipping a latte with A, talking about our yesterdays, our todays, and maybe a tomorrow or two, at least for me. Sometimes I’ll get to the bench second, and I’ll have to wonder if the person sitting there is actually A, or if some interloper has…interloped. But I’ll know as soon as they look up at me. I’ll know as soon as they say good morning.
We’ll grow old together on this bench. All the dog walkers, all the joggers who pass by this particular bench—they’ll know it as our bench. Or at least my bench. Because I’ll be the one who doesn’t change. When it rains, I’ll have a polka-dot umbrella. When it snows, A will bring a blanket for us to sit under. In the autumn, we’ll dress like the leaves. We won’t realize we’re aging. But we’ll age on this bench. And always be the same two people at heart.
We won’t live together. We’ll rarely get to see each other at night. But every morning, we’ll have the bench.
It’s a nice fantasy. But it doesn’t sound like anything real.
A
Day 6133 (continued)
Arwyn had to break plans with their friends to go see a movie downtown, and since I don’t want to accidentally run into any of them, I suggest we stay uptown—whatever that means. I look on the city map for a divider, but I don’t see any.
“Want to go to a museum?” I ask Rhiannon. There seem to be plenty of museums on the map.
“Let’s go to the Metropolitan Museum,” she says. “It’s right over there.”
She points to a building that looks like a mansion at the edge of the park. Then, the closer we get, the bigger it becomes, more like a castle than a mansion.
I’ve seen the massive stairway leading up to the Met in so many movies and TV shows that I feel I already know it; seeing it presents a thrill of recognition, not a thrill of discovery. Once we’re inside, I get a map, and it’s like we’re suddenly time travelers, able to walk to any spot in history to see what it will end up leaving behind. I don’t know much about art, so I have no idea where to begin. I also don’t know which periods Rhiannon likes best, or if she doesn’t have a preference, like me. The museum will help me find out more about her, too.
“So where should we start?” I ask.
She yawns, and then blushes in embarrassment at her yawn. “Sorry! I didn’t sleep much last night. Let’s start with the impressionists. Those rooms are always my favorite.”
I consult the map. “Upstairs!”
“You are way too cheery.”
“I guess I always get some sleep.”
“You wouldn’t have, in that hotel.”
“That bad?”
“No—it was fine. I’m just not used to sleeping alone in hotel rooms.”
“I wish I could’ve been there with you.”
“I know. Me too.”
Our wishes hang there between us. There is a spellbinding quality to having them expressed, in knowing this is what we both want. But there’s a sorrow, too, because this kind of choice will never be ours.
We’re walking through a corridor lined with sketches and old photographs, each in its own alcove, public yet requiring some effort to be seen. “I like that one,” Rhiannon says, moving closer to a black-and-white scene from the 1940s, where f
our girls—three small, one bigger—are watching six soap bubbles rise in the air over an empty city street. There’s a certain symmetry between the girls and the bubbles, as if there is some meaningful relationship between them. The photographer’s name is Helen Levitt, and she’s left no trace of where the bubbles have come from or who the girls are. The title of the photo—Children with Soap Bubbles, New York City—tells us nothing.
Rhiannon yawns again, then apologizes again. We walk from black and white to color, then from print to canvas. We’re greeted by ballet dancers caught in their poses. Rhiannon walks over to observe them, and I stand a little bit back, to see her lean into them as they lean toward the barre.
“Degas might be my favorite impressionist,” Rhiannon says to me when I get closer. “Though Monet’s close behind.”
“Why are they called impressionists?” I ask. “I mean, aren’t all paintings impressions?”
Rhiannon takes her eyes away from the Degas dancers to look at me. “Agreed. But there’s something different with the impressionists. They recognize that their subjects are constantly changing, and that they’re only capturing one moment. It’s not even a definitive moment. Like, they’re not saying this is the best possible way to show this scene or this person. They’re saying this is just one of the ways you could see it. This is the way I saw it…and then it was over. Only I caught some of it. I managed to get some of it down, before I, too, was gone.”
Other people are trying to see the dancers, so we step to the side, head to new rooms, to Monet’s haystacks and Van Gogh’s straw hat. No color is a single color. No solid is completely solid. Everything looks different when we look closer. I think about what Rhiannon said, about how these are singular moments, flashes of impressions. At the same time, they feel like composites, built from many different moments and observations to achieve something nearly impossible: a timeless immediacy.
I want to tell Rhiannon this, but she is already three paintings away from me. She drifts down the wall until she sees something that merits her attention; then she goes in, gives the painting at least a minute before moving on.
I look through a frame of my own devising. We museumgoers are a part of the paintings for as long as they remain in our view. We separate from the room in order to peer through the poplars. Two of us stare at the same woman from over a century ago, and we know nothing about her and yet know something about her at the same time. We look for the clues in her expression.
We are strangers here. We assemble to look at art, and in our way, for the smallest amounts of time, we bring the art back to life.
RHIANNON
We are strangers here. We look at different things, see different things. If I didn’t know Arwyn was A, I would walk right past them. Even now, I don’t know what to say. We are surrounded by some of the most famous paintings in the world, and I can’t think of anything to say that I wouldn’t say to someone else.
If anything, I think about how much Alexander would love it. Alexander would want to dip his fingers in the brushstrokes. He would want to find a landscape and wade inside.
DAWN, AGE 45
We are strangers here. I’ve talked to Irene, the guard in Gallery 964, so many times over the years. I know the names of her nieces and nephews. I know where she’s vacationed. I know that she likes Monet more than Manet. I know she likes Vermeer the best, but doesn’t get rotated to his room nearly as much. Her boss thinks that when she’s in Gallery 630, she pays more attention to A Maid Asleep than she does to the potential thieves and vandals who step inside. She admits this is probably true. Why work as a museum guard if you’re not going to look at the paintings?
I know all this about her, but still, we’re strangers. Because every time Irene meets me, I’m someone else.
I sit in front of the same painting each time. I’ve spent hours studying it. If I was the same person each time, it might cause suspicion. Or at least Irene would know me to say hello to. But since I come in a different body each time, I haven’t been pegged as a scholar plotting a thesis or a thief planning a heist.
The Monet Family in Their Garden at Argenteuil. Painted by Manet, when the Monets were living across the Seine for the summer. I like that they were friends. I like how comfortable Monet’s son Jean is in the painting, while his mother takes the time to pose and his father, the one who should know the most about posing, stands to the side, gardening.
Why do I love this painting so much, when there are so many other great paintings around it? I’ve never been to Argenteuil, or out of the United States. It could be that I simply like it. But to come day after day (when I can), it also has to speak to me, and I must return to it again and again to try to understand what it’s saying. In my heart, I think it’s about family. It’s about how that boy leans on his mother, perfectly drowsy with contentment. I must have felt that way about someone, sometime. I know I must have had a mother—even if it was just for that first day, I must have had a mother. She must have liked certain kinds of paintings. Maybe she would have loved this one. Maybe that’s why I love it so much. Maybe that’s what I want it to say to me. I want to believe that I come from somewhere, that there are pieces of that somewhere embedded in my thoughts. It is not like being adopted or raised apart from biological parents—those children can at least look in the mirror and see some traces of where they came from. I must rely on the things that feel like they come from somewhere deeper than mere memory. Songs speak to me. People glimpsed in shopwindows speak to me. Certain names speak to me more than others. And this painting speaks to me.
Irene comes over and asks me if I knew that Renoir was standing right next to Manet, making his own portrait of the Monets. I tell her I did know that. I don’t tell her that she was the person who told me, many years ago, and that she’s told me many, many times since.
A
Day 6133 (continued)
Rhiannon yawns again. This time she doesn’t turn to me to apologize. She might not even remember I’m here.
RHIANNON
I’m already thinking of the drive home. I shouldn’t be. We still have plenty of time.
A
Day 6133 (continued)
Another yawn.
I’m starting to panic. Not because she’s yawning—I know that’s from a lack of sleep, and I know that in a way the lack of sleep was my fault. I’m more worried that we’re not talking to each other, that we’re not learning anything more about each other.
Then I tell myself to stop. Calm down. I am putting too much pressure on a single day. I have to believe that, like all other couples, we’ll have plenty more days after this.
I follow her from room to room, circling around the centuries and the continents. Rhiannon pauses in front of a woman named Madame X. She is a very white matron in a very black gown, painted by John Singer Sargent as she looks to the right. I get a sense that she isn’t looking at anything in particular; she’s looking off to the right so she can be painted looking off to the right. That is how we will remember her.
“Have you ever looked like that?” Rhiannon asks me.
“What do you mean?”
“Have you ever had a day when you looked like that?”
There are people nearby. They might hear us.
Rhiannon must see my alarm; she laughs and says, “Don’t worry—this is New York. I’m sure you can say anything and nobody will care.”
I study the painting. I think of really white skin, of being afraid of sunburn. I try to remember a dress, any dress….
“I’m not sure. I don’t really remember what I look like. It’s not that important.”
“That’s weird,” Rhiannon says. “I see a painting like this, I wonder what it must be like to have that face, that skin, that much sophistication. But I also know I’m never going to look like that, or live that kind of life. But you might.”
“I love that you’re th
inking that way,” I tell her. “But that’s not the way I think. Maybe I should—I don’t know. I guess I could look in the mirror more. I just don’t really see myself when I’m other people, if that makes any sense.”
“Let me ask you—what do you look like right now?”
I tell her the truth. “I have no idea. I know I have short hair, because I can feel it’s short.”
“But what color is it?”
“Brown?”
“Ish. I’d go with auburn. What about your eyes?”
“I have two.”
“But what color?”
“I have no idea. Why would I pay attention to that?”
“Are you pretty?”
“I would never think that. I mean, if other people were reacting to it, I’d notice, I guess. But I never look in the mirror and go, Oh, hey, how pretty am I today?”
“God, that must be nice.”
“Do you?”
“I mean, those aren’t the exact words I’d use—but I definitely notice whether it’s a good day or a bad day.”
“You couldn’t possibly have a bad day!”
“Thank you. But no. I definitely have bad days.”
“Then what’s today, on the good-to-bad scale?”
“I had two hours of sleep and took the fastest shower I could. I think that escorts me straight to the bad-day category.”
“Well, that just proves it. You have no objectivity. Because your bad day is pretty great.”
“I never claimed objectivity. And neither should you.”
“It was a compliment!”
“I’m aware of that. But I’m still stuck on the fact that you don’t know what you look like.”
“I’ll never know what I look like.”
“You know what I mean. The body you’re in.”
Someday Page 19
