So, one Saturday afternoon, stuck on the story I had been fiddling with for six months and was about ready to discard, I drove to Helena’s place on Amsterdam Avenue to let her know why she hadn’t heard from me. I missed her, I told myself, though of course I barely knew who she was.
No one seemed to be home and I made several tries, hanging around the neighborhood for over an hour, then going to a local movie before trying again to no avail. It wasn’t so much that I was desperate to see her—it was and it wasn’t—as that I wanted to do the right thing.
I worried that something had happened to Helena, that she had gotten sick or done herself some harm.
Still, busyness, the usual distractions (plus a new one, a new woman in my life), kept me from her door for another two weeks. This time I was in luck: I caught her leaving the building just as I was pulling up in my car. She looked even sadder than the saintly image of her that flickered from time to time in my untrustworthy memory. Helena positively glowed with grief.
When I called to her from the car, she ignored me and continued walking at an increased pace. I would have cruised alongside her, but there was a stopped cab just in front of me trapping me in place.
Not wanting to risk losing her again, I abandoned the car in the middle of the street and jogged after her, catching up as she was about to descend the subway steps.
–I was calling you, I said. Didn’t you hear me?
–Please go away, she said. You’re making a scene.
–I need to talk to you, I said. Will you come back to the car with me? I couldn’t find your number and I didn’t know how to get in touch.
–I’m no longer available to you, she said, her hand over her heart, a touch of melodrama in her voice. You’ve had your chance and you’ve thrown it away.
I stared after her as she hurried down the steps, her heels clicking like castanets, then I fled back to my car. A policeman was waiting for me with one of the aggrieved drivers trapped behind me. The cop had already started writing the ticket so there was nothing I could say to influence him.
I pleaded the vagaries of love. The snitch, who had called the cop, smirked with satisfaction as the cop, all business, handed me my ticket.
That evening, out for dinner with V, the new woman in his life, B told the story of the officious citizen who had turned him into the police because he had left his car for a moment when it had been stuck behind a cab. V said that anyone who called the police on someone because of a moment’s inconvenience was beneath contempt. B thought so too, though he suspected her sympathy was worked-up.
He didn’t mention H and invented another reason for having left his car.
The next morning when the ache of loss returned from wherever it had strayed, its intensity undiminished, B knew that it was H’s absence he suffered and H’s absence alone. His free-floating grief had found its object.
–You seem inconsolable, sweetheart, Vivian said to me over dinner, to which I nodded in acknowledgment. I had done everything in my power to avoid obsessing about Helena and had failed miserably.
–I’m fine, I said irritably.
–I’ve seen you better, she said.
A minor disagreement emerged which had the earmarks of a fight. If it was what it seemed, it was our first, a landmark perhaps or the beginning of the end. I was in one of those curmudgeonly moods that seeks out trouble. In thrall to my discontent, I went home at midnight, though it was my custom (of two weeks) to spend Saturday nights at Vivian’s place. The inconsolable, it was mutually agreed, were best left to sulk in their own tents of residence unattended.
I found two messages waiting for me at home on my answering machine. One from Vivian regretting our fight and one from Helena pleading for forgiveness for her “unforgivable behavior.” Helena left her number for my reply, the number coming through in garbled form and I had to play the message back several times to make almost sure I had it right. It was close to one a.m. and I fretted about whether it was acceptable to call so late.
By this point, I kind of believed we were fated not to connect—that I had the number wrong or she would be out—so that when she answered on the first ring I was at a loss for something to say. –I just got home, I said, and found your message waiting for me.
–Where were you? she said, a subtext of disappointment in the question.
–I was visiting a friend, I said. Look, I’ve done nothing but think about you since that night we met.
–What were you doing with this friend? she asked. I ignored the question which I thought unworthy of her, reiterated my desire to see her again as soon as possible.
–If you wanted so much to see me, why were you out with this friend? she asked.
It was like a bad dream in which the other person was speaking a seemingly familiar language that made little or no sense. Perhaps she was being slyly amusing and I had failed to pick up on the joke.
–When my first choice isn’t available, I said, I sometimes take the next best offer.
–I suppose you think I’m out of line asking but I have a history of getting involved with men who are already taken. Are you already taken?
I was in one of those double-bind situations where I wanted to tell the truth, but at the same time didn’t want to discourage.
–I’m not taken, I said, italicizing the taken in my mind, though I have been dating someone. I was aware of feeling in danger as I waited for her delayed response.
–Well, she said, if you come over now, I’m going to expect you to stay the night. I want to get that out so there’s no misunderstanding later.
–Why don’t we do this tomorrow night, I said. I’ll take you to dinner and we’ll see how things go.
–You don’t want to see me tonight? she asked.
–It’s kind of late, isn’t it? I’d like to see you tonight, but we both need to get some sleep, don’t you think?
–I don’t sleep much, she said. Anyway I’m busy tomorrow night.
She was also—I pursued alternatives—busy the next night and the night after that. –Are you saying, I asked, that if I don’t come over tonight, you don’t want to see me at all?
–Look, do you want to come over or don’t you? I had the impression from the way you ran after me yesterday that you were dying to see me. If I’ve misinterpreted, we can just say good-bye and avoid getting into something we’ll both eventually regret.
Alarms went off in my head, which I did my unsuccessful best to ignore. –Look, I’ll call you tomorrow, I said.
–That’s if you don’t lose my number first, she said in a low, pained voice, and that was it.
She called back in the morning to apologize for her edginess. She talked about having been hurt in a long-term relationship and how long, as someone like me had to know, such hurts took to heal. I commiserated, forgave her, dredged up my own apology.
B spent the next few months seeing H at least once a week, sleeping over on Friday nights—the sex sometimes spectacular—comforting her when a sudden recollection of Phillip’s defection would throw her into paroxysms of grief. Her presence, her operatic affection, were his comfort. They attended H.A. meetings together on Wednesday evenings, sometimes holding hands out of sight of the others.
B continued to see V on occasion, keeping her a secret from H, who was intensely jealous. When B found a free moment to think about it, it troubled him that his life had become so busy and complicated, so fraught with potential dangers, he had virtually no time to sit in front of the computer and imagine language on a blank screen. H was becoming increasingly demanding. The more time B spent with her, the more jealous she became of the life he lived outside her company.
So B had to know he was asking for trouble when he told her that as much as he appreciated her company he needed more time to himself. At first H accepted the news well, said that she could understand as a writer he needed extended periods of time to collect his thoughts.
B said he was grateful for the generosity of her response a
nd warming toward her, he remembered the terrible ache of loss he once felt at her absence. Love revisited and he put his arms around H, holding her against him, lifting her into the air. After they kissed (H had this way of bruising her lips against his) he carried her into the bedroom like a bride. H was a clothes designer and the bookcase headboard of her custom-made platform bed was filled with copies of Vogue, Elle, Mirabella and Vanity Fair. Perfume seemed to emanate from the magazines.
After they made love, H confided that it bothered her just a little that his writing was more important to him than she was. He had no choice but to write, he told her. Not writing for him was not being alive.
–You poor man, she said, kissing his face. All her gestures tended to excess.
At two in the morning she woke him to say that she felt unbearably unhappy and that he was the cause.
–What did I do wrong? he asked, still half asleep, trying to remember details from the dream that was slipping away.
–If you have to ask that question, she said, I think I’d like you to get your things together and leave.
–I’m sorry I made you unhappy, he said, turning on his side away from her. Can we discuss this in the morning?
–If that’s what you want, she said, but before he could reclaim his dream, the light was on and she was shaking him.
–In my space, I’m the one who makes the decisions, she said.
To argue with her as he knew from two previous occasions was to make her even more adamant so he got out of bed and began to get dressed in a desultory way.
As B was letting himself out she said, –If you had any character, you wouldn’t let a woman bully you this way. Phillip would have smacked me one if I dared to mouth off to him.
–Phillip’s footprints are too large for me to fill, B said, pleased with the remark only until its cheapshotness registered in private echo.
First B couldn’t remember where he parked his car and when he found it on Riverside Drive the radiator grill was gone, had apparently been blown loose by the heavy winds. He wandered up and down the block looking for the errant part, persecuted by the cold, cursing the fates. It was like a piece of him had blown off into the abyss.
When I got home, there was a message from Helena waiting for me on the answering machine.
–I never want to see you again, it said. Who the fuck do you think you are?
The ringing of the phone woke me some hours later, the room filled with light, and I staggered from bed to answer. I was in one of my curmudgeonly moods.
The voice at my ear pleaded for forgiveness.
–I wish it were in me, I said, still angry at my banishment. I’ll call you when I’m ready.
–You will never forgive me, she said with a certitude I found hard to dispute.
2.
B wasn’t sure whether the indefinable sorrow that had been haunting him had gone away or that it had become so familiar he had grown to accept it as a natural condition. Or perhaps his bruised feelings had produced a protective covering. Whatever, the pain he had once thought irremediable seemed barely a glimmer of its former self. It was as though he had dreamed of loss and woke to find he had everything he could possibly want.
B had become less quixotic in his passions. He no longer fell in and out of love precipitously, but chose his companions in a clear-eyed and sensible way. An unfamiliar calm had come over him. His worries seemed unimportant, his chronic discontents a parody that at long last began to entertain, his former loneliness an aspect of the unremembered past. Whereas his emotional life had been a muddle from the outset, he made useful distinctions now between sexual need and emotional entanglement. Both in this age of disease carried their own unacceptable baggage. All of his past loves, it struck him, had been prohibitively difficult puzzles he had predictably failed to solve.
B had entered a period of post-storm calm. He had a brief obsessive affair with a 20-year-old he had met in Seattle on a reading tour.
In his present becalmed state, he could barely imagine what had attracted him to H in the first place or to R for that matter or to G, for whose loss he had grieved for what seemed like years. Of the three, only H remained a continuing (though remote) presence in his life. They no longer dated—the night she threw him out of her apartment had brought an end to that phase of their relationship—but they bantered on the phone from time to time and occasionally got together for lunch. The calls generally came from H and it struck him that if she stopped calling, their friendship, if that’s what it was, would come to an irrevocable end.
Months had passed since our last conversation and I began to concern myself in some distant way about Helena, worrying that she had lost her job or gotten sick or gone back to the Midwest. I remembered that during our last conversation she had mentioned going for a checkup to a doctor she had never been to before. She had been anxious about it, had been dwelling on certain real or imaginary symptoms. And then I had this disturbing dream in which Helena called to tell me she was dying of a rare, recently discovered, sexually transmitted disease.
I called the next day and a recording reported that her number was no longer in service. My follow-up call produced predictably the same result. We had no friends in common and I let myself believe there was no way of finding out where she might have gone. And even if there was a way, what possible good would it do me to know. Instead of thinking about Helena, I focused on feeling nothing, nurtured the frail sense of well being that lately sustained me.
A few weeks after the dream, impelled by an unfocused urgency, I drove to her building and rang the superintendent’s buzzer. A frightened painfully thin Chinese woman appeared at the door.
–My husband out, she said, eyeing me suspiciously.
–Do you know what happened to the woman in 3B? I asked.
–My husband back in one hour, she said, holding up two fingers to signify. You come back.
Though I could see the super’s wife was uncomfortable with strangers, I resisted dismissal. —The woman in 3B, I asked, did she leave a forwarding address? The super’s wife, who seemed careworn and tired, stared blankly at me.
–Husband back in one hour, she said.
I spoke slowly, rephrasing my question, emphasizing each word.
A small light went on in her tired eyes. –You want to see apartment? she asked and the next thing I knew I was following the woman up the stairs. A child of three or four tagged along behind us.
After she had ushered me into the apartment, the woman picked up the child and stood waiting like a sentry by the opened door. I checked out each of the four rooms that comprised Helena’s former flat, performing the role assigned me as prospective renter. The place had been cleaned and cleaned out, though a few odds and ends of furniture remained, including the newish platform bed we had slept in together the six or seven times I had spent the night.
Suddenly weary, I plopped myself down on the bed—it was the only place in the bedroom to sit. Though it was an okay apartment, and showed well even without Helena’s few well chosen things, I recognized that there was something sad about its emptiness, a sadness I could not or would not feel. I lay back on the bed with my hands pillowed behind my head and closed my eyes. Dozing was not part of my agenda. I meant only to collect myself before leaving to go home.
My mind was abuzz, my senses heightened. I was aware of a slight medicinal smell in the room, bare traces of illness. That’s when I thought of renting the flat and keeping it for Helena in case someday she wanted to return from wherever she had gone, though I couldn’t really afford to keep two apartments. Nevertheless I held on to the sentimental idea, played with it in my imagination as if I were a character in a made-up story. Then I found myself thinking of a time I had visited my mother in the hospital and she had not recognized me, had not the faintest idea who I was. Even after I introduced myself and she smiled warmly at me, I could tell she remained skeptical about my credentials and had drawn on resources of graciousness to get through a potentially emb
arrassing situation. She pretended to know me and I went along with the pretense because it seemed the only acceptable choice.
Then I remembered my father telling me that if I had been more attentive to my mother, she never would have lost her memory. Then I remembered looking at Genevieve’s diary, which seemed to have been left about for my discovery. The entry that caught my eye made me regret my intrusion. –I realized this morning, it read, that I don’t love B. When I look back on it now, I don’t think I ever loved him.
Then I remembered my father, who had these crazy moments, informing me in a letter that he no longer thought of me as his son.
I was beyond being hurt by these memories. I took my anti-depressant twice daily, after breakfast and before going to bed. Nothing touched me these days, not much, not deeply, and not, so I thought, more in despair than hope, ever again.
The super’s wife came into H’s bedroom and said something to B in Chinese, something harsh apparently, her eyes angry, perhaps worried. He figured she was asking him to leave, which he had every intention of doing, but for some reason he didn’t move, was not quite ready to make the effort. That wasn’t it exactly. His spirit had already taken the necessary steps, had risen from the bed, had thanked the woman for showing him the apartment, had returned to his car, which had a popped lock on the driver’s side and an open space where the tape deck had been, had started up the car and driven through the usual relentless traffic to his parking garage, had walked the two plus blocks to his co-op apartment (his home, his safe place), opening both locks and closing them again from the inside, making himself a Scotch and water, putting a Kronus Quartet CD on the player, remoting on the TV without sound, lying down on the couch, calling up from the deep an opening sentence for the impending story about H he somehow needed to tell. That sentence, the first he had conjured in a long time, gave him a sense of justification, kept the demons on their best behavior.
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