Yours sincerely,
Caring and Companionable in Chelsea
And those were the first volleys of what turned out to be an extended correspondence between C&C and the man who signed himself Lonely on Livingston, whose name, he eventually confided, was Saul. Two and a half months passed before they made an appointment to meet the following Friday night—it was her idea not his—and she wondered as the time got closer if she had set herself up for disappointment.
They agreed to meet at a café on the outskirts of Soho at 6 o’clock, each to be dressed all in black to facilitate identification. The first plan was to wear yellow carnations in their buttonholes, but the idea was more clichéd than she could bear and since she had just gotten herself a new black sweater, the in-black plan was a last-minute modification. No matter, it was still too “Shop Around the Corner” and therefore a tad embarrassing.
In any event, she wanted to observe Saul first, see what kind of appearance he made no matter the beauty of his spirit, before she presented herself. To this purpose, she arrived ten minutes late and peered warily through the blue-tinted window of the café. A little more than half the tables were occupied, mostly in groups of twos. There were a few single women waiting apparently for dates or husbands, but not an unattended man (dressed in whatever color) waiting for a woman in black. Saul had seemed so eager when she suggested the meeting and yet, unless there had been some mix-up regarding the place, he had seemingly not turned up. More likely, he was just delayed. A meeting postponed as long as theirs was fraught with all kinds of anxiety. Instead of entering the café and taking a table, she decided to walk around—look into shop windows—to give Saul opportunity to arrive at Café Retro before she made her entrance.
She was four blocks away when she hurried back, not wanting to make Saul feel that he had been deserted. Again, she peered through the window to assess the crowd. This time there was a man seated by himself, a man of Saul’s age perhaps, which he said was forty-seven, interestingly ugly if something of a pudge, but he was wearing faded jeans and a dark blue (almost black) turtleneck. He was studying the menu as if he were trying to decipher a coded message.
She entered the restaurant and walked slowly past the man’s table, before seating herself at the vacant one adjacent to his. He had not looked up when she passed him, which meant what? She was in no mood to guess. Which meant most likely that he was not expecting someone. Or, as his correspondence indicated, he was painfully shy.
It was only after the waitress arrived to take his order that he raised his head. She looked over and smiled and the man (Saul?) nodded to her in acknowledgment.
Collecting herself as it were, menu in tow, she edged over to his table, but his head was down again and she had to clear her throat to attract his attention. “May I join you?” she asked, a question he studied a moment without answering. She tried again. “Are you waiting for someone?” she asked.
“I’ve been waiting for someone all my life,” he said.
That confused her, but as she was already in the process of joining him, she took a seat. “You’re not dressed in black,” she said.
He gave his clothes a surreptitious glance before answering. “I guess not,” he said.
The waiter was hovering so she ordered a decaf latte and a blueberry-apricot tart while her companion glowered at the menu in apparent disappointment. He eventually settled unhappily on a medium-rare burger and an iced tea. “These places never have what I want,” he said.
“What do you want that they don’t have?” she asked.
“That’s just it,” he said. “I never know what I want until I see it on the menu.”
“And so there may be nothing that you want,” she said. “Or something so out of the ordinary …” She left the sentence unfinished rather than say something impolite.
After about a half-hour of missed cues and mostly nonsequential conversation, she began to look over her shoulder for the possible emergence of the real Saul. And yet every once in a while, her companion would allude to something that very possibly referred to some matter from their five-month correspondence. It was disconcerting, and she considered asking him directly who he was, but the context, if there was one, restrained her. She liked the way their mutual shyness played off against the other.
“I don’t usually invite myself to other people’s tables,” she said or told friends she said after the event, or non-event, was over.
“I never thought you did,” he said, finishing his hamburger before she finished her tart.
When he got up to leave, he offered his hand to shake, wiping it thoroughly with his napkin before presenting it. The gesture seemed to parody itself, but she played along. At least that’s the way it happened in the story she told to her handful of confidantes.
Saul was silent—no e-mail from him the next day or the day after that, no apology, no explanation—and she assumed (what else?) that this episode in her life was concluded.
She spent a few restless nights concocting scenarios as to why Saul had stood her up, the worst of them infiltrating her dreams, and then she willed herself not to think about him at all.
The following week, out of some impulse she didn’t understand, though perhaps it’s the nature of impulses not to be understood, she revisited the café she had been to the week before. She had hoped to show up at the same time as last week, but the impulse to revisit, which took over at the last possible minute, delayed her arrival.
There were no hesitations, no peering through windows, this time around. She merely entered the café as if she was meeting someone there (well, she was, wasn’t she?) and headed directly toward his table.
She was all but positive that the man sitting alone at the same table with his back to the door was the same man she had joined last week and she took the seat across from him before discovering to her unacknowledged embarrassment that it was someone else altogether.
“How are you doing?” he said as if he knew her.
“Do I know you?” she asked. “You do look familiar.”
“I was wondering the same thing myself,” he said. “Jay.” He offered his hand, but she had already gotten up.
“I thought you were someone else,” she said. “Sorry.”
“I am someone else,” he said, “but you’re welcome to stay. There aren’t any other free tables.”
She hesitated, was about to turn around and check out the room, but that seemed rude and so she slid back into her seat.
It was the same ritual as last week except with a different partner and at the end of the meal, Jay, if that was his real name, insisted on taking her check.
“I’m the intruder,” she said. “I ought to buy you lunch.” She held out her hand, expecting to be rebuffed but instead found herself holding both checks.
“I’ll leave the tip,” he said.
They walked out of the restaurant together and she said goodbye at the door, thanking him in her coolest manner for the pleasure of his company. Nevertheless, he walked along with her to the next corner, oblivious to her well-mannered dismissal of him.
“When will I see you again?” he asked at the corner.
She smiled, less at him than at the opportunity he was offering her. “Never, I hope,” she said, and instead of walking off as she planned, putting as much distance between them as possible, she waited for a response.
He seemed momentarily dismayed, though that may have been an illusion encouraged by expectation. In the next moment, the post-dismayed moment, he put his hand on her shoulder and urged her gently toward him. It all happened so fast or so slowly she didn’t have time to react or then again had too much time. Then he kissed her on the top of the head as if she were his niece for godssake, and moved off.
“Hey,” she called after him.
After a moment’s hesitation, he dutifully turned around and seemed to be returning without actually moving toward her. Then she realized that it was she who was approaching him. “Why did you do that?” she
asked, arms crossed in front of her. She took no enduring responsibility for the belligerence in her tone.
He shrugged, then apologized half-heartedly and walked off. If she hadn’t felt compelled to get back to the office, she might have gone after him and given him the shaking he deserved. She hadn’t met a man she disliked so much in the longest time.
Lois developed a theory that Saul 1 and Saul 2 were somehow in cahoots with the probably pseudonymous Jay, who appeared at the same table Saul 2 sat at the week before. No acceptable explanation offered itself. Of course gratuitous nastiness could explain almost anything.
She promised herself that she would not return to the café at the same time the following Thursday, but when the time came she could barely keep herself from turning up. She had lunch in at her desk and read ten pages of a new Nadine Gordimer novel, actually reading five pages twice so as not to lose her way.
When she announced to her therapist that she was proud of her restraint he seemed unimpressed. “If it were me, I would have been curious to find out who was going to show up this time,” he said.
“I don’t like being the butt of someone’s deranged idea of a joke,” she said.
“How can you be sure it’s a joke?” he asked.
“I just know,” she said, regretting what seemed now like a missed opportunity.
The next day she appeared at Café Retro at the usual time—this time she was actually five minutes early—and found her table occupied by three women. There was no one there she recognized; eventually, she took a table by herself in the back.
It was one of those days when nothing on the menu appealed to her so she settled for a Caesar Salad and a Bloody Mary for her lunch, the salad to make herself feel virtuous and the drink as a reward for suffering the constraints of virtue.
If she were a food critic, and she had done some restaurant reviewing in the past, the salad would have gotten a C-plus/B-minus, losing points for the packaged croutons. For a second or two, she harbored the illusion that someone was casting a pall over her salad and eventually she looked up to see a familiar figure hovering alongside her table.
When he took a seat before asking permission and without invitation she realized that what she thought was a second anchovy had only been an aspect of his shadow. “Do you mind?” he said.
And what if she did? “Yes,” she whispered. Though she had not forgotten her instinctive dislike of him, she was also, if unexpectedly, glad to see him.
“I’d all but given up running into you again,” he said.
“This is not my usual place,” she said. And then she told him as economically as possible, the story of the two Sauls, searching his face to see if any of this was news to him.
The story seemed to confuse him and he questioned her on several of the details, seeming to miss the point or make something else, something more elaborate and complicated, out of it altogether.
“I’ll tell you why I don’t believe your story,” he said. “Someone like you would never take out a Personals ad.”
His presumptions knew no bounds, she decided, though perhaps his remark was meant as some kind of oblique compliment. “Why wouldn’t somebody like me take out a Personals ad?” she let herself ask.
If she were pressing for a compliment, if that’s what it was—she had the idea that she was trying to decode him—she should have known in advance, shouldn’t she, that he was hardly the kind of person to honor such unworthy requests. “You just wouldn’t,” he said.
She laughed at the persistence of his evasiveness. On the other hand, she tended to believe that he was on to her in some not easily defined way. Though she had of course taken out the ad, it was an uncharacteristic gesture. “Thank you, I think,” she said.
“If what I said translated into a compliment,” he said, “it was not exactly intended.”
“What an obnoxious thing to say,” she said. She found herself eating her barely tolerable salad in slow motion so as not to finish before his order even arrived.
When the waiter asked if he might remove her plate, which had three orphaned leaves and a crouton remaining, she waved him off. There was work still to do. Ignoring the tempting fry dangled in her direction, she choked down the last leaf of grass, and mopped up the dregs of the dressing with a wedge of bread. Noting that he was halfway through his chicken and mozzarella sandwich, she signaled the waiter over, ordered a cup of coffee and studied the dessert menu as if she might be quizzed on it afterward.
“What looks good?” he asked.
“I never order dessert,” she said. “Reading the description is pleasure enough.”
After he claimed the check, getting no resistance from her this time around, she got herself together to leave. She expected him to ask for her number while planning to deny his request, the language of her refusal gradually forming itself in her mind.
“See you around,” he said.
Their encounter felt incomplete and she continued to sit across from him, imagining herself telling him that he was so not her type, he was beyond hope of alteration. It annoyed her no end that he refused to give her the opportunity she had been anticipating. “Well, goodbye,” she said. “I forget your name.”
“Sometimes I forget it myself,” he said.
This time, leaving the restaurant more or less together, they went off in opposite directions. She couldn’t help feeling somewhat insulted by his decision to honor her feelings in regard to him.
At therapy that evening, she talked about the incident with Leo, who seemed inappropriately amused at her account. “Let me get this straight,” he said. “You’re angry at this man you barely know because he didn’t give you the opportunity to hurt his feelings.”
“When you put it that way,” she said, “it makes me sound like a bad person. All I wanted … well, maybe I did want to hurt him a little. He was so arrogant and he led me on. Anyway, I don’t have to ever see the son of a bitch again.”
“And unless you return to that café, you probably won’t,” Leo said. “So what is all this anger about?”
She was disappointed at Leo for being less than his most perspicacious self. “If you think it’s because I’m interested in that, you’re barking up the wrong tree this time around.”
He was silent for a change, gave her one of his severe looks. “Did I say that I thought you were interested in this guy you went back to the restaurant a second time to see?” he said. “I don’t recall saying anything of the kind. If this guy doesn’t matter, let’s talk about what does. In any event, I’m the person you’re angry at now.”
“I don’t like it when you manipulate what I say,” she said, struck by the recognition that she had said the same thing almost verbatim two sessions ago. “I’m not angry at you, damn it.” Hearing herself, she smiled ruefully. The guy does matter in some way, she thought, unwilling to say it, unwilling to let the thought linger. But he shouldn’t. “Can we change the subject?” she said. “OK?”
The following Wednesday, she went back to Café Retro with a colleague who had never been there before and was disappointed not to see her tormentor at his usual table.
About halfway through the meal—the food less inspired than the PR she had given it—she noticed the man she thought of as Saul 2, eating alone about five tables away. She got up abruptly, excused herself (or didn’t) and sidled between tables with exceeding grace (she imagined) to ask the question that had been obsessing her.
She had to clear her throat to catch his attention. “Oh hi,” he said, looking up, held by the short leash (she thought) of some hugely diverting internal life.
“Do you know a man about your age with a reddish beard who calls himself Jay?” she asked.
“No,” he said too quickly. “I don’t think so. Should I?”
She didn’t know him well enough to accuse him of being a liar. “I don’t know if you ever told me your name,” she said.
“I guess I didn’t,” he said.
“Look, if you see Jay,
would you give him a message for me?” she said. “Would you tell him …?” But there was no message she wanted to leave and besides the reluctant messenger seemed to have retreated into the sanctuary of his inner life. She returned to her table without saying goodbye.
Was it the next day? More than likely several days passed before she got the unexpected phone call she had somehow been waiting for. The voice was familiar, though not so familiar that she placed it immediately. “I understand that you wanted to hear from me,” he said after first establishing that she was no other than herself.
“Now that I hear your voice,” she said, “I’m not sure that I do.”
“OK,” he said. “Look, I’ve been invited to a book party tonight—I’m not good at phone invitations—but if you’re into crowds and finger foods, I wouldn’t mind having you along.”
“I don’t know,” she said. “Who’s the writer?”
“It doesn’t matter,” he said. “You never heard of him. If you don’t want to go, we can do this another time. Or never.”
“You bring an exceptional lack of grace to even the smallest things,” she said. “Will you pick me up or do I have to meet you there?”
“I don’t mind picking you up if that’s what you want,” he said, “though I think it might be more fun if we arrive at the party separately and pretend to be former lovers who had just run into each other after twenty years apart.”
“Uh-huh,” she said, almost amused by the idea. “And for whom are we performing this childish charade?”
A compromise was negotiated. He would pick her up at The Magazine and take her to the party—that is, take her to the building in which the party was taking place—and one of them would go on up while the other would walk around the block or go across the street for coffee before making an entrance.
The problem was, their agreement hadn’t stipulated which of them would do which and they got into a mild dispute on arrival when Jay suggested that she go up first. “I think I’d rather be the one getting the cup of coffee,” she said.
You, or the Invention of Memory Page 12
