* * *
—
“What’s up?” Phil asked.
“My mother is dying and I don’t know what to do.”
“What’s up?”
“I’m a fake. And I’m not going to get away with it.”
“What’s up?”
“It’s a beautiful night, don’t you think?”
“What’s up?”
“Phil, I haven’t seen you in two or three months. And I’m not ready to forgive you for that.”
“What’s up?”
“The opposite of down?”
“What’s up?”
“I’m afraid of this park. Bad things happen in this park.”
“What’s up?”
“I need to eat.”
“What’s up?”
“I feel guilty because I forget about the war.”
“What’s up?”
“I just want to be satisfied, and I don’t know if that will ever happen.”
“What’s up?”
“It’s getting late, isn’t it? I feel like it’s getting late.”
* * *
—
But, Leo, Simon thought, I will never love you like that.
* * *
—
Sarah was not used to being up so late. The city, she felt, had entered its vulnerable hours, not quite awake and not quite asleep, not quite loud but unable to be silent. The line blurring between what was thought and what was said.
She thought briefly of Ashley and Amanda, that old life that would probably still be hers in the morning. She wondered if Lindsay was still at the party, or if she had gone home. Maybe Lindsay would be a new part of the old life. Maybe the old life could have new parts.
The streets were getting less and less crowded as people took their confessions indoors. Walking through the East Village, Sarah could see that many lights were still on, and even if they were off, that didn’t necessarily mean that the people inside were asleep. Murmurs and moans, conversations and confessions in many forms seeped through the walls and into the streets. Sarah could hear some of the shouting coming from the street-level apartments: “You never loved me!” “This is what I want you to do.” “You are too good for me, and I’ve always known it.” She did not stop to listen. These things had everything to do with the night, but nothing to do with her.
When the streets had been more crowded, Sarah had been overwhelmed by the immensity of humanity, how many of us there are and how little we can affect. Now, with the streets emptying out, she was struck by a different kind of immensity—the immensity of space and building, the immensity of all that’s around us. It didn’t make her feel inconsequential, as it normally might have. Instead she found some comfort in the immensity. It guaranteed that she could always wander. And it also guaranteed that she’d never have to wander too far.
She followed Eighth Street until she got to the park. It, too, was emptying out. People looked exhausted from speaking, but glad about what had been said. On one bench, two guys held on to each other, one of them clasping, the other one trying to comfort. On another bench, a young woman cried silently, shaking her head in disbelief. But not everyone was sad or longing. Other couples kissed under lamplight—some extending the kiss beneath their clothing. Sarah saw one guy watching it all, looking more exhausted than most. She’d had no desire to talk to anyone for hours, ever since she’d left Lindsay. But now the impulse returned. As she walked over, he looked up at her. He didn’t say anything until she’d arrived.
“What’s up?” he asked.
“Not much,” she said. “And everything.”
Because wasn’t that the truth of it? In terms of the immensities, nothing much was happening to Sarah. But on her own terms, things were.
“What’s up with you?” she asked back.
It was the first time the whole night that a stranger had offered Phil this. And now that it had been asked, he realized it was what he had been waiting for. It was what he needed. And he couldn’t figure out how to respond.
“I’d like to be able to give you an answer,” he said. “I’d like to know.”
He began to tell her everything that had happened that night—all the people he’d asked, all the answers he’d received. Stewart and the others were long gone; he was the only one of his group left in the park. It was as if he had lost something here, and he had to find it before he could leave. But he wasn’t sure what it was, or what it looked like.
“It’s a strange night,” Sarah said. Then she told Phil about the party, about leaving, about wandering. She told him about the vulnerable hours, about what it was like to be lit by a multitude of stars instead of a single sun.
“It’s loneliness,” he said. “These hours bring out the loneliness.”
“I’m not sure,” Sarah told him. “I used to think it was loneliness, when I thought about it at all. But maybe it’s just the fear of loneliness. I think that makes us more vulnerable. But tonight I don’t mind being alone. If you let go of everyone else, it’s amazing what you can see.”
“And who you can meet,” Phil added.
Hours ago, Sarah would have thought this was a flirtation. But now it was just an observation. A late-night, early-morning observation in the middle of an empty park and a full city.
“I’m Sarah,” she said, offering her hand.
“I’m Phil,” he said, taking it.
“I’ll be here tomorrow at sunset.”
“In that case, so will I.”
And with that, they parted. Because Sarah wanted her wandering to end at home. Because she wanted to start the new part of her old life. Because she realized now: If you can conquer the vulnerable hours, you can allow yourself to be yourself, to go forward. You breathe in the night air, and it sustains you.
TRACK FIFTEEN
Twelve Months
JANUARY
What a dispiriting time to start the new year. We wrap ourselves in layers upon layers, and still there’s always some part of us that’s exposed. We want the feel of corduroy, of yarn, of flannel, but all we get is ice. It’s only the start of winter. Perhaps that’s the worst part: the knowledge that winter isn’t close to over, that we are going to have weeks more of this, at a time when each week itself feels like a winter. Every now and then, a bird will land on the fire escape, and I will think, You fool. We turn on all the halogens, try to trick ourselves out of the dimness, but it has settled in our bones. I don’t want to wake up, I say every morning, and you say, Wake up. The floor is cold, the sky is dark. I turn on the bathroom light and don’t recognize this as the life I want. You turn on the radio—it tells us the temperature and makes things sound even worse than they are. Wind chill, we’re warned. You make coffee. I drink it. I want us to barricade ourselves inside. I don’t want the world today; what I have in this room is good enough. Wake up, you say. I can’t, I tell you. I can’t. It’s just too cold.
FEBRUARY
Here it is, placed perfectly beside the unlucky thirteenth. The light is staying longer, but I hardly notice, because it’s still so cold. People who invest their hopes in a groundhog get what they deserve. It snows the morning of the fourteenth, and for a moment, I feel a perfect lightness. You call me from your office, ask if I’m looking out the window. The cabs are the only cars on the street, their brake lights studding the smudge-white like rubies. We consider our plans, the reservations we’ve made. Plans: as if we’re building a house, as if we need a blueprint. Reservations: as if we’ve always had some hesitation, some doubt. I have reservations about our reservations, I say. Why spend the evening with other candlelit couples? I would rather see the snow gathering in your hair. We need to hurry, before the snowfall becomes an accumulation, before the lightness turns heavy. It is the shortest month, and we are at its pivot. There is a card in my pocket for you, but I haven’t s
igned it yet.
MARCH
Some days you’re the lion, some days you’re the lamb. And likewise with me. The winter has left us tired, just as likely to bite as to comfort with woolly words. You’ve lost your scarf, then try to justify it by saying you don’t need it any longer. Color slowly returns to the world, and then it snows again. I buy you a new scarf, because it’s on sale. You swear you don’t need it. I start to wonder why children are told to draw the skies as blue, when so often they are simply gray. In fact, the sky outside is the color of paper right now. We need to go away, you say. I reply, Spring break, woo-hoo! March invites sarcasm. We were never the drunk kids on the beach. We wouldn’t have been able to find the party house. I was thinking something like Paris, you say. Is there anything like Paris besides Paris? I ask. This is not the right response. I make the lamb swallow the lion. Really? I say. Could we?
APRIL
So here it is at last. I walked home tonight and the clock on the bank told me at six-forty-five that it was seventy-one degrees. Since I was in a reveling mood, I reveled in the fact that I live in a neighborhood where the bank clock tells me the temperature. First real day of spring, twenty days after spring was supposed to have begun. Students blooming in Washington Square Park. Every bench taken, people lying on the don’t-step-on-the-grass. In the center, the concentric circles of watching, ringed so tightly you can never gather what the crowd is looking at unless you join it. I never join it; such clusters make me think of drugs, philosophy, and Hacky Sack, and I could never manage to Hacky Sack, not once, not even on the first day of spring. So I head past the arch, past the strollers and the strollers. I head home to you, and find you’ve already opened the windows. I love days that are caught between heat and air-conditioning, days that provide their own utility. I know this won’t last. Listen—here comes the first crack of thunder, sounding like a car falling from the sky and hitting the ground. Tomorrow’s forecast calls for rain, colder, maybe nice by the weekend. I can’t complain, I won’t complain, but I will entreat: Shower us, April, with more days like this, so true and momentary. Winter has lasted too long. Summer comes too soon.
MAY
It’s this morning, I tell you over our usual quick breakfast. We grab our cameras and head out; the closer we get, the more caps and gowns we see, until every configuration has a soon-to-be graduate at its center. The gowns are a ritual, I know, but I think they also work to remind everyone whose day it is, and why every family needs to pause for something bigger than its own disagreements. Look at all the happiness here. Later we will compare our photographs, and make up stories to go with them. This girl is the first in her family to have gone to college. This man worked the night shift so his son could major in semiotics. This couple hasn’t seen each other since their divorce four years ago. Only when their daughter’s back is turned do the uncertainty and anger surface, complicated by the love they have in common for the girl in the purple gown. I skipped my graduation—I was already on to the next part of my life. You go to reunions. I take pictures of you as you take pictures. You are so proud of the capped and the gowned, each and every one of them. I am stuck thinking about how we will never be young like this. Not together. We are already beyond this. We are already fending for ourselves. To these students, we are the sign of things to come.
JUNE
We are a hundred blocks away from our home, and we decide to walk. The evening feels like dawn, the last traces of sun still there as the television hour begins. The air opens itself up to music, and as we walk within it, I imagine each person we pass as a musical note, adding up to this sidewalk symphony, this combination of hot and cool and night and day that still feels new even though we’ve felt it hundreds of times before. You tell me how this would’ve been the week that you headed off to camp, when you were young. You tell me about your parents dropping you off at the bus, about how sad and scared you were at first, and then, as the years went on, how you couldn’t wait to see your friends, how your parents became an afterthought, your wave to them perfunctory. We can imagine now how it must have felt for them—that tug at their hearts, and then the freedom as the bus rolled away. Eight weeks of a quiet house. Eight weeks alone together. Eight weeks of nights like this. I cannot be tired as we walk and walk and walk. I cannot be tired as I listen and listen and listen. On nights like this, you can skip over the tired part. On nights like this, you slip right into the dream.
JULY
It’s time for an escape, but since everyone else is escaping, there isn’t much of an escape to be had. Not from the city, not from each other. As our car trudges toward Cape Cod, you say, I’m not really feeling the independence, are you? It’s much safer for us to drive together when it’s cold out. Now it’s the tale of someone who likes air-conditioning stuck with someone who likes the windows down. Our lack of velocity pushes it in your favor, but I can’t help it—I roll the window down anyway and hear the traffic report coming from the car next to us, hear the woman telling her kids to stop jumping around. There isn’t much hope, it seems. Our conversation has slowed to the speed of the traffic. I offer you grapes. You say you don’t want any grapes. Then, six minutes later, you say you want some grapes. Do you want me to peel them for you? I ask, and you say, I don’t even know what that means. I want to change the song that’s playing. I don’t dare look at the map and offer another route. This is the way we’re going. Eventually we’ll get there. The only question is whether it will be worth it, or whether it’s already been ruined.
AUGUST
The only thing that can get us to leave the bedroom is when the circuit breaks, and one of us has to trudge to the fuse box to restart the apartment. It feels like someone’s left the oven door open—a slow, heat-worn suicide. We are running out of ice cream, ice cubes, ice packs. The air-conditioning unit sounds like it should be powering a battleship, and for hours at a time, it will take a time-out. We can’t bear the furnace of our bodies. It’s as if God is mocking all of the times we liked our sex sweaty, blazing, flush. Now we’re stuck in bed and neither of us wants to touch the other. Nothing personal, of course. It’s just too darn hot. Days like this, it feels like everything is already over. There is no longer any reason to move, no reason to say a word. We’ve become plants; all we want is to be watered. When the air conditioner kicks back in, we stand in front of it. We don’t touch each other; we just position ourselves there, full of such base gratitude.
SEPTEMBER
I want you to buy me school supplies. I want glue for my fingers and crayons for my back pocket and a piece of chalk so I can practice writing my name on the walls. I want to put leaves between sheets of wax paper and iron them, so they can hang on all the windows. I want my notebooks to be new again. I want that sensation of writing on the first page. I want you to tie apples to the trees so I can pick them. Then I want you to put one of the apples in a brown paper bag with a cheese sandwich and a carton of chocolate milk. I want to blow the milk with a straw until the bubbles pour out of the spout. Don’t be mad at me. Please let me do this. Give me this new beginning and I will sit at the front of class. I will pay attention. I will even clean the erasers. I will pick you for my team at recess and sit with you every day at lunch. Just let me sharpen these pencils first. Let me feel, just for a moment, that the world is precise, and I have exactly what I need.
OCTOBER
I am a star of the silent screen, miming words without ever saying them. You are a ghost beneath a sheet; I can’t tell your expression, if you’re even bothering to haunt me. Trick or treat? In this moment, I am dressed as the Big Bad Wolf, and you are a straw wall. No—wait—you’re brick. Trick or treat? We once went as peanut butter and jelly, but nobody got it—we needed two other people to be the bread. I’d been happy we’d found a costume that hadn’t involved hierarchy, because who wants to hear from the lips of a lover, I think you should be Robin. Trick or treat? Right now you could easily be Mount Rushmore, and I am the feather duster trying t
o make the mountains laugh. Or no. You are a glass of lemonade, perched proudly on a summer day. And I am the fly who buzzes around it, who can’t stay still. Trick or treat?
NOVEMBER
The leaves have fallen, and we need to decide if the bare trees are beautiful.
DECEMBER
Perhaps the thing we need to celebrate the most is getting through the year. Perhaps the greatest gift we can receive is to be given more, and to know that the more will be good. These are the carols I sing; these are the words I will use to garland our branches. Come here. Come close. Be with me. We often talk about the ups and downs, but mostly I feel the sideways slants, the near and the far. Maybe that is why what I want most this time of year is stillness, and you there with me for the quiet, breathing part. Let’s turn off the lights, turn off the computer, turn off the music, keep the door closed. Let’s light a single candle and walk through our lives. I want you, but more than that, I want to be with you. Up and down, sideways, near and far, a new angle every day. The year is over before we’ve known what to do with it. But that’s okay, you see. Take my hand and let’s walk blindly into another. That is what we do.
19 Love Songs Page 20
