Traveling Light

by Thalasinos, Andrea

  Roger was stronger, too. So were the flies she couldn’t kill and the recurring plantar wart on the bottom of her heel for which she lacked the endurance to follow through with the directions on the package and tend to every night.

  She smoothed back her hair and sighed. “Dendron,” Eleni likened her hair to the tree-like seaweed that washed ashore on their ancestral island within view of the Turkish coast. Her relatives had hopped from one tiny island to another only to then be stranded with eight million people between two rivers on the other side of the world. Such was her inspiration for creation of the Center—to gain understanding and perspective and maybe even to bridge the gap between grandparents who’d been shepherds on a remote island with no running water and a granddaughter with a Ph.D., who taught at a college, was married to kseni and lived in Manhattan.

  Paula’s stylist had promised transmutation through a new hair-straightening product. But product isn’t alchemy. Not the miracle tears allegedly cried from an icon of Panayia, witnessed by an old widow living on the sun-bleached island of Kos, where some still hang out the bloody sheet after a wedding night. Paula wound back her hair and clipped it even though it exposed the gray roots. Damn, there were so many things to worry about. Her bangs had spiraled like bedsprings to her hairline; it looked like her grandmother’s 1920 immigrant passport photo.

  Roger didn’t mind Paula’s hair. Curly, frizzy, straight, he didn’t care. Neither did he care if she was fat or thin or wore makeup. For months they’d avoided eye contact, and she wondered if he could pick her out of a police lineup. Sometimes comfort is born of neglect—a fine line between acceptance and not caring at all.

  Roger was the strongest yet most fragile man she’d every known. He’d take a bullet for her yet wouldn’t move the piles of crap off his bed to clear space for her. Shoulder-high stacks of astro- and particle physics journals served as his foot- and headboards; piles of clothes draped over chairs to form haystacks. The closets were packed and rendered useless long before Paula’d arrived. Yet she’d doggedly believed that the magic of those first months of courtship (along with a Greek church wedding) had formed a sacred union. Her commitment was such that she’d never once doubted that someday one of them would bury the other.

  Her first glimpse of Roger in Christoff’s living room years ago had left her thinking that he looked “humanoid.” His shiny pink head and sharp-ridged cheekbones made the skin look newly stretched—dewy, like he’d just stepped out of a pod where he’d been spawned. But, except for Heavenly and Tony, Roger was the only person with whom she didn’t have to fake a laugh.

  She was enthralled by his electric blue eyes—alight from years of peering deep within the recesses of the universe, into the spaces between particles—and even more by how his penetrating gaze sought that which bound her together. From that first meeting on, his unusually intense stare made her knees relax and part ever so slightly. “The urge to merge,” he used to joke.

  Roger’s eyes were framed by white eyebrows, those you’d expect to see on Santa. After they’d make love Paula would run a finger over one and then the other in wonderment at their silky fur. She’d marveled at the tenderness in her heart. This was the shard that pierced—that he cherished her in a way her parents hadn’t, in a way no one had. She’d kneel on the couch on the lookout for Roger after he phoned from his office at Columbia saying he was on his way. Like a joy-struck, besotted dog at the window, twitching with anticipation for the first signs of her master. Even the sounds of Roger rummaging upstairs at all hours of the night in his vampire way were comforting. It was a landing spot she’d fought long and hard to find. And while she was prepared to do battle to make this one work, little had Paula known that Roger would require full surrender and retreat.

  And so it would be until the day she left for lunch and never came back.

  * * *

  The first time she stepped into the foyer of Roger’s brownstone she’d caught a whiff of musty basement odor. As Roger unlocked the door and stepped inside, he must have had second thoughts, and then turned, using his large frame to block Paula’s view.

  “Hey—what are you doing?” She’d chuckled and turned it into a game by poking him where she knew he was ticklish. As he ducked and grabbed his sides, she glanced past his shoulder, eager to see what he didn’t want her to. The cardboard boxes.

  “You moving?” It was an innocent enough question.

  “No.”

  She’d squinted in dim light to get a better look. “Looks like you are.”

  “Ummm … I’m just reorganizing—ignore all of this,” he issued the disclaimer, and seemed edgy. She’d never seen him unsure or tense.

  As her eyes adjusted to the darkness, she panned the foyer. There was a lot to ignore. Boxes piled several high, stacks of academic journals, some to the top of her head.

  “Most of this was my parents’.”

  Peeking around the corner, she spotted a pile of folded Oriental rugs stacked on top of a piano (she could see the legs) so high they grazed the white plaster ceiling medallion. It looked like a madman’s warehouse.

  “I’m sorting,” he’d explained. “Cleaning—I hadn’t planned on company.”

  She looked at him. The comment stung. She was on the verge of saying, Hey, bucko, you invited me here, but didn’t. A self-imposed gag order set into motion with a silent agreement.

  “‘Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain,’” Roger deflected her with a joke. It worked; she laughed. “And don’t worry,” he said, looking deep into her with those eyes of his, “If we get married we’ll sort this all out and make it our place.” He’d lowered his face, his breath tickling her skin.

  “Marriage?” she joked, play-shoving him back. She then stepped onto the tops of his boat-like shoes, facing him as he began walking her out the door. She’d slipped her arms around his neck and drew him closer. “Who said anything about marriage?”

  And so she’d laughed along with her witty beau. Who keeps a tower of three-legged broken chairs, tangled and intertwined like a strand of DNA? A thick layer of frost-like dust like that doesn’t accumulate overnight? But like many women hopelessly mired in the throes of early hormonal love, Paula turned a deaf ear, instead hearing only refrains of “love will find a way” whirling about in her poor love-starved heart.

  The next ten years played out so bizarrely that she couldn’t have explained it with a gun held to her head. One can only explain what they understand. It had been an out-of-the-blue-freak-thing-that-she’d-never-in-a-million-years-seen-coming. But what bride gets married thinking a cardboard box filled with two hundred can openers (saved just in case the one in the kitchen drawer breaks) would be more important than her?

  Even after all these years she’d still bump into people who’d swear, “God, Paula, that wedding of yours was the most lovely, heartfelt one I’ve ever been to.” Then her heart would rush with hope. Their words were sincere enough, but chilling. As if the wicked fairy of Sleeping Beauty had been in attendance; perhaps Paula had pricked her finger on the spinning wheel. But she hadn’t felt a thing that afternoon and instead marveled at how she could be so lucky and that finally, finally, her time had come.

  But like the fairy tale, it didn’t take long for Paula to sink into a silent sleep.

  * * *

  The cell phone buzzed in her black leather purse. “Fuck.” Paula turned away from the window, cigarette burned clear down to her knuckles. What now? She’d just started to unwind after Christoff’s warning. She looked back out the window, resting her forehead in her hand. Ignore it. Maybe it was Roger calling about the NSF grant. Even so, he wouldn’t call. He was too calculatingly cheap about wasting cell-phone minutes. “What’s the fuss? I’ll see you later,” he’d dismiss. “Go ahead; waste your minutes.” They’d always kept their money separate.

  Thank God the phone finally stopped. She sighed and watched as birds gathered, chased each other, and then flew off. Did they ever lose their way? She watched
one flapping its wings in a puddle next to the bench. Were they ever afraid of getting lost? Did they make friends? If they did, how did they ever find each other again in the vastness of the sky?

  A voice from down on the sidewalk made her look. A middle-aged blond woman chatted and strolled arm in arm with a much taller man who was smiling shyly. How she liked men with shy smiles. Roger’s smile had been like that. The woman sported a yellow plastic tote bag she swung seemingly without a care in the world. What must their lives be like, the stuff nobody sees? Who would suspect how she and Roger lived?

  Without thinking, she shoved up the double-hung window farther and switched elbows. Thick air collided with the bone-dry air-conditioned room. The din of street noise was calming, horns from everywhere blended into one long complaint. Bus exhaust and urine, aromas of week-old garbage in alleys across the street, rushed in like a humid belch.

  Her desk phone rang and it startled her. No one ever called.

  “Shit.” Maybe it was Christoff again, newly baptized as Mr. Micromanager.

  Mashing the cigarette butt, she waved away the smell and shut the window. Her tight black cotton skirt bunched up around her hips; it was roomier a month ago in the fitting room at Bloomingdale’s. She yanked it back down to the tops of her knees. Her underwear felt like a girdle; a new roll of fat hung over the top elastic.

  Paula picked up. “Queens County DHSS.” It was Celeste.

  “Who died?” Paula’s pitch lowered on the last word.

  “No one yet,” Celeste mimicked.

  Paula’s best friend was nicknamed Heavenly by fifth-grade boys after a science class on astronomy, as she was the only girl with fully developed breasts—heavenly bodies. The name stuck, even with her parents and eventually Tony, her husband, too.

  “You busy?” Heavenly asked.

  Paula gave a nasty laugh. She glanced at the seventy unopened e-mails on the computer screen. “I should be.”

  “Hey—take a long lunch,” Celeste coaxed. “I’m at the hospital. Sounds like you need a break anyway.”

  Paula snorted. “Yeah, something like that.”

  “They just brought in an elderly man speaking Greek,” Heavenly said. “Looks indigent, probably homeless.”

  “Greek? Who?” Paula’s mind ticked off all of the old people in Eleni’s neighborhood in the vicinity of the hospital.

  “Never seen him,” Heavenly said. “No ID. Can you come translate?”

  Paula thought of all the old Greeks. She’d never once heard of anyone being homeless. Even if a Greek managed to get everyone to hate them over the course of a lifetime, someone still took them in. It was more shameful to leave them to the kseni than to face down a lifelong grudge. Surely she would have heard about it from Eleni.

  Heavenly explained that the man had been walking with a large black dog before he’d collapsed. A Korean grocer on Northern Boulevard reported seeing him listing to the left as he walked the dog on a rope leash and carried several plastic grocery bags. The man first sat and then lay down on the sidewalk just under the storefront window. Thinking it bad for business, the owner called the police. Squad cars arrived. Next paramedics and Animal Control were on the scene. There was a commotion before they whisked him off to Queens County Hospital. He’d become agitated, calling to the dog as they struggled to lift him onto the gurney. The dog had bitten one of the officers and fought like a wild animal against the grab leash until Animal Control could subdue him. “How fast can you get here?” Celeste asked.

  Paula hesitated. Curiously, her stomach burned with the old sickness, as she called it. An unease not felt in years, normally elicited by tense childhood family dinners and hurt feelings she’d have to hide or risk getting slapped. “Stop with the long face, katsika [goat face].” Vassili and Demos would sit elbow to elbow in white shirts so freshly starched they smelled like rice. Humid house aromas of lamb cooked with garlic and the oily cinnamon fragrance of moussaka. The brothers brooding as they shoveled down mouthfuls of yemisis, the rice mixture falling in flakes off their spoons. “Smile, goddamn it, for once. Fake it,” Vassili would come up for air to bark between mouthfuls. Paula’s stomach would fall to her knees. “Sit up straight,” Eleni would then correct. All forks would halt, eyes focusing on young Paula’s slouch. Once she inadvertently knocked over her milk, which loosed a flood of curses as to how she’d ruined yet another dinner, as if by that one mistake, a shaky little hand, their entire lives had become so miserably hard.

  The unease emanated from somewhere. Perhaps a muscle she’d not used for millennia. “You there?” Heavenly asked. “He won’t make sundown.” she whispered. “I need a name—a relative.”

  “Yeah.” Unease tickled inside Paula’s chest cavity.

  “Time is critical, miksa mou,” Celeste said, calling her my little snot face in Greek, an old nickname from childhood.

  “I’ll get a cab,” Paula said in a quiet voice.

  “Thanks, kiddo. I owe you.” Celeste paused. “You okay with this?” Heavenly was surprised by Paula’s reluctance.

  “I’ll call from the bridge.”

  For months she’d dodged Heavenly’s “you look sad” observations.

  Well, who the hell isn’t? Paula had wanted to carp back.

  “You know—it wouldn’t kill you to go talk to someone, Paula.”

  No, but it wouldn’t help either. Nothing could help. Speaking of it would be disloyal to Roger. She’d felt sworn to secrecy; no one knew, not even Celeste, though Paula could tell she’d found something odd about how Paula and Roger lived. Celeste and Tony had always figured Roger for an oddball.

  “Hey,” her husband, Tony, always the detective even when off duty, would break Roger’s balls on their way to dinner, “you guys got illegals up there, meth cooking in the bathtub?” to which Celeste would shoot him a don’t spoil dinner again or I’ll kill you face.

  At dinner Paula and Roger would each pay separately. So many times they’d swing by the brownstone to pick up the couple for an evening of seafood out on the Island, and it would be Paula, standing alone out on the front stoop. “Hey, Roger can’t make it, so I’m your date.” There was Paula alone again. Even when Roger would join them, Paula looked alone.

  Over time Paula had become masterful at hiding. “Roger prefers to meet people out for dinner,” she’d explain. “How about we take you guys out since you had us over last time?”

  But Paula’s composure had begun to unravel three weeks ago in the ladies’ room. She looked into the mirror to enjoy the reflection of her beloved and most precious of cameo pins, the carving of Psyche, the Greek goddess of the soul. To Paula’s horror, there was an empty oval in the gold setting where the cameo had been. Her jaw dropped. She’d stood staring under the unflattering fluorescent bathroom lighting, which makes even eighteen-year-olds look like hags. The emptiness bore past her collarbone and deep into soft tissue. She’d not been able to move, her mouth open, lips slack, like a stretched-out piece of elastic.

  She’d dashed into action, searching around the toilet area behind sweaty metal pipes. Flinging open doors, she retraced her steps, asking at the Welcome to NYU Center if anyone had turned in a cameo. An elderly white-haired woman patted Paula’s hand, saying, “Relax, dearie. Give it time. It’ll probably turn up.”

  She ventured out to McDonald’s on Fifth and then back to their brownstone—as if anything could be found there. The cameo had probably fallen down a sidewalk grate or been crushed unceremoniously under the wheels of a city bus. As Paula bent over, scouring the pavement, her insides gnawed, like she’d lost a finger. And though she’d unpinned the empty frame of the brooch and tucked it into her purse, she felt Psyche’s absence on her chest.

  Passersby paused at her posture, looking on the ground, too. “Lose something?” they asked, but she was too stricken to answer. Such was the fate of the carved piece of Italian helmet shell complete with the classic butterfly hovering just atop Psyche’s head—which had survived innumerable births, death
s, not to mention wars. The first piece of antique jewelry Paula had ever purchased. It had been on a six-month layaway in a junk shop in Berkeley, her reward for finishing the set of twelve-hour Ph.D. prelims. And while not her most expensive piece, it was the only one she’d have grabbed in the event of a house fire.

  She hung up the phone with Celeste. With newfound purpose Paula stuffed twenty-three conference submission papers into her bag, vowing that later she’d find a quiet bench in one of Manhattan’s hidden Victorian parks to review them. They’d been printed months ago and hauled around until their edges were bent and ratty. The shoulder strap rocked into its familiar groove as she rushed downstairs. She kept an eye peeled for Psyche on the gray cement stairs. Her bag tapped against her hip as if to hasten her along.

  Pushing open the front door of the building, Paula clutched her torso as she looked up to the sky. Explosive bursts of wind signaled an incoming rainstorm. It had gotten so gloomy that the park lights flipped on, twinkling through maple branches that seemed to bow toward their breaking point. Their leafy arms waved like lantern-carrying roadmen advising travelers to seek shelter.

  A red dragon-shaped kite swirled in arcs against the slate clouds just above one of the taller oaks in Washington Square. Its long tail streamed a flight path. Paula traced the string. It stopped at the higher branches. No desperate kid dancing to untangle or scramble up the tree trunk to get a leg up on the lower limbs. No telling how long the kite had lain in the upper branches of the oak’s canopy, waiting for the arrival of a storm front to trigger its flight.

  CHAPTER 2

  In bumper-to-bumper traffic, it took the cab almost an hour to reach the hospital. Paula lowered her head and scooted through the entrance of revolving doors, thinking she could sneak past a young security cop and a heavyset woman attendant encased in a bulletproof Plexiglas cube.

  “Ma’am,” the attendant called.

  Paula rushed toward the double doors in the ward where Celeste had an office.