by Peter Gadol
I kept up a stupid prolonged flirtation with one of my partners, who was married, which I am pretty sure Ezra never knew about while it was happening. My partner and I never had an actual tryst, and things cooled off, but my infatuation distracted me. The last year with Ezra was terrible. He kept saying he didn’t have a place in my life; he was a visitor. I’d tell him he was my life, but that sounded thin. I don’t have a place in my own life, he’d say, I’m a visitor there, too. I’d say that I didn’t know how to respond to that (or what he meant), and he’d snap: Why do you think you have to say anything? Some version of this conversation kept recurring. Then he’d say, I never wanted this house, it’s too much. I never wanted this garden, he’d say, or this view, and I’d say, You know that’s not true. You’re the one who always looked at the listings first. We weren’t making love. First tenderness left, then joy. When I got to my studio in the morning, I’d stretch out on a couch for a half hour with my eyes closed until I felt a yoke loosen across my shoulders. We agreed to try living apart for a time, although we knew this was less a trial than a prelude to our dissolution.
Ezra moved in to a small apartment up by the park and wanted to be free to see other people. He’d always been very sexual. I didn’t want to know about any of it, but eventually he told me when he came round to take care of the plants, and I didn’t interrupt him. The years fell away quickly, and we saw each other often; we were never out of each other’s lives. In many ways we grew closer again, confiding in each other once more, or, that is to say, he told me about the women he saw, none very seriously; I tended to tell him about my clients and projects. Ezra didn’t earn much as the assistant manager of the local bookstore, so I helped him out occasionally when he let me. He traveled with me to both of my parents’ funerals nine months apart. We met for dinner regularly, a movie sometimes. I cooked for him, he cooked for me. But I didn’t take him to dinner parties or events as my plus-one; he didn’t spend time with my friends. When we met up, it was always only the two of us. I never felt as centered as I did when I was driving back to the house on the hill after being in his company.
Whenever Ezra was involved with someone, we saw each other less. During these periods, I missed him but wanted him to settle down with someone new in a meaningful way. Only then would I be able to pursue my own happiness, then it would be my time; I can see now this was my thinking. The longest I’d ever gone without hearing from him was two weeks.
Two months ago in September, I hadn’t heard from Ezra for three weeks. I was busier than usual working on the conversion of a landmark insurance headquarters into a charter school. Something had happened between us—I won’t go into it—and I was trying to achieve some distance. When Ezra didn’t answer a series of texts, I thought, Well, I hope I like her.
Another week went by, and he still wasn’t answering my texts or calls, and I became worried. I dropped by his apartment. When I was knocking on his door, the property manager stepped out and said she assumed Ezra had gone away because he had missed his rent. This was very unusual. Weirdly though his car was still in his garage—she’d checked that morning. Ezra had known some dark days, and I didn’t think his depression ever became so unbearable that he’d harm himself, but I panicked. I had my key out before the property manager grabbed hers.
The wool blanket I’d given him for his last birthday was neatly folded across his made bed. Pillars of art books doubled as night tables. Ezra’s clothes, shoes, and luggage were in his closet. He had always been neat. The dishes were put away, but there were some salad greens going bad in the refrigerator. There was a stack of bills and magazines on his writing desk along with a fat biography of a poet bisected by a bookmark and a mug marked by rings of evaporated coffee. And next to the mug and the book was a printout of an article: it was the essay that had launched the stranger game.
THE DAY AFTER I’D FOLLOWED THE WOMAN AND CHILD HOME from the park, I went into the office early to work on some renderings but had difficulty focusing. For a change of scenery, I walked to the museum at noon and slipped into an exhibition of recent acquisitions by younger artists. The very first patrons I noticed were two men standing in front of an expansive abstract painting of layered squares, off-whites floating over delicate blues floating over earthy browns. The work looked like a painting but was actually a collage of ephemera—boarding passes, sales receipts, postcards, circulars—all of which were sanded into one smooth plane and drenched in resin. It was unusually beautiful. I observed the two men. One was tall, scantily bearded, wearing steel glasses; the other was younger, tightly packed into his sweater and slacks. Both of them admired the work, too, as far as I could tell. I stepped closer and stood with my back to them, facing a kanji-shaped cardboard sculpture.
The taller and older man solicited the younger man’s reaction: What did he see? A landscape, the younger one said. Hills rising in the distance, like when one looked north in the city—do you see it? Hills spackled with low-lying homes. He speculated about how it was made, and the older one recalled something useful about decoupage, then chuckled. He said he didn’t know what he was talking about, he was talking out of his ass, which (I noticed when I looked over my shoulder) prompted the younger one to pat the taller man’s behind. They were new lovers, I decided, and it was the younger one’s idea to spend a day off at the museum because the older one had written in his dating profile that he felt equally at home in museums and sports arenas, and the younger one had said, Well, let’s see about that. Should we start with an exhibit or go to a basketball game?
They continued holding hands as they shifted left toward the next work. I slipped in front of the collage. The younger man had a way of tipping back his head in laughter no matter what the older man said. The older man—older by fifteen years?—gestured with his free hand, making ever-wider enthusiastic circles and then, suddenly, pointing at one corner of a photograph. The younger man was looking first at his new boyfriend, then the sleepy portrait of a teenager slouching back on a bike seat. These roles were fine for now, mentor and acolyte, but what would the younger man teach the older one to keep things even? Here, listen to this song, I love this band. Hey, let’s go camping in the desert next weekend, you did say you’d go camping.
The men were quiet when it was only the three of us in the elevator, me staring the whole time at my shoes, and I wondered if with this proximity I was breaking the no-contact rule, even though I said nothing, never met their glance, and preserved a safe distance following them out of the building and into the courtyard. I waited one stoplight cycle before crossing the street after them and assumed I’d lose them, but they were easy to find checking out the food trucks, settling on the one selling healthy salads. I didn’t actually want the sesame noodles I bought one truck over.
There wasn’t anywhere to sit, so the two men crossed back to the museum plaza and perched at the edge of a planter. For now they were protected in new romance, but maybe the older one had been single so long, he’d become set in his ways, and he was annoyed by a flaw he’d observed lately in the younger man, that he refused to acknowledge when he didn’t know enough about a topic (especially politics), because he probably thought expressing a strong opinion was better than offering no opinion. All of our lives were chaptered, which the older man knew well enough; maybe the younger man did, too. But if the older man was writing his fourth or fifth chapter, and the younger only his second, would they last together?
Memories now: Ezra and I making out in an apple orchard when we were twenty-four. Napping in the afternoon in a hotel abroad, a late plate of pasta, red wine, willfully getting lost in the canal city at night. Ezra the easily distracted sous chef unevenly dicing shallots, more interested in amusing me with an account of his day, the crazies who had come into the store, how he’d write them into the novel he’d never finish because there was always so much to add. Ezra coaxing James the Cat down from our one tall tree in front (James was first my cat, then our cat)—Ezr
a cradling James toward the end, knowing we’d have to put the poor guy down. Ezra the troubled sleeper, slipping back into bed after a four a.m. neighborhood walk, thinking I wouldn’t notice, but how could I not notice? I’d pull his right arm over me and hold it and say, You’re not going anywhere now—
My phone vibrated in my pocket, our studio assistant reminding me about the conference call with contractors that I was now late for. And then I noticed the older man staring over at me. I was playing the game all wrong. I had neglected my subjects. I hadn’t observed them closely enough to forge a connection. They remained elusive, and instead of trying to achieve greater empathy, I had waded into my own reverie.
As I headed toward the street, I looked back one more time: the two men were standing now, giggling about something, the younger one tipping back his head, the older one with his right hand pressed flat against the younger man’s stomach, then patting his abdomen. You, you’re impossible, come on, let’s get you something else to eat, and I could use a glass of chardonnay—what? It is not too early. Let’s get you a sandwich and both of us some wine and we can sit and watch everyone go by—now, how does that sound?
THE ESSAY I FOUND ON EZRA’S DESK HAD RUN EIGHTEEN MONTHS earlier in an online journal known for its literary travel writing, much of which was posted by guest contributors. It immediately went viral. Usually the articles were accounts of glacier hikes or reef dives; there were columns about what to see when you only had three days in a river city, that sort of thing. This particular essay—the author’s bio stated only “A. Craig is a pseudonym”—read unlike any other filed under the rubric Road Trips. It was titled “Perro Perdido.”
Late in the autumn of my life, I came to the realization that I did not like myself very much. I had been teaching literature at the same college for thirty years and not written a new lecture in half that time, my disengagement only surpassed by that of my students. For many years my research sustained me, but the midcentury realist authors whom I once cherished and to whom I was forever linked as a scholar had become odious tenants whom I seemed unable to evict. My romantic life was likewise jejune. My very last affair ended unceremoniously while driving home from a party. I was doing what I always did, which was to run through all of the new people whom we’d met, issuing an acerbic group critique. The too-tight skirts, the pop politics, the overall idiocy and decline of serious reading. I was especially good (I thought) at mimicking voices and was mocking someone’s recitation of her weekly cleansing routine when my girlfriend said, Stop it, please. Why do you always have to be so mean about everyone? But I’m only trying to amuse you, I said. Well, stop it, my girlfriend said, it’s getting old. But I pushed it and said, Oh, come on, you love it when I—No, she said. I don’t know why I ever encouraged you. Stop, please, she yelled again. I said stop! By which she meant stop the car. I’m suffocating, she said, I need air. She got out and walked off into the darkness. I never saw her again.
So I found no fulfillment in my work, experienced increasingly briefer runs at dating, and also diagnosed myself as the kind of snob I’d loathed as a younger man. Jogging in the park in the morning, I became inordinately irked by the women who nattered away on their cell phones while speed-walking, by the men who wore sunglasses even when it was cloudy; I found myself interrupting colleagues during meetings to correct their pronunciation of ex officio (It’s Latin—with a hard C, please); I looked down on the drivers of luxury sedans and mothers in parks with sloppy toddlers and overweight people eating ice cream.
The truth was I was achingly lonesome. I would come home to the house I’d once upon a time hoped to share with a lifelong lover and keep as few lights on as possible to avoid feeling overwhelmed by the rooms that needed repainting and the warped cabinets and the general lack of wall art. How lonely and alone I was, drinking, masturbating, drinking more until I fell asleep in front of cooking shows. At least in the morning I had my routine, somewhere I needed to be, a position of some respect. Then the worst possible thing happened: I came up for a sabbatical, and because I was entitled to it, I took it.
I winced when I read about Craig’s relationship to his house. It was easy enough to picture him padding around empty rooms, with too many hours he couldn’t fill, with no plan for his time away from his college. He wrote that he slept in later and later each day. He started going to neighborhoods in the city where he wouldn’t run into anyone he knew and where he could sit in cafés for hours and solve crosswords. He noticed he wasn’t the only one in any given coffee shop staring at a book without turning the pages. When he stopped off at the grocery store on the way home, he stood in silent confederacy with the other people purchasing single portions of lasagna from the deli. This, too, sounded familiar.
One evening, Craig continued, he realized that besides ordering his coffee from a barista, his only interaction of the day was helping a woman retrieve a box of chocolate chip cookies from a top shelf, and it occurred to him, given how chatty she was, that quite possibly it was also one of the few interactions she’d had, as well.
It made no sense. A city full of people: Why was there loneliness everywhere I looked?
The next day I walked down the hill from my house to a taco stand on the boulevard. My order was ready right at the same time as the one put in by a young woman, and I took a step back and pretended to inspect the contents of the bag I had been handed, although what I was doing was staring at her, unable to avert my gaze. She was wearing a plaid jacket, a striped skirt of an entirely different palette, and leggings printed with an animal pattern. What a mess. And, oh, her hair; her hair was a feathery fuchsia that reminded me of one of those trolls you hoped you didn’t get when you inserted a coin in a boardwalk vending machine—
Stop it, I told myself (hearing my ex-girlfriend in my mind). Why did I need to be so dismissive? The woman had style, or a style, and maybe (no, definitely) it didn’t appeal to me, yet she probably liked the way she looked or she wouldn’t be parading around in this outfit, drawing the gaze, I noticed as she walked away, of both a man walking a spaniel and the spaniel.
I followed her.
She had perfect posture, a dancer’s line. Her feet were turned out while she waited for a light to change. Where did she get the self-confidence to put herself together like this?
Even though she was holding the bag with her tacos in it, the woman turned into a vintage dress store. I stood on the sidewalk but watched her inside examining a long beaded frock (quite a different look than what she had on). I pretended to be looking at my phone when she exited the store and continued down the block. I followed her past a vegan café, past another boutique. She went into a store that sold barware and pricey liquor. This time I went in, too, and pretended to sort through an ice bucket full of novelty stirrers. The woman headed straight for the bourbon in the back. She asked a clerk for help—her voice was a round alto, and she had an accent: Could you by chance recommend a good earthy bourbon?
Then she finally glanced over at me ever so briefly, long enough for me to notice her eyes, pure sapphire, and I thought if you’re born with eyes that vivid, you will probably be attracted to bold color your whole life. I wanted to keep following her, but what if she saw that I was also carrying a bag from the taco stand? I did not want her to feel like I was stalking her even if that was exactly what I was doing.
I thought about her all afternoon. Had she come to this country alone? Did she have someone in her life with whom she could share tacos? Carnitas for you, pollo for me. What color was his hair? How did he dress? I decided she had done some modeling because she was tall and her look probably held marketable appeal. But the modeling career, it was a sideline, a way to earn money while she pursued her greater ambition—which was what? I could make up something: she wanted to front an all-girl band, she wanted to get a psychology degree and work with at-risk teens—but the truth was I didn’t have enough information to get a sense of who she was in the world. At firs
t I’d wanted to write her off because she looked clownish, but now I yearned to connect to her, however tentatively, even at a distance.
Let’s mark this as the moment when I recognized that a transformation in my life was not only possible, but also, remarkably, within my reach.
The day after following the fuchsia-haired woman, Craig walked down the hill to the taco stand at approximately the same time, although he knew the chances were slim that he’d find her again. Instead someone else caught his attention, two people, an elderly couple across the street. The man was quite bundled up given the warm weather, a sweater pulled high around his neck, and he moved stiffly around a small cherry of a car to where the woman was standing. It seemed reasonable to assume they were married. The woman appeared both serene and distant. She was wearing a knit cap. She didn’t look the man in the eye when he opened the passenger-side door for her and eased her into the seat. Craig noted the tenderness with which the man, still moving very slowly, reached across the woman to buckle her safety belt. Then the man took half an eternity to walk around the car and slip in behind the wheel. Eventually he sped off, and not at a pace commensurate with his mobility; he drove fast, dangerously fast, as if with the potential speed of the car, the man were compensating for his diminished agility. This sporty coupe, impractically low to the ground, devilishly bright, was affirmatively alive with horsepower.
At home that night, I found myself thinking only about the fuchsia-haired woman and the sports car couple, and I experienced the pleasant erasure of time that I always imagined writers must enjoy when they submerged themselves in their characters. But eventually my own solitude returned. How faint and spectral I looked to myself reflected in the window. I didn’t want to become a ghost. I knew I needed to get out and wander. This was how I came up with my scheme, rules and all.
