Find Me

by André Aciman

  “But I’m speaking with you.”

  “I’m a stranger, and with strangers opening up is easy.”

  “The only ones I can speak frankly with are my father and Pavlova, my dog, and neither is going to be around much longer. Besides, my father hates my current boyfriend.”

  “Not so unusual for a father.”

  “Actually, he worshipped my previous boyfriend.”

  “Did you?”

  She smiled, already anticipating that she’d toss off her answer with a dash of humor: “No, I didn’t.” She thought for a moment. “My previous boyfriend wanted to marry me. I told him no. I was so relieved that he didn’t make a fuss when we broke up. Then not six months later, I heard he was getting married. I was livid. If I was ever hurt and cried for love it was on the day I heard he was marrying a woman we had spent hours and months making fun of when we were together.”

  Silence.

  “Jealous without being the slightest bit in love—you are difficult,” I finally said.

  She gave me a look that was at once veiled reproof for daring to speak this way about her and bewildered curiosity that wished to know more. “I’ve known you for less than an hour on a train. And yet you totally understand me. I like it. But I might as well tell you of this other, terrible defect.”

  “What now?”

  We both laughed.

  “I never stay close with anyone I’ve had a relationship with. Most people don’t like to burn bridges. I seem to blow them up—probably because there wasn’t much of a bridge to start with. Sometimes I leave everything behind in their apartment and simply disappear. I hate the drawn-out process of packing up and moving out and those unavoidable postmortems that turn into teary-eyed pleas to stay together; above all I hate the lingering pretense of an attachment after we don’t even want to be touched by someone we no longer recall wanting to sleep with. You’re right: I don’t know why I start with anyone. The sheer annoyance of a new relationship. Plus the small home habits I need to put up with. The smell of his birdcage. The way he likes his CDs stacked. The sound of an ancient radiator in the middle of the night that wakes me but never him. He wants to shut the windows. I like them open. I’ll drop my clothes wherever; he wants our towels folded and put away. He likes the tube of toothpaste squeezed neatly from the bottom up; I squeeze it whatever way I can and always lose the cap, which he always finds somewhere on the floor behind the toilet bowl. The remote control has its place, the milk needs to stand close but not too close to the freezer, underwear and socks belong in this drawer but not that drawer.

  “And yet, I’m not difficult. I’m actually a good person, just a bit opinionated. But it’s only a front. I put up with everyone and everything. At least for a while. Then one day it just hits me: I don’t want to be with this guy, don’t want him near me, need to get away. I fight this feeling. But as soon as a man senses this, he’ll hound me with despairing puppy eyes. Once I spot that look, pfffff, I’m gone and immediately find someone else.

  “Men!” she finally said, as though that one word summed up all the shortcomings most women are willing to overlook and learn to put up with and ultimately forgive in the men they hope to love for the rest of their lives even when they know they won’t. “I hate to see anyone hurt.”

  A shadow hovered over her features. I wished I could touch her face, gently. She caught the glance, I lowered my eyes.

  * * *

  Once again, I noticed her boots. Wild, untamed boots, as though they’d been dragged on craggy treks and acquired an aged, weatherworn look, which meant she trusted them. She liked her things worn and broken in. She liked comfort. Her thick navy woolen socks were men’s socks, probably lifted from the drawer of the man she claimed she had no love for. But the mid-season leather biker’s jacket looked very expensive. Prada, most likely. Had she dashed out of her boyfriend’s home, and in her hurry, thrown on the first items at hand with a hasty I’m heading out to my dad’s, call you this evening? She was wearing a man’s watch. His too? Or did she just prefer men’s watches? Everything about her suggested something gritty, rugged, unfinished. And then I caught a sliver of skin between her socks and the cuff of her jeans—she had the smoothest ankles.

  “Tell me about your father,” I said.

  “My father? He’s not doing well, and we’re losing him.” Then she interrupted herself: “Do you still charge by the hour?”

  “As I said, confiding comes easier between strangers who’ll never meet again.”

  “You think so?”

  “What, confiding on a train?”

  “No, that we’ll never meet again?”

  “What are the chances?”

  “True, very true.”

  We exchanged smiles.

  “So go on about your father.”

  “I’ve been thinking about this. My love for him has changed. It’s no longer a spontaneous love, but a brooding, cautious, caregiver’s love. Not the real deal. Still, we are very open with each other, and there is nothing I’m ashamed to tell him. My mother left almost two decades ago, and since then it’s been just him and me. He had a girlfriend for a while, but now he lives alone. Someone comes to take care of him, cooks, does his laundry, cleans and tidies up. Today is his seventy-sixth birthday. Hence the cake,” she said, pointing to the square white box resting on the top bin. She seemed embarrassed by it, which may be why she threw in a tiny giggle when she pointed to it. “He said he invited two friends for lunch, but he still hasn’t heard from them, and my guess is they won’t show up, no one does these days. Neither will my siblings. He likes profiteroles from an old shop not far from where I live in Florence. It reminds him of better days when he used to teach there once. He shouldn’t have anything sweet of course, but…”

  She didn’t need to finish the sentence.

  The silence between us lasted awhile. Once again I made a motion to pick up my book, convinced we were done talking this time. A bit later, with my book still open, I started looking out at the rolling Tuscan landscape and my mind began to drift. An odd and shapeless thought about how she’d changed seats and was now sitting next to me began to settle on my mind. I knew I was dozing off.

  “You’re not reading,” she said. Then, seeing she might have disturbed me, she immediately added, “I can’t either.”

  “Tired of reading,” I said, “can’t focus.”

  “Is it interesting?” she finally asked, looking at the cover of my book.

  “It’s not bad. Rereading Dostoyevsky after many years can be a bit disappointing.”

  “Why?”

  “Have you read Dostoyevsky?”

  “Yes. I adored him when I was fifteen.”

  “So did I. His vision of life is one that an adolescent can immediately grasp: tormented, filled with contradictions, and lots of bile, venom, shame, love, pity, sorrow, and spite, and the most disarming acts of kindness and self-sacrifice—all of it so unevenly thrust together. To the adolescent I was, Dostoyevsky was my introduction to complex psychology. I thought I was a thoroughly confused person—but all his characters were no less confused. I felt at home. My sense is that one learns more about the blotchy makeup of human psychology from Dostoyevsky than from Freud, or any psychiatrist for that matter.”

  She was silent.

  “I see a shrink,” she finally said, with an almost audible rise of protest in her voice.

  Had I yet again snubbed her without meaning to?

  “I see one too,” I rejoindered, perhaps to take back what might have seemed an unintended slight.

  We stared at each other. I liked her warm and trusting smile; it suggested something frail and genuine, perhaps even vulnerable. No wonder the men in her life closed in on her. They knew what they were losing the moment she turned her eyes away. Out went the smile, or the languor when she asked heart-to-heart questions while staring with those piercing green eyes that never let up, out the disquieting need for intimacy that her glance tore out of every man when your eyes happened t
o lock on her in a public space and you knew there went your life. She was doing it right now. She made intimacy want to happen, made it easy, as if you’d always had it in you to give, and were craving to share it but realized you’d never find it in yourself unless it was with her. I wanted to hold her, touch her hand, let a finger drift along her forehead.

  “So why the shrink?” she asked, as though she had pondered the idea and found it totally bewildering. “If I may ask,” she added, smiling as she parodied my own words. Obviously she wasn’t used to a softer, more congenial approach when speaking to a stranger. I asked why she was surprised I was seeing a shrink.

  “Because you look so settled, so—prettified.”

  “Hard to say. Maybe because the empty spaces of adolescence when I discovered Dostoyevsky never got filled. I once believed they’d be filled at some point; now I am not sure such spaces are ever filled. Still, I want to understand. Some of us never jumped to the next level. We lost track of where we were headed and as a result stayed where we started.”

  “So this is why you’re rereading Dostoyevsky?”

  I smiled at the aptness of the question. “Perhaps because I am always trying to retrace my steps back to a spot where I should have jumped on the ferryboat headed to the other bank called life but ended up dawdling on the wrong wharf or, with my luck, took the wrong ferryboat altogether. It’s all an older man’s game, you know.”

  “You don’t sound like the sort of person who takes the wrong ferry. Did you?”

  Was she teasing me?

  “I was thinking of this when I boarded the train in Genoa this morning, because it occurred to me that perhaps there were one or two ferryboats I should have sailed on instead and never did.”

  “Why didn’t you?”

  I shook my head then shrugged my shoulders to suggest I didn’t know why or didn’t want to say.

  “Aren’t those the absolute worst scenarios: the things that might have happened but never did and might still happen though we’ve given up hoping they could.”

  I must have looked at her with totally baffled eyes. “Where did you ever learn to think this way?”

  “I read a lot.” Then, with a self-conscious glance: “I like talking to you.” She paused a moment. “So, was your marriage the wrong ferryboat?”

  This woman was brilliant. And she was beautiful. And she thought along the same twisted, meandering paths I took sometimes.

  “At first, no,” I replied, “or at least I didn’t want to see it that way. But after our son left for the States there was so little between us that it felt as though his entire childhood was nothing more than a dress rehearsal for our unavoidable separation. We barely talked and when we did, it seemed we seldom spoke the same language. We were exceptionally cordial and kind, but even when we were in the same room we felt so alone together. We’d sit at the same dining table, but weren’t eating together, slept in the same bed but not together, watched the same programs, traveled to the same cities, shared the same yoga instructor, laughed at the same jokes but never together, and sat side by side at crowded movie theaters, but never rubbed elbows. There came a time when I’d spot two lovers kissing on the street or even hugging and didn’t know why they were kissing. We were alone together—until one day one of us broke the pickle dish.”

  “Pickle dish?”

  “Sorry, Edith Wharton. She left me for someone who was my best friend, and who is still my friend. The irony is that I wasn’t in the least bit sorry she’d found someone.”

  “Maybe because it freed you to find someone else.”

  “I never did. We stayed good friends, and I know she worries about me.”

  “Should she?”

  “No. So, why the shrink?” I asked, eager to change the subject.

  “Me? Loneliness. I can’t stand being by myself yet I can’t wait to be alone. Look at me. I am alone here on a train, happy to be with my book, away from a man I won’t ever love, but I would much rather talk to a stranger. No offense, I hope.”

  I smiled back: None taken.

  “I tend to talk to everyone these days, I start conversations with the mailman just to gab a bit, but never tell my boyfriend how I feel, what I read, what I want, what I hate. In any event, he wouldn’t listen, much less understand. He has no sense of humor. I need to explain every punch line to him.”

  We continued chatting until the conductor came to collect our tickets. He looked at the dog, complained that dogs weren’t allowed on the train except in cages.

  “So what am I supposed to do?” she snapped back. “Throw her overboard? Pretend I’m blind? Or get off now and miss my father’s seventy-sixth birthday party which won’t really be a party because it’s his very last since he’s actually dying? Just tell me.”

  The conductor wished her a good day.

  “Anche a Lei,” she muttered. And to you too. Then, turning to her dog: “And stop drawing attention to yourself!”

  Then my phone rang. I was tempted to stand up and take the call in the empty spot between the cars, but decided to stay put. The dog, stirred by the chime, was now staring at me with gaping, quizzical eyes as if to say, You too with the phone, now?

  My son, I mouthed to my companion, who smiled at me and then, without asking, took advantage of the sudden interruption to gesture she was going to the bathroom. She handed me the leash and whispered, “She won’t be any trouble.”

  I looked at her when she stood up and, for the first time, realized that her rough-hewn look wasn’t as dressed down as I’d initially thought, and that she was, once she stood up, more attractive yet. Had I noticed this earlier and tried to brush the thought away? Or had I really been blind? It would have pleased me no end had my son seen me stepping off the train in her company. I knew we’d be talking about her on our way to Armando’s. I could even foresee how he’d start the conversation: So tell me about that model type you were chitchatting with at Termini …

  But then just as I was fantasizing his reaction, the phone call changed everything. He was calling to say he was not going to be able to meet me at all that day. I gasped a plaintive Why? He was replacing a pianist who’d fallen ill and had a recital in Naples that same day. When would he be back? Tomorrow, he said. I loved hearing his voice. What was he playing? Mozart, all Mozart. Meanwhile my companion returned from the bathroom and silently resumed her seat across from me, leaning forward, which signaled she meant to continue speaking after I’d hung up. I stared at her more intensely than I’d done during our entire trip, partly because I was busy with someone else on the phone, which gave my glance a vaguely inattentive, guileless, roaming air, but also because it allowed me to keep staring at those eyes that were so used to being stared at and that liked being stared at, and might never have guessed that if I found the courage to return her gaze as fiercely as hers was at that moment it was also because, in staring, I’d begun to nurse the impression that in her eyes mine were just as beautiful.

  Definitely an older man’s fantasy.

  There was a halt in my conversation with my son. “But I was so counting on taking a long walk with you. This is why I took the earlier train. I came for you, not for the paltry reading.” I was disappointed but I also knew that I had my companion as an audience, and perhaps I was hamming it up a bit for her as well. Then, realizing I had gone too far with my complaint, I caught myself: “But I understand. I do.” The girl seated diagonally in front of me cast an anxious look in my direction. Then she shrugged her shoulders, not to display her indifference to what was happening between me and my son, but to tell me, or so I thought, to leave the poor boy alone—Don’t make him feel guilty. To the shrug she added a gesture with her left hand to suggest I should just let it go, get over it. “So tomorrow?” I asked. Would he come and pick me up at the hotel? Midafternoon, he replied—fourish? “Fourish,” I said. “Vigils,” he said. “Vigils,” I replied.

  “You’ve heard him,” I finally said, turning to her.

  “I heard you.”
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br />   She was taunting me again. And she was smiling. A side of me thought she’d leaned even more toward me and had thought of standing up to move to the seat next to me and put both hands in mine. Had this crossed her mind and was I seizing on her wish to do so, or was I simply making it up because the wish was in me?

  “I was looking forward to our lunch. I wanted to laugh with him and hear about his life, his recitals, his career. I was even hoping to spot him before he spotted me and that he’d find a moment to meet you.”

  “It’s not the end of the world. You’ll see him tomorrow fourish?” Yet again, I caught the jeer in her voice. And I loved it.

  “The irony, however—” I started to add, but then changed my mind.

  “The irony, however?” she inquired. She doesn’t let go, does she, I thought.

  I was silent for a moment.

  “The irony is that I’m not sorry he’s not coming today. I have quite a bit to do before the reading and maybe I could use a rest at the hotel instead of walking about the city as we normally do when I’m just visiting him.”

  “Why should that surprise you? You lead separate lives, regardless of how they intersect or how many vigils the two of you share.”

  I liked what she had just said. It didn’t reveal anything I didn’t already know, but it showed a degree of thoughtfulness and care that surprised me and didn’t seem to fit the person who’d sat down in a huff on boarding the train.

  “How do you know so much?” I asked, feeling emboldened and staring at her.

  She smiled.

  “To quote someone I met on a train once: ‘We’re all this way.’”

  She liked this as much as I did.

  As we neared the Rome station, our train began to stall. Minutes later, it stirred again. “I’m taking a taxi when we get to the station,” she said.

  “It’s what I’m doing.”

  It turned out her father’s home was five minutes away from my hotel. He lived along the Lungotevere and I was staying on Via Garibaldi, just a few steps from where I used to live years ago.