Chapter 3
3
You remember falling asleep in the studio, black paint under your nails, charcoal on your socks, your thumbs so dry they were like frost and cracking, the growl of the trucks, dirty East Fifth Street, men lined up outside the church. You remember pigeons that ate cigarettes, clapping for rats, purple light at dawn, and how it was the only time when you could hear the birds. You remember sitting in empty churches to watercolor. Something about the light in there, vastness, drama, the hollowness of sound. You remember you were smoking too much. The Turk was volatile. You remember being afraid a lot.
There are white pillows behind your back like graceless wings. On the little table next to your bed, a ginger tea bag, used tissues, lavender oil, a blurry photo Max took of a bench in Central Park—empty, in the pouring rain—in a wooden frame. There are unopened cards from Rio, Seattle, and Old Lyme from friends who are well and worried. Some artists, some from your book club, some wives of my friends. They adore you. Who doesn’t? I keep meaning to read them to you. It is something, I think, how everyone believes they’re your favorite. It has something to do with your attention to detail. Just being with you feels like being chosen, winning a prize.
I find your hand beneath the blankets. I want to say something about your fingers in mine as a chronicler of time, but it feels like committing you to something that I won’t.
I remember, from that time, seeing other women—my mother was always setting me up with her hairdresser’s daughter; she didn’t know you yet—but really, truly, only that none of them was ever you. I remember going to you like there was a strong wind at my back. I remember the first time we slept together, you moved my face toward yours like it was a reading light and said, Here. I remember that whenever I left you it felt as if I’d moved away from a fire.
There must be a more subtle way to relay urgency. There must be a better word than love.
You remember that every time we were together, you talked more, breathed deeper, felt like your feet were wrapped in warm towels and held. There could be another metaphor here, you say. For protection, for coming back home when there was no home to begin with.
Or: it felt like putting a spoon into an old cup of coffee and stirring around and around?
I remember, in the beginning, writing poems about you and not sharing them. You were a moth, a petal, a sheet on a clothesline, a stack of old letters in the wind. You were everything, but how to say that? I remember, eventually, sharing them because you said, How else do we get better?
I remember how kind you were, but also how honest. I read like a fiend but had never studied craft. I was meant to work for my father. Textiles, like his father. And his. I remember, before you, not so much a feeling of destiny as of fate. And because my father believed that the best thing he could give us was stability, and because between my brother and me, I was better at numbers, and more reliable…
Oh, Abe, you say. That was such a tricky time for you. You didn’t trust yourself.
I remember some days, we’d meet at the Ramble shelter in the Park and you’d watercolor; I’d write. I remember the first short story I was ever proud of I wrote as we were perched on a rock. You were making paper-clip flowers, our thighs touching, the sky flamingo pink, reflecting on the silver of my pen.
I remember that one, you say. It was about chess and a night mouse, wasn’t it?
It was.
I remember that sometimes, I wouldn’t hear from you for days. When I’d buzz your apartment, you’d come down, squinting, white paint in your hair and on your neck, hungry, thirsty, late for your shift. I was working, you’d say. I lost track of time.
In the beginning, it is not that I wrote for you but I had no idea how to make writing a life. Because of you, I found that the more I wrote, the more I wrote. And because a story runs on hope in the beginning, until it grows legs…and then it runs on those.
You cough. I lurch. The doctors say the coughing is a good thing: an expulsion. I try to think of it as a sign of life.
You put your hand to where your hair would be. You rub your elbow, squint your eyes, as though you are wishing for something or wishing something away. Me too. Sometimes, it’s as if you’re blurred. Or maybe: underwater. You move as if in slow motion to rub your nose. It’s the medicine. It’s everything.
You reach for your legs. They ache in the evenings.
Shall I shut the windows? I say. Turn on a light?
You shake your head. Outside, there is a salt breeze that we dreamed about affording since my first book sold and the Roman collector with a glass eye purchased the giant steel sunflower you welded on our fire escape. In those days, we never would have imagined dying here. When we moved, this place felt like more life.
Do you want to keep on? I say. You nod, close your eyes.
You remember the first time you invited me up. You hadn’t noticed how bad it had gotten till I was there: the unpaid bills, laundry, anti-war sign so big that you couldn’t see out your window. You remember I took your laundry to my mother’s and your bills and paid them. You remember I opened the window, put the sign on the street.
You remember I brought you matzo ball soup and a silver ashtray. You remember tulips in the Park, pennies at Bethesda. You remember getting yelled at for feeding apples to the horses on Seventy-Ninth and how we did it anyway and then raced down Fifth. You remember the time we got caught, no pants, by a policeman not far from Bow Bridge. We were sure no one was around. You remember tiramisu and the opera. Creativity begets creativity is something you liked to say. Which opera was it? We can’t remember.
You remember when you showed me what you’d been working on, it turned out my favorite painting was also yours. Yellow shoes were in it but that’s all you remember. It was so long ago now. You sold it to a man who lived in Canada. I remember he was in gas.