A YEAR AND A HALF AFTER my husband died, I moved to New York. I was thirty-six. I wanted a break with everything that was familiar to me, in a place that had always been my beacon. I had a green card, and I knew three people who lived there: a married couple, and an ex-boyfriend. It was a start.
But four years later, I had reluctantly started to think about returning to live in Australia. Though it’s a big place, New York is also a small town, and freelance writer-editors without a strong network of contacts are as common as muck. Skype had become my professional lifeline because most of my work came from Australia. I had enough—just—but it felt tenuous. Outside work, I went on dates generated by algorithms that, in person, had no rhythm of their own. Inevitably I would have to tell my story and, for most suitors, widow was a curiosity killer. I had no piano in my apartment, but I carried my metaphorical piano stool like Schroeder did his toy piano. It didn’t seem to matter where I was; I kept men at a manageable distance. Which is to say that I kept myself at a safe distance from everyone else.
Widowed for more than five years, I still hadn’t moved on with my life. Perhaps it looked from the outside that I had—after all, I had given up a salaried corporate job for the freelance life; I had sold or given away most of my possessions and rented out my house; I had moved country. For a while I even had what Stevie Wonder called a part-time lover. But inside, I didn’t feel that much had changed. Most of the actions I’d taken since my husband died were about renunciation—giving up things, just as I had done in abandoning the piano after I failed at the Chopin competition. I hadn’t replaced what I’d farewelled with a hopeful vision of my future and a clear plan to achieve it. I felt as though I were treading water. The water just happened to be in the northern hemisphere. I had longed to be free and to be anonymous in the big city: I was both, and I was lonely. What I really wanted, I realised, was to experience love and intimacy again. I was, after all, human. That goal felt small, and immense, and impossible.
I lived in the tiniest bedroom of a decrepit three-bedroom apartment on St John’s Place in the Prospect Heights neighbourhood of Brooklyn, which hugs the north-eastern tip of Prospect Park. It is—or was—the poor cousin to the more prosperous Park Slope, the location for many independent films about angst-ridden thirty-somethings. My flatmate Derek worked at a nearby cafe, Cheryl’s Global Soul on Underhill Street, while he tried to further his career as a cartoonist and illustrator. Due to the dimensions of my room, which I referred to as the cabin, I did my writing and editing at Cheryl’s, or at the Brooklyn Public Library on Eastern Parkway, two blocks from our doorstep. We picked up our essentials from the corner store, which we dubbed the cat-piss bodega due to its persistent odour. A pair of running shoes was slung over the telegraph lines at our nearest intersection, just like you see in the movies. The neighbourhood was quiet, except for the very occasional gunshot.
Derek was an excellent cook, and he and I would feed each other if we happened to be home together. One morning he announced that he had invited around a friend to share dinner with us that evening. I smiled when he told me, but I had been dreading it all day—the last time a friend of his had joined us for a meal, I had retreated to my cabin after an excruciating attempt at conversation.
This time the friend was a fellow cartoonist, from the Midwest, who had only recently moved to New York. When people ask me how Nate and I met, I like to say that he walked into my kitchen. He was handsome, funny, intelligent, and refreshingly unperturbed by the fact that I was a widow. To top it all off, he loved jazz. Our first date was at a now-defunct jazz bar called Puppets in Park Slope, where the tenor saxophone of Noah Preminger was so loud we had to shout at each other. Which is the only time in the eight years since that we’ve done that.