The next day when I boarded the bus to meet my cousin Joyce for lunch, there she was, halfway to the rear. No great coincidence—she lives eight blocks north and we were headed for the same place—yet unsettling. Joyce is the sort of person who’s hard to imagine alone. She responds so powerfully to others, it’s as if she wouldn’t exist without them. Her unprotected self was a stranger—bright red lips pursed somberly, dark eyes muted, gazing inward.
I approached and she leaped up, throwing her arms around me and exclaiming in her tremulous musical voice like liquid gold. Everyone turned to watch. Joyce was notable even when quiet—almost larger than life at close to six feet and outfitted to make heads turn, today in a longish white dress splashed with flowers. Masses of untamed curls trickled from beneath her wide-brimmed straw hat and fell to her shoulders. How people had prized those curls when she was a child, as if curly hair were the ticket to life’s most splendid offerings. I was struck with stage fright at the exaggerated scene she was making, yet childishly pleased, too. After all, she acted in good faith. Life is small, I imagine she thinks. Let’s help it out a bit.
Just as we broke from our embrace the bus veered, and the contents of Joyce’s enormous tote bag poured out and scattered on the floor: books, papers, pens, wallet, tissues, makeup kit, comb, glasses, pillbox, cough drops, keys, address book. Joyce was notoriously sensitive to subtle vibrations. Could she have caught my symptom so fast?
“Look at this mess,” she groaned as we crept around gathering things up, the nearby passengers pointing out strayed objects. At noon the bus was never crowded. The travelers were mostly old people, some with canes, walkers, or caretakers. I bent to retrieve a ballpoint pen that had rolled behind a woman’s feet. “Excuse me,” I said, but she sat impassive, not moving aside to ease my groping. When we finally had the bag reassembled, Joyce hugged me again, less vigorously.
“You look fine, Laura. Not sick at all. I thought you’d look worse.”
“Thanks a lot.” I laughed. “It’s the suntan. And I’m getting plenty of sleep.”
Soon she was waving at the restaurant owner, sitting at the bar reading a copy of Variety, and then at the waiter. “Lorenzo! How are you, my dear!” I was afraid for the bag if she hugged him, too, but she merely engulfed him in her smile. The owner sent complimentary glasses of wine to our table.
As we picked up the menus, my shoulders tensed. Joyce has always had an odd habit in restaurants. She liked to order the same dish as me. What are you going to have? she’d ask casually, and I, just as casually, would say, I think the spinach salad. Oh, that sounds good, I’ll have that, too. Something would clutch at me, as if a choice to which I was exclusively entitled were being taken from me. I wouldn’t have minded had I thought Joyce really wanted the spinach salad. But no. She chose it, I was convinced, only because I was having it, thereby making it less my own. It was perplexing, especially as Joyce didn’t have an envious nature, and moreover what was so enviable about spinach salad? It wasn’t as though it were filet mignon or pheasant.
I used to mull it over. Maybe Joyce wanted to create, in a public place, the illusion of an intimate at-home lunch where everyone eats the same thing. No, I definitely sensed a boundary infringed upon. I began trying to outwit her, adopting the strategy of asking her first, forcing her to choose. So what are you going to have, Joyce? Well, she’d say, I’m not sure. Either the mussels or the shrimp salad, maybe. What about you? as if offering me a choice between those two. The linguine with clams, I think. Oh, I didn’t notice that, she’d promptly chime in. Maybe I’ll have the linguine, too.
It was a difficult game to win, a game of pursuit and evasion, and I wasn’t even sure Joyce was aware of being a player.
“So, Laura, what have you decided on?” she asked.
“I don’t know yet. It all looks good. What about you?”
“Well,” she said reluctantly, “I’m torn between the tabouli and chick peas with eggplant and the grilled salmon.”
“Hmm.” I perused the menu some more.
“What are you in the mood for?” she urged.
“Let’s see, I think I might have a mushroom omelette.”
“Actually that sounds very good. Light. I ought to have something light, too. Let’s have the mushroom omelettes, then.”
“You don’t have to have it just because I’m having it,” I said a bit testily.
“I know. Of course not. It just sounded good.”
The waiter, Lorenzo, appeared.
“We’ll have the mushroom omelettes, Lorenzo,” said Joyce.
“I’ve changed my mind. I think I’ll have a cheeseburger. Medium rare.”
“That’s an idea,” she said, brushing her curls off her face. “You know what, Lorenzo? Forget the omelettes. Bring us two cheeseburgers, medium rare.”
Foiled again. I never thought she’d stoop to that, and in front of Lorenzo, too.
“Tell me,” I said when he’d gone, “why do you always like to order the same thing?”
“Why, do you mind? I didn’t realize you minded.”
“I’m curious.”
“It’s nice to order the same thing. Why not?”
“But why is it nice? I really don’t get it.”
“Because then we’re, well, we’ll be having the same experience.”
“But why is it nice to have the same experience?”
“It just is. Don’t you think so?”
“I knew a man like that once. I don’t mean he liked to eat what I was eating. Nothing like that. But he .. . we felt as if we were always having the same experiences because inside our heads, or our guts, it was the same. The same chemical components or something. Oh, he was different in many ways—he was older, he had a different background, he wasn’t even American, really. But we had this feeling you seem to crave, that there were no boundaries, that we felt everything in exactly the same way. It was, I think, sick.”
“Why sick? It’s a certain kind of romantic ideal. It’s not realized very often, but still...”
“Yes, and it’s obvious why. It’s madness. Was, I mean. We couldn’t be together and we couldn’t be apart. Or he couldn’t. I could have managed—to be together, that is. But he needed the Other. With a capital O. He knew too much about me, from the inside, because he was the same. He wanted mystery. But he also couldn’t. . . can’t. . . couldn’t let go either.”
“When was this?” Joyce asked cannily.
“Oh, long ago. Long, long ago. It was like a fairy tale, and they’re always long ago, aren’t they?” I hesitated as she stared. “I was young. I was like someone entranced, I don’t mean by sex, I mean by this crazy way of being with a person.”
“In the fairy tales,” said Joyce, “when the princess is carried off it’s always from being asleep or doing housework—sewing shirts out of nettles or minding the geese or being a drudge like Cinderella. Were you asleep?”
“No, I wasn’t asleep. And it was not exactly like being carried off. It made up a little world, like a trick with mirrors. We could see each other in the mirror. I also think it made me sick, frankly.”
“What, years later? Nonsense. You’ve got a virus. You told me so yourself. Didn’t you have lab tests?”
“Yes. I mean it left me open to this . . . thing. I don’t know. He was like a virus himself. He got into my bloodstream and has to work himself out.” I lit a cigarette even though I could see Lorenzo at the far end of the room gliding in our direction bearing the cheeseburgers, shoulder height. “No two people can have the same experience of anything, can they? Because even if the thing is the same, the people having the experience are different. Look, never mind all this, Joyce. I don’t know what’s come over me. I’m not used to drinking wine at lunch. Don’t pay any attention. I’m sorry about the omelettes. It’s not important. This virus has probably gotten to my brain.”
“I believe it has. Thank you, Lorenzo. That looks lovely.” He blew her a kiss as he left. “The Tsumati think that any man and woman who have been together, even if only once, leave a trace of themselves in the other person, so that you can carry around traces of any number of people, and they influence your thoughts and speech and actions. They shape you and change you.”
It was a pleasure to listen to Joyce when she got going, and to watch her mobile face mirroring the vivid workings of her mind. “That’s why you have to be careful whom you sleep with,” she continued. “Not for old-fashioned morality, but to choose what will become a permanent part of you, which is actually a higher form of morality. You know how old married couples get to talk and look like each other. Well, this is the same idea, only scaled down. But that’s just one kind of explanation for the general phenomenon of influence. Personally, I think you’ve just got a bug, Laura. Even more to the point is that the major diseases of our age involve the immune system defecting or turning on itself. It’s obvious from what you read in the papers that we’re into self-destruction on a global scale. Why wouldn’t it be happening on the individual level, too?”
“Maybe I should join this tribe of yours.”
“The Tsumati are an ethnic group. When you say tribe, it conjures up images of savages dancing around the campfire with tom-toms. Have you noticed that the fighting in what used to be the Soviet Union or Yugoslavia is always between ethnic groups, but in Africa it’s tribes? And yet these groups have exactly the same distinctions. So how long ago did you know this man you mentioned, again?”
“Long ago, I told you. How is Roger, by the way? It’s odd that since you two got married I forget to ask. I wonder what that could mean.”
“He’s fine. Same as ever.”
“So it’s working out?”
“So far.”
After eight years of indecision and moving—her apartment, his apartment, together, apart—Joyce and Roger married last year. More sensible and convenient, they decided, to continue their struggles under the official rubric. At their wedding, a colorful, mellow affair, the eyes of the bride and groom shone with relief: at least they’d no longer have to worry about whether to spend their lives together. Their gestures had the blissful serenity of people who have accepted the world and their fate in it, Buddhist monks, for instance. The only one who didn’t seem entirely content was Joyce’s cat, and with good reason. The cat was her confidante about intimate matters, especially this long back and forth romance with Roger. The creature sensed she was losing her raison d’être.
“Do you still talk to the cat as much?”
“No. It’s too bad, and she really feels it. She was heavily invested in that closeness. But with Roger around all the time we can’t really have the same long talks. And there’s not that much left to say.”
“Why don’t you get her a cat for company? It might be more appropriate.”
“I’ve thought of that. Except it means when I go to Africa there’d be two cats to take care of. I don’t know how Roger would like that.”
I left half my cheeseburger—I hadn’t really wanted it. I would have preferred the tabouli salad with chick peas and eggplant that Joyce was considering in the first place. The chair was stiff and unyielding. I imagined my soft bed awaiting me, calling, Lover, come back. It was hard to keep talking amid the buzz of voices and clink of silverware, and hard to attend to civilized table manners. To close down, not feel anymore, what heaven that would be.
“Joyce, I have to go home. I can’t sit up anymore. That cheeseburger did me in. It was overdone and greasy. How was yours?”
“Mine was fine.”
Of course. Joyce rarely admitted to disappointment. Willfully upbeat, she’d hardly uttered a bitter word through two divorces. That must be how she kept the good vibrations rolling in her direction, as in a Taoist prayer. The Taoist prayer, as the Tai Chi teacher often says, is not a request for the future—Make me happy! Make me well!—but a declaration of what is in the present: I am well. I am happy. Such declarations attract the vibrations of wellness, as the great symphony of the universe unfurls. Fine, is Joyce’s prayer, her declaration of what is. No complaints whatsoever.
Outside, the sun was blinding, like coming out of an afternoon movie. Two fire engines screeched down the street with an ambulance in their wake. Against the sirens’ treble came the petulant continue of a car alarm—existential dread made audible, worthy of one of Dante’s deeper circles. The strollers on Broadway didn’t seem to mind, though. So inured, or so acquiescent, they accepted it as readily as birdsong.
“Just a second,” Joyce said. “My bag feels very light. I think I’m missing something.” She rummaged with one hand while looking skyward as if for assistance. “Oh, God. I think it’s my notebook with all my notes. I was going to the library. This is awful. I can’t lose that. It has everything about the lineage system for my article. Maybe I left it inside.”
Lorenzo searched. We all searched under the table and retraced the path to the door, but no notebook.
“It must have been when everything spilled out on the bus,” I said.
“Oh, right. I forgot all about that.”
“Someone might have picked it up and given it to the driver. Call the lost-and-found at the MTA. It’s a long shot, but still.”
This was not idle encouragement. Years ago I had lost a precious notebook, too, and gotten it back. But this didn’t seem the moment to tell Joyce. Besides, it was another Q. story, and I’d said more than enough about him.
“I’ll try that. This is why people keep everything on a computer. That’s what Roger’ll say, anyway.” She sighed. Her eyes looked teary; even her springy hair seemed to droop,
“If I hadn’t gotten on the bus just then it wouldn’t have happened.”
“Don’t be silly, Laura. It was just a coincidence.”
She didn’t understand. It was my dropping things. Porous Joyce must have absorbed it. Did I also spread loss: husbands, health, work? What would the Tsumati have to say about that?
We kissed good-bye and went in opposite directions. I have no friends, says the Samurai creed. I make my mind my friend.
I follow the witch’s advice about walking. I drag myself out to Riverside Drive, the sinuous, leafy stretch Q. called Lungohudson, after Lungarno in Florence and Lungotévere in Rome, to walk it off the way you might walk off a drunken stupor or an overdose. Or a fit of rage. The way long ago I walked off Q. I used to be a good walker. I urge the muscles on like coaxing out a lost language I once spoke fluently.
Swimming in air. The city heat continues; the viscous air resists my movements. Without the faraway ship to lure me, without the salt air, I can’t go more than a few blocks before I’m felled by weakness and sink onto a bench, like the old people with their visibly bored caretakers.
Thank goodness I don’t need a caretaker, though several friends have volunteered to walk with me. Mona entertained me with tales of last-minute shopping expeditions with her newest Let Me Dress You clients, members of a Czech mime troupe whose bags were lost in transit. She recited several phrases in Czech, such as “How much?” and “When can we eat?”
“I really mean it,” she said. “I’m starved.”
We passed the defunct Café Athena, its windows sealed by a corrugated tin panel on which vandals had spray-painted clumsy scribbles. Sheets were spread on the sidewalk with old shoes, magazines, and kitchen appliances for sale.
“Let’s try the place two blocks down,” said Mona, turning away from the pitiful scene. “Can you walk that far?”
The walls were bare, the floors were dusty, there was no music; the service was as lackadaisical as in the Athena but charmless. “This isn’t going to work. I’ll have to keep looking.” Her only sign of disappointment was the faint heave of her chest as she inhaled, hinting at secret weariness: all those husbands, children, gourmet dinners.
“How’s Evelyn doing?”
“Oh, the same,” she sighed. “Singing a little less, watching more TV” Tim, who was taking a few days off, was always ready to walk. He lives along the Drive, too, half a mile south of me, in a ground-floor apartment. “Ring my bell, or just knock on the window. If I’m there I’ll come out and keep you company.” He walks fast, with long purposeful steps. He likes to have a goal. “We’ll go as far as the flower beds.” Or, “We’ll go down to the Marina. Can you do that?” “Not without stopping. Do you mind stopping every couple of blocks?” “No, I’m used to it. It’s the way I walk with my father, except he’s eighty-one.” It won’t be long now, with Tim and me. He must sense it, too. But we’ve got that weekend coming up.
In the end, it’s better to walk alone. “I have no friends; I make my mind my friend.” I invent little games—how far can I go without stopping? One good day, achy but no fever, I go for five blocks. I pretend this strip of the Drive is my estate and walk through my land as Tolstoy used to do, checking on the serfs, asking about the crops and the families’ health, noting repairs to be made on the hovels. Bringing small items of charity and accepting small items of tribute. I record snatches of talk caught in my ear as I pass, and sometimes unreel the tapes in the data bank, listening until I have them by heart to write down later: Jilly and the suicide on the Golden Gate Bridge. Grace’s projected show of dental equipment. The witch’s success in treating Beaver.
The best my estate has to offer, its centerpiece, is an enormous tree stump, almost four feet in diameter, that stands like an august sculpture guarding a popular sandbox. The tree didn’t topple in a storm but was deliberately cut, for its surface is entirely flat and smooth as a bench, though no one ventures to sit on it. Too high, for one thing, nearly three feet above the ground; too hard to scramble up the sides of rough, tortuous bark coiled like gargantuan innards. And it looks very forbidding, a throne for larger-than-human royalty, elephants or dinosaurs. It must have been the familiar tree men who cut it. For years I’ve seen them on the Drive, ascending into the upper branches in their metal seats to lop and prune, bend and straighten. What happy work, up amidst the leaves doing arboreal housekeeping, seeing from on high the curving Drive and broad river. The Tai Chi teacher told a story once—or the interpreter told it for him—about a friend who worked up in the branches and one day slipped from his seat. Because of his practice of Tai Chi, he didn’t resist the twenty-foot fall but yielded to it, landing soft and unharmed on the waiting earth. But maybe it was more than that. Maybe he had breathed an invulnerability that rides only on the tides of the upper air.
When I stop to rest on a bench, I study the motley parade of joggers, all panting like dray horses in the service of a pitiless master. I listen to the tinkling tune of the Mister Softee truck, the shrieks of the children, the shouts of people calling their dogs with absurd names, Abelard, Sebastian, Hector.
I find all this very soothing. I trust the walking more than any other remedy. I walked off Q. and it worked, at least long enough for me to marry Ev. Q. couldn’t leave Susan, not just yet. It wasn’t the children any longer—they were finally all right, Jessica attending Wesleyan, Carla doing well in a detox program. But Susan had thrown her back out carrying a carton of old papers down to the basement storage room. She was in pain and couldn’t manage alone. She needed his help.
It’ll just be a few weeks, he said. How can I leave her flat on her back?
Flat on her back, I repeated. Flat on her back.
Yes, what’s so odd about that? It’s the only tolerable position. That or standing up. Sitting is unbearable.
Why didn’t you carry the goddamned carton yourself?
I wasn’t home. If I had seen her lugging it, of course I would have. . . . Why are we even going into all this? It’s not the issue.
That’s just it. If it weren’t this it would be something else. I’d like to see you flat on your back. I swear if I were a man and could knock you out I’d do it.
(That was before I took up Tai Chi. Had I known Tai Chi I would have drawn close to him in a pretended embrace, then stepped aside and let his own erotic energy hurtle him to the floor.)
If you were a man we wouldn’t be in this situation. But go ahead. Swing from the shoulder. I won’t hit back.
Don’t give me any of your lame wit, Q. You’ll never leave her. You’re lying. You’ve always lied, whether you know it or not. At this point it’s fine with me if you don’t leave her. Actually I find it disgusting when men leave their wives for younger women, did I ever tell you? Do you think I like my part in this vile mess? Stay with her, just tell me the truth.
I’m not lying. I—
I hit him on the shoulder, trying out how it felt. I hadn’t hit anyone since I was seven years old and knocked out a boy’s loose baby tooth in the schoolyard; he was hogging the ball. Q. was jolted but didn’t lose his balance. I know now what I did wrong, relied on upper-body strength. Now I could throw him off balance with a touch.
I’m not lying, he repeated, straightening out his shirt. It was gray-and-white-striped. I have many faults, he said, but I’m not a liar. I love you and I want to live with you. You know that.
I don’t know any such thing. What I do know is that you’re a weak overgrown adolescent and I don’t want to see you ever again or hear your name mentioned. I don’t want to feel you touch me or hear your voice or—
You can’t mean that, Laura. I can’t believe you mean it.
It was his steady gaze and tone that incensed me. His coarse hair was brown then. He needed a shave. Did he have the mustache? It came and went.
I do. I want you to get out of my house. Stop looking at me like that. What role are you playing now, Svengali? Cut it out. Just go.
All right. All right. I can’t talk to you when you’re like this. You should have done this onstage. You would have been very successful. Okay, I’m going. I’ll call tomorrow.
Didn’t I made it clear? Don’t call tomorrow or ever. This is ruining me. I don’t want you in my life.
I’ll call in a few days, when you’ve calmed down, said Q.
I thrust his sweater at him and pushed him toward the door, but the touching was a mistake. I turned away and the door opened and closed. So quietly, as if he were afraid to wake someone. A temperate man.
I called in sick the next morning—I was teaching at a private school while I worked on the novel, as Q. had urged. He was the guardian of the novel, he liked to joke. (The muse, I thought but never said aloud, maybe because I knew I’d have to finish it without him.) The late September day was warm and bright. I put on a pair of new sandals and started up Sixth Avenue—I was living in the Village then. I walked to Fourteenth Street, turned west and went up Eighth Avenue until I got to the sleazy section in the Forties, then turned west again and up Ninth. I walked for a couple of miles, not seeing much around me except that I’d reached Riverside Park. Soon my eyes focused. I watched a barge make its way downstream. I passed the Marina with its houseboats bobbing in the water. A few bicycles skimmed by, a few mothers wheeled strollers, but mostly I was alone. Everyone was at work or school, keeping the city’s life going. My legs and feet ached but I forced them on as if guards in shiny boots were prodding me with rifles: Into the woods! Hand over your valuables! Onto the train! After a while I stopped to sit on a bench, but only briefly. It was wonderful how my brain was numbed; I had almost forgotten why I was walking. At some point I went over to Broadway and stopped at a hot dog stand, eating as I headed back to the river.
I passed the high towers of Riverside Church and followed the river up to the George Washington Bridge, where I thought of crossing over to New Jersey—not jumping, only crossing—but didn’t. I wanted pavements and wasn’t sure I’d find them there. It was six-twenty when I got back home. Just as I unlocked the door the strap on my right sandal broke. How lucky, I thought, it waited till this minute. The sandals had been brand-new in the morning. Now the heels were worn down and there was a small hole in each sole, precisely in that place behind the ball of the foot where (the Tai Chi teacher would explain years later) we take root in the earth from which our strength rises. The rushing spring, it’s called, because the earth’s energy bubbles up through it to diffuse through the body. But you have to allow it in, make way for it and welcome it.
I tossed out the shoes and looked at my streaked, sweaty face in the mirror and said, Good, I’ve walked him off. I’ve thrown him away like an old shoe. I didn’t see him again for three years.
I’m not asking for forever. Only for the way things are and must be. If I can walk this thing off and get my strength back for three years, I’ll take it gladly.