I lived with Faye for weeks after I showed up. I hunkered down in her apartment all day because of that loud, stinky city that never stopped fidgeting. I only poked my nose out in the evenings, and even after dark the streets were still too busy for my taste.
That made her smile. She said my brother had been a wild bear, but I was even wilder. He at least had been okay going outside with her, meeting people, visiting museums, or even just walking down the street, looking around at everything.
I didn’t care what Thomas managed to do or not do: he and I weren’t the same, I knew that already. I’d never have up and left without so much as a look back.
It took me days on end to decide whether I ought to write my parents and tell them that I was coming back but alone, or not say a thing and give them at least a bit more time to hope that I’d found him. I took the easy way like a coward: I didn’t do anything—and I ended up wishing I hadn’t.
Because I wouldn’t go outside most of the time, Faye brought over friends or colleagues once or twice a week, maybe so she’d civilize me. They were New York women, but they were all shapes and sizes—tall, thin, short, squat—so that I got to wondering if all the civilizations of the world had been thrown in a bowl and tossed together and that was what made all these funny combinations. Some looked at me funny and one of them even said I was exotic. I didn’t really see what she meant. I was just a man from the Far North, while she was a tall, wiry woman with long, shiny blond hair that smelled like lilacs. Her skin was so thin that it probably wouldn’t have taken anything to make her veins burst. While Faye was in the kitchen, she whispered that I should come over for dinner sometime and I had no idea what to say. She was easy on the eyes, sure, but I just stared at the thin white hand she put on my arm and I didn’t say a thing. That can’t have been very good manners on my part. She made a face and pulled her hand back as soft as she’d stuck it out.
I hadn’t met many women, just enough to know that they were so much more complicated than men. I had trouble understanding what they wanted, what was hiding under their words. I thought their words always meant two things at the same time until I met Faye, whose words were as honest as her feelings.
It didn’t take me long to understand why Thomas had stayed with her, why he’d fallen in love with a woman who didn’t have to do anything more than smile. But that hadn’t been enough to keep him there. It was just sheer chance that he’d left at the end of July, almost a month to the day before I turned up. She came home one afternoon and found a note saying he was leaving, he couldn’t stay longer. She knew he didn’t like planes and he only had the money from his odd jobs, so she figured he must have taken a boat because he wanted to leave the United States. He could just as easily be on a cargo ship as on one of those Caribbean islands, but I was sick and tired of looking for him. I couldn’t stop living my own life just to run after a ghost that didn’t want to be found.