I remember a summer day walking in New York long before I had ever laid eyes on Annie. It was unusual for Maureen and me to be in New York in the summertime. Maureen did not like the heat. She spent her days sitting silently in one of the old chairs in the darkened apartment, as if the temperature made it impossible to read. In the late afternoons she walked across town into the park towards one of the museums. She considered this a great effort. When she returned in the evenings she collapsed on top of her bed for a nap and called out for something cold to drink.
We met for dinner in the apartment every night at eight-thirty. We ate something she had picked up on her way home or else she asked the cleaner, Delores, to make a tortilla and leave it in the refrigerator. She claimed that Delores made better tortilla than Maureen had ever tasted in Spain.
During that hot summer, I was free to move around the city by myself during the days. I had spent the afternoon in question browsing the bookstores along Fourth Avenue. There used to be a great number of them, many with fairly good selections of antique photographs. I once collected them and don’t know why I stopped. I still have them. One of my favorites is a complete book of Eadweard Muybridge’s stopped motion pictures. They have a vaguely erotic quality about them: pairs of flesh-white wrestlers with faces frozen in exertion and horses floating above the earth with rippling chests.
I worked my way from Fourteenth Street down to Ninth Street going in and out of stores. I was sixteen and had a very specific sort of picture in mind. I ended up buying a collection of German semi-nudes from the 1920’s. The pictures are attributed to “Anonymous.” I remember the book because its racy red cover and black print were what initially caught my attention. It was entitled “Frau Allein” or, Woman Alone, and looked like a political manifesto. The pictures themselves interested me because of their alluringly amateur quality. It seemed to me that the subjects (housewife-types of different shapes and sizes) knew the photographer intimately. The pictures seemed to have been taken in the women’s homes, as if he had come around and rung the bell and had, over tea, persuaded these women to take off their clothes or merely open their blouses, or lift their skirts.
I had the book under my arm. I was between Fourth Avenue and Broadway walking along in the desolation of the late-afternoon city heat. The sky, gleaming and expansive at the western end of the island, was a blinding slab of blue, like the reflection off a boat’s hull above the Hudson. From behind me I heard a series of muffled collisions, as if the largest pedestrians had begun forcefully walking into one another. I turned to find the street behind me almost empty, the last remaining people darting out of sight into doorways. I think for just an instant I imagined it had something to do with the book I had bought. Until I noticed the sky. It had become a mossy-gray behind me. I had never seen such a sky. An instant later, the raindrops, whose muffled collisions I had heard against the metal rooftops, made it to the street. My clothes stuck to my skin, the red binding of my book bled in my hand and my feet slipped in their shoes.
I ran across the street and took shelter with another man in a doorway and together we watched the downpour, the street flowing like a river, sweeping the city of its refuse.
It was like that: I realized my feeling for Annie in an instant—like weather.
When I had known Annie for just a few months, we took our first of several trips to Dorset for a visit with Sasha, her older sister. She lived in a small village, a twenty-minute walk from one of the most pleasant and tranquil rivers in the world. Their Mother had come from there.
We set off from the station on a warm Friday afternoon. Along the way we picked up schoolchildren at almost every stop. The corridors were lined with them gazing out the windows at the green fizz of passing landscape and blowing cigarette smoke through the small opening at the top of the glass. Games of flirtation were played along each corridor: school bags stolen; sweet wrappers flicked back and forth; bursts of cruel laughter. While I was only a few years older than some of these disheveled boys with their shirts hanging out or the girls with their pleated skirts and perforated knee socks, I felt a generation apart. After all, I was with Annie.
At the station, I held both bags in one hand and Annie’s hand in the other as we waited on the platform. She stood up on her tiptoes and searched amongst the crowd. The station was quite full, mostly with commuters and noisy school children. They passed around us: the commuters, silent and determined, on their way to the car park and the students still buzzing from the pleasures of the train journey on the way to the bus stop. No one seemed to be waiting for anyone like us.
“Do you see her?” asked Annie. She scanned the station anxiously and then looked up at me. “Well, do you?”
I told Annie that I had never seen her sister so I didn’t know what I was looking out for, but when I saw Sasha, I recognized her instantly. She looked like Annie, only older, a little taller and not as pretty. She emerged from the crowd smiling with a self-deprecating curve of the mouth. Annie released my hand and rushed across the platform. Sasha opened her cardigan to receive her and they embraced passionately.
We drove to Sasha’s small house in her powder-blue Volkswagen Polo. The car made pained sounds of determination from a place directly beneath my seat. I sat in the back smothered with luggage and several bags of shopping as Annie talked continually, interrupted only by bursts of not entirely natural laughter. Sasha watched the road and occasionally smiled. Once or twice, I caught her glancing at me in the rear-view mirror. I smiled and she looked away.
After I had put our bags on the guest bed I returned to the kitchen. Annie had gone to wash-up and Sasha and I were left alone. She rested her hands in the pockets of her over-sized cardigan where she fiddled with a collection of moist tissues. She had the habit of dabbing at the corners of her eyes and then blotting her forehead, as if she were an old woman suffering from cataracts and hot flashes when really she was just thirty-two. She seemed depleted and unhappy. Wilted with resignation, it seemed to me, but Annie said that in fact it was stubbornness, a lack of compromise that had hurt her sister.
We stood there watching the slow kettle. A row of souvenir mugs stood along the windowsill behind the sink. In each she had arranged a few dried flowers. Through the windows, I could see her well-tended garden. She was obviously very proud of it so I told her it was lovely.
“Oh, I need a garden,” she said. “I don’t know how you two live in that filthy city.”
“I’ve always lived in a city,” I told her. “Perhaps I should give country living a try one day.”
“You should,” she said and offered me a biscuit.
“I imagine it takes some getting used to.”
“Yes. I suppose so. But then you begin to notice things in a way you didn’t notice them before and you can really feel time passing.”
“I’m not sure I’d want that,” I said.
“No. Most people don’t,” she said.
Annie returned and we all sat down at the table for tea. Sasha warmed her hands around her mug despite the double-glazed windows that made the room almost uncomfortably warm. “Annie says that you’re a photographer?”
“I’m hoping to be,” I said.
“He’s very good,” said Annie. “He’ll take some pictures of you.” She turned towards me. “Won’t you?”
I’d never known Annie to be the excited one, the organizer. “If you won’t mind,” I said.
Sasha nodded, looking down into her tea. It was an indulgent, motherly gesture, as if she were not quite listening.
“Get your camera,” said Annie. I don’t think I’ve ever mentioned Annie’s mother. She disappeared when Annie was six and Sasha was twelve and left them in the charge of their father. She wrote birthday cards that first year, postmarked from Denmark and was not heard from again until she died seven years later in Leeds, of all places.
“There’s no need to take pictures of me,” protested Sasha.
“I want some,” said Annie. “I hardly have any pictures of you and they’re all from about ten years ago.”
“Well, not now,” said Sasha touching her sister’s hand. “I look awful. Not now.” Having quieted Annie, Sasha turned again to me. “You’re at Art College?” she asked, her hand still resting on Annie’s.
“Almost finished.”
She nodded again. “But you’re an American?”
“That’s right.”
“The accent’s difficult to detect.”
“Actually, I’ve spent a good part of my life here, or in Europe.”
“How’s that?” she asked.
I glanced at Annie. I thought she would have supplied Sasha with all those details, but apparently she had told her very little about me.
“His mother travels all over Europe,” said Annie. “She’s working on a book.”
“Oh?”
“A guide book and she travels for research,” said Annie.
“She never stops travelling,” I said.
“Annie would like that. When she was little, Annie said she was going to join the Navy. She wanted to see the world.”
“Did she?” I asked.
“Yes she did.”
After tea, the three of us walked out her drive and then along a narrow road. We had to walk in a single line, Sasha in front and me in back, pressed up against the hedges to avoid the cars whizzing past. I thought of Timothy. After a few moments we turned into a break in the hedge about the width of a single car, where we could all walk together. Annie and Sasha linked arms and I carried the picnic supper they had prepared. We followed the two troughs of flattened grass on either side of a flowering median until the pass opened into a large field. At the end of the field flowed the gentle river on which canal boats floated slowly past and brought with them the smell of cooking meat and sometimes music.
As we sat, the air seemed to be floating horizontally with its collection of petals, insects and pollen. I remember picking tiny leaves from my sandwich. The evening was so still I could hear Annie and her sister chewing. They chatted away on many different subjects, about people I didn’t know, or things that had happened long ago. They recommended books to one another with varying degrees of imperative. Sasha would name a title, the author and then put both hands on her chest. “This book,” she would say and shake her head as if she could no longer risk speaking for fear of bursting into tears. I thought they both sounded overblown and a little silly. I may have let this show. At one point, Sasha turned to me and said, “you’re not a reader, then? Some people just aren’t, I suppose.”
“No. I guess not. Not like you two.” I watched Annie’s head where it lay in Sasha’s lap and felt slightly jealous. We sat in silence until Annie or Sasha sighed and commented how lovely everything looked. Even the cold bottle of white wine that Sasha had provided failed to inspire a sustained three-way conversation. Finally, I resorted to the most tired of commonplaces and asked Sasha about her work. Sasha worked for the council as a home-care nurse. I imagine she spent her time making reassuring cups of tea, puffing up pillows, and stealing pensioner’s cigarettes. On that first visit, after we had all complimented the scenery numerous times, the conversation turned to politics. Sasha was very down on Margaret Thatcher and her attempts to privatize everything. I didn’t know much about it. I had no strong opinions on the subject one way or the other. Sasha was talking about the hideous repercussions for the country and, perhaps, for nursing in particular. I am not confrontational. I can’t have been listening very closely, for, had I realized how strongly she felt about it, I would have kept my mouth shut. “I don’t know why everyone gets so upset about Thatcher,” I said off-hand. “All round, she seems to be making England a nicer place to live . . . .” I have very little interest in politics and get most of my information from the headlines or conversations I have with those who are more informed. I may have been quoting Theo, but he would have said something like, “a damned nicer place to live,” but I can’t carry off that sort of talk.
Annie and Sasha glared at me. Annie looked disapproving while Sasha was obviously very angry. She twice raised her hands in front of her face before clapping them together ceremoniously. She shook her head as if to clear her vision. “I don’t think you have the slightest idea what you’re talking about, Gordon.”
I had no idea what to say. “You really don’t,” added Annie, nodding sadly.
“She may have made it a nicer place to live for you and your mother who, as far as I can make out, don’t work, but for the rest of us, she happens to be making it very difficult indeed.”
There was a long cool silence as the river trickled past. Sasha’s anger seemed slowly to subside, as poor Annie made polite chat. I resented Sasha’s self-righteousness, especially over something I cared so little about. I could hardly have explained that to her, however; it would only have made things much worse.
We stayed out by the river until almost dark. That was always my favorite part of the picnics. As the sun went down, the tame English landscape was transformed. The ball of fire in the black trees, the tan grass and wispy sky—Dorset suddenly looked like Kenya.
As we rested in the guest bedroom before dinner, Annie reprimanded me further. “Don’t talk about things you don’t understand, Gordon,” she said. “Especially with people who do.” This is sound advice that I am happy to pass along. I might add, do not say anything at all if you feel, as I have felt for the majority of my life, an inability to feel passionately about public things. But that was how I was raised. Maureen had no politics except to judge things on aesthetic terms. I suppose it is a condition that might be attributed to being an expatriate, but I don’t think so. I think the majority of people have trouble feeling passionately about things. I would venture that loneliness and boredom are the most common emotions. What about abandonment? You might ask. What about betrayal? What about love?
After dinner, the three of us sat around the table smoking and finishing a bottle of wine. I was trying to repair the damage I had done with Sasha at the riverbank. I made repeated efforts at conversation, mostly unsuccessful. I even made an apology, which she accepted graciously. The whole experience was exhausting and it was getting late. I decided to leave the two of them together to catch up without my interference. I rose from the table, thanked Sasha for her bland cooking and kissed Annie goodnight.
Annie and Sasha sat up late chatting at the little kitchen table. I could hear them whispering from where I lay in the guest bed. I tried to sleep, but just when I began to drift off one of them laughed and the other made a shushing sound. As it got later I began to wonder what they could possibly be talking about for so long. I then made a decision I am now ashamed of. I very gently peeled back the sheets and stepped onto the cold floor. I moved gingerly toward the door and after another moment’s pause, pushed it partially open. A small band of light from the candles fell across my shoulder and I could hear their voices more clearly.
“He’s an idiot,” said Annie.
When I heard her say that, I felt sick. I had been lying there worrying that they had been talking about me and now I was sure: I, obviously, was the idiot.
Sasha laughed. “You’ve always loved each other. Since you were kids.”
“He had his chance,” continued Annie.
“He loves you,” said Sasha. “He calls and tells me. He’s pathetic, actually.”
“He tells me as well and I don’t care . . . Besides . . . Now I’ve got Gordon. He loves me and I would like to be happy and I . . . .” She stopped in mid-sentence. “What is it?” Silence. And then it suddenly occurred to me: I’ve been seen.
“Gordon?” called Sasha.
I said nothing. Irrationally, I froze (I may even have closed my eyes like the child I remember myself being) and hoped I was invisible.
“Gordon?” Sasha called out again. For what could have been a full thirty seconds, there was only overwhelming, deadly silence.
“He’s asleep,” said Annie finally.
The relief I felt at that moment has never been matched in my life. She had not seen me. It was not me she had called an idiot. Someone else, but it didn’t matter because she had me. I could not have been happier. I thought nothing of what Sasha had said about them loving each other since they were children. Everyone has their moments of conviction; that’s how I think of it; not as stupidity or denial, as it may seem, but as conviction: an overwhelming desire to believe in something.
I pushed open the door and yawned wildly. A delicious feeling of exhilaration pushed at the back of my eyes. I must have never seemed so awake. “What?” I asked groggily. “Were you calling?”
“I thought you were in the room,” said Sasha.
“In the guestroom,” I said, thumbing over my shoulder.
“No, in here,” she said coldly. Her hair was now down around her shoulders and she looked even older than she had that afternoon.
“No,” I said. “I heard you calling and got out of bed. Did you need something?”
“No, darling,” said Annie. “Go back to sleep. I’m coming now.”
I turned and walked back into the room. I was wide-awake when Annie came in. She disrobed quietly thinking I had gone back to sleep. When she lay down beside me, I rolled over to her and began to kiss her.
Sasha and I exchanged an icy handshake at the station. She glared at me as Annie hung around her neck. Her distrust of me had been confirmed by what she thought she had seen the night before. That look she gave me at the station was the moment she wanted to make it clear that she didn’t care for me and it wasn’t lost on me. I knew it each time we came to visit and Annie knew it as well.
Annie and I sat in the train compartment watching the landscape turn slowly gray the closer we got to London. “What did you two talk about so late?” I asked.
Annie shrugged. “Just catching up.”
I don’t know why Sasha is so bitter. Annie told me a story about her sister’s early devotion to some depressive boy with whom she had gotten herself pregnant. The baby was terminated. Annie claimed that Sasha wanted to keep it, but this may have been wishful thinking on her part; Annie disapproved of abortion. The boy is probably at least fifteen years older than I am, so I should probably not refer to him as a boy, but this has always been the way I’ve thought of him: that is, sympathetically. He felt that he wasn’t making enough money to begin a family. Apparently, it hadn’t been Sasha’s first termination.
With the baby, unbeknownst to Sasha and her lover, went their fondness for one another. They hung around for a while, kicking at the emptiness between them. The real difficulty, according to Annie, was that they still vaguely recognized one another as the people they had loved. Like recognizing a childhood friend in a station somewhere and finding, upon shaking hands and inquiring into one another’s lives that you don’t like each other at all. Annie said that Sasha still thought about this young man.
“How can you stand her?” I asked.
“She’s my sister. We didn’t have a mother. We’re very close.” She shook her head, turned and looked determinedly out the window. I don’t understand that sort of blind family loyalty.
Annie was silent for a time. I stroked the back of her head but she kept moving away. “Sasha doesn’t approve of you either. When you stand in the room she’s not sure you’re really there.” Annie laughed unconvincingly and a small drop of saliva appeared on the glass like a fleck of rain.
* * *
The moment when I realized my feeling for Annie came as we wound our way back into London. I had wandered down the train to find us something to eat. The snack car had run out of almost every item on the menu. The steward was totally uninterested in serving me. He dragged his hand over each sandwich as I pointed through the dirty glass and I had to point out the two cans of lemonade, one after the other, in the fridge. As it was Sunday, the train was free of students and quiet. I studied each of the sleeping or reading passengers as I passed the cabins on the way back to ours and decided that there was no woman on the train as attractive as Annie.
When I finally made it back to our compartment, I found Annie asleep. She had let her hair fall across one eye and the skin on her cheek creased slightly where she rested her face against the seat cushion. I glanced tentatively at the large man with swollen forearms and scrubbed skin sharing our compartment. He never looked away from the window or changed the angry expression with which he watched the passing landscape. I put our snacks down on the small white plastic table marked with grey initials. Someone had shakily scratched another Annie’s name. I dragged my finger over the letters and the crushed heart the artist had added beside her name.
As soon as I sat down next to Annie, she switched positions and laid her head in my lap. I was content watching the houses standing in their little gardens. They seemed startled, as if the train had interrupted them in an act of privacy. I was happy thinking of the people inside having something to eat or watching television. As we passed one house, joined in an endless series to others exactly like it, I saw a young woman squeeze a full-sized double mattress through her window. It snapped open in the air and landed soundlessly on the patio. She leaned out and looked down at it and then we sped past out of sight. I once read that moments like these define modern human existence. The world passes at such a rate it is almost impossible to know anything for certain. For every action witnessed, any number of details or gestures go unseen that make it impossible to decide what an action really means. Was the house on fire? Was she a prisoner in need of a soft landing for her escape? Had she discovered a betrayal that had taken place on that disgusting mattress? Or, did the mattress simply need getting rid of and why bother carrying it down the stairs? I was concerned by the possibilities. It is far more reassuring to imagine simple lives passing behind darkened windows. I was content with this thought until I looked down at Annie again. This was the moment I have alluded to. She had fallen into a deeper asleep; her skin had slackened, vibrating partially from the motion of the train. Her lips were parted, her eyes held effortlessly closed. She was truly asleep and I was horrified. The usual competence and energy in her face, the privacy, was nowhere to be found. I hardly recognized her. I could see into her open mouth, her crooked teeth, the velvet ribbon of tongue and the dark, cave entrance of her throat. I suddenly felt overwhelmed by the thought that everything would not be all right. Terrible things could happen to such a face, I decided. I put my hands around her chin and her forehead and tried to hold her still, but it didn’t help. I had to wake her.
She blinked and looked up at me without recognition and then only slowly, she began to look awake. “What is it?” she asked, glancing up at the window.
The man sitting across was now watching us. When I returned his gaze he frowned and looked out again. “What is it?” she repeated. “What’s the matter?” She looked up at me with alarm.
“You looked so . . .” I paused. I didn’t know how to say it. I felt really very emotional. “I don’t want anything terrible to happen to you.” The man looked at us again and let out a small, incredulous chuckle. Annie reached up and awkwardly cupped my chin in her palm.
“Don’t worry,” she said. She was being kind, although she seemed irritated to have been woken. She moved her hand back and forth over the stubble on my jaw until her grip slowly slackened as she drifted back to sleep. I shook her once more and she emerged again with that same expression of underwater horror. “What?” she asked.
“I’d like to marry you,” I stuttered and glanced up at the man sitting across from us. His hairless eyebrows rose above his pink face.
She looked at me for a long moment. Her face did not change from one second to the next and then she put her small hard hands on the back of my neck. She smiled, but suddenly tears bubbled up and overwhelmed her expression. They were tears of joy, she explained, but she looked miserable. She pulled my head towards her and kissed me. I cannot be sure if it was my breathing or perhaps Annie’s, but I think the man might have let out a sigh before turning back to the window, to the landscape that had been replaced by the first dreary neighborhoods of the city.
“Do not be a fatalist,” said Maureen when I told her this story. “Your father is a fatalist, it’s simple-minded.” Although she did not say so, it is also un-American.
I had called to tell her that Annie and I were engaged. Maureen wanted to know if I was in love with Annie and I said that I was. She asked me how I knew and I recounted the story, exactly as I just have. She said I had it all wrong: “Love,” she told me, “is not fear of what you might lose.”
“Have you never felt that you had something that it would just kill you to give up?” I asked.
“Oh, Gordon,” she said. “You’ve never felt that strongly about anything. Not even as a child. You’ve always been quite self-sufficient. If I’ve done anything for you, I think that might be it.”