My Education (39 page)

I realized I'd gotten my reckoning from him already.

At this hour my unbeautiful block, with its broad deserted sidewalks, and its facing chain link parking lot now plunged into darkness like a secretive garden, and its restive ailanthus trees brooming their leaves through the pools of street light, had the feel of the deep countryside, as if that feeling came up all the time through the pavement, but could only be felt during near-perfect moments of hush. A delivery boy in cooks' whites and a white paper hat on his head glided by on a bike, as if towed by his handlebar freight of a great padded cube of stacked pizzas. From many blocks distant we heard drunken singing. Beside me Dutra metamorphosed. Dutra's steady ascent as the years slipped away had concealed the years somehow, his arrow and time's keeping pace. Now abruptly his fell and I gazed on a middle-aged man. Perhaps this was the relativity Dutra had labored so hard, and with such total lack of success, to elucidate to me, while sprawled on that scratchy orange couch we had shared. Two airplanes fly next to each other and onboard them no one gets old . . . I could not have it right. I longed to have something to ask him so that he could lord over me with his vast erudition. Instead I asked, “Are you taking the subway?” and with this he unfolded and rose to his feet, and I stood up also, now too close beside him to look into his face.

“I'll walk.” When I protested he added, “What, you think Big Bad Brooklyn'll eat me? Don't forget I was born here. I'll survive.”

“You were born in Queens.”

“So much the worse.”

“I just meant it'll take you so long.”

“It'll take me an hour or so. I've got plenty of time.” Without warning he crushed me against him. “I love you,” he stated, as if bracing for a rebuttal. Before I could gasp out an echo he added, “I love you, I love my mommy, I love Alicia.” He released me. His “mommy”: mocking her, mocking himself, mocking all of us? Even with sarcasm he could not get the better of what he had said. He stood staring just past my ear, his eyes damp.

“Don't you love any men?”

“I love Lion.”

“You hardly know Lion.”

“He's your kid. I love him.” Now he'd mastered himself. “You locked out?”

It was the moment to tell him, the first time in this long day and night that I'd felt I could seize his attention and turn it to me and the child I was going to have. Yet I couldn't. It would have felt like kicking him. Instead I said, “I've got keys in my pocket.”

“Okay. Tell Matthew thanks for the food.” He turned to go.

“I love you too,” I said then, to his back.

“I know, Ginny. So long.” And he sprang down the steps as if newly awake and strode off.

Not a week later Myrna greeted me, on my return home, with a look of rebuke and a phone number scrawled on a sheet of notepaper. “That gentleman called here again. This time he used up all the tape so to make him stop calling I picked the phone up.” She looked much as I imagined she would after plunging her arm shoulder-deep in our hamper. “He asked me to give you a message. I had a great difficult time hearing him. It sounded to me like he called from inside a tornado.”

In fact he had called from a rented convertible traveling west at high speed through the state of Wyoming. “That's when he calls to say goodbye: from
Wyoming
,” I told Matthew later, aggrieved. Dutra had sold all his assets, or left them in somebody's care to be sold, and gotten onto I-80 with no clear destination in mind. At least, none he'd shared with Myrna. Just his mobile phone number. When I called I got a boilerplate message that the Sprint customer I was trying to reach must have strayed out of range.

T
hat June a friend who taught French at Columbia offered me keys to her on-campus office; she was spending the summer in Paris. By then I was known in my circle of friends for my vagabond work habits, which gave visual expression, as I aimlessly wandered the streets with my laptop in tow, to the aimlessness that for years had afflicted my mind. Since Lion's birth, and his complete annexation of our cluttered apartment, I had “worked” on my third, as yet nebulous, book in the apartments of neighbors of ours when they went on vacation, in the circulation library of the local Catholic college until they expelled me, in an unheated, sawdust-choked former sculpture studio in an unheated, rat-infested loft building beside the expressway, and in any number of other unsuitable places which only had in common being neither my home nor a place that sold coffee. I could not even pretend to work at home or in public cafés, though I barely did better elsewhere; hence my ongoing quest. After all, I had a book many years overdue and a new baby coming, and amid this excitement of certain disaster my friend's offer seemed like a lifeboat: I'd have a manuscript finished by August! Even the commute to the office was fortunate. Much as I liked spending days in our neighborhood, I hated those jarring encounters that often took place, between Myrna and Lion and me, as I toiled with my laptop from one possible spot to another. Hated them no less if they took place at a distance—myself spotting Myrna and Lion, but remaining unseen—than if us three, heedlessly turning corners, were abruptly and queasily brought face to face. Unfocused enough as it was I became even more so, stung by the sight of my child getting on with his life very well without me. And so the train ride to Morningside Heights was a welcome adventure, like my own daily Paris, with its new rituals and refuges. I liked most my own newness: it felt like years since I had worn the city's anonymity.

Despite that it was just a few days before I saw Nicholas.

I was sitting on the traffic-median bench at Broadway and 112th Street, on the pretext, not that anyone would ask, of riding out a mild bout of nausea, but really for the view of St. John the Divine to my left, and of a framed square of the secretive lushness of Riverside Park down the street's steep incline to my right. I was on my way home, it being almost two
P.M
., the end of my workday, though the sun felt like noon and the day hardly started. I'd been doing all right in the office, amid the strident spines of the complete Irigaray and de Beauvoir keeping march around the walls, but with the commute I didn't even have four hours left for my work, and a good part of that was spent browsing the lunchtime selections on Broadway. Each day I'd felt more reluctance to pack up and leave. Today, dragging my feet, I'd skipped the subway station at 116th and kept walking, and now as if like my bench mates I had hours to burn was lounging on a bench two blocks shy of the next stop at 110th, between a bunion-tormented overweight woman and a small, birdlike man. The man was working a crossword I'd begun to spy on—I was just trying to read his next clue when I saw Nicholas clatter past with the traffic, so near I might have reached out and caught at his sleeve.

“That boy will get himself killed,” said the woman, who had seen him also. Hearing this my shock turned to delight, and I started to laugh. The woman must have been well past seventy. I was now thirty-six. Which made “that boy,” Nicholas . . . fifty-four? Whatever his age, he had changed very little. What I'd glimpsed of his style was different, but so akin to his previous style in flamboyance that the two ways of dressing together expressed more about him than either would have considered alone. He'd been wearing a three-piece tweed suit in a color that read, at that speed, as dark gold, with a bright green bow tie, polished caramel shoes, and some sort of elasticized bands binding up his pants cuffs. He'd been on an old black no-speed bicycle, with fenders and a rack to which was tied a briefcase of some kind. He'd been wearing no helmet, the probable source of my companion's comment, though she might also have noticed that he rode in precisely the least legal and least secure place, on the inside of the inner, fast lane, with the murderous cabs. Nor did he wear glasses or shades. I had seen, bearing toward me in all calm intentness, his narrow and elegant face.

I'd spent the greatest portion of my life now in New York, more years than I'd ever lived anywhere else. Here was the bedrock and topsoil, here the place seeds had sprouted and flourished or died; here I'd been young with some people who were already growing cantankerous; here I'd found my husband and given birth to my child and here the only world that child yet knew. I could accommodate my pre–New York life; four times a year I played host to my mother as she tirelessly circled the globe, and I continued to know people from my school days and even my childhood. But these threads had stitched themselves into New York. They were a part, however small, of the cloth of my life in this place. While Nicholas, by contrast, was not. He'd been severed from me totally. Yet it was far less his absence from me than my absence from him that to me made the difference. For him, nothing of my life—my real, full New York life—had yet happened! It was all in the future—how then could
he
still exist? He had not quite seemed to, passing by on Broadway. He must have been a phantom, or a prank.

I saw him again the next week, from a far more serene bench on Morningside Drive. It was true I'd been aimlessly walking the streets, aimlessly sitting on benches without so much as the newspaper for occupation, somewhat more in the interval. Perhaps I'd spent my working hours outdoors, far away from my laptop, because the weather was clear, blue, and hot, and because walking limbers the mind. But it was equally true I hadn't written a word since I'd seen him. I'd sat in the office relaxed as a fist, attentive to physical signs that I might need a bagel. The bench on which I'd paused now was en route to the famous pastry shop and literary enclave where such, unlike me, as can write in a place that sells coffee would sit hours on end, gazing loftily into their thoughts. I hadn't really wanted to go there. There were only a few passersby, the Drive otherwise quiet and sun drenched, a far cry from Broadway. We might as well have been alone. There was no avoiding the encounter, unless, rattling swiftly uptown again, energetically pedaling, he failed to recognize me. It was possible; I was fourteen years older. But he did recognize me, and even seemed gladly amazed.

“My God, Regina,” he cried, at the same time as he swung a leg over his seat without ceasing to glide, so that he rolled to an elegant stop, perched upright on one pedal. He could only have mastered that trick as a boy, the devilishly handsome blond boy he had been growing up in Vancouver. Where I'd known him bikes had been pointless: everyone had driven up and down the escarpment, or slogged the stair-steps in the sidewalks on foot. Now I was surprised to realize that I, too, had been absent from critical parts of his life. I had never suspected he might be a cyclist, as if he'd been born onto pedals the way some are born into the saddle. And so my whole history with him coincided with a time of exile from his native conditions.

He must have been happy to be in New York, where the whole level city lies spread for the cyclist who isn't afraid of collisions. He clearly was not. Once again he did not wear a helmet, and once again he did wear a flamboyantly beautiful suit, just two pieces this time, no bow tie, bespoke shirt with a pale pink pinstripe.

“Do you live here now?” I asked, the greatest shock how unshocking it felt, to be standing before him again.

“Now? I've been here for more than a decade. Eleven years come September.”

“I can't believe we've both lived in New York all that time. Although I've been in Brooklyn.”

“As I know, having read the Author's Note of your book with the same delight that I read every word preceding. It's a wonderful book, Regina. How nice to get the chance to congratulate you directly. All the while I was reading it I kept thinking, What a good thing she's made! It must be satisfying.”

I didn't protest his absurdly outsize compliment, just accepted with thanks—I'd learned at least one thing since last he'd known me. What I did linger over, in silence, was that I hadn't been absent to him after all. Any pleasure this might have yielded was obscured right away by the knowledge he'd known I was here and not contacted me. But why would he? I'd known where he was, or had thought that I did, and not contacted him.

We walked together, he pushing the old bicycle. I let him do all of the talking, which task he performed with easy, boyish garrulity, speaking of the neighborhood, of his apartment in a dignified building on 119th Street which within a few minutes we slowly went past, of his many terrible and few promising students, of school controversies and colleagues. In fact he knew my friend the French professor, but not at all well. “How smart of you, leaving your own home to write. It must give you such clarity.”

“I hardly have a choice. At home there's a three-year-old boy who takes my efforts to write as a personal insult.”

The disclosure delighted, but didn't seem to surprise him, and he didn't pursue me for details. Instead he said, with satisfaction, “I always knew you'd make a wonderful mother.”

Now my heart did lurch into my ribs. “Really? Why?”

“Oh, of course,” he evaded the question.

We came to the quad, then his building, within clear sight of the French department building wherein was the office I already knew I would not use again, and at last to his department mailbox, and all that while I felt eyes fix on me, as his companion, just as I'd felt them in the past. And just as in the past, he ignored the persistent yet guttering spotlight of furtive attention, performing his envelope errands, then leading me back as we'd come. His grimy Parisian building, with its worn-off gold numbers and sleepy doorman, once again was in sight. “Are you hungry?” he said. “Won't you come up for lunch?” And before I could speak, coded reassurance: “You'll give me a nice change from eating alone.”

Still my heart shuddered and tried to escape as we mounted the three steps beneath the awning and crossed the tiled lobby to the ancient elevator and rose to the tenth, topmost floor. His apartment, at last, gave a tangible shape to the passage of time. Now even that glacial, underfurnished apartment of his postdivorce year seemed in retrospect meager, ad hoc, a place of scuffed walls and cheap kitchen utensils. Here was grandeur. Banks of west-facing windows gave a view all the way to the Hudson and Palisades, over the bowed heads of inferior buildings. Enormous squares of art fenestrated the walls, each piece an oblique reminder of the styles I remembered him loving, the unelaborate Inuit whalebone figurines, and Mondrian's bright demarcations, and Friedrich's humbling fields of ice. On the walls that were not hung with art stood cliff-faces of well-ordered books, housed in beautifully joined, off-white bookcases, not heaped in man-high stalagmites on the floor. The expanses of cream-colored carpet were unworn and unstained, the solitude thriving and orderly.

Yet lost as they were in that gracious, impeccable space—how his twenty-two-year-old lover of the moment, whoever she was, must have swooned the first time that she saw it—somehow I spotted the few photos immediately. One, no more than two inches square, was set in a cube of gray glass that sat on a bookshelf, almost camouflaged by the bright spines. The other, an enlarged black-and-white, hung framed on the wall of his study. I glimpsed it down a long hall, through an open doorway, from a distance of perhaps fifty feet, but I would have recognized the subject had the photograph lain ten floors down in the street.

He caught me looking. “You remember these good people,” he said. He picked up the glass cube and handed it to me with perfect simplicity, and there it lay in the palm of my hand: Martha, as I had first known her, in amber or locked beneath ice. Their son—Jeremiah? Johann?—was a featureless white-swaddled lump in her arms. She gazed steadily into the camera, ambiguity lifting one side of her mouth, as if she were afraid to show herself truly happy, or truly unhappy, but I couldn't decide which it was, what the truth of her feeling had been in that moment, and in this way she was just as I'd first known her, also. She even wore the oversize button-up Oxford, her wardrobe in all my first memories of her, the rolled-up sleeves girding her elbows like donuts. Of course, I realized suddenly. She had worn them to breastfeed. It was barely a year since I'd stopped wearing such clothes myself.

“I'm reminded this one is a photo of Martha,” Nicholas was saying, now leading me down the hall to his study, as if I'd insisted on seeing both pictures. I still had the cube tightly gripped in my hand. “Which isn't to say,” he went on, “I would rather not see her. Not at all. But for me, this is a photograph of Joachim.” There it was, the high-minded, unsuitable name, somehow transmuted in the utterance, its alternatives rendered implausible, even before I'd laid eyes on the person the label denoted. As we entered Nicholas's study he turned to face me and in synchronized movement I turned the same way, so that I wouldn't have to look at the picture we'd come to regard. Instead I found myself facing the life of their son: that featureless, white-swaddled lump now grown the ripe, heavy cheeks of a baby; now the lengthening delicate neck of a toddler, air interposing itself between shoulders and jaw, strange composure saturating the eyes. It seemed that with Joachim, just as with Lion, that period of uncanny and ageless composure, of regal self-assurance and detachment—as if the child has already outlived you, or come from the past, from the charcoal of eons-dead stars—had peaked close to age two and a half. Thereafter the comical, treacherous world laid its snare, and the gestures of character covered that early quintessence. So that perhaps I was unsettled even more when the child of seven, or ten, or fourteen—the clown-child baring teeth to the camera; the proud, nervous child astride a small horse; the unaware child gazing out a bus window; even the child half-concealed by his own heedless sleep—in his thoroughly singular presence yet disclosed with sly flicks of the veil Nicholas, and then Martha, the longer one stared, although Martha a great deal more often, her unreduced presence in him like an optical trick. And though I hardly knew why, I abruptly remembered a trip I'd gone on with my mother, while I was pregnant with Lion, and she, for the first time in years of insatiable travel, inclined to revisit the country in which she'd been born. After my father had squired her away she had never gone back, through five decades of mind-boggling change, so that nothing at all looked the way it once had, which had suited and even relieved her. Then turning one corner we'd stumbled by chance on her grade school, with its humble colonial brick and its three cement steps she had climbed with small feet crammed in pinching “good” shoes shaped like little canoes. The forgotten and never-loved building seemed smaller to her, but not nearly shrunken enough not to wound with its merciless sameness, and she had bent herself nearly in half and sobbed into her lap as I drove us away. So perhaps it was her grief I felt as I gazed on this child not mine, and not even much of a child anymore. Grief not for him, nor for Martha exactly, but for all my lost selves, which I liked to imagine were still somehow there, waiting for my return. But those selves were long gone. I would never be younger again. This was so simple it went without saying, but unsaid, one could try to forget it.