Paper Lantern: Love Stories (7 page)

We’d been drinking the night we first met, too, though it was pitchers of Rolling Rock, not champagne. I’d driven into Chicago for a reading and book signing by a friend who’d been a teacher of mine when I was in a graduate program in American studies there. After his reading, a small group, Lise among them, adjourned to a Hyde Park neighborhood pub. I’d noticed her in the audience at the bookstore. It was bitterly cold, and I’d taken a chance driving in but thought I could make it back to Michigan before the predicted lake-effect snow. She was wearing a furry Russian hat à la
Doctor Zhivago
that accentuated her cheekbones and the green of her eyes. There should be a word for a flair for looking stylish in hats. For Lise that included baseball caps, bathing caps, rain hoods, bicycle helmets, headbands, and probably tiaras and babushkas—anything that swept her hair up and bared her delicate face. Tendrils of auburn hair kept straggling out from under the fur hat and she’d tuck them back with the unconscious self-consciousness of a girl tugging up her swimsuit.

Later, when we’d tell each other the story of how we met, the word we’d use was
effortless
. We found ourselves seated directly across the table from each other in the pub and discussing our mutual friend’s new book. Then, looking for things in common, we went on to talking about books that had changed us, movies that had swept us away, music we loved, food, travel, all the while refilling each other’s beer steins, until inevitably we reached the subject of our personal lives.

Lise brought it up in the spirit of recounting what changed her, what had swept her away. I hadn’t drunk anywhere near enough to tell her about the ill-advised relationship I’d had after I’d quit my job as a city caseworker, with a woman named Felice, who had once been on my caseload. She’d managed to get off welfare by working as a cocktail waitress in a mob bar. Her dream was to go to law school. At the time we met, her daughter, Starla, was in remission from leukemia. When the disease returned, Felice turned to drugs. We’d go together to the children’s wing of County Hospital to read to Starla. She loved stories about cats, especially a series about Jenny Linsky, a black cat who wore a red scarf. I bought Starla a red scarf she took to wearing, which was as close as we could get to bringing her the cat that Felice was determined to sneak into the hospital. Starla’s death after months of wasting away left Felice inconsolable. It wasn’t numbness or escape she was after; she wanted to hurt herself, and I couldn’t find a way to help her. Talking about her like that sounded wrong, though—psychologized, abstracted, factual, but also censored, sanitized, and less than honest. I didn’t know how to tell what had happened, even to myself, and felt too guilty to try. After Felice disappeared, I had lucked into a teaching job in Michigan on the strength of my newly published first book. A few threatening letters from Felice were forwarded to me—letters threatening herself. They arrived with a Chicago postmark but no return address. I never knew where she was living or with whom, and felt braced for worse to come. That night in the pub with Lise, back in the city from which I felt exiled, was the first time in a long while that it seemed natural to share a drink with a woman. When Lise asked me directly, I simply told her I wasn’t seeing anyone.

Lise said that she was involved, off and on, with an older man who was a collector.

“A what?” I asked.

She laughed. “Whenever I say what Rey does, people do a double take.”

“Tax collector? Butterfly collector? Juice loan collector?”

“An everything and anything collector. He’s got a great eye! That’s the name of his business: Great Eye Enterprises. He has this talent for stuff. This stein—he could give you a disquisition on beer steins that would make you have to have a set of them. It’s sexy. He’s sexy. It’s partly smell—I don’t think anything indicates sexual attraction more than smell. It’s the sense most directly linked with memory. With Rey it was love at first sniff. The first time I met him, I literally started to tremble and had to hide in the Ladies’. Even when we’re apart I keep one of his undershirts in my closet for a fix.”

“So, is this an off or an on cycle?”

“Sort of in between. He’s starting a business in Denver. We talk on the phone at least twice a day. There’s so much history between us, and we deserve to be together, but I don’t know. I need my doctorate, and though he gets me, he doesn’t get that. He’s a salesman, not a scholar. He made a half a million dollars last year and wants to support me, but he’s getting tired of waiting. He says he needs a woman in his bed every night, which sounds hot, but he’s major needy, and in the culture he was raised in I’m not sure ‘in his bed’ doesn’t extend to ‘in the kitchen.’”

“So, how long have you two been involved?”

“Seven years.”

The people we’d come in with were bundling up to head out into a blizzard that had howled in ahead of schedule. We hugged our mutual friend goodbye, and it was only Lise and me left at the table when the waitress announced last call. We moved to the bar, looking for something to cap off the evening and clean away the aftertaste of beer. I suggested grappa. “Perfect,” Lise said. But the bar didn’t stock it.

“How about a couple shots of Drano instead?” the bartender offered.

Lise said she had a bottle at her place that she’d brought back from Rome, a trip she’d taken with Buck, a paintings conservator, during an off phase with the collector. She’d bought the grappa because it was flavored with rose petals; it took pounds of petals, thousands of roses, to make a single bottle. In Italy, the relationship with Buck had seemed a romantic adventure, but once back in the States she began to suspect that Buck, despite the macho way he dressed—the Wolverine boots and his prized Stetson Gun Club hat that he had worn during their trip to Europe—was gay and didn’t know it. She returned to her ne plus ultra—Rey.

“Once someone has taken you across a line into the best sex of your life, you can’t go back. It’s not easy for other men to turn my head from Rey,” she said. I didn’t ask what she meant by “across a line,” and I wondered how many other times Rey had been there to collect her yet again.

The sleety horizontal snow had plastered my wipers to the windshield. Given the alcohol, the hour, and the weather, Lise suggested that rather than find a hotel, let alone trying to drive back to Michigan, I sleep on her couch.

The couch was more about decor than comfort, a quality shared by most of her furnishings. Stuff—chiming clocks, threadbare tapestries, knickknacks, ornate mirrors, and murky oil paintings—crowded her small apartment. The room looked as if it might have a musty resale shop smell. I supposed it was decorated in Great Eye. There was a sense of recycled pasts that brought her phrase “so much history between us” to mind.

“Like it?” she asked.

“Very quaint.”

“Please, the operative term is
whimsical.
I meant the grappa.”

“The operative term is
thank you, I never tasted anything like it.
”

“So what do you collect?” she asked.

“What do I collect?”

“Everyone collects something,” she said. “First editions, baseball cards, saltshakers…”

“Frankly, since moving to Michigan, I’ve been trying to get rid of shit.”

I interpreted the alarmed look she gave me to mean that we were on a subject sacred to her, beyond anything in common between us.

She unrolled an unzipped sleeping bag over the brocade cushions and fluffed a pillow faintly scented by her shampoo against the single fin of the couch. “At least you’ve dared to remove your shoes, or do you always sleep fully dressed?”

“I forgot to pack my footy pajamas.”

“Will you be warm enough without them?”

“If my feet get cold I might need the loan of that fur hat.”

“It’s been a lovely evening. Thank you. Sweet dreams, Jack,” she said, and tucked the flap of the sleeping bag over me.

“No peck good night?”

Amused, she leaned toward me, chastely kissed my forehead, and let me draw her in. Her mouth tasted of rose petals and white lightning. She pulled away, and went about the apartment switching off lights, then, silhouetted against the street glow of the windows, stood as if she might be listening for something. Neither of us spoke—a silence made palpable by ticking gusts of sleet. She was shivering when finally she returned to the couch and slid in beside me under the sleeping bag.

From that first night, I always preferred that room in the dark. The windows above Dorchester, steamy with radiator heat, appeared tinted by the northern lights—an aura reflected from the blinking neon hangers in the dry cleaner’s shop window below. The storm faded to a tape hiss in the background of her breathing as we kissed and she lay back with her mouth open, waiting for another kiss.

“I think we can dispense with the pretense of you sleeping in your clothes,” she said.

“In my wildest imaginings I couldn’t have anticipated this. Not to be forward, but besides no jammies, I don’t have protection.”

“Me neither,” she said. “Just so you know, I’ve never done a one-nighter.”

“I’ve been tested since the last time I was with someone.”

“You’re safe with me,” she said, and though I hadn’t the slightest idea on what that assurance rested, I couldn’t at that moment summon the nerve to ask.

The following evening, when I phoned from Michigan, more than a hundred miles away, I said, “That thing about you never having done a one-nighter, how about keeping your record intact?”

“You’d do that for the sake of my record? I’m glad to hear it because I spent the day thinking about you. Not to be forward, but when are you back in town?”

“How’s this weekend?”

“Not good, I’m sorry,” she said, without explanation. “The weekend after?”

“I’m in New York then, doing a program at the Donnell Library.”

“I love New York. I could meet you there.”

All it took were those intervening two weeks of waiting for our initial effortlessness to turn into anxiety about seeing her again. I didn’t know what I might be getting into, but I knew already that despite the lightness of that first night together, her effect on me was powerful.

I arrived in New York on a Thursday and stayed at a friend’s unoccupied pied-à-terre, a fifth-floor walkup on Waverly Place, around the corner from the Village Vanguard, where Sonny Rollins was playing. On Friday night, after a dinner with my library hosts during which I tried to conceal my distraction, I went alone to the late set at a jammed Vanguard and stood by the bar letting the waves of tenor sax wash over me. It was a practice run of sorts: I imagined Lise beside me.

“Still remember me?” she had asked when I’d phoned her on landing at LaGuardia.

“Everything about you but your face,” I’d said. “Still coming?”

“I can hardly wait. Maybe you’re suffering from prosopagnosia?”

“Is there an over-the-counter remedy?”

“For lack of facial recognition? Not to be forward, but a direct application of moist heat is rumored to be efficacious. And, Jack, don’t be duped by an imposter.”

I could recall her green eyes beneath the brooding brow of a Russian hat, her amber tendrils of hair, the shape and shade of her lips, but not her face, as if that single snowy night we’d spent together had left me dazed.

In the crowd at the Vanguard, I felt as if I were waiting for a stranger, a stranger scheduled to arrive the next morning in a cab from LaGuardia and ring the buzzer. Having already undone the intricate battery of locks peculiar to New York, I’d race down the five flights to where she’d be waiting in the cold with her overnight bag. We’d kiss hello, and then climb back upstairs together. Just like that she entered my life.

*   *   *

That winter and spring, I gave readings at a literary festival in D.C. and at universities in Chapel Hill, Berkeley, and Miami, from the book of prose poems and vignettes I’d written while working for the Cook County Department of Public Aid. The book began three years earlier as a record of the stories I’d hear from welfare
recipients
, as they were officially called, which I’d write down at the end of the workday as I rode the L from Bronzeville back to my apartment on the North Side. Working on it had seemed effortless. I’d be lost in a trance of writing on the train, and sometimes my stop would go by before I noticed. It was shortly after meeting Felice that I realized I had the rough draft of a book I had never planned to write. If I cut back expenses, I had enough money saved to get by for five months or so, and I quit my casework job to finish a book that still seemed more like an accident than a gift.

There’s a tradition of books that have managed to survive their working titles:
Something That Happened
became
Of Mice and Men
,
The Inside of His Head
became
Death of a Salesman, Trinalchio in West Egg
became
The Great Gatsby.
My book was in that company, thanks only to its inept working title,
Farewell to Welfare
. I had intended to dedicate it to Felice and Starla, but after Starla’s death, the book was published without a dedication. It was my first and, I now thought, possibly my only book, one from which I felt increasingly dissociated. Back when I’d started on it, I had felt there was so much that needed to be recorded in the plain language that people spoke on the street, a language real and by nature subversive, in opposition to the sanitized bureaucratic jargon of the case reports I had to file. But since Starla’s death, I hadn’t written a word.

At each university that spring, once free of obligation, I’d wait for Lise to arrive. The anticipation was a kind of foreplay. She’d fly in and we’d spend my honorarium on a weekend in a hotel as if we’d won at the track and the college towns were our Bouzy. In North Carolina it was the Grove Park Inn in the mountains near Asheville, where Scott Fitzgerald stayed when he’d visit Zelda. In D.C. we slept on a rickety antique bed at a place that referred to itself as an inn where, Lise agreed, the operative word was indeed
quaint
. At Berkeley we drove down the coast to the Vision Perch, a bed-and-breakfast in Big Sur.