Tolstoy Lied : A Love Story (9780547527307) (6 page)

I lift my face to the autumn brilliance shedding from the sharp river of sky onto the deep, shop-lined channel of Eighth Avenue. The air is cool, the periodic sidewalk-planted maples spangled orange. “I'm so sorry,” I say. “You deserve better.”

She doesn't speak.

I lay my hand on her shoulder. “I sometimes think being shocked when romance lets us down is like joining the military and being surprised when people shoot at you.”

She sighs. “Promise you'll come to opening night?”

“You know I'm coming. I ordered my ticket last week.”

“I'll get you a seat in the front row. I'll get you ten seats. I need you there.” She stops. We've reached her favorite health-food shop: terminus for our walk. “I've decided,” she says. “I'm going to be like you.”

“Celibate?”

“A hermit.”

I follow her inside. “You wouldn't last a week.”

Yolanda greets the woman at the counter. “I'll take an almond tonic with carrot juice,” she tells her. To me she says, “I wish I were gay.”

“Do women do so much better with romance, left to our own?”

“Women don't
do
this shit!”

“Suit yourself.”

She glares at the street.

“I'm not a complete hermit,” I say.

“You're a complete hermit.”

I turn to her. “I met a guy. Tuesday.”

“Oh great.”

“He asked for my number.”

“And you
gave
it to him?” She shakes her head. “The poor guy.”

“What's that supposed to mean?”

She smirks.

Behind the counter, the woman pours a viscous liquid out of the blender and into a cup. She hands it to Yolanda.

I watch Yolanda count her change. “I think I'd like to go out with this one,” I say.

Yolanda stops counting. “What, he's a Nobel Prize winner
and
a Chippendales dancer? But you'll still deduct points for bad grammar. Besides, he'll never survive the fax test.”

Yolanda believes I maintain my dysfunctional phone-fax setup to screen potential dates. I've never been able to convince her of the truth, which is that I landed in the situation out of sheer laziness. I have a fax machine that kicks in whenever the telephone line is silent for more than thirty seconds—a defect I discovered the first time I was put on hold without Muzak, when my relief at being excused from Manilow con maracas was fractured by a shrilling in my ear. I decided to take the fax machine back to the shop the very next day. But it snowed.

After a month or so I rationalized: my fax machine provided an outlet for creative expression, a verbal challenge, an avenue for oral improvisation. It was, in any case, beyond the thirty-day return period. Having memorized more literature than I care to admit, I myself have no shortage of fodder for the gaping maw of my fax, no matter how long airline ticket offices keep me on hold. And when I'm forced to set down my phone midconversation to search for a piece of information or take my kettle off the burner, I advise my conversational partners to throw the silence a bone now and then until I return. People recite poetry, whistle, sing nursery rhymes. The less adventuresome count aloud or just clear their throats. I announce my return to the phone with a deliberate, noisy fumble of the receiver, fair warning for anyone confessing secrets into the silence. The conversations after I return are noticeably more fluid—the fax machine has, over the years, earned its keep as a social lubricant.

According to Yolanda, though, I come up with an excuse to put a potential date on hold; then I listen in on his filibuster and subtract points for cliché and poor grammar.

“I have never, ever, put someone on hold unless I had to,” I say, as Yolanda takes a sip of her smoothie and turns for the door. “And I'm not that picky with men.”

“What about that sweet guy with the flowers?”

“Him? He was a madman. He showed up for our first date with roses.”

“He wasn't a madman. He was crazy about you.”

“I don't even
like
roses.”

“Still, it was romantic. He was the wrong guy, I give you that. But bringing roses is romantic.”

“It's the
opposite
of romantic. Romance is careful attention to what a particular lover wants or needs. Giving roses to a woman who doesn't like flowers is not romantic. It's the opposite of romantic—it's generic. And if a woman loves, let's say, auto repair, then buying her a welder's torch is the ultimate in romance.”

Yolanda sweeps open the door. “Everybody make way for the love expert.”

We step out onto the sidewalk. There is a shout. Just feet from us, a restaurant delivery man and his bicycle flip hard onto the sidewalk. In one continuous motion, the scrawny preteen skateboarder who just shoved him bends, nips two bulging bags of food out of the bike's basket, and is straightening from his crouch—the downed biker and I still inert from shock—when Yolanda knocks one of the bags out of his arms with an impressive kick.

Still holding the other bag, the kid palms the pavement for balance, slams his wheels to the sidewalk, and shoots away, heading uptown.

“You want to know why you piss me off?” Yolanda screams after him.

If I were a zoologist hunting specimens of the indigenous New Yorker, this would be my hunting call. No Manhattanite can resist.

A block away, the kid slows.

“Okay, fine. Steal the food. But at least you could stick around and
acknowledge
what you did to him!”

Holding aloft his middle finger, the skateboarder turns a corner.

From the pavement the delivery guy, a ropy black man with skin so dark he almost shines, looks up at Yolanda as though he's having a religious vision.

“You okay?” I ask him.

“Not English,” he says softly, with a thick, eloquent accent. He turns up his palms.

I point to his leg, where a long, painful-looking scrape extends from the edge of his shorts to his ankle. He smiles to reassure me. “Not English,” he repeats.

“Denial,” Yolanda tells him, setting a firm hand on his shoulder as he stands. “That's the problem with the world.”

“Ah,” he says with fervor, and follows Yolanda with large glimmering eyes as she hugs me goodbye and strides off, smoothie in hand.

When I get home from work, the number two is blinking on my machine. The first message is Hannah: Adam is back, has already taught Elijah the Russian word for snot, is driving Hannah crazy so nothing has changed. They all want to see me.

I set down my bag and reach for my calendar.

The second message is George. It was a pleasure throwing hors d'oeuvres with me yesterday. Would I care to call him?

I put down the calendar. Then I unload my bag and tidy the papers on my coffee table. I wander to the kitchenette's narrow window and stand for a long while, my eyes roaming a familiar course across the skyline. Uptown, the high rises are a bright, endless filigree. Though I've been hoping for George's call, I abruptly don't want to think about him. I think instead about the city. All those lives. All those individual, earthshaking dramas, and threaded through them the workings of history and poetry and the laws of physics and chemistry and biology, all rushing headlong at the same time and none of it forgetting to work for even an instant. This evening, for some reason, it makes me want to feel religious. The tiles chilling my bare feet, I consider some capacious intelligence keeping it all afloat—a phosphorescent world under an invisible cap of stars. I don't believe in God; I've never been able to convince myself that emperor's wearing clothes. The only faith to which I can comfortably do lip service is an ancestral one, inherited from my grandmother: a petite matron who, when complimenting a family member or voicing her hopes for her grandchildren, would invoke the name of an Irishman (“You should only be happy, Ken O'Hara”). Only in college, in conversation with an Orthodox Jewish classmate—a species as foreign to me as the Amish—did I at last glean the meaning of my grandmother's Yiddish disclaimer.
Kenahora: not to tempt the evil eye.

I raise the last of my diet soda. Framed mute in my window, the city dazzles. And the hollow sensation I've felt since playing George's message crystallizes into ordinary fear. “To Ken O'Hara,” I say, and drain the can. And dial.

George is a consultant for a nonprofit specializing in education policy. On the phone, his voice is friendly and reasonable. He's working on a smaller-schools initiative. Trying to muster public will to fix those overcrowded classrooms. Move the algebra lessons out of converted janitorial closets. Address the thirty-five-kids-per-teacher status quo and the tragic dropout rates. It's not the kind of work where you expect dramatic victory. The idea is to turn the tide one drop at a time. Meanwhile, he likes hiking.

Do I like hiking?

Whatever spontaneity I felt at the reception has deserted me. I do not spill my life story like hors d'oeuvres from a sodden paper plate. In point of fact, I'm practically monosyllabic.

George grew up in Toronto. His father and sister and three nieces, he says, are still there. He just bought a birthday present for his oldest niece. A ragtime recording. He used to play the banjo.

Hasn't touched it though, in two, three years.

His voice trails off, expectant. After a moment he says, “Not a banjo player yourself, I take it?” His voice is kind. As though he's worried for me.

It feels like a decade since my last date. And I'm abruptly and viscerally reminded why I wanted it that way. It was because I detested this exchange—two people reading from scripts, stringing up intriguing details about themselves like bait. Awaiting nibbles.

George jokes easily, posing the usual questions: family, life, work.

My script is blank. “Seattle,” I say. “I was born in Seattle.”

“And did you always know you wanted to go into American literature?”

This man knows nothing about me. Twelve years' commitment, books and poems into the thousands, paltry stipend paychecks: all bottleneck in my mind and I open my mouth and out pours eloquence. “Yes.”

Trying to rouse myself, I force a laugh. “So. Do you have any pets?” I say this in a wry tone.
A tone meant to acknowledge our mutual sophistication, as well as the absurdity of two adults starting from zero, gathering information about each other as though we were nothing but gawky kids hoping against hope the other likes our favorite movie.

The line goes briefly silent.

“I once had a hamster,” he says. His tone is not wry. It admits, in fact, only two possible interpretations. One: They don't have wry in Canada. Two: We
are
gawky kids.

Dating is—I understand this with thunderbolt clarity—an existential insult.

“Would you mind holding a second?” I say. “I've got something on the stove.”

With a stiff apology, I explain about my fax machine. Then, gently, warding off the specter of a cackling Yolanda, I set the receiver on the coffee table, nonplused by my own blundering. Odds are, at this rate, that George will never know me well enough to understand that I have nothing on my stove, ever, except occasionally a teapot. I force myself into a full, slow exhale. I know how to talk to a fellow human being. I talk to humans all the time. Obviously it's been too long since I had a conversation with a man capable of surprising me, even if all he did was throw his food.

Seconds pass. I'm furious at myself. Then, as from a great distance, I hear George through the receiver, clearing his throat.

“
O Canada!
” he trolls.

Even from this distance it's apparent that this is a man who could not carry a tune in a Samsonite.

“
Our home and native land! True patriot love in all thy sons command.
”

I can think of nothing to say to a banjo-playing Canadian named George. After fourteen years' boot camp, I'm a literary Manhattanite. I don't wear pastels. I no longer consider the word “earnest” a compliment. I know that patriotism is just another ethos that needs to be put up on a lift and checked for leaks. I cannot date this man.

It's only when he belts out
True North strong and free
that I start, despite myself, to laugh. As he continues, my laughter swells, grows giddy. I'm afraid he'll hear. Can he? He draws a deep breath, and yodels. “
From far and wiiiide . . .
”

I pick up the receiver gingerly, afraid I'll guffaw. “Hello?”

He keeps singing. Now he's rolling his R's, booming and operatic. “
O Canada, we stand on guard for thee.
” He finishes with a vibrato sufficiently grand to wilt maple leaves. The line goes silent.

“Encore?” I suggest, more meekly than I intend.

“Not a chance. You have to go on a date with me if you want the cabaret version.
Ms. New York Sophisticate.
” His voice turns gentle on these last words. I've been forgiven. I'm not sure I sinned—in Manhattan hard edges are a moral imperative. But after I say yes, my temples pounding, after we agree on a plan and I set down the receiver, relief floods my apartment so thoroughly I open a window and lean out onto the sill, sipping the air of the city that floats and shimmers to the horizon.

The office is in a brick building on Thirtieth Street, with grimy but dignified stonework and thick, scratched windows. I'm cleared for entry by a taciturn woman who finds my name on a clipboard and motions me to the end of the hall. George warned me over the phone of the irony: his education-policy group rents office space in a failed school, a building rezoned for business in the 1960s.

The stairs are shallow, covered in speckled tile, wide and echoing. As I climb I bear to the right and hold the rail, cornering apprehensively as though a crush of oncoming student traffic might knock me backward at any moment. I mount three floors and find the door propped open.