Cities I've Never Lived In: Stories (15 page)

I stayed in a hostel next to a church. For the first two nights I was in a dorm room, but I switched to a private after that. To get to the private you had to pass through a dorm. The first night the dorm was empty, but the next night a man arrived. He picked the bed closest to my door, and I could hear him turning over in the night. Rooms like that—rooms that were tucked inside other rooms, which were then part of a larger building—felt like holding, like being held by something that you couldn’t see. That time in Memphis was the loneliest part of my trip, though I didn’t know it then. I felt happy. I walked to the vegetarian café where the beer was two dollars after six. I read Graham Greene. On Sunday I even went to church, knowing that it could be an answer to the loneliness, but that you had to believe in order for that to be the case.

He had the sort of face that made me check for a ring, and this wasn’t easy, as I was always getting things mixed up, and which ring went on which finger, and I would stare so long at a man’s hand that I was sure he’d noticed. I only checked maybe once a year, and it was only a particular kind of guy, the kind of guy who was a few years older and already had the gentleness of living with a woman, maybe had raised a child with her, and it was that gentleness, that love already existing for others, that drew me, so I knew right away that you had to look for a ring.

He had a ring, and so I told myself, There, now you know, and I felt the calm settling of disappointment as it joined the tide of all the other disappointments, the soft, great ocean of disappointment that comes from living among millions of others who also want things, sometimes the things that you want.

His face had aged into a worn beauty. He was sad; you could just tell. He looked intently at you at first and then afterward didn’t look. He had a soft voice. I had to sit close to hear him. He owned the restaurant that I applied to and was surprised to have gotten a callback for. It had been years since I waitressed, but my letter—I noticed when I reread it—was simple and direct. After meeting him I knew that he would have wanted a letter to be like that. And I was direct in person and still had the sort of appearance that drew some people. Life hadn’t been quite what I wanted. I didn’t have the things I would say I wanted most. I was quick and sad and you knew looking at me that nothing had gone quite right. I don’t know. What do we know of ourselves? Some people noticed me in a room. Some noticed, but some didn’t. I don’t believe any, though, held their breath while looking at my finger. I didn’t hold that sort of promise for someone: a new life briefly opening and then just as quickly closing. He was like that for me. I fell in love with his life and his restaurant—the light dimmers, the menu, the basket of aprons, the shallow soup bowls, the way the candles burned my fingers when I cleaned them, and his farm, and probably his wife and little girl, and the chef I would end up with when I couldn’t be with him, and everything, everything he had, for one night, my first training shift at the restaurant.

In the city you had to work several shifts before a restaurant hired you, and I had been offered another job that I was afraid of losing. I wrote an e-mail to him, hoping he would understand. I wrote that I had to take the sure job, the one that I would lose if I waited for my second shift at his restaurant, and that I was sorry, as I liked meeting him, and liked his restaurant so much. Life never quite works out the way you want, I wrote, and I’ve never known what to make of it. He wrote back saying never mind about the second training shift, that if I wanted to work at his restaurant, that would be fine.

An East River Ferry terminal was near the restaurant. The ferry skirted down Brooklyn, landing in Manhattan. I used to take the ferry the other way, take it to northern Brooklyn and be let off among warehouses and duplexes painted red and blue that looked as if they were in a fishing city, some Eastern European city I’d never been to. I’d walk to a Polish café, where I’d get a square of plum cake and find a ledge or the edge of a planter where I’d sit and eat, then walk and look at the buildings. I walked wishing I lived there, near or in one of the red and blue buildings. I would narrow the city down to the river and the ferry and the circle of life around them, with little more than a café and post office and bakery and grocery store and small park to make up my world.

The ferry was never crowded. While New York was overrun with people, the ferry made me feel I was in a city that people had forgotten, where there was enough time for the man who tied up the boat to wish me a good day—every time, always a good day. Subways were so crowded I had to push through, but on the ferry I sat at a table and watched out the window, trying to decide which way the city stretched.

In the city it was a treeless fall. Even where there were trees, the colors didn’t change beyond a leaden yellow. Leaves grew wet and faded and fell and were raked by the weekend crews that cleaned up after summer cookouts. It was as if the city was frozen and time was passing somewhere else. I took the train to New England to find that the trees had already lost their colors and the fields were full of pumpkins. I couldn’t tell if it would have been better to stay in the city and avoid the sadness and confusion of seeing time sped up like that.

It had been a while without love, but I didn’t miss it the way I used to. My last lover rarely held me, and yet that hadn’t seemed sad. It was enough what we did—enough to go to the deli with the racks of doughnuts in the window and to go to parties and through undertones communicate the time we wanted to leave together. Enough time had passed that the loss of my marriage wasn’t so raw anymore. On Sunday mornings, I read the Vows section of the
Times
carefully, not the simple articles of young people getting married, but about the longer, more tangled relationships, those that had been close to breaking apart. The lesson being not that love conquered all or that love was eternal, but that there was no lesson much beyond luck, timing what life gives you or doesn’t.

The restaurant got its name from the owner’s farm, Four Hills. The farm was north of the city, in the Hudson Valley. One day in October, I learned why it was called Four Hills. I went up with a line cook at the restaurant. It was a Wednesday, and we were both off during the day, so we drove to the farm to pick up produce. We stopped at a café that he liked and had biscuits and eggs and bacon and coffee. Grant was a quiet man. I had only noticed him when he had, on a busy night, brought my food out to tables. He was large and uncomfortable outside the kitchen, and the plates of food looked small in his hands, too small and inconsequential to be something he worked at every night.

After we ate, we drove toward the hills. The farm was nestled at the base of them, and the trees were lit in red and orange. I found I didn’t want to look at them too closely.

At the farm, Grant worked like he did in the kitchen, with quick focus. Afterward, I helped carry tubs of produce and eggs to the car. Then we drove to a wine bar he knew outside of town, near the river. When he had suggested it, I had looked at my boots covered in mud, and at my jeans and jean jacket. It’s fine, he had said, we’re in the country.

Riding in the car, I was dazed by the trees. I told him a story of how one day, months earlier, I had taken the train to Fort Tryon Park and spent the time in the park talking about the trees. The friend I had gone with had stayed quiet. But isn’t it amazing? I had said, all these trees? She had just been out of the city, she said, the week before, so maybe she was used to trees. But I hadn’t been out of the city, and they seemed spectacular to me, how small and lovely you felt walking under them.

At the wine bar, we ordered at the counter and took our glasses to a deck out back. It was high up and overlooked the river. I talked about the trip I had gone on, talking about the soup kitchens and the cities, and then about being back, about the truck horns on the BQE. He was interested in food sustainability and talked for some time before stopping. I sound ridiculous, he said. I forget there are people starving in this world. He went inside and came back with a plate of toasted bread with chutney.

After, we drove back to the city. The trees had been too much, anyway. One wants trees, but not that many after so long without. We parked and carried the produce in. The owner was at a back table on his computer, drinking a glass of wine. A lot of greens, Grant told him. I went into the bathroom to change for work while Grant went to the kitchen.

Someone famous came in that night. I forget who. The food was really beautiful, everything that we gave to this famous person. It was a good night. Enough tables for everyone to move efficiently, but not so many that the food had to be prepared too quickly. There was a hush, too, from the trip, and I moved as if still under that canopy.

The horns were incredible back then. They were the deep, sonorous creatures of the city, beckoning as if from a dream. A BQE on-ramp was close by, and drivers used my street as the access, backing up the length of it. The cars—with the twerpy horns and the rap on the radio—were annoying but forgettable, slapped away like so many pesky flies in the fall when all the flies are trying to get indoors, trying to keep alive. The trucks were different. They were the conversation the city was having with me back then, the rumbling, infernal progress of need across a landscape, of making movement heard and felt, making progress heard and felt. It created a tremor. Reminded me of how small I was. I slept and woke to those horns. Sometimes one low, steady, constant bellow would last improbably long—ten, fifteen seconds of need. The horns echoing to each other, calling to each other. I slept and woke to that.

The first night Grant stayed over, we lay in bed listening to the trucks. Like they are all lost and finding their mates, I said. It was a horrible sound, but better if you thought of it that way. The light from streetlights came in and we moved our hands through it. All the trucks trying to find each other in the night. He told me that the restaurant wasn’t doing well, that it was losing the owner money and they were trying to stay afloat. Which you know, he said. Of course. Because you aren’t making money either. When you’re poor, I said, sometimes it becomes easier to make even less money. We weren’t trying to fall asleep. We’d had sex while the light was going down and hadn’t yet turned on the lights. We were getting hungry but still hadn’t moved, putting off the discomfort the nudity was going to bring us. I had some money, some years ago, after the divorce, I said, some money from my ex-husband, but that’s gone now.

He said he didn’t want to work in kitchens anymore. He wanted to spend the winter in the farm cottage. He had planned to go to Spain, had started in kitchens to save money, but had stayed instead. It hadn’t been the plan, but he was still young, and now wanted to spend a year on the farm. He said that kitchen only had a dorm fridge and a hot plate. That’s what I want, he said. That’s all I want. He was a strong man. You could imagine it for him. And you? he said. What foolish things do you hope for?

Something very similar, I said, not wanting to tell him otherwise, that hopes softened in time, and now mostly I thought about things I’d miss when they were gone—the smell of him, the way he moved, the street that I lived on.

In the kitchen he laid out what I had in the fridge—which wasn’t much—and made a dinner of omelets and fried potatoes. After, we went out for the cheap manhattans they made at the corner bar, which weren’t good, but were strong and large, and then we went back to my apartment and fell asleep, as the trucks had at last quieted, and I had drawn the curtain to darken the room.

The church was still there, not changed at all, still with the Pilgrim Travel Hostel on the upper floor and the playground behind. Our apartments—the Church Apartments—were gone, having been razed for parking. Back then, when we lived there, we could always tell the travelers. For some reason they always struggled with the lock. We would stand by our window and watch them try to get into the church. You could see, not alarm, but the warding off of alarm. They would step back and look around as if expecting someone. Richard used to bike to his job at the college. We bought the bike from one of the travelers. We kept it against the living room wall. We didn’t have any money and were afraid of someone stealing it. I would be working in the living room and he would open the door and roll the bike in then sit on the sofa with his helmet still on. We didn’t have very much furniture—just the couch, a coffee table. We wanted to be ready to move, I think. The apartment building was attached to the church and I found a door that went inside it. I spent time, at night, when I couldn’t sleep, walking the church hallways. Richard always fell asleep right away.

The church ran a day care. During nap time, the children slept on rolled-out mats, without any pillows or blankets. They slept in rows just like that, and made crafts from colored pom-poms—making rainbows that hung from string. I liked the day care: the colored pom-poms, the snacks in Dixie cups, the day they decorated their bikes in the parking lot.

On Sundays I went to church and Richard stayed in bed, neither of us believers, but I was moved by the neighborliness of the event. The deacon had long flowing hair and flowing robes. I was afraid of her equanimity and cheerfulness, but the pastor—a thin, thinning-haired woman with hurt eyes—it was natural to like her for the stinginess of her gifts. It was the deacon who always read stories during the children’s service, which was the second one of the day, the one that I went to. The pastor sat behind the altar watching as if she had been ordered to stay away.

Back then a child—a little girl named Ruth Simmons—was taken from the Pilgrim day care. After class, she had gone out in the hall with the other children and gone up to an adult. They left together, and though the teacher hadn’t recognized the adult, Ruth was so natural that the teacher had thought nothing of it. I don’t remember this time well, except for the pastor, not in robes anymore, but in a linen skirt and blouse in the parking lot, facing the sky as if looking for God. I would say I didn’t believe in God back then, but when I thought of God I thought of the force the woman was communicating with. As if God was everything that wasn’t her. To her we must be God, I thought, though I wasn’t sure what I meant. Mostly back then I thought of how I wasn’t good enough at any one thing. I had by then loved so much that hadn’t loved me back. How was so much inequality possible? Who was loved more than it loved back? Perhaps only children. Perhaps that’s why the death of a parent is so painful.