Cities I've Never Lived In: Stories (17 page)

I left the story with the man from the island stealing a car. He drove to New Hampshire and stayed in abandoned houses. He wandered the houses and one day found a full closet and traded his coat for a warmer one. He also pocketed some old photographs. When the cold became unbearable, he drove to a shelter. Nothing after that, no more mention of him. He was simply in line for the shelter. Later a body was found in a lake with the warmer coat on and several photographs in a plastic bag. The owner of the coat and photographs was found alive. He couldn’t account for the body in the lake—he didn’t know anyone who was missing. Then he remembered his parents’ home, left empty, and drove there with the officer, where they found a strange coat and pieced together what happened. As if finding a coat were finding a person. Maybe by saying it here, I can stop with that story. So often stories don’t work.

It’s quite a thing to think about, my mother said. She was visiting from the Cape. The subletter had left weeks earlier and my mother was staying in his room. He had moved out when I was away, leaving only a necklace pinned to the wall. It was a tiny room. My mother sat on the bed while I sat on the floor. She looked around and said it reminded her of when we had lived on the island. There was a place where we could pick grapes, she said. I was pregnant with you that summer, and I thought all the time about how you would be able to pick grapes.

I talked about the restaurant, my worry that it wasn’t going to last the winter. That it had been my plan to save thirty thousand dollars to have a baby, but now there weren’t enough customers.

Thirty thousand dollars wouldn’t have paid for a baby, she said.

I know, I said.

The next morning I put cream and sugar on the table while my mother started the percolator. I told her I had dreamed that night about returning to Berlin, and she asked if I remembered Poland. All that way, she said, and you didn’t leave the hotel. There’s no reason to believe things will always go that way, I said.

We left the house for the Neue Galerie to meet up with a friend of hers. We looked at the work of an artist who painted the same lover over a period of twenty years. He had been married and never painted the wife. He was from Belgium, or a similar country, and to be in rooms with his large paintings was to be surrounded by the inner world of a man I didn’t know. My mother spoke little over lunch, so I talked with her friend Robin. She wore a broad scarf around her shoulders. I was glad that my mother had never resorted to scarves. We talked about art and travel while my mother drank coffee and picked at her cake. Afterward, after saying good-bye to the woman and getting on the train, I was exhausted.

And the art, you liked it? my mother asked.

I felt bad for the wife, I said.

It’s not easy for anyone, is it? she said. You liked Robin, though, you got along well with her?

You were quiet, I said.

I don’t know why.

The art?

Sometimes I wonder if you would have been happier with someone like her.

She didn’t mean it as a question. She said it to herself, looking out the window, and I didn’t respond. I was thinking of the man who had spent all those years painting the lover and never once the wife.

That Saturday the man at the market had clams. There, my mother said, as she stepped forward and bought two dozen. At home, I scrubbed clams and put them on a towel, while she opened a bottle of chardonnay we had bought at the discount store. The wine tasted of pear juice. She was leaving the next morning. We sat at the table in the fading light and I tried to talk about Richard, put in mind of him, I think, by the clams, and the cold, and of having my mother there, and of having her about to go.

When I had spent the winter in Provincetown—it was when my marriage was ending and a painting friend had offered her cottage cheaply—I used this friend’s license to clam every Sunday, going at first out of curiosity, and then because I loved it, and then after that, when the wind became bitter, the clams scarce, the ice on the jetty treacherous, simply because I didn’t know what else to do.

Much of my money that winter went to the heating bill and food and beer at the Governor Bradford, which wasn’t cheap—nothing in Provincetown was cheap, though it seemed like there were only seven of us staying for the winter, and none of us had any money. Everything should have been given away. I didn’t bring my computer, but I did bring pens and my notebook, which more than leading to creating anything, mostly helped alleviate the panic that I wasn’t creating. The Stop & Shop was two miles away and I’d walk with my backpack and come home to cook lunch, and perhaps I’d write something or sketch with my friend’s supplies. Afternoons I’d walk until stopping to have a drink at the Governor Bradford. There weren’t happy hour specials in Provincetown, but being in New York had put me in the habit of drinking at dusk. Then at night I’d listen to the radio or read the
Times
or fiction from the library.

I didn’t get along with the bartender at the Governor Bradford. She stiffened when I came in and was slow to greet me. At first she had been easy with me—probably thinking I was a tourist there for only a week—and told me stories about herself and the area. When she had learned that I researched stories she asked what they were about. I tried to think of something that would be easy to describe, and I talked about a girl who had gone missing from the pier in Portland. The bartender froze in place. She said, Several of my friends left here and walked off the pier. I thought of the pier, two dark blocks from the bar, how you could hear and feel the ocean and what it must have felt like.

I went to the Governor Bradford most nights until Richard came to visit and then my habits changed. We were happy then—during those two weeks—and switched to a bar across the street where younger locals went, and day trippers, and professionals from neighboring towns. There was a raw bar and microbrews, and it was warm and nice to sit by the window and eat oysters.

In the cottage, we fell in together as easily as if we were still married, when we used to stay out late and sleep until noon and play records from bed. He would lie there, one hand lifting records from the floor and putting them on the player, which was also on the floor and covered with dust, so all our record players—and we went through a lot of them back then—played too slowly. In Provincetown, he lay there while I sat and smoked and watched out the window, talking to him, telling him stories about my childhood. I touched his back tentatively, unsure of what I wanted. He didn’t move, either toward me or away. We might have been drinking the night before. He was not a big drinker, but there were a few nights he was hungover and slower in the morning. I wondered if I was mistaking his slowness for intimacy.

There was a window over the door, and another near the bed, covered with a gauze fabric that brought to mind cheese-cloth. I smoked with my feet under me and watched out the window. Maybe it is cheesecloth, I said. He lay with his head down and eyes closed. What else do you see? he said. I told him about the seagulls, the clouds, the different shades of gray that made up the landscape there.

We went to the Old Colony the night they closed for the season. They turned off their fridges and put beer on the counter and you could buy anything for two dollars. They also turned their heat off, but space heaters blew air into the dark room. It was as if they had already closed, then opened to make fifty more dollars. He had loved that, sitting on a chair against the wall in his wool coat. That night he told me—we were sitting at the bar and he was holding a drink and he moved the bottle away from his mouth to say it—I’m going to take the bus out in the morning. Okay, I said. He got us both a shot of whiskey. Of Evan Williams. They didn’t have beer and shot specials in Provincetown like they did in New York; we had to buy everything separately.

The P & B bus for Boston left at six thirty in the morning, in the dark, from the harbor. He stayed up all night, working in the living room, while I slept for a few hours. I got up at six and went to the kitchen to make coffee. You don’t need to be up now, he said. It’s fine, I said, walking past him. We walked to the harbor holding coffee in travel mugs, and he had his bag over one shoulder. I wore a long coat over my pajamas. The bus was already there, idling. We drank coffee standing near the door of the bus. The harbor like that, in the dark, felt like a wild animal. You heard it and felt it—the dark abyss of it. Sometimes it felt like the wildest place on earth. He lurched onto the bus in the way he had of moving, as if breaking something that was attaching him to where he was.

My mother and I talked on the phone several times a week. Sometimes we’d start in midconversation. There’s not much furniture in here, my mother said when I answered the phone one day, not long after she had visited. I’m sitting on the kitchen floor, she said.

She was, it turned out, housesitting a cottage on a lake for the winter. She knew the owner from Puritans, the store where she worked. Ever since those years of living on the ocean, she had wanted to see water when she woke up. Ocean property had grown so expensive. Even a lake she couldn’t afford. You should come here for a time, she said. The previous tenants left boxes in the attic.

Going through other people’s stuff?

Part of the deal is that I clean the place out, she said. He said I could keep anything I wanted.

Is there anything good?

No, not really. But you should come. There might be something of the sort that you like. Or maybe she had said, Something up your alley.

When I arrived—a week or two later, the restaurant had shut down and I wasn’t working anymore—she was wearing surprisingly fashionable clothes though she wouldn’t have known it, only recognizing them as clothes from years ago. She had on high-waisted jeans and a T-shirt and her hair was held back by a scarf.

Those sorts of pants are in again, I said.

With who? she asked.

In the city, people have started to wear those.

Not skinny jeans anymore?

It’s transitioning.

There we go then, she said. I found them in the boxes. And I may have found a mystery for you, she said. Something you might like.

In the boxes?

Yes, something in the boxes.

She talked about the mystery after dinner. Her dinners were always tidy—baked chicken, salad in small bowls where most things, even the carrot shreds, came from bags and were slightly dried out, and then fluffy rolls, a bottle of ice-cold chardonnay that she had opened days ago. After we ate, she loaded the dishwasher, wiped and dried the table, then sat down. I asked if she minded if I taped her. You’re working again, then? she said.

I’m not sure. Maybe.

When I turned the recorder on, her voice became loud and dutiful. There are some people who are natural being recorded, but my mother wasn’t one of them. She said that she had found photographs of children standing in front of her house, sitting near the sliding door, standing before the lake. They were a boy and a girl—blond and happy. She thought they were childhood pictures of the teenagers next door. She had watched them before they left for the season. They were working at a camp and had its name on their hats and sweatshirts. The dad would grill, and then the children would leave for town in a jeep.

My mother said that she had waited for the family to leave for the season before swimming in the lake. Sometimes the father came on the weekend to do projects. She took the pictures to him. He—Ian—was in front of his house, putting in a new mailbox. She told him that she had found the photographs and wondered if they were his kids. He didn’t hold the photographs as his hands were dirty, so she held them. Then he went inside to wash his hands. When he came back, he asked if he could keep them and she said yes, that was why she had brought them over.

She got to know him as the fall went on. She would be out raking and he would be out raking. Or they would both get the mail. Those sorts of things. They would talk about the weather, or the town, or what getting older entailed. Once he said that if he had acted peculiar that day, when she had brought over the pictures, it was only because he wasn’t sure they were his kids. They looked like them, but not enough, for some reason, that he knew right away. He said, Isn’t that something you should know?

One day, when we came back from shopping in town, Ian was in his yard. He had just arrived for the weekend. I hadn’t met him yet. The three of us stood on the lawn; she introduced me, I shook his hand, then my mother and I went into the house, carrying groceries. I sat at the table while she made lunch. Afterward she wiped and dried the table, then laid out photographs, having kept several of them. I studied them, then asked what she supposed. I don’t know, my mother said. I thought you would like them.

I thought, She must be lonely. There was hardly any furniture and trees kept light out. It had the economy she wanted. She said to me at some point—maybe when she was hand-washing dishes because she only had two of everything and we had wanted to eat salad in bowls after eating soup—I’m sorry that I’m not something different. You think it wouldn’t pain me to keep four bowls.

Looking at the pictures on the table, I talked about my interest in doubling—that reality could have been altered slightly, leaving traces of another. For instance, his children, at the time those pictures were taken, could have been somewhere else, but that didn’t mean those weren’t also his children.

I thought about it later, on my mattress on the floor. I wasn’t trying to explain the pictures. I was trying to explain another world, one I had always wanted to find. One day, when we were in Provincetown, Richard and I had broken into a dune shack. I had stood inside, looking out the window at the ocean. I didn’t move, even as he tried to show me things he had found. He asked if I was okay. We lived in so many houses when I was a little girl, I said. What was I feeling? Desire, maybe. To want something that you couldn’t remember. It was a hard feeling to live with. After the divorce, I saw light everywhere. Some light—the light at the end of the day, the way it hit the pigeons that flew around the steeple, the way it hit the sides of buildings—that light felt like entrances to another world. Like the shack had felt when I was looking out the window. Sometimes it was better to be farther from this feeling. I felt it would split me if I let it.