Heart of the City (27 page)

CLAIRE HAD billed the weekend as a chance for Tom to meet another girl. But as they approached Penn Station, she saw she’d fooled only herself. She had never before played pursuer. So she had made a show—not a particularly good one—of handing him off to someone else. She had told herself that a date with Myrna would be a sort of tryout. How would Tom behave? Was he such a loner that he would fall for just any girl? Or did he have manners, standards? She didn’t like admitting it, even to herself, but she had felt a certain satisfaction at the date’s demise, because of her own growing attraction. Tom was smart but understated. He had plenty of his own ideas but listened closely to other people, on the belief, it seemed, that every scintilla threw some new light on the world. Most of all, Claire liked the feeling of having insight into Tom’s private battles: he wanted to make more of a mark in the world but was nearly oblivious about where to start. As a professor at Tougaloo at a time of social upheaval, she knew a thing or two about reform. In Tom, she felt, she had an eager pupil.

How to undo the weekend’s false premise, however, eluded her. Tom responded to directness best. She feared the subtleties of the weekend—the way she looked at him Saturday evening, the way they’d danced—may have been lost on him. She cursed her imprecision.

They were on the platform now, waiting for her train to Long Island.

“Tom, I—I need to ask you something.” She gave him an imploring look.

“Can it wait?” When he took her hand and drew her close, she cocked her head and gave him a small smile. They kissed as the train came in.

FROM EARLY November to Christmas, Claire and Tom spent every weekend together. Sometimes he took the train to Long Island, but mostly Claire came to New York. For two people who never quite got used to the city’s sharp elbows, they looked to the world like any young couple whose love story was inseparable from the city. They visited the Aqueduct Race Track, the Brooklyn Museum, and the Bronx Zoo. They went to an exhibit on Pompeii in the East Village, a concert at the Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine, and a stage play of Lorraine Hansberry’s “To Be Young, Gifted and Black.” They walked the warrens of Wall Street, bought rice candy in Chinatown, and saw a Greenwich Village screening of the steamy Swedish avant-garde film
I Am Curious (Yellow)
. They traded copies of the
New York Times
and the
Village Voice
, and frequently consulted a book Claire had bought—
New York on $5 a Day
.

On Friday, November 7, at the Rainbow Room at Rockefeller Center, they raised rum sodas and toasted Mayor Lindsay, who had upset Procaccino at the polls three days before. The elegant bar, on the sixty-fifth floor, had a revolving dance floor whose glass tiles glowed with colored lights. Through the windows, as they swayed, Claire and Tom glimpsed the soaring lights of the Empire State Building.

AS THE days grew shorter, Tom wrestled with how much to tell his friend Chuck about his relationship with Claire. Chuck still lived with his parents, in Struthers, Ohio, and in one phone call, when Chuck asked, Tom said he’d seen her just a couple of times since Chuck’s visit. But he didn’t elaborate.

“Well, that’s peachy, Tom, because I’m jetting out there in just a week or two,” Chuck said. “We got to get together with Claire again. This time, we’ll get her to swear on the Good Book that she’s got another girl.”

But Chuck, uncharacteristically, never followed through. Instead, he took to his typewriter and wrote Claire a single-spaced four-page letter full of stories about his life back home. He had found a teaching job, he told her, at Youngstown State University’s department of speech. In November, he called to invite Claire to Thanksgiving with his family in Ohio.

Her heart sank: Chuck had no idea. What should she say? There was no time to think.

“Chuck, you know,” she said finally, “I’ll be in Ohio then.”

“Gangbusters! You will?”

“Yes, to see Tom.” She closed her eyes. “We’d love to see you.”

For the first time in as long as Claire had known him—and it saddened her a little—Chuck was at a loss for words.

THE DAY after Thanksgiving, Claire visited Tom at his childhood home in the Youngstown suburb of Boardman. His parents weren’t quite sure what Tougaloo was, but they seemed impressed that their son’s girlfriend was on a college faculty. “I hope some of this young lady’s influence rubs off on you, Tom,” his father said. “We’d like to see those three magic letters—P, H, and D—after his name,” he said to Claire. “But we’ve seen a little more procrastination lately than his mother and I would like.”

“I’m working on it,” Claire said.

Chuck caught up with them that afternoon, and over the next three days the group visited the Butler Art Institute and the steel mills, and went to a party on the lake. Tom and Claire held hands and whispered into each other’s ears.

If it hadn’t been plain to Chuck before, it was now. After dropping Claire at the airport on Sunday, Tom drove to Chuck’s to say goodbye. “You snatched her, pal,” Chuck told his old friend. “Good for you.”

“I’m not sure we would have met if it weren’t for you, Chuck,” he said. “We’re grateful for that.”

Chuck looked down, shook his head, and gave a halfhearted laugh. “If only I’d tried harder to get her to bring another girl. You ever see this?” He gestured to the wall above his desk. There was a framed photo of Claire, her hair fluttering by some seaside. “Our grand tour of Europe.”

Tom didn’t know what to say. Chuck lifted the photo off its hook and slid it, face down, into a desk drawer.

BACK IN New York, the letters between Claire and Tom grew more amorous. In December, Tom signed a birthday card, “Love, Tom.” In January, she signed a letter, “Love and kisses” and called him “My man.” In February, to everyone’s relief, Tom passed his qualifying exams, putting him on track to those three letters his father had harried him about.

Claire’s fellowship at Brookhaven would be drawing to a close in late spring, and as the days grew warmer and longer, Tom grew anxious. In their weekdays apart he began sending her colorful greeting cards. One showed a pair of nuzzling porcupines under the caption, “As one porcupine said to another ... I love you so much it hurts!!” Occasionally, he added a few words of his own: “Whenever we’re apart, I want to be with you forever.” Or: “P.S. I want to love you for always.”

Constitutionally shy, Tom struggled to express his innermost feelings. He hoped that with the greeting cards and the hints he inscribed in the margins she would see he wanted to marry her. She was always picking up on social cues he missed; she’d have to glean his intentions.

Claire, it turned out, could see them perfectly. But if Tom wanted her, she decided, he would have to stand up and be counted.

The days closed in on Tom like wet concrete. Over dinner one night, Claire mentioned the date of her last paycheck from Brookhaven. She began talking about her fall schedule at Tougaloo and making notes for a new class she planned to teach. Tom awoke one morning after oversleeping and shook his head at his reflection in the bathroom mirror. His cheeks bore red lines from the creases in his pillow. His hair was getting too long.

On a Sunday in mid-March, Tom led Claire from Penn Station to his dorm room, pushing aside the books on his bed so she could sit—in case she needed to.

“Will you marry me, Claire?”

She gave him that small smile, the one he’d first seen moments before their first kiss. Then she closed her eyes and pressed her lips to his.

Crossroads

TIMES SQUARE

Robin Miller had set aside the fourth day of her research trip to Manhattan for interviews with strangers on the street. How did the September 11 attacks affect you? she asked. What did the attacks mean for the city? If a memorial or museum were to be built on the site of the fallen towers, what should it look like?

But just ten months had passed since the attacks, and Robin, twenty-two, who grew up in small-town Minnesota, was getting a glimpse of how raw people’s feelings still were. Some of the people she stopped obliged her questions. But the subject made a few—a young bicycle messenger, a middle-aged woman who worked near the site—so distraught that they excused themselves, brushing away tears.

Was it too soon? From the distance of her college campus, in Fargo, North Dakota, the question of how to design a 9/11 memorial had seemed like just a tougher version of the kinds of problems her fellow architecture students discussed all the time. It was solvable, she felt, with all the conventional tools of research: a list of good questions, a site survey, and persistence. But now that she was here in this heartbroken city of millions, Robin wondered whether conventional tools were enough.