Heart of the City (37 page)

Now an older Puerto Rican man staggered toward her from the plaza. He was singing a Spanish song and spinning, as if dancing with an imaginary partner. He teetered toward her and stopped. “Me gusta tu pelo,” he said to her.
I like your hair.
Sarah had learned Spanish on a semester of language school in Barcelona three years before. Her grandmother was Puerto Rican, and Sarah had wanted to better communicate with her. “Vale,” she told the man now, smiling.
Okay
. The man made a little bow. Sarah winced at the smell of alcohol. Washington Square Park, she decided, wasn’t working out too well as a study hall. She tacked a rushed ending onto her Spanish paper and stuffed her folders into her bag. Glancing over her shoulder again, she saw that the businessman was still there. He was still looking at her.

Okay, she told herself. Enough’s enough.

She turned to face him, defiantly crossed her arms, and stared back.

WHEN DANIEL had laughed at her slapstick with the cellphone, he knew she’d noticed. The next step would be to say something. But what? Daniel had been in the same relationship since he was thirteen. He had no idea what a man was supposed to say to a woman in a park in New York. With his halting English, he worried that in any case he wouldn’t be understood. So he fell back on what he recognized was adolescent: he looked at her with an open, innocent expression. The mood in the park was so sublime that he felt certain she would take it for what it
was—not the unblinking stare of some predator, but a harmless gesture of admiration.

Then something strange: when he next looked over, she was speaking with some drunk in Spanish. From his year of high school in Madrid, where his mother had grown up, he recognized the woman’s accent as a Spaniard’s. Daniel looked more closely at the cover of one of her books, which she held against her chest, and made out Spanish words. If she were from Spain, then maybe he was agonizing over nothing. If neither was a native English speaker, then she would perhaps forgive—or even appreciate—a fumble.

But before he had time to work out an opening line, she did something that shocked him. She aimed her body—and that perfect posture—straight at him.

LATER, IT would be hard to explain. It would sound implausible or just weird. Even to them. But for the next half hour, on that warm June day in Washington Square Park, Daniel and Sarah just looked at each other. For a full thirty minutes, they wordlessly studied each other’s faces. The silent exchange of expressions—yearning, fear, pleasure, doubt—made Daniel feel like a mime re-enacting some universal story about the phases of love. By the end, because he was already in a relationship, Daniel was prepared to walk away. He was ready to let those thirty minutes stand as lived poetry—an instance of beauty he’d remember forever, precisely because words never had a chance to muck it up.

When she first returned his gaze, Sarah had in mind only a game. Who would blink first? Who would be chicken? Then, after a moment, something gave. The man’s face, she saw, was as expressive as a dancer’s and as unguarded as a child’s. She felt she could read in its lines his every feeling. This is who I am, he seemed to be saying. I am absolutely ready to fall in love. When
Sarah’s face broadcast fear, he responded by looking down, submissively, and then up, with a puppy’s drooping eyes. She nodded slowly. I trust you, she told him with her eyes. I won’t be afraid.

Sarah had thrown herself into fast-burning romances before. She had seen so much change in her short life that love had come to seem ephemeral, a seed better devoured on sight than tended into uncertain maturity. Her parents had divorced when she was a toddler. She was just eight when her mother—a professional ballerina in New York before becoming a child psychiatrist—was diagnosed with a rare intestinal cancer. Sarah had been the youngest member of her dance company by at least five years. With so much time on the road, her relationships with men had seldom been more than flings. So much of life was unpredictable that it was sometimes safest to keep moving. The dance critics who called her “weightless” had no way of knowing the depth of their insight. There in the park, Sarah felt weightless again, and drawn by the familiar gravity of someone else’s desire.

THEN REALITY intervened. Looking at her watch, Sarah saw that little time remained before Spanish class. She hadn’t eaten lunch and felt suddenly hungry. She picked up her bags and walked toward the man. He looked startled by her approach. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I need to eat something. I have to go.”

“Oh,” Daniel said. “Um, eres Española?” he added hopefully.

“No. Why do you think that?”

The man she’d spoken to, and her book, Daniel explained.

Sarah laughed. His English was so-so, but she could understand him. “So you’re Spanish?”

“No,” he said. “French. Should we eat something?”

Across the street, at a small deli swarming with students, they bought a quiche and unwrapped it on the steps of a nearby NYU building.

“This quiche is pretty bad,” Sarah said.

“Yes, I think I can taste the plastic.” Daniel rewrapped it and set it between them on the step.

“So how do you know Spanish?”

“My mom is from Madrid,” he said, brushing some of the crumbs off his sleeve.

“Great, so you can check my Spanish paper.”

“Por supuesto.”

He ran the fingers of his left hand across the pages of her notebook, and on one, the important one, was a ring. “You’re married?”

“No,” he said. “My girlfriend and I bought them for each other. But not because we are married.”

“That’s really nice.” She let her eyes linger on his hands, so he would not see her disappointment, and then noticed something else: the scars. His wrists bore a crosshatch of what looked like half-healed cuts or burns. “Your hands.”

“I’m a chef,” he said, a little self-consciously. “Here.” He pointed out a minor error of grammar in the paper and handed it back to her, smiling.

The eyes, voracious and dark, that had held her in the park seemed less assured at this closer distance. “I should be getting to class,” she said.

“Later we can meet?”

“Actually,” she said, “I’m meeting a friend. A guy.”

“Entiendo,” Daniel said, looking down. There was long pause. Then he looked back up, catching her eyes again.

“I have a cellphone—”

“I don’t know,” he said abruptly. “Maybe it’s better to go.”

Daniel kneaded his hands. Sarah played with a strap on her bag, looking at him and then back at the park. Neither seemed able to pull away.

“Here,” she began, reaching into her bag for a pen.

“No, please,” he said, shaking his head. “At 3 p.m. tomorrow, I will be sitting under the same tree.” If she were still interested
then, she could find him there. If not, he said, the day’s beauty would stand, undiminished.

THE NEXT morning, Daniel was consumed with the question of clothes. That stiff dress shirt and those slacks were not him. Sarah had said she was a dancer—an artist. When she showed up the next day—
if
she showed—he wanted her to see that he, too, was an adventurer, a bon vivant. He decided on his most striking outfit: a blue cotton kimono with a white jacket that he’d bought recently in Paris’s Chinatown.

After parting with Sarah the afternoon before, Daniel had been gripped by a kind of delirium. He wove back into the park, and then out again. He flitted in and out of record stores on Eighth Street and Sixth Avenue, trying in vain to remember which American hip-hop albums he had always wanted on vinyl.

On the train to Manhattan now, his heart galloped. He was no longer a tourist drifting aimlessly through a new city. He was a suitor with a destination. Serendipity had given way to intention, lightness to weight. He entered the park a few minutes before three. It was another warm day, but a Friday, and the throngs of sun worshipers and musicians seemed even a little thicker than the day before.

He found their tree, the one beside the walkway to Washington Square South. But the only sign of life on their ledge, besides some students bent over books, was a pigeon pecking at the concrete. Daniel circled the central plaza. All the ledges looked the same. Did he have the right spot? Was he turned around? Toward the fountain at the center, pigeons chased one another in circles, wings aflutter. They leaped awkwardly, toes scrabbling, in some ancient mating dance. Five minutes passed. Then another five. He had a feeling of falling. New York was a city of eight million people. He didn’t even know this woman’s last name.

All this buildup, he told himself, shaking his head. For what? She’s with the friend, the guy, whoever he was—she said so herself. Of course she’s not coming. It was 3:25. He decided to make one more pass, then leave. This time, though, she was there. She had brought two bottles of peach-flavored iced tea.

THE EVENING before, Sarah had met the Venezuelan dancer. She spent the night with him, but her body had felt borrowed rather than given. Here it was different: Stretched out beside Daniel under this tree, sunlight trickling like warm honey through the branches, Sarah felt whole. She told him a little about the mother who raised her, and the father she seldom saw. He told her about his childhood among working-class Arabs and Algerians in the Paris suburb of Argenteuil. As a teenager, he had formed a hip-hop band with some of his immigrant neighbors.