After a few more minutes of careful observation, and a quick glance at a stopwatch he keeps tucked inside his pants pocket, the guard looks up at me and says, “The park closes in about an hour. You’ll have to leave soon.”
I nod my head. I smile at him. Don’t worry, I want to tell him, these days I always do.
X
After that night Angela and I had only the semblance of a marriage left, even as we appeared to draw closer. She spent less time at the office, and never had a reason to call again to say she would be late. We began to take long walks throughout the city in search of some minor and relatively obsolete object that Angela had suddenly declared she needed. It was her way of trying to salvage or, at the very least, make the most out of what was left of our marriage. There was a deliberate, almost childish quality behind the effort. Angela had taken my hand while I was still in bed on a Saturday morning and had pretended to drag me out using all her strength.
“Come on,” she said. “It’s beautiful outside and I want you to help me find some things.”
We lived our weekend lives for the next several months as if they were scenes plucked from a movie made to convince one that there was nothing more charming than being young and in love in New York. One weekend we went searching for an old record player, the next an appropriate stack of classic records to go with it. We searched for vintage dresses and matching hats in the East Village, and made Saturday and Sunday markets in Union Square and Chelsea a habit. We busied ourselves with the city in a way that we hadn’t done since we first started dating, and at least in that regard New York seemed endlessly generous to us. The sheer density of the city, which at times we had both claimed to hate, was buying us time.
Those late spring and early summer ventures across Manhattan, and on one occasion Brooklyn, were often riddled with nostalgia, small-pocketed bursts that left holes in our day. During one trip we went to a coffee shop on Bleecker Street that had been closed for at least a year; it was where Angela had passed her first afternoon in New York waiting to meet her future roommates. The coffee shop may have been gone, but it was hard to declare its absence a loss for any reason other than a personal one.
“The coffee was terrible,” Angela noted. “And the bathroom was full of shit.” Still, we went back to it on a rainy Sunday afternoon in May because Angela wanted to be reminded not so much of that first afternoon in particular but of who she was on that day, a young stranger to the city with vast stretches of her life still open before her. A couple of weeks later I took her deep into Brooklyn to stand outside the last apartment that I had lived in before we moved in together. I had been too embarrassed to show it to her, even though I suspected she would have found the building and the neighborhood charming and closer to her own heart than the apartment she had moved into. It was a four-story brown-brick building, squat and half a block long, its sides covered in seemingly meaningless graffiti. Most of the people who lived there were Bangladeshi or from somewhere in Central America, and the building carried on its walls traces of both—a bit of Bengali and Spanish speaking together. We took a shortcut through a large cemetery to get there. A hard winter had meant that half the trees had yet to bloom, and only scattered patches of grass were green, which made the entire grounds seem unbalanced, as if the grass and trees were changing sides as we walked. Angela thought that it made the cemetery, with its angel-crested obelisks and granite mausoleums, look a bit psychotic.
“It’s like it can’t make up its mind whether it wants to live or die,” she said. “It’s unhealthy.”
When we reached the apartment, we spent a good five minutes standing outside watching a few kids ride their bicycles up and down the same block.
“We should have lived here,” Angela said. “There are no kids on bikes where we live.”
“It’s not too late,” I noted. “There’s probably an empty apartment right now.”
Angela seemed to consider the thought seriously, and she might have even tried to picture us setting up camp on this block and eventually having children of our own, but there was a stale, false note in that image that she couldn’t get past.
If these trips sound like the beginning of reparations, they weren’t. We both sensed that they were the prelude to what might be a long, slow good-bye even if we never acknowledged it as such. When my classes ended for the year, Angela found her temporary way out.
“They asked me at work today if I want to spend the summer in L.A. It’s an important case. I’d be working with another firm out there who’s also involved in the suit, but I’d be the only one from our offices there all the time.”
It didn’t matter whether or not it was an important opportunity for her. She wanted or needed to get away, but despite her bluntness and her training as a lawyer, she couldn’t say that to me directly. We went to the airport together in June. I promised Angela I’d come see her in a few weeks, and she promised me that she was going to do the same. We talked every night for the first ten days, but after that we gradually began to skip a day here and there for reasons that we attributed to the difference in time and Angela’s busy schedule. When two weeks had passed, neither one of us had bought a plane ticket yet, and I was convinced that neither of us was going to. I’d be lying, then, if I didn’t admit to being somewhat grateful for the phone call that came in July telling me that my father had died. I announced the news to Angela early the next morning before she left for work. “I’m going to come,” she said. “I don’t want you to be alone,” and before she hung up the phone, “I’m sorry that I’m not with you there now.” By lunch she had a return ticket back to New York for the following night. I met her at the airport; we took a taxi back home, holding hands all along the way while not saying much of anything. When we were finally settled in the apartment, Angela crawled into bed and invited me to join her. We fell asleep partly out of exhaustion, partly out of relief at finding ourselves together again. There was no blame, hurt, or disappointment to be shared or stifled. It was simply us.
The next morning Angela asked me what she could do to help. “I can handle the arrangements,” she said. “You shouldn’t have to do that.”
The thought of arranging anything had never crossed my mind.
“The funeral,” she said, after I had stared at her silently long enough. “And if there’s a will or anything else that needs to be taken care of.”
“We don’t have to do anything,” I told her. “He’s going to be cremated. They can send his ashes by mail if we want them, but I don’t think I do.”
“His ashes by mail?”
“That’s what they said.”
“And what about your mother?”
“I’m sure she knows already.”
A part of Angela assumed that it was grief that had so efficiently reduced my father’s death for me, and so for two days she said nothing more about it. She thought she could console me with a nice dinner out and frequent, spontaneous bursts of affection, and because I was greedy, I took every one of them. After two days, though, she wanted more evidence of mourning. She would often stop and ask me how I was holding up if there was a prolonged silence between us.
“I’m fine,” I told her on each occasion.
“This has to be difficult for you,” she said. “Even if you were never close.”
“If it is,” I said, “I’m not quite sure just how.”
That was when she told me that she hated what I was doing, and that I was “acting as if nothing happened,” although it was the “You’re doing it again” that struck me the most. She returned to Los Angeles three days later.
“There’s nothing that I can do for you here,” she said. “You seem to be doing just fine. And the case is almost finished now. It’ll be all over by September at the latest.”
Those were not the last words Angela said before she left, but they were the ones that remained. After she was gone I spent a week debating whether there was a not so subtle intention buried within them, and when I failed to come up with a definite response, I called Bill and asked him if I could return to the center as a volunteer for the last month of the summer, if only to avoid the long emptiness that stretched out before me each morning.
There was very little left of the center when I showed up on the first day in August. Two of the three old but still functioning Xerox machines that had taken up the bulk of the front entrance were gone, as were several plants that even in the best of times had never fared well at the office. A gray steel filing cabinet was missing from the hallway. Two desks that sat in the center had been completely cleared but were still facing each other for no apparent reason. Above it all I could clearly hear, without any interruption, the rush of traffic coming from Canal Street and the jackhammers on the Bowery and the trucks idling as they waited to get over the Manhattan Bridge. There was nothing left in the office to absorb that noise.
The same woman Bill was with at our wedding was now sitting at my former desk answering the phone, which rang only twice while I was there. She barely looked at me when I entered, and I wondered if she was embarrassed for or because of me. Bill greeted me at the door with a long extended handshake, although I had the feeling that had we known each other better, or seen each other more than a few times in the years since I had left, he would have preferred to hug. He had that worn, battered look you often see on people after they’ve come from a hospital visit, or from the funeral of someone they were once close to.
“As you can see,” he said, “it’s not the same around here anymore. We have a couple of interns from Columbia, a couple of part-time lawyers who work pro bono, but really it’s just me and Nasreen.”
In the judge’s chamber, Angela and I had both cast cynical looks at each other when Bill arrived with Nasreen. When we discussed it later we didn’t even remember her name. We called her that “poor woman,” as in, “I feel sorry for that poor woman.” All we saw was that Bill had taken someone into his bed who, while perhaps not much younger, we assumed to be in no position to claim control over her life.
“It’s probably not the first time he’s done this,” Angela noted, and while I had no evidence to the contrary, I assumed she was right. Bill, with his concern for all things foreign and misplaced, seemed like the type.
“I’m the only full-time lawyer left,” Bill continued. “One quit six months after we let you go. The rest left a few months later. Since then it’s just been me, but to be honest I don’t think we’re going to last much longer.”
“It’ll change,” I said. “You’ll be fine eventually.”
“You’re right, it will. But the damage will have been done by then. We’ve lost almost every case we’ve taken for the past six months. It was my fault. I didn’t ‘diversify’ enough. I had too many difficult cases. I fucked up. I would have never done that a few years ago, but I thought, fine, fuck it. Why not, right? How long can one country keep up all this suspicion? Soon, I thought, there would be something more than just terror behind our policies, but I was wrong.
“Let me tell you, Jonas. I didn’t even need you to make up their stories. They were good enough on their own. They were perfect. Absolutely perfect.”
Bill gave me one of the empty offices to work in. It had previously belonged to another lawyer, Sam, who had bright red hair and pale freckled skin that most of the clients couldn’t stop staring at when they first arrived. The children especially looked as if they could stand there forever and gaze up at this strange red-haired wonder.
“See what you can do with these,” he said.
He handed me a manila folder with a half-dozen one-to-two-page statements that had been typed according to a format that Bill had prescribed. I read through them quickly, but in each case I could have stopped after the first couple of paragraphs. The rest was familiar, and had already been spoken or written hundreds of times before in this office. I felt tired suddenly reading them again, and I knew that this was how much of the country felt as well. We were straining to break our hearts. My students had all but admitted as much when they said they wanted to save Africa and that millions were dying. Without such a grand scale it was impossible to be moved.
For Bill’s sake I put my best effort forward. I spent a substantial amount of time correcting the grammar in each of the statements, and then went back and filled in the color. Imaginary prison sentences were added. Threats more severe than the ones that had actually been spoken were issued. One man, instead of having just a brick thrown through his bedroom window, had his house burned down while he was at work. By the time I finished with my revisions the day was over; it was summer, the sun had almost set, and I was certain that there was no one else left in the building besides us. For my day’s worth of labor Bill and Nasreen invited me to join them for dinner. Neither asked where Angela was, and I realized that like Bill, I must have worn my troubles where anyone could see them.
“I’m cooking,” Bill said, as if to deliberately further upset the equation he knew I had made about his relationship. He must have had dozens of similar lines that served as proof that his relationship with Nasreen was based on two equals’ meeting. Others would have shed the spotlight on Nasreen and the accomplishments she had had in her previous life and what she was doing now to save him. Bill was smart and considerate like that.
“I’m sorry,” I told them. “I have dinner plans with friends in the city already.”
When I didn’t return to the center the next morning, Bill was hardly surprised. He told me as much when I called him two days later to say I wouldn’t be coming back.
“Classes are starting soon,” I said. “And I’m just realizing how much work I have to do.”
“You don’t have to tell me, Jonas. I understand.”
In previous times the guilt would have gotten the best of me. I would have apologized and eventually returned, but I knew this time I would do no such thing. For the next few weeks I sought other distractions. I spent many hours on a bench in Tompkins Square Park watching a group of homeless teenagers play guitar. I dug through used bookstores for early editions of collected poems that I had claimed to love while I was in college. And all along I told myself that I was fine and not in the least bothered by anything in life, even as I sometimes felt a gentle, almost palpable hum of danger. I had often felt something similar as a child, and I thought that I had buried that feeling as deep inside me as it could possibly go so that I would never know it again, but still it returned at the oddest hours—while waiting for the light to change at Seventy-second and Madison on a trip to watch the opera in Central Park, or while ordering coffee at a diner on Second Avenue. When the last week of August finally arrived, I entered my classroom literally humming.