“Can’t,” Martin answers.
I yawn my agreement.
We tell him of our plan to heat a DiGiorno pizza and watch TV:
The Simpsons’ Treehouse of Horror
.
I am asleep before the end of the episode.
Is it supposed to be this hard? We don’t talk about it because talking would only make it more difficult, because we’re unhappy, because we’re ashamed.
Born into a world built in our service, we’d been shepherded to schools (Entire buildings were dedicated to the cultivation of our minds!) and had our lunches prepared (Candy bar companies had made things “fun-size” for us!). Only yesterday we were young, aristocrats rich with time. And the way a snob is proud of the money into which he is born, we had been proud of our youth.
And then we lost it. We graduated. We did our best to grow up, though often our best wasn’t very good:
I got drunk at a fundraiser for the private school that hired me a year later. During a dinner auction I placed a bid on airfare to Paris and then at the coat check on the way out, I began hugging a parent who, in a conference one month earlier, had expressed doubts about my syllabus. Two other teachers had to tear me away.
Martin smoked too much pot and then followed it up with too much wine at a fancy Italian restaurant where I’d taken him to celebrate his passing his Tortes exam. Ever decorous, following the first course, he vomited onto his plate.
“Check please!” I said immediately, throwing my cloth napkin over his mess.
“I’m not ready to leave!” he slurred, straightening his back and adjusting his chair. “And even if I were, it’s not your place to ask for the check.”
“I just thought—”
He dressed me down, explaining that by asking for the check, I was siding with the wait-staff. A regular argument of ours—whether or not I was on his side when it came to disagreements he had with his mother, friends, classmates, and now the wait-staff. Instead of making preparations to leave, we resumed our former squabble.
When the waiter did finally come to collect our plates, Martin announced that he had nothing to hide. Proudly, as if he were a magician about to unveil the new location of his vanished assistant, with a flourish he removed the napkin, revealing a neat little mound of puke. “I’m finished,” he declared, his chin in the air.
The way to handle things, he explained to me once outside, was to act as if throwing up on your plate were completely natural. It was they who should be embarrassed for even batting an eyelash. “A good waiter would have known better than to go on staring like that,” he said, scowling.
The Park Avenue wind whipped our faces as we walked home. Martin held me roughly. “It’s a shame,” I lamented half to myself, “that we can’t go back there. I really liked that place. The décor was perfect and the maître d’ so charming in the beginning.” “The food was a three,” Martin sniffed. “Anyway, we could still go back if you’d only just followed along! No one told you to go and make a scene!” he scoffed, as we turned a stone corner and hurried through the December cold.
IV
In the first months our relationship, Martin had given me a tour of his New York, the city of his youth, in ruins all around us. The pizza place he went to every day after school, a favorite bar that didn’t card, a corner of the park where he and his friends used to smoke pot. Walking down Broadway from West Seventy-eighth Street, he laughed while confessing membership in “the pervert club,” what his middle school friends called themselves after spending too many lunch periods prowling the sidewalks for women.
On a weekday evening, following a walk in Central Park, we stopped in a deli and he remembered: “I was buying potato chips right here. It was, like, two in the morning and this lunatic came in and picked a fight with me out of nowhere. We were fighting up and down the aisles. It was like a movie. There were crushed Cheetos everywhere! Eventually the cops came. . . .”
And while visiting his friend Zach at Zach’s parents’ place on Park Avenue, Martin recalled getting caught. We were in the study and Zach was fixing us drinks from a bar hidden theatrically behind a false bookcase next to a real one decorated with family photos, one of a great-grandfather receiving the Nobel Prize. “For something or other,” Zach answered me, before launching enthusiastically into a story about when his mother nearly discovered them smoking pot in this very room. “You should have seen Zach’s face when he heard her coming. ‘Zach!’” Martin imitated her.
Imagining Martin as a kid, I felt a peculiar pang. We lose people to the future all the time. And we grieve; we expect to. So why shouldn’t we also grieve for what the past takes? Before is no different than after really, so if you can miss someone looking forward, you can just as easily miss someone looking back. I saw pictures of Martin—a boy I’d not yet met, would never get to meet—and nearly wept. I missed him so much.
We went for a walk in Battery Park. He bought me a bracelet from a street vendor, a silver chain that looked like monsters holding hands. The day rushed by, was over in just a few hours. The ocean, the sky, the grass roped off, the buildings heaped up against the Southern Bank. The Statue of Liberty, the whole city at our backs. His face close to mine, his mouth, his cold hands. How fleeting is an afternoon, when compared to its memory? The scary stories have it backwards, I think. It is we the living who are the ghosts of this world, we who haunt the past. And the present—Martin’s cold hands touching mine—is just a vapor.
Dining out, visiting museums, kissing on street corners . . . Martin and I soon made new memories. Climbing a fence to play basketball at night, bringing gin and ice to mix cocktails between plays, I blocked too aggressively, too drunkenly, and showing off bumped into a fence, giving myself a fat lip, which Martin kissed.
I was standing at the corner of Eighty-second and Madison when I saw Martin approach on rollerblades. He was coming from the park where he’d been playing hockey with his friends. The sunlight broke through the trees dappling his figure as he sped closer, before he stopped, just in front of me, and took me in his arms.
We rode the Seventy-ninth Street cross-town bus a certain way. I liked to sit in the middle of the extra-long buses with the accordion center. And as it bent back and forth on its way through the park, we’d pretend it was a rollercoaster and raise our hands up over our heads. We were a blur of motion, a changing shape. Together, rushing ahead, claiming the future in the name of the past.
V
It was probably a Tuesday. For most of our relationship it was very often a Tuesday, Tuesday being the most nondescript day of the seven, Tuesday being like the middle of the bread—what my father shapes into dice.
When I was a kid, during summer vacations in Greece, after dinner while my mother chatted with the rest of the family, my father and I took turns rolling his bread dice against the table, arbitrarily trying for double sixes and snake eyes. My mother would pause to voice annoyance, while I would pause to marvel at my father’s wondrous talent. How my father could make something out of nothing, dice out of bread—that was magic! For a few years, Martin and I were, too. For a few years, we made life out of Tuesday.
We’d just finished dinner and were sitting in the dark on an antique chaise-and-sofa set his parents had given him. We’d ordered Chinese takeout and were opening our fortune cookies by the light of the TV. Martin read his aloud: “You are happy.”
He scowled. “What a rip-off! A fortune is supposed to tell your future, not your present. I hate when I get this kind.” He crumpled the strip of paper and began packing some weed into a glass bowl his friend Zach had given him for his birthday.
“Maybe it is about the future,” I said, still opening mine. “Maybe later on, years from now, you will look back on this moment and see that you were happy even though you didn’t think you were at the time, even though at the time you thought you were unhappy because you figured you’d gotten a lousy fortune that told you nothing at all about your future, though it actually did, does.”
Martin shrugged. “I don’t think so. What’s yours say?”
“‘Life is a tragedy for those who feel and a comedy for those who think.’”
“You got the better one.”
“Mine’s less personal. More Western Philosophy than a fortune. You know the fortune cookie was invented in California?”
Martin took a big hit, expanded his chest to accommodate the smoke, and exhaled. Then he had an idea for Western Philosophy fortune cookies and began talking again about Heidegger and the Nazis, the misuses of philosophy, logic traps, and Zeno’s paradox.
He passed me the bowl. I declined. I sipped my gin and tonic and suggested we broaden the line of cookies to include peach-flavored gummy candies shaped like busts of Friedrich Nietzsche. “They’d be small, come four or five to a pack, and we could call them, ‘Peachy Nietzsches.’”
“Existential Chewing Gum,” Martin added. “It would lose its flavor after only a minute, which is to be expected in a godless world. And yet, one must continue to chew. To find meaning in it, even pleasure. ‘Sisyphicous.’ ‘Sisyphusilicious,’” he tried again slowly, puzzling over the pronunciation.
“Your dessert depresses me,” I said. “You are happy,” I reminded him.
I slipped my fortune into my wallet where it remained until my whole purse—with my fortune in it—was stolen off the back of my chair at a cafe a few years later, after Martin and I had broken up.
VI
“Imagine you have a heap of sand before you.”
“Okay.”
“Are you imagining it?”
“Yes,” I said into the phone.
“I don’t believe you. Where is the heap?”
“It’s on my living room table. I’m looking at it right now.”
“Okay, good,” Martin said. “Now, imagine yourself removing one grain of sand at a time.”
“Wait, I accidentally got two. It’s hard to separate them.”
“That’s okay. Just keep going.” He paused. “Now, is it still a heap when only one grain is left?”
“Umm . . .”
“If not, then when did it go from being a heap to a non-heap?”
“I don’t know.”
“Exactly. That’s the heap paradox. Sorites paradox is its official name, but—”
“I’m sorry, what? I couldn’t hear you.”
“I said, ‘Sorites paradox is its official name.’ I can’t talk any louder because I’m at work—I’m a paralegal. The conference room was empty, so I figured I’d try you. . . . I should get back though. But, um, I was wondering if you’d want to get a drink later?”
VII
We promised to remain friends, but after a few tearful attempts decided it would be best not to see each other for a while. We continued to call each other on birthdays and major holidays, and now and then we exchanged emails: One regarding the launch of my new literary magazine. Another announcing the death of his parents’ dog. I sent my condolences. He sent his congratulations. And then . . . a heap.
Last week, we met for dinner at a restaurant in the West Village.
He looked assured, handsome . . . grown-up.
“You mean old,” he said with a laugh.
I picked up my menu and hid behind it.
“You haven’t changed,” he added, referring to my hiding.
Whenever we spent any time apart, even if it were only a weekend, I’d react this way. With two days worth of facial hair, he’d greet me in the doorway. He’d come very close, reach his arms around me, and I’d squirm away, flitting off into the kitchen or the bathroom or anyplace where I could watch him at a distance until I got used to him again. “You’re like a cat,” he’d say, when eventually I’d come closer, sitting across from him first, then brushing up along his side, until finally winding up in his lap.
“You’ve changed,” I’d say suspiciously, touching his beard. “I have to get to know you again.” It became our routine. Martin would laugh. And I would laugh with him, knowing how silly I sounded. But hadn’t he changed? Wasn’t his beard proof? Time had passed, and when he’d bring his face close to mine, I’d feel all the intervening hours between us.
I put the menu down after only a few seconds. Whereas a weekend apart had once left me feeling distant, years apart had left me feeling paradoxically close. We talked about movies, the weather, our current lives, and then about the past, as if it had nothing to do with us anymore, as if we were tourists.
Martin had gotten a job at a new firm. A lawyer at last. Why, just yesterday he’d used some of the philosophy from his college thesis in one of his closing arguments. I mentioned my writing. He said he enjoyed the piece I’d recently published in the
New York Press
—“An Open Letter to My Date of Last Friday.”
I reddened, worried what he’d think of me now, writing trashy dating stories for a free newspaper. “It’s basically fiction,” I said defensively. “I actually wrote the piece a few years ago. I’ve been trying to submit my writing more, trying to work on my follow-through, ‘go the distance’ and all that. Been watching a lot of
Rocky
. . .” I trailed off.
“It was good. I told everyone I know to pick up a copy.”
I cringed. “Really?”
“I told everyone it was fiction, of course.”
“Of course.” I looked down. “So I got an email last week from this editor who’s starting a web-magazine. He read my piece and wants me to write their sex column.”
“You’re going to write a sex column?”
“Well, no,” I backtracked. “It wouldn’t be a sex column, exactly. More of a ‘single girl’s column.’ I’d write about my life, about dating and work, what I’m thinking about. . . .”
Martin chewed. “What are you going to call it?”
“I’m trying to decide between ‘Rue the Day’ and ‘Second Base.’ I like ‘Second Base’ for the obvious Homeric echoes, the island of Calypso being second base and all that—did I tell you my theory about baseball being based on
The Odyssey
? Think about it: You leave home. You try to return home. There are a series of islands—bases—along the way, and outside forces try to strike you out or help you along, just like the gods.”