The Secret Lives of People in Love (3 page)

The British sent help almost immediately, but a storm made any rescue attempt impossible. It’s hard for anyone to say how long they survived. It would have been pitch-black and freezing cold. The worst thing is that they all would have known that a rescue was impossible.

I wonder what they thought about. I know they mentioned me and were glad I wasn’t with them. I wonder if any of them secretly wished that they had been at the end of the line and picked to help on the tug. I bet that Dimitri, my best friend, thanked God for sparing my life. I know he kept a photograph of his girlfriend with him at all times, and I can bet he held it close as he perished.

I’ve often lain awake while Mina sleeps and prayed for Dimitri to give me a sign that he is okay; perhaps, like the fish my father and I used to yank up from the dark sea, he has found himself reborn in some bright place. I wonder if they drank the vodka—I suppose it would have helped to keep them warm. For Dimitri’s funeral, his girlfriend and I, along with his parents, chose some of his personal effects and buried them along with photographs. His mother had watched me throughout the service, which included full naval honors. I know why she looked at me, because I still asked myself the same question.

After the funeral, I told Dimitri’s girlfriend what he told us on the
morning we set out—that he was going to ask her to marry him. She slapped me and has never spoken to me since. Whatever I did wrong, I hope I can be forgiven.

Mina knows that my best friend was killed back in Russia, but not the whole story. I will tell her one day, and if she holds me tight and thanks God, then I’ll know I should definitely marry her and will probably ask her right then and there. I think we can have a nice life together in Queens or on Long Island.

I want to take my bodyboard into the water, not for myself, nor for my comrades, but for Mina. I want to surf along the lip of one of those waves; I want the sea to carry my unceasing love to their still bodies, I want the sea to tell them I’ve found someone I want to marry and that I have to say good-bye—but that I’ll try and keep them going by remembering our good times together—at least for as long as I am alive.

Most of all, I want to believe that being picked to help on the tug was no accident. I want to feel it somehow happened like that because things happen for a reason. I want to believe this more than anything, because if it were just an accident, then God must have died before he could finish the world.

It was past midnight when he reached the old mine entrance. The rain had stopped. Puddles were silvered by moonlight. Water weighed down clumps of his hair, which sat upon his forehead like small black anchors.

The ground of Edmonson County had not been mined since Kentucky was divided by the Civil War. The structure around the entrance to the mine was a tangle of girders strangled by ivy. There were rotting coal wagons fused by rust to lengths of track.

The air was thick and humid. Plumes of his white breath rose into the darkness. Broken glass, like fallen stars, crunched beneath his shoes. His shoes—full of holes—were the shoes she had plucked from the shop shelf years ago.

“How handsome,” she had said all those years ago at the store. He had stood at the mirror slightly bowlegged, his eyes askew as they both peered at the crooked body to which the shoes were attached.

“How handsome in those shoes,” she had said as they bounced their way home in the truck, such a long time ago.

He bent his way past the old bunkers, farther into the night, past ghost miners gossiping over tin cups. He remembered the photographs she kept under her bed, the honey-colored portraits of ancestors. Welsh choirs, bearded men in tunics, and women’s heads poking out from rings of white linen, coal-dusted cheeks against leaden skies, the first car in town, gas lamps in doorways.

He stepped over a collapsed wall. He continued walking until the rocks and broken glass beneath became a carpet of grass and then a meadow. The meadow sloped unevenly toward a river, as though slowly tipping its contents into the gushing tongue of water.

He stopped here and listened.

The low hissing of the river. His own breathing. Wind rushing between stems of wet grass.

They had just spent that afternoon together, soaking each other up after six years of not one word. No matter where he went, he had been unable to escape Edmonson County because it was her home and it haunted him; the fiddling of crickets; the smell of a hot night; a clear, cool pond—his senses had conspired to bring him back.

Now, on a sloping meadow hours into a fresh day, he found himself a desperate man, struggling to free himself from the shackles of a life he had not pursued. And her voice trickled through him, an icicle perpetually melting.

She was curiously delighted to see him that day when he showed up after six years. She was working at the same place. She did not act
surprised, as if for all that time he had been hiding somewhere close by. They drove through town in her small truck. Roofs were being hammered, children kicked stones, she slipped off her shoes to drive.

In the country not far from her house, a heavy pink mist swallowed up the legs of cows and the trunks of trees. After miles along dusty narrow roads, they pulled into her driveway and parked next to a claw-foot bathtub filled with dry leaves. Several dogs scrambled off the porch tossing their limbs and barking. They ran in circles around the truck.

He watched her walk barefoot across the driveway and then followed her into the house. As he stepped onto the porch, a line of cats’ heads appeared at the screen door and then disappeared when the thunder of dogs approached.

As he peeled open the screen door, he noticed small cats poised before him, watching his movements intently, as if he had inadvertently set foot upon the stage of a feline theater. The cats lounged on shelves, atop the refrigerator, and on stairs. Like strange mechanical toys, they raised their paws and swiveled their heads. The ones adrift on the floor were curled up and listened to their mistress in the kitchen as she skated a tall spoon around a glass of iced tea. The dogs bounded toward him again, salivating. Several of the cats were trodden on and hissed.

She stirred the iced tea and sang. Then he stirred it as she sat down and asked questions about his life. He stirred the tea until they were both silent—as though from its sugary bottom, something delicate had risen and usurped language.

Neither of them was married, and this gave the illusion that little
had changed. With the glass of iced tea in his hand, he almost confessed everything.

Years ago, they were engaged to be married, but one day he left.

He forgot why he had left long before he realized that she could not be forgotten, that the boundary of their intimacy was impossible to cross.

Displayed on a lone shelf with English paperback novels was an old pickax with her granddaddy’s initials, M.L. He contemplated that he was sitting on top of the him that had never left—a him that had not been away for six years, a him that was running over in his head how much money the tobacco crop might yield and how much help he would need hanging it.

In between talk were pockets of silence, in which he mused upon the confusing dichotomy before him. How easy, he thought, it would be to stay, to make this my chair. How accustomed I could become to the animals, why, after a day or so I would know their names and could call them for supper. He peered out to the porch and saw how it could be improved—making a mental note of tools for the job.

It was soon time to feed the dogs, and he offered to help—a way to continue the illusion of an everyday life. When the biggest dog rose from crusty folds of blankets, there lay a pair of shoes, a little chewed but intact. As he pulled them out, he remembered how she had chosen them in the shop.

She saw him holding them and turned away.

“They’re not the same shoes,” she said.

“They sure look the same—the ones you picked out.”

“Not those, honey.” The words shivered as they fell from her mouth. “They’re not yours anymore.”

After slipping the shoes onto his feet, replacing them with the ones he’d arrived in as a gesture of fairness, the light in the house dimmed and he followed her singing to the backyard. She was standing beside a tree from which two swings hung off the same branch.

“Swing,” she said sadly, the hard blue of her eyes glistening. And so they swung for their lives, the end of the branch above like an old finger, cutting out a circle of dusk.

As morning flooded the meadow below with light and then shape, he pictured her back at the house asleep on the porch in a rocker, golden cords of her hair adrift on bare shoulders.

They are the same shoes, he thought, the ones she picked.

And he listened because wind was filling the old mine as though deep underground in silence and in darkness, the earth once more had grown rich and waited for the clumsy but devoted hands of men.

Since his mother’s funeral, Edgar had begun to walk alone through the park. When he was a baby, she pushed him along its many paths. In the afternoons she read books to him, and though he couldn’t talk then, she knew he was listening, and he remembered her voice. When she died, his childhood split open beneath his feet.

His father, a handsome, stern man who smelled of smoke and cologne, had forbidden Edgar to leave the apartment without a grown-up, but his father generally stayed at the office until late into the night. Edgar knew he would not be missed.

Slipping out past Stan the doorman was not difficult. Stan liked a drink and would disappear every couple of hours for fifteen minutes, after which he’d sit in his room and try to appear as sober as possible, which made him look even more drunk.

Once Edgar crossed Fifth Avenue, he followed a path far into the woods. On entering the park, he often saw tourists having their portraits made, fire jugglers, slow games of chess, forlorn secretaries, and
the homeless who gathered in groups to debate the weather in loud voices.

Nestled between a sycamore tree and a cluster of lilac bushes, there was a bench where his mother had told him secrets.

“Without you,” she had once said, “the world would be incomplete.”

The bench was not particularly ornate. It was small and wooden and in the rain would soften and grow dark.

Edgar had overheard his father say on the telephone that he would never get over his wife’s death but that he would just learn to live with it. Stan the doorman had told Edgar that she was in a better place, but Edgar could not imagine anywhere better than the park, especially in spring when the lilacs—like tiny bombs—burst open and spill their fragrance upon a carpet of crabgrass.

Around the legs of the bench were clusters of tea-rose bushes, which his mother called Peter Pan roses, on account of their refusal to grow into the soft, many-layered cups of their cousins.

Not long after she was diagnosed, she would—despite the doctors’ instructions—sneak out with Edgar, and they would stroll very slowly through the park. After three months, she could only walk with the help of a cane, and as she walked, she balanced upon it like a tired acrobat. When her wrists and ankles grew tiny and she could no longer leave the apartment, Edgar wrapped the cane in Christmas paper and put it under his bed. It had bent slightly by supporting her. It was crooked with the weight of her love.

A week after she died, Edgar was awakened by the sound of his father cleaning out her closet. Through a cracked bedroom door, he
watched his father angrily scoop out her sweaters, skirts, underwear, and socks, and then put them into trash bags. On his walks through the park after school, Edgar would remember the sound clothes hangers had made sliding across the pole of her closet, and the breathlessness of his father—the agony of being left behind.

Edgar was angry with his father for disposing of his mother’s clothes as if they were copies of old Sunday papers, but they never exchanged any words about it; in fact, they never spoke to one another except about school or work.

The morning after his father cleared everything out, Edgar had untied the string on one of the bags and rescued a sweater. It was under his bed with the cane and a birthday present he had been unable to open. A small card attached to the gift read: “I know you won’t forget me.”

On the wrapping paper were drawings of Peter Pan roses.

Edgar drifted farther away from his father. They communicated through silence that flowed between them like a river. In the months that followed her death, the river widened, until Edgar’s father was a motionless speck in a wrinkled suit watching him, arms akimbo, from the opposite bank.

Sneaking out past Stan the doorman, and then sinking into the lush green of the park was the only activity that bore any significance for Edgar. He ate to keep himself from feeling dizzy, and he slept so that he would not fall asleep during the lugubrious activities of daily life.

School was an ordered dream. He paid attention in class and he ate lunch with the other children, but their laughter only reminded him of
how unlucky his mother had been. When invited over to play at other boys’ houses, he quietly declined.

Edgar had taken on the life of a shadow, while his true self—like a stone figure of Narnia—remained at the bedside of his shrinking mother.

Christmas came and went. Stan the doorman brought in a tree and helped Edgar’s father string lights through its branches. Presents arrived and were opened. A turkey was carved, but joy had regressed into the trunks of the trees, and into the sleeping bombs of the lilacs.

Edgar’s father acquired a dog, which Stan offered to walk but seldom did. Like a piano bought for the purpose of decoration, the dog somehow knew that no true pleasure was taken from its presence and it spent most of the day and night in its bed, and then one day it disappeared and nobody noticed.

Edgar’s father began to work every other Saturday, and then every Saturday. The apartment fell asleep under dust. Life became quiet and drawn out like a wet Sunday afternoon. By the time winter passed and the earth began to soften, the river of silence between Edgar and his father had become a sea—but it was not rough, nor did the tides bring news of change. Beneath the surface swam unsaid things.

On the one-year anniversary of her death, Edgar’s father left the apartment before Edgar woke up. One hour before the car arrived to take Edgar to school, he made himself some cereal and then pulled her sweater from under the bed. He folded it, and by removing his homework and a history book, he found a space for it in his backpack. The scent of her sweater almost drove him mad, and during recess, he
found an empty cubicle in the bathroom, opened his bag, and inhaled what little of her life it had absorbed.

After school as usual, he crossed Fifth Avenue and headed for the bench. Along the main path, a tourist laughed uncontrollably as he posed for a portrait. His girlfriend laughed, too; they kissed. At first, Edgar had thought tourists were foolish to want pictures for themselves and their loved ones, but after his mother died, he realized that memory needs all the help it can get, and things are sometimes like keys.

When Edgar arrived at the end of the grove that hid the bench, the scent of lilacs picked him up and carried him forward, but then he stopped because there was a man on the bench with his eyes closed.

The man was Indian and had a turban tied around his head. He wore a brown suit and a stiff raincoat stained with water marks.

The turban was almost the same color as his suit, and bits of thread dangled from it like the beads that sometimes hang from lampshades.

As Edgar approached, the man opened his eyes and peered up at him.

“I’m sorry,” Edgar commanded, “but you can’t sit here.”

The man adjusted the turban slightly. One of his eyes began to wander to the side of its socket, as though it yearned for a life of its own.

“I can’t sit here?” he said.

“I didn’t know anyone knew about this place,” Edgar said, looking back upon the path.

“Oh, I think it would be very popular,” said the man. “It’s lovely.”

Edgar sensed that the man had no intention of leaving and so climbed up onto the bench beside him.

“How do you know about this place then, if it is such a very big secret?” The man leaned into a purple nose of lilacs and sniffed.

“My mother used to bring me here,” Edgar said.

“Oh?” he said, though this time, he seemed surprised. “She’s not here today?”

“She’s dead,” Edgar said.

The man began to laugh and then jumped off the bench.

“You must be crazy!” he said, adjusting the turban on his head. “People don’t die!” He laughed again, though not mockingly, but with utter incredulity.

The man’s loose eye drifted in its socket, while the obedient one remained fixed on Edgar.

“You must be crazy,” the man said again, sitting back down on the bench. Edgar shrank back and looked up at a small opening in the trees. It had clouded over, but the vegetation around him swelled.

“You’re not scared of me, are you?” the man asked.

“No,” Edgar replied. He was not scared because he felt that life had already done its worst.

“Well, don’t worry about my terrible eye.” The man pointed. “It sees everything quite clearly when it wants to.”

“But I was with her when she died,” Edgar said.

“Stop talking crazy,” the man insisted, which made Edgar cry.

The sky darkened suddenly, and a soft wind shook the bloated ends of the lilac trees.

“Could it be that your mother is actually here? With us now?” the man asked softly. “Your tears are falling upon her small hands,” he said, kneeling down at Edgar’s feet. He cradled a wet tea-rose leaf in his hand. “See?”

Edgar looked down and imagined the fragrant cups of roses, which in summer would pop open around the bench. He remembered his mother’s fascination for small things.

“It’s just a Peter Pan rose,” Edgar said.

The man laughed, and his eye slipped from its moorings. “And I suppose that the wind is just air? And not laughter’s laughter?”

“I wish I could believe you,” Edgar said.

“Terrible.” The Indian man shook his head.

“I don’t understand how she could leave us,” Edgar said.

“I know, it’s awful.”

“Why did it have to happen?” Edgar asked.

“She’s just changed clothes.”

Edgar imagined repeating all this to his father—the ensuing sigh, and then the click of the door as his body made a quiet exit.

“If you think she has gone for good, then you’re cutting yourself short, my friend,” the man said. He pulled an orange from his pocket and began to peel away its skin with his nail.

“My own wife,” the man said with a mouthful of orange, “is the blend of light in late summer that pushes through the smoky trees to the soft fists of windfallen apples. Would you like some orange?”

“No thanks.”

“Oh, you really should, it’s rare you find such a sweet one,” the man said. “And I can tell that you haven’t been eating.”

Edgar shuffled in his seat.

“What would your mother say?” He held out a segment of orange. Clouds above them broke apart and trees echoed with birdsong.

Edgar and the man chewed silently.

“I’m very sorry,” the man said when they had finished the orange.

“My father threw away all her clothes.”

“That’s not uncommon.”

“Why?” Edgar asked.

The man turned to Edgar. “He probably hasn’t said much to you either, has he?”

“No, he just works, and then when he does come home before I go to bed we have dinner, and then I go to my room while he reads the newspaper.”

“And I suppose you think that he doesn’t love you?”

Edgar nodded.

“Big problem,” the man said to himself.

“What is?” Edgar asked.

“Well, he loves you both so much that it consumes him.” The man’s loose eye began to revolve. “When somebody leaves this plane—or, if you like, goes into another room—those left behind sometimes try and stop loving—but this is a mistake, because even if you have loved only once in your life, you’re ruined.”

Edgar imagined the sad, bent figure of his father.

“Before I met with my wife, I loved her very much. I didn’t know who she was, but I had this fire inside me for someone I knew existed. Now that she hangs out stars, I still love her, though we speak another language altogether.”

“Is she dead, too?” Edgar asked.

“Are you listening to a word I’m saying?”

“Sorry.”

“Okay, you’re forgiven, but no more of this silliness.”

A bird dipped between the trees and came to rest on a branch.

“You have to help your father.”

Edgar imagined his father at the office, the dark rings beneath his eyes. The beauty of his slowness.

In the early stages of his mother’s illness, Edgar had secretly watched his father get down on his knees and gather up the clumps of her hair from the shower drain. Before anyone truly believed what would happen, Edgar’s father had tried to save everything, and he kept the hair in a pillowcase.

“Come,” the man said. “This is a very pleasant seat, but let’s go for a walk.”

Edgar didn’t move.

“Show me all the places she took you. Let’s ride on the subway and sing her favorite song.”

Edgar couldn’t think of anything to say. His mother had told him never to talk to strangers.

“I know that you might be afraid—what I’m saying is hard to believe, but it’s possible to continue loving, if you know how.”

Edgar felt for the sweater in his bag.

“You are hungry and so am I,” the man said, rubbing his chin, as though it had suddenly appeared on his face. Adjusting his turban, he said, “Okay, I have a very nice suggestion. You are going to tell me the
favorite eating place of your mother, and then I am going to go to the favorite eating place of your mother, and if you like, you can join me there.”

Edgar told him about a Chinese restaurant on the Lower East Side, and then the man walked to the end of the grove and was gone.

One whole year—365 days ago, her eyes had closed and her hand (which had shrunk until it was almost the same size as Edgar’s) released her son’s hand. Her soul, like a spring coiled between two doors, was vaulted into the unknowable as one door opened.

A boy at school had told him there was no such thing as a soul, that people were just machines. And even though the boy had meant no harm and everything he said made sense, Edgar felt as though there was some information that had been withheld, not only from the boy, but from everyone.

Moments before his mother died, Edgar remembered a sudden energy had filled her. For several minutes, her eyes opened very wide. She even tried to sit up. She looked around the room and then at Edgar’s father, who sat—frozen with disbelief—at the end of her bed.

Anniversaries are sad and beautiful. Snow momentarily turns to rain.

Edgar pushed open the door of the Chinese restaurant—advertisements flapped upon its door like wings.

He slid into the booth opposite the man, whose loose eye was following the waiter back to the kitchen.