The Secret Lives of People in Love (4 page)

When Edgar sat down, a Chinese woman appeared through a bead curtain.

“Long time since you come, Edgar.”

“Yes,” Edgar said, and felt his mother warm his insides.

The Indian man cupped his hand on Edgar’s shoulder.

Edgar ordered all the dishes his mother had loved. Moo shu pork, pork-fried rice, hot and sour soup, won ton crispy duck, and General Tso’s chicken.

There was a fish tank opposite their booth, and Edgar wondered if the fish remembered them.

It was a strange thing to taste all her favorite foods. The smell of the duck and the thick smoothness of the soup all conjured her.

He could see her long fingers on the table, occasionally scooping steaming food onto his plate. She pushed her strawberry blonde hair behind her ears, and her eyes widened with each mouthful. They discussed school, the importance of nutrition, and where they would go for a vacation in August when New York was unbearably sticky.

The strange man opposite Edgar ate in silence.

After the meal, the Indian man scooped out handfuls of quarters from his pocket. The Chinese woman counted them on the bar loudly.

Edgar opened his fortune cookie. He broke the stale biscuit and read it to himself. It said:

“Long Roots Moor Love to Our Side”

Next, they went to a Laundromat in Chelsea and sat in orange, molded chairs beside churning washers. It was late, but Edgar knew that his father would not be home yet.

“Even though we always had a laundry service,” Edgar said, “Mommy used to bring me here for fun.”

The Indian man nodded. Several Polish women folded towels next to them.

“Grandma used to bring Mommy here when she was my age, and they had long talks.”

“Did you have nice talks with your mother here?” the Indian man asked.

“Oh, yes,” Edgar said. “She taught me all the different names for clouds and how to predict the weather before it happens.”

They both laughed because outside a cloud opened with such violence that the street was suddenly filled with laughter and the excited screams of people running as if they were children.

“It’s like we are in a machine being washed together,” the Indian man noted.

Edgar nodded. “We used to sit where those women are,” Edgar said, pointing to the women with the towels. “Mommy used to have candy in her purse, and we would buy a soda from the machine and have a sugar picnic.” Edgar couldn’t help but laugh as he remembered. “She told me not to tell Daddy, but one day her purse fell off the table at supper, and candy went all over the floor, and Daddy just looked at her in surprise, because there was more candy than he had probably ever seen.”

The Indian man laughed, too, and then bought Edgar a soda and some candy from the machines with some of the quarters left over from lunch.

Edgar laughed so much that pieces of candy fell from his mouth, but the Indian man didn’t seem to mind at all.

In the hot Laundromat, Edgar could almost smell his mother’s perfumed wrists. The powder machine, with its very small but brightly
colored boxes of washing powder, reminded Edgar of the small box of Joy that was on the shelf above his bed. When his mother gave him the two quarters to buy it, she had said:

“I will always give you joy”

As they left the Laundromat and walked toward the subway on Fourteenth Street, they both stopped, because there was a homeless man sleeping on a vent.

“He was once a little boy,” the Indian man said sadly.

The man was covered with several blankets and lay on wet cardboard boxes. His hair was thin and ragged. His skin was coated in dirt. His shoes were three sizes too big and had no laces.

“He still is a little boy waiting for someone to love him,” Edgar said.

Edgar pulled his mother’s sweater from his backpack.

“What are you doing?” the Indian man asked.

“Finding a new way to love Mommy,” Edgar replied.

He laid the sweater next to the man’s hands, and as he did so, the cold, dirty fingers sensed the sweater’s softness and reached out for it. At his feet was a badly written sign that read:

sometimes we all need help

“That was nice, what you did,” the Indian man said.

“It was nothing, really,” said Edgar.

“It was nothing and it was everything,” said the Indian man.

“What do you mean?” asked Edgar.

“You’ll see one day,” he said.

A cool wind blew across the subway platform, and Edgar tried to
remember what the Indian man had said, not wind, but laughter’s laughter.

When the train squealed to a stop, Edgar reached for the Indian man’s hand and they boarded, sitting next to a boy and his mother. The mother was peeling the shells from pistachio nuts and putting the nuts into a bag. The boy watched her, a basketball balanced on his knees.

The boy’s mother was pregnant.

“All the secrets are in there,” the Indian man said, pointing to her abdomen. Edgar looked at her bulging body. He had once been inside that warm house.

When they reached their stop and left the station, it was dark, and for a moment both Edgar and the Indian man were transfixed by the night sky.

“We leave one womb for another.” The Indian man laughed.

Although the stars appeared to be close, they were millions of miles away.

“The light from the stars takes so long to reach us that sometimes a star will have expired by the time we can see it,” the Indian man said.

“Some of these stars are dead?”

“Nothing dies in the way that we think, Edgar,” the Indian man said. “Perhaps what really matters is that they are so beautiful, whether they are still awake or not.”

They walked through the park, but it was so dark that even though surrounded by trees and bushes they could not see any of them. They felt only each other’s presence.

As they neared Fifth Avenue, the moon crisped the tops of trees, and Edgar knew that his father was home. As they stood on the edge
of Fifth Avenue, the Indian man’s eyes seemed to glow and their light touched Edgar’s face.

Without saying a word he adjusted his turban, turned around, and walked back into the park without once looking back. Edgar watched. The Indian man’s painful amble suddenly took on a strange majesty. He seemed to grow as tall as the trees. Then his form grew bright.

Edgar looked past the avenue, past the buildings, through the clouds and into the universe.

No solid object separated him from infinity.

The sea between Edgar and his father began to drain, and in the distance burned the fire of a man waiting to be rescued by a small boy he once knew.

A few hours ago I boarded a plane at Los Angeles International Airport wearing no socks. By dawn tomorrow I shall be walking beneath the fruit trees of Athens.

Last week I received a letter from Samantha in Greece. She informed me of her forthcoming marriage to her childhood friend. We had spent only a few weeks together, five years ago, but when you finally meet the person who in daydreams you had sculpted without words, the transparency of time becomes the color of hair, and shapeless years become the shape of lips.

Perhaps we are each allotted only a certain amount of love—enough only for an initial meeting—a serendipitous clumsiness. When it leaves to find others, the difficulty begins because we are faced with our humanness, our past, our very being.

The conditions under which I left Samantha were complicated by my drinking.

I had been drinking so much back then that my skin was beginning
to change color. I remember watching Samantha for the last time through the shutters as she skipped up the front steps of my apartment building, her bag swinging. I had thought I would live in Greece with her forever. But sometimes, when confronted by something of unfathomable beauty, the bars of the cage around us begin to tremble. So I ran away to protect myself and remained a prisoner.

I am somewhere above the Atlantic Ocean. I look down into the darkness and imagine a scatter of uninhabited islands. For the years Samantha and I have been apart, I have been marooned. And as if I have been stranded on one of the imaginary islands below, I am now finally drifting away on a raft tied together with thick grasses of fear and relief.

A few days after receiving Samantha’s letter, I couldn’t sleep and got up. I decided to go for a walk along Sunset Boulevard. It was quiet. Dawn swept through the streets. I saw a woman in a wedding dress waiting for a bus. She was slumped on a wooden bench. Her dress swam around her and across the bench, obscuring an advertisement in Spanish. Her feet hung an inch off the curb.

A veil covered her eyes. Her mouth quivered. Her lipstick looked smeared. I realized that since leaving Samantha, there was a part of me that had never stopped grieving. And all this time, it was not Samantha for whom I had often woken up sobbing, but for my self, for the plague of indifference that had kept me from her all these years. Like a ship, I had dropped anchor in the middle of the sea. I had chosen to quietly rot.

There was a man in jeans bent over beside the woman in the wedding dress. He was sifting for cans in the trash. I remember the con
centration on his face. He was the street’s unofficial archaeologist. I thought how simple it would be for us to change places.

When suddenly I realized that I knew the woman in the wedding dress, I decided to buy a seat on the next flight to Greece. I went home, found my passport, and hailed a taxi for the airport.

I wonder how happy Samantha is and how many photographs have already been taken of her and her childhood friend.

I imagine her voice.

I can see her family house, perched high above the city, its white stone walls erupting out of scorched earth, emptying coolness into a blue shell of sky. Her father is playing backgammon on the veranda. His mustache is twitching. There is soccer on the television.

As the homeless man rummaged deeper into the trash for cans, the woman in the wedding dress began to cry, and I saw through the veil a face from long ago. But instead of rushing over and calling out her name, I just stood there.

The woman in the wedding dress waiting for the bus is called Diane, and we lived in the same apartment building years ago. She was training to be a nurse, and I was in my final year of a PhD in ancient history. She lived across the hall, and we would drink chamomile tea together. Sometimes she would discuss her knowledge of hospital procedures. Other times, I would clumsily fight my way through a passage of ancient Greek or explain the significance of ancient bartering.

Sometimes we would hold hands for no reason or pet her cat at the same time. I had planned to fly to Athens and write my thesis, so the night before I moved out, we had a farewell dinner. After a long meal with wine and the retelling of old stories, we made a promise. With my
elbows on the kitchen table, and her fingers skating across the vinyl, we agreed that if we were not married by the time we were forty, we would marry each other. Then we made love. I always wondered what happened to her. Los Angeles is a place of nightmares and fantasies.

Everyone on the airplane seems to be asleep. There are hundreds of dreams taking place around me.

I was nearing the end of my stay in Athens when I met Samantha. I had divided my time between drinking and researching the mysteries of ancient dialect for my thesis. We first kissed on the rooftop of my apartment building amid the clanking of air conditioners, below an orange sky sprayed lightly with stars. Love reveals the beauty of seemingly trivial things—a pair of shoes, an empty wine glass, an open drawer, cracks on the avenue.

I stopped drinking soon after I returned from Greece.

I stopped drinking not to prolong my life, but because abstinence allowed me to continue loving her, as though by not drinking I proved myself worthy of her companionship.

My memories are arranged like puddles—they are littered throughout the present moment. It seems arbitrary, that which the mind remembers, but I know it is not.

During the years after I left Samantha in Athens, I would often stay awake all night—not only because we were lost from one another, but because when we kissed, I had only tasted alcohol. Her childhood friend, her husband-to-be, knows how she tastes now. This is his privilege.

When the woman in the wedding dress began to cry, the homeless man who was searching for cans in the trash stood up straight and put his hand on her shoulder. Between them sat a plastic bag stuffed with crushed cans. There must have been at least two hundred. Each can had touched someone’s lips.

As an archaeologist, I’ve often wondered how we as a race keep going through all the misery. The answer is revealed: the potential for closeness with strangers.

Floating above the mountains of the Peloponnesos, slowly descending toward Athens International Airport, saltwater caresses and soaks into the land. As passengers begin to stir, I imagine old women hanging out sheets and slicing lemons. Samantha will still be sleeping.

Outside the airport, there is a billboard advertising perfume. It shows a young, beautiful couple with the slogan:
How Does She Smell to You
?

Sleepily, I imagine the two people on the billboard are Samantha and me, and instead of taking a bus directly to Samantha’s house, where her courtyard will be bursting with irises, I take a taxi in the opposite direction to the port of Piraeus. After drinking a glass of water in a café, I find the owner of a boat and pay him to take me to a small uninhabited island thirty kilometers southwest of the mainland. As we make our way out to sea, he offers me a slice of spanakopita—spinach and feta cheese pie. When Samantha made this, years ago, flour would collect on her cheeks and forehead.

As we near the island, there is a wind blowing up from the south,
so I ask the captain if he can dock on a northern beach. He seems perplexed but shrugs his shoulders. When I request that he wait three hours for me, he shrugs his shoulders again and lights a cigarette. From his old radio I hear a song with the words
agapi-mou
—my love.

Slowly, I make my way to the highest point of the island. I can feel the skin on the back of my neck start to burn. I am thirsty, and sweat runs down the ridge of my back in salty corridors. I have traversed this island before. I have sipped wine amid its flowers.

I wade through purple sea daffodils and poppies. There are clusters of cyclamen, nodding—urging me to the highest point of land. I once told Samantha how the ancient Greeks referred to cyclamen as
chelonion
, because their tubers are shaped like turtles. She had kissed me and said, “The world laughs in flowers.”

As I reach the pinnacle, the skin on my neck and arms begins to blister. I am as close to the sun as the island will allow, and flowers give way to dry and hollow stems of yellow. The soil has turned to bloodred dust.

As I buckle to my knees and then lay on my stomach with my chin embedded in the crimson earth, I can see a carpet of flowers lining the hillside, a gradual descent in color.

And then, as I close my eyes, the wind—after skimming along the sea, peeling its salty freshness—races up between the wildflowers, slowing as it gathers the weight of their bouquet. When the wind finally comes upon me and inhabits my shirt like ice, I inhale the memory of Samantha.

If I were to fly home without seeing Samantha, by the time my plane arrived in Los Angeles she would be married. Diane, in the wedding
dress, would have boarded her bus, and the homeless man would have sold his cans.

Up here on this forgotten elbow of land, I have nothing to lose, and though I am more afraid now than I have ever been, I am relieved, I am unburdened, I am ascending.