The Secret Lives of People in Love (6 page)

He scooped up some of the unbroken snow and chewed it. Then he laughed. How silly he had been to fall in love with a mannequin. Silly, he thought, but understandable, considering his circumstances.

As the path widened, Saboné noticed someone sitting on a bench, and he stopped walking.

Then he recognized her and recalled the image of her bloodied
handkerchief, and the spots of blood that followed her across the station to the platform—the eyes of her soul.

Her presence convinced Saboné that he must be dreaming, because she was so very white. When he got close, her eyes, which were wide open, did not follow his movement.

At last he reached out for her, but she did not move. He stroked her face with his fingers, including the nose, which, although white and free from any storm beneath, was completely frozen. Crumbs of snow that had collected in her hair were still intact.

He knelt down in the snow at her feet and remembered the sight of his very own blood outside of the shop.

He pulled himself up onto the bench. He reached around her with his arm and moved her closer. He squeezed her until he felt the bones beneath. Then he settled down and became quite still. He found the drawing of her in his jacket pocket and unfolded it. Then he put his arm around her again and wished that everyone he had ever met was somehow able to see him. It was some time before they were moved.

I think of Leo very often these days. I think of him tonight as I sort packages for a truck that’s headed for London. It is so cold in the warehouse that we wear our breath like beards. The office sent down a box of gloves last week, but I enjoy the feel of cardboard against my old cracked hands. I have worked for the Royal Mail for almost three decades now. I thought they would let me go when I stopped speaking twenty years ago, but they’ve been good to me, and when I retire in ten years I’ll be given a state pension and a humble send-off. I enjoy my work. It’s the only reason I leave the house, except for my walks on the beach.

Each package has somewhere to go and the contents remain a mystery. Occasionally I’ll find a box where the address has been written by a child. I used to put these boxes to the side until the end of my shift so I could study the penmanship and compare it to Leo’s. In a child’s handwriting, language is exposed as the pained and crooked medium it really is. Since losing Leo, these packages are like shards of glass.

The warehouse is divided into sections. There are no windows, and sometimes I imagine the factory is in Oslo, Mumbai, or Rotterdam. Outside, the sopping Welsh hillsides roll away in one direction like old giants under blankets of moss. In the other direction, the land suddenly stops as though woken up. Where the land stops, something else begins, and the sea stretches north until it starts to freeze, and then it clings to the earth like a child to its mother.

Small muddy vans roll in from villages in the valleys. These vans are unloaded and the packages sorted by nearest city. Every two days, hulking lorries chug from the warehouse to Glasgow, Manchester, London, and Penzance.

As I walk home each morning in the dark, I picture headlights carving through night’s flesh. I love the names of the towns on the packages the same way I love the different species of weeds that blindly push through the shell of earth around the forked gate of my house.

Hundreds of years ago, the village relied solely on fishing. I have a book of paintings in my sitting room at home. One of the paintings has young women in aprons standing on cliffs watching a ship get smashed against the rocks. In the foreground is an arm of sunlight reaching down to the surface of the sea. I couldn’t tell you who painted the picture, but I understand the inclusion of that long beam of light, I understand the grief that makes such details necessary. There is little fishing work in this town now.

Although the warehouse provides more of a steady income than fishing, all the boys in the village dream of going to sea. They dream with their windows open of ancestors on the sorts of ships you only see in bottles now.

Sometimes I walk along the rocky beach beneath the village. The dark green water sweeps in, and I scream with the roar of dragging rocks. I spend hours peering into rock pools at fish and crabs. I wonder if they know they’ve been cut off. I like to sit on the cold pebbles until the tide sloshes over my shoes and water soaks through my socks and pulls at my toes like some hysterical being.

When early morning comes and my shift ends, I write down the number of vans that I unloaded. After thirty years, I’ve never made a mistake, because for me, each truck is like a person. As a boy I always felt that vehicles had faces.

I clock out and find my coat in the break room. There is a half-eaten sandwich on the table. A calendar of topless women hangs from one of the lockers. The women look cold. They wear large smiles. Perhaps photographs can fake happiness, but never grief.

The warehouse is half an hour’s walk from the village, first through a narrow country lane and then up a hill into town past hedgerows thick with birds peering out from their nests. In summer, wild berries replace the black eyes of the birds.

In a few hours dawn will flood the world. I stop walking and lean against a lamppost. My left leg always hurts, and it’s worse in winter. Everything is worse around Christmas.

The light from the streetlamp falls upon my hands. They are the color of stained glass. In the village church there is a magnificent stained-glass window. Sometimes I kneel beneath it and drown in color. When the pain in my leg is back to a dull throbbing I continue walking. Stones caught in the tracks of my boots scrape the concrete. I miss autumn—the season when summer takes on the memory of its
own mortality. And then winter. And then the miracle season, when everything begins again fearlessly.

The walk home is always slow, and rows of slate houses glisten. Their black foreheads are white with tomorrow’s breath. Curtains are pulled across the eyes from within.

A bird hops around a lamppost. There is a plump worm in its beak. It flies away as I approach.

I pass the corner pub. Even though it’s against the law, pubs in the village are open all the time on account of the few remaining fishermen who return an hour or so before dawn, with a thirst built up from being on the water without being able to drink any of it. The light spills out into the street with the sound of laughing. I smell beer, and a dull thud from the jukebox reminds me of my leg, which reminds me of Leo.

A mist wraps around the town. Its white arms spread through the streets. Dogs bark at kitchen doors.

I used to go into the pub for a pint or two. But I haven’t been in for about six years. It’s all so useless.

After Jeanne took Leo’s things to America twenty years ago, I felt a sense of relief. The house was quiet, and for some reason I began to think about my mother, who died when she was sixty-eight. The same year Jeanne and I were married. My mother slipped on some ice and broke her hip, then without any warning she died in the hospital. It was like the closing of a book I never thought could end.

I spent last Sunday watching the fishing boats chug home, their hulls thick with silver pellets of fish.

I haven’t said a word in twenty years, but there was a time when you
wouldn’t have been able to shut me up. I’ve lived so long without the pain of language. My life is a letter with no address.

If you were to watch me for an afternoon, you’d notice that my hands are always moving. Like blind siblings they are always touching one another.

I like watching the fishing boats. Each boat’s arrival is celebrated by a spray of birds. Seagulls from a distance look like eyes drifting over the waves. Last week one of the young captains asked if I needed work. I shook my head. He was a handsome boy, probably about the age Leo could have been. I wonder who has inherited the life Leo left behind.

I live in the house I grew up in. My parents’ room is the same. It is the guest room, but the only guests are ghosts who drift in through the doorways in dreams.

Everybody in the village knows my life story. But I’m too old to think my sadness is special.

Jeanne is my age, but lives a different life. In this village with its damp shoes and Sunday hymns, you are old the moment someone you love dies. And then Sundays are spent watching light move across the garden from small hot rooms that smell like ironing.

Jeanne lives in Los Angeles. We’re still married, though we haven’t spoken since Leo. I think they make pictures in Los Angeles. Perhaps her life is a long fantasy.

Sometimes I linger outside the junior school at the bottom of the hill. At this time of year, Christmas decorations hang in the windows. Beyond the school are mountains dotted with sheep and the odd light
of a tractor grinding its way home. Sometimes I time my walks to coincide with the three o’clock school bell. Children gush into the playground like hot water and into the arms of their parents. I would give everything, even memory—especially memory—if I could hold Leo again. The weight of his absence is the weight of the entire world.

I stopped speaking soon after the accident in the hope I’d retain the memory of his soft, lispy voice. Sometimes I cup one of Leo’s words in my hands like a trembling bird. After the accident, the doctors said I had only a few months to live. Jeanne went back to America, and I waited for that journey home. I felt like packing a suitcase but didn’t know what to put in it. That was twenty years ago. I have stopped going to doctors. They only believe what they think they know. They are like priests—blinded from spirituality by religion.

Jeanne would be shocked if she could see how bleak everything is, though the village hasn’t really changed, except for cars being allowed in the marketplace and a link road through the mountains for lorries. When I thought I was going to die after the accident, I started writing a book, and then never stopped writing. It is called
Dreams Are Lost Cities of Childhood.

I have worked on it every day for twenty years. I will not be finished until I’m dead. The book I’m writing is the book to end all books. My death will be the concluding chapter. I have drawn all the pictures, too. The book is about my life with Leo and Jeanne. I cannot draw myself, so I mark my body in the pictures with an X. Sometimes when I read old chapters, I am suddenly in the midst of how things were—it’s like being on a theater set that someone has built of your life. Memory is like life but with actors.

Jeanne wakes up to sunshine. She drinks orange juice. Los Angeles is warm, even at this time of year. Leo would be a man now. Some people have Christmas at the beach in America. They do in Australia, too. I wake to rain tapping on the window like a hundred Welsh mothers. Each drop is a note on the minor scale.

Jeanne came here to study the climate. There is a university in Bangor. Students come from across the world to watch clouds. I remember watching her marvel at the slow, swirling explosions of white. I offered her a paper cup of cockles. That was when you could buy them from a cart, but it’s long since gone. It was where old people met and talked about the war. Jeanne’s accent was smooth and rich. I used to wish that my ancestors had gone to America. Perhaps then things would have been different. Perhaps we could have met at the cinema, a drive-in. Perhaps Leo and I would have worked on an old car together—the sort people build in their garages.

Twenty years ago, I drove off the side of a cliff. I was trying to make Leo laugh by turning around to make faces. It’s as simple as that.

Leo’s body was recovered half a mile from the wreckage. He looked as though he were asleep, but his insides were liquid. I like to think he was carried from the car by the same angels that drift in and out of the stories I’ve grown fond of reading by Milton and Blake. They wrote beneath the same moon that’s above the village. Everything that’s ever happened, the moon saw.

They tell me I survived the accident.

It’s Wednesday morning. Darkness at this hour is seldom remembered. Most people are about to wake up. I stand lopsided outside my front door. It is not really a door, but another gateway to sadness. It be
gins to drizzle. The fog rolls away and creeps up the black hillside. Fires are being lit. Mornings in Wales reek of frying eggs and wood smoke. Children are stirring in warm beds. Soon they will be released from the arms of dreams. All arms are envoys of God. It is night here, but day somewhere else, and somehow it keeps going and going whether we’re a part of it or not.

Suddenly the sky is full of rain; drops the size of thumbs. It will soon be Christmas. The children at school are putting on a play. They make their own costumes. Night is a tattered veil suspended. The moon is full and absent all at once. Leo’s face waits for me in every mirror. Dreams are the unfinished wings of our souls.

Way above the Park, traffic has stopped. A fat woman in tight clothes pushes twins in a stroller. The eyeballs of the twins slide up to the elevated train. The train grieves into the station.

Gabriel watches the twins and then looks into the space they are being pushed. Gabriel looks down at his watch and shuffles into an alley behind a bakery. His package should be ready.

A steel door opens separating a word sprayed in white. Two trembling hands emerge holding a box tied with string. There is a bird tattooed on one of the hands. Gabriel places his hands on the top and bottom and only when the other hands feel the responsibility of weight transfer do they release and disappear back behind the steel door. Gabriel taps twice and looks around.

As Gabriel makes his way through the alley toward the subway, he pauses beside a motorcycle lying on its side. He is tempted to open the box for a quick peek at what’s inside.

Two men waiting for the train look Gabriel over. Their pants are
baggy and remind Gabriel of sails. Their eyes want to know what he is carrying and why he is handling it with such care. They look at the hole in Gabriel’s sneakers. They look at Gabriel’s scar. He was in a fire. There were several deaths. It crosses his cheek and disappears under his ear. People notice it because it is a lighter shade of brown than the rest of his face. His mouth hangs open, a habit that makes him look absent but that his wife loves.

As he stares down the track into the light of an approaching train, he considers what he is doing and thinks about his mother. The train brings with it a cold wind that makes the two men on the platform forget about Gabriel.

The silver doors slide open. An intercom spits out a muffled message. The subway car is full of short Mexican men with paint on their sneakers. They are huddled together but don’t talk. One of them is reading a tattered children’s book to improve his English. Gabriel notices a boy and a girl, perhaps seven or eight years old. Their grandfather—a mustache curling down each side of his chin—is asleep with his mouth open. The boy is amused by this. The Mexican man reading the children’s book is concentrating so hard that he doesn’t notice the girl lean and mouth the words as he thinks them.

The train crosses an unmarked boundary into Brooklyn. Gabriel looks at the other passengers, but only an old woman in black is watching him. As he looks at her, her eyes fall on to the box and then she turns her body away from Gabriel toward the glass of the door. Gabriel’s mother once told him that if you keep thinking of someone dead, you summon them.

As the train rushes into light and slows, Gabriel is able to see the people who might step into his car. He notices a transit cop. The transit cop doesn’t move from the platform, then is lost behind the rush of men in suits and women in long coats with long hair. He moves the box onto his lap and rests it on his thighs. As he pulls the bottom of his coat over it, he realizes how dirty he must look, because his sneaker has a hole in it and his coat is stained black in places. He looks at how clean the new passengers are and remembers the smell of freshly ironed shirts on Sunday nights. He hasn’t worn a shirt like that since his wedding. His mother was still alive then and made paper butterflies to put in his bride’s hair.

The people standing around Gabriel do so uncomfortably. He is hiding something, and they know it. He wants to stand and offer his seat, but the package must be delivered intact. When Gabriel coughs, people bury their heads. His wife wants him to see a doctor, but doctors cost money, he tells her.

A woman with short black hair in a pink raincoat is laughing to herself. The woman reminds Gabriel of his sister who lives in a suburb of Havana. She is always depressed because the man she loves is a drunk.

Gabriel is being watched by tourists. He knows they are not from the city because they are each holding a map and the women have hair that is neither fashionably styled nor untidy. They are huddled together like the Mexican men next to them. The women chatter and the men stare coldly at the floor and at the bulge under Gabriel’s coat.

The car is continually full, because when people alight, others are
there to take their place. Gabriel wonders how many people occupy one seat in a day, and if the seat could record the thoughts of the occupants, what it would say about human beings.

Another stop and a young blind man is helped onto the train by a girl with bleached hair. She tenderly applies pressure to his elbow. A suit immediately rises and the young blind man sits, nodding gratefully for each gesture. Everybody looks at the blind man because he cannot look back at them. He knows people are watching him and sits very still, only once adjusting his white stick so it’s propped against his thigh.

Gabriel closes his eyes and imagines being blind. He feels the box below him in the darkness and grips it tightly, making sure it is still only a bulge under his coat. When he opens his eyes the train is not moving and the blind man has vanished. The doors are open. It is his stop. Gabriel rushes between the bodies stepping into the car. He repositions the box under his coat and then walks toward a stairway at the end of the platform.

Leaning against a steel girder, Gabriel peers down at the tracks. Only last week someone jumped.

There is a Chinese woman playing a bamboo flute. It is cold but she is barefoot. Tied around her neck is a pink scarf. Gabriel listens to each note. It is a very slow song, which Gabriel thinks is somehow related to the pink scarf. She has no box or hat to collect money. He lays a quarter next to her foot.

Gabriel steps into the empty car of a new train and sits below an advertisement for laser eye-surgery. He carefully raises the box to his
nose and sniffs. From the smell, he tries to conjure a picture of what could be inside and what his wife will think.

Gabriel stands up and looks into a neighboring car. He can see a homeless woman with her head slumped over. She is holding a shoe and crying. Gabriel cannot make out her features because the glass in the door has been written on.

Gabriel thinks about the photograph of his sister from Havana taken at Coney Island when she came to visit. She has her arm around Gabriel’s wife. It is Gabriel’s favorite photograph because it is how he dreamed life would be when he was a child.

He remembers how they had laughed and eaten hot dogs with ketchup dripping off the ends.

Gabriel alights and then waits for the train to disappear into darkness before making his way aboveground. On the yellow strip that separates the platform and the track there are broken crack vials. Gabriel tries to conceal the box with even greater effort.

His footsteps echo as he makes his way on to the cold street. As he passes a gas station, he can see two fat men watching soccer on TV and smoking. Farther along he passes a man yelling into a pay phone and notices that the receiver is not connected.

The houses here have white bars dividing the glass and the street, but through the bars Gabriel can see people eating, watching TV, and arguing. In one apartment there is a boy sitting alone eating an orange.

Gabriel turns down a street, which used to be a row of crack houses. But they’ve been bought and will soon be demolished. He comes upon an old factory building. With trembling fingers he pulls out a key from
his pocket and pushes it into a thick steel door. He steps over an empty suitcase and begins the climb to the top floor.

His hands are shaking so much that he is worried about damaging the contents of the box. He reassures himself that it will be soon be out of his hands. When he reaches the top, he stares out through a glassless window at Manhattan. The Empire State Building is shrouded in mist. Perhaps one day it will be on display as an ancient obelisk. From below the window a woman screams once.

Gabriel knocks seven times on the door and then slides keys into several locks. He pushes on the door and slips inside. At one end of the room is the faint glow of a television. Beside a sunken couch is a bed covered in mostly broken toys.

Asleep on the couch is a boy just turned three. Gabriel kneels before him as his wife emerges from behind a curtain.

“José sneak it out the back like he say?” his wife asks. Gabriel nods.

The light from the TV flickers across the boy’s face. Gabriel touches the boy’s knee and then shakily unties the string of the box. As the boy rubs his eyes and sits up, Gabriel presents the box to the boy and opens the lid.

“Surprise!” Gabriel and his wife say.

The boy stares at the cake—the skillfully written number three—the thick icing that rounds the cake like a crown and the cream that lazes from the middle. The boy doesn’t touch the cake but covers his face with his hands and peeks at it from behind his small fingers.