We were seated at a restaurant in Crown Heights, the penny-tile floor glowing in the candlelight. “I believe in promises. I believe in publicity.”
“I promise to pass through a series of worlds with you,” I remembered from her vows. I’d told the waiter I was only having wine, but ate half the spinach gnocchi off her plate, then paid for everything.
“She’s going to get tired of you soon,” Jon said. He was lying on the couch streaming The Wire on his laptop with two pink tissues issuing from his nostrils like a villain’s mustache in an elementary school play. The coffee table was littered with used tea bags and copies of Film Quarterly. I rummaged in their kitchen but could only find warm gin.
“Why did you set us up, then?”
“She’s smart and beautiful and nice and claims to like your poetry.”
I walked home through the park. “You have failed to reconcile the realism of my body with the ethereality of the trees,” I said to the mist. Because the park is on the flight path, the city corrals and euthanizes geese. Which mate for life, I confirmed on Wikipedia. The glow of the screen seemed to come off on my hand. I looked up and saw the clouds as craquelure.
I poured myself a large glass of water that I forgot to bring to bed. “The little shower of embers,” I texted Alena, then regretted it.
* * *
Out of Dr. Andrews’s climate-controlled office on the Upper East Side, I walked into the unseasonably warm December afternoon, turned on my phone, and checked my e-mail to find a message from Natali, a mentor and literary hero of mine, about her husband, Bernard, for me an equally important figure:
B fell in NYC and broke a vertebra in his neck. He had an operation and it went fine, and he is now out of immediate danger. But recovery is slow and I haven’t been told when he might be able to be transferred back to Providence. Starting tonight I am staying at a hotel close to Mt. Sinai Hospital with uncertain Internet access. Below is my cell phone number but I am not quite competent in receiving messages. Some seem to vanish. Love, N.
As I read I experienced what was becoming a familiar sensation: the world was rearranging itself around me while I processed words from a liquid-crystal display. So much of the most important personal news I’d received in the last several years had come to me by smartphone while I was abroad in the city that I could plot on a map, could represent spatially, the major events, such as they were, of my early thirties. Place a thumbtack on the wall or drop a flag on Google Maps at Lincoln Center, where, beside the fountain, I took a call from Jon informing me that, for whatever complex of reasons, a friend had shot himself; mark the Noguchi Museum in Long Island City, where I read the message (“Apologies for the mass e-mail…”) a close cousin sent out describing the dire condition of her newborn; waiting in line at the post office on Atlantic, the adhan issuing from the crackling speakers of the adjacent mosque, I received your wedding announcement and was shocked to be shocked, crushed, and started a frightening multiweek descent, worse for being embarrassingly clichéd; while in the bathroom of the SoHo Crate and Barrel — the finest semipublic restroom in lower Manhattan — I learned I’d been awarded a grant that would take me overseas for a summer, and so came to associate the corner of Broadway and Houston with all that transpired in Morocco; at Zuccotti Park I heard that my then-girlfriend was not — as she’d been convinced — pregnant; while buying discounted dress socks at the Century 21 Department Store across from Ground Zero, I was informed by text that a friend in Oakland had been hospitalized after the police had broken his ribs. And so on: each of these experiences of reception remained, as it were, in situ, so that whenever I returned to a zone where significant news had been received, I discovered that the news and an echo of its attendant affect still awaited me like a curtain of beads.
Neither Bernard nor Natali had ever seemed to exist in time, at least not in the same temporal medium I occupied; Bernard’s wizardly beard and otherworldly learnedness had made him appear impossibly old when I first met him my freshman year of college, and it was only when I grew older that I was able to remember him as comparatively young; he was in his late sixties when I first attended one of his classes. And yet, precisely because he seemed beyond the reach of time, I could never imagine Bernard actually aging, and therefore his bodily fragility never seemed, in any particular present, real to me; in that sense he was forever young. Natali — the only person I knew who had read as much as Bernard, perhaps more, since she was fluent in several languages, having been born in Germany and having learned French as a child before becoming a major English-language poet — always seemed the same age to me, even in memory. This condition of temporal exception was in part the effect of a level of literary accomplishment that struck me as anachronistic: each was the author of more than twenty books in several genres; each had translated as many volumes; the small press they’d founded in the early sixties had published hundreds of books and pamphlets of experimental writing. Moreover, the house they inhabited in Providence — a house so full of books that it seemed built of books — also felt exempt from time. Bernard and Natali were always working and never working, that is, they were always reading and writing when they weren’t hosting receptions for other writers; there was no division between labor and leisure; their days were not structured conventionally; the house was not subject to quotidian rhythms but to the strange duration of the literary.
All of this, I should say, initially made me intensely suspicious; they seemed too perfect, too open, pure, generous; how could they be involved with generations of authors — the offensive, the quick to take offense, the batshit crazy — without making a single enemy, unless they were secretly bland or intellectually inert or there were bodies decaying under the floorboards? The first time I was in their house I moved gingerly not only because I felt I was in a museum, terrified of breaking something, but also because I feared a trap.
As I reread Natali’s message, I scrolled through memories of my first evenings in their house as my teenage years came to an end: spilling wine on hardwood and upholstery, Bernard and Natali patiently listening to my younger self as I affected literary seriousness, my speech no doubt a patchwork of interpretive clichés and errors of fact, their telling stories the import of which would often only occur to me years later. I remembered debating and/or flirting with other students and hangers-on, other young writers from whom I was desperate to distinguish myself, getting no help in that regard from either Bernard or Natali, since they treated everyone equally, infuriating me. But the memory that returned to me most vividly as I stood on East Seventy-ninth Street was of meeting their daughter, a young woman with whom I was for a time obsessed, and of whom I still occasionally think, despite having met her only once.
A distinguished South African writer had come that night to campus to read from his new novel, so I encountered the daughter at what was an unusually crowded gathering. It was perhaps the second or third time I’d been in the house, which meant I was still nervous, skeptical. I was standing in the dining room where food and wine and glasses had been laid out on the table, admiring a collage of Bernard’s on the wall, when a woman — older than I was then, younger than I am now — identified the source of one of the collage’s elements from behind me: a sliver of a movie poster for Murnau’s Sunrise. I turned to face her and was, as they say, stunned — large gray-blue eyes, a full mouth, long and jet-black hair with a few strands of silver in it, and an immediately apparent poise and intelligence for which no catalog of features could account. Realizing that I was just staring at her, it finally occurred to me to speak, and I managed to say something about the rightness of fit between silent film and collage, mute media that depend on splicing for effect. Whatever its merit, she acted as though I’d contributed something intelligent, and electricity branched through me with her smile. I asked her if she was often at Bernard’s and Natali’s and she said, laughing, “I grew up here,” and then I understood — her knowledge of the collage, her aura of brilliance, her obvious comfort in this hallowed space — that this gorgeous woman was their daughter.