Her own iPod would be an embarrassment: Forbidden Broadway, Sting, French for Dummies.
She looked around at the café’s brass-rimmed tables and the waxy caned chairs. Then she looked back at Tom. He was in a state of pain and worry she had never seen him in before. Back in their once-shared hometown, through the years, first when he was married, then when she was married, they had looked for each other across rooms, hovered near each other at parties, for years they had done it, taut and electrified, each stealthily seeking the other out and then standing close, wineglasses in hand, spellbound by their own eagerly mustered small talk. She would study the superficially sleepy look his face would assume, atop his still-strapping figure, the lowered lids and wavy mouth, and emanating from behind it all his laserlike concentration on her. The more a lovely secret was real the less you spoke of it. But as the secret came to evanesce, as soon as it threatened to go away on its own accord, the secret itself grew frantic and indiscreet — as a way to hang on to its own fading life.
Now they had gotten lucky at long last and neither of them was married anymore — though anything that was at long last, and that had involved such miserable commotion, was unlikely to be truly lucky. They had arranged this rendezvous in faraway France, and neither of them knew its meaning, for its meaning had not been determined out loud. “Is this a date, or independent contractors in semi-prearranged collision?” he had asked just last night, and then spring rain had poured down upon them, shining the concrete, dripping off both their eyeglasses, which they removed, and she had kissed him.
A private car now pulled up at the curb.
“Good God,” he said, “the car came so fast.”
“Keep eating. That comes first. Eat whatever you can. The car can wait.”
She could see he had no appetite but was force-feeding, pushing the food in as if it were a job. Small bites of the lamb. “People are indeed sheep,” he said now, chewing. “Stupid as sheep. Actually with sheep at least one of them is always smart and the others just turn their brains off and follow. ‘What’s Maurie doing now?’ they ask each other. ‘Where is Maurie going, let’s follow!’ The flock is the organism.”
“Like the military,” she said.
He swallowed with some difficulty and at first did not say anything. “Yeah. Occasionally. Civ-Mil has never worked properly as a unit.” He pulled a bay leaf out of his couscous. “Bay leaves are bullshit,” he said, flinging it down on his plate.
“What will you do with the rest of your time here?” he asked, rounding up the remaining food with his fork, pushing it into small piles, with rivulets and valleys.
“I’ll find things,” she said. “But it will not be the same without you.”
He put his fork down and grabbed her hand, which put a knot in her chest.
“Remember: never drink alone,” he said.
“I don’t,” she said. “I usually drink with MacNeil-Lehrer.” She assumed he would call her when he got to D.C.
He withdrew his hand, fumbled with his wallet, threw cash down on the table, and grabbed his suitcase.
They got up together and walked to his car. The blue-bereted driver got out and opened the door for him. Tom tossed the bag in the back and turned to her, about to say something, then changed his mind and just got in. When the door shut, he lowered his window.
“I don’t know how to say this,” he said, “but, well — keep me in mind.”
“How could I not?” she said.
“That’s something I don’t ask, ma chère.” She lowered her head, and he pressed his lips to her cheek for a very long moment.
“May our paths cross again soon,” she said, stepping back. And then like a deaf person she made a little gesture of a cross with the index fingers of each of her hands, but it came out like a werewolf ward-off sign. Inept even at sign language. A Freudian slip of the dumb. As the car began to roll away, she called out, “Have a good flight!” His head turned and bent toward her one last time.
“Hey, I’ve got all my liquids packed in my unchecked bag,” he shouted, not without innuendo. She flung one palm quickly to her mouth to blow a kiss, but the car took a quick right down the Rue du Bac. A kiss blown — in all ways. But she could see him lift his left hand quickly at the window, like a karate chop that was also a salute, as the car merged and disappeared into the fanning traffic.
Years earlier, at a Christmas party of a mutual friend, their spouses both out on the wintry summer porch smoking, she had found herself next to him, in the kitchen, jiggling the open bottles of wine to see which one might not yet be empty. The day before, along with a photo of prizewinning gingerbread houses on display at the mall, he had sent her an e-maiclass="underline" “I just took three Adderall and made these for you.” In the next room Bob Dylan was singing “Gotta Serve Somebody.”
“What is the thing you regret most in life?” he asked her, standing close. There were perhaps a dozen empty bottles, and she and Tom methodically tipped every one of them upside down, held them up to the light, sometimes peering into them from underneath. “Nothing but dead soldiers here,” he murmured. “I’d like to say optimistically that they were half full, not half empty, but these are just totally empty.”
“Unless you have a life of great importance,” she said, “regrets are stupid, crumpled-up tickets to a circus that has already left town.”
His face went bright with amusement and drink. “Then what happens to the town?” he asked.
She thought about this. “Oh, there’s a lot of weather,” she said, slowly. “It snows. It thunders. The sun comes out. People go to church and sit in the sanctuary and sometimes they see escaped clowns sitting in the back pews with their white gloves still on.”
“Escaped clowns?” he asked.
“Escaped,” she said. “Sort of escaped.”
“Come in from the cold?” he inquired.
“Come in to sit next to each other.”
He nodded with satisfaction. “The past is for losers, baby?”
“Kind of like that.” She wasn’t sure that she agreed, but she understood the power of such a thought.
His stance grew jaunty. He leaned in close to her, up against the kitchen counter’s edge.
“Do you ever feel that no one knows what you’re talking about, that everyone is just pretending — except for me?”
She studied him carefully. “Yes, I do,” she said. “I do.”
“Ah,” he replied, straightening his posture. He clasped her hand: electricity burst into it then vanished as he let go. “We’re all suckers for a happy ending.”
THANK YOU FOR HAVING ME
The day following Michael Jackson’s death, I was constructing my own memorial for him. I played his videos on YouTube and sat in the kitchen at night, with the iPod light at the table’s center the only source of illumination. I listened to “Man in the Mirror” and “Ben,” my favorite, even if it was about a killer rat. I tried not to think about its being about a rat, as it was also the name of an old beau, who had e-mailed me from Istanbul upon hearing of Jackson’s death. Apparently there was no one in Turkey to talk about it with. “When I heard the news of MJackson’s death I thought of you,” the ex-beau had written, “and that sweet, loose-limbed dance you used to do to one of his up-tempo numbers.”
I tried to think positively. “Well, at least Whitney Houston didn’t die,” I said to someone on the phone. Every minute that ticked by in life contained very little information, until suddenly it contained too much.
“Mom, what are you doing?” asked my fifteen-year-old daughter, Nickie. “You look like a crazy lady sitting in the kitchen like this.”