The most peaceful moment of my trip happened in that city. I was on the train to East St. Louis. It was across the river and its own city; there was no reason to be there unless you belonged there. The train went across the bridge from Missouri to Illinois. It was sunny out, only a few people on the train. Only a few people ever seemed to be on the buses or trains of those cities. Two men, one sitting in front of the other, began to sing. They sang so their voices alternated; you heard one and then the other. The moment had happened by accident. They had begun a conversation, one learned the other could sing, and so they had started up. They stopped as easily as they had begun, trailing off, one saying to the other, You are good, you ever sing at your church? No, the other one said.
When I got off the train, I went into a thrift store and bought a dress and a blouse. They came to two-sixty. Then I went around back to a half-open door that went into the soup kitchen. The few people in the room stared at me. Their eyes were harder than they had been in other places. I stood in line but the food looked bad, so I only asked for a cup to get some water. Later, when I kept going to cities — Louisville, Cincinnati, Columbus, Pittsburgh — but didn’t go to the soup kitchens anymore, it was East St. Louis that I thought of. I thought of St. Louis and East St. Louis, and of that thin, light-filled train that took you from one side of the river to the other.
I stayed in Memphis for a while. I didn’t go to the kitchens, but I still walked around. I gave a dollar to a man on a bicycle. He was asking for money for food. He said the last man he asked gave him a cigarette, telling him it would dull his hunger. The next day he bicycled past me and tried again. I gave you money yesterday, I said.
I stayed in a hostel next to a church. For the first two nights I was in a dorm room, but I switched to a private after that. To get to the private you had to pass through a dorm. The first night the dorm was empty, but the next night a man arrived. He picked the bed closest to my door, and I could hear him turning over in the night. Rooms like that — rooms that were tucked inside other rooms, which were then part of a larger building — felt like holding, like being held by something that you couldn’t see. That time in Memphis was the loneliest part of my trip, though I didn’t know it then. I felt happy. I walked to the vegetarian café where the beer was two dollars after six. I read Graham Greene. On Sunday I even went to church, knowing that it could be an answer to the loneliness, but that you had to believe in order for that to be the case.
FOUR HILLS
He had the sort of face that made me check for a ring, and this wasn’t easy, as I was always getting things mixed up, and which ring went on which finger, and I would stare so long at a man’s hand that I was sure he’d noticed. I only checked maybe once a year, and it was only a particular kind of guy, the kind of guy who was a few years older and already had the gentleness of living with a woman, maybe had raised a child with her, and it was that gentleness, that love already existing for others, that drew me, so I knew right away that you had to look for a ring.
He had a ring, and so I told myself, There, now you know, and I felt the calm settling of disappointment as it joined the tide of all the other disappointments, the soft, great ocean of disappointment that comes from living among millions of others who also want things, sometimes the things that you want.
His face had aged into a worn beauty. He was sad; you could just tell. He looked intently at you at first and then afterward didn’t look. He had a soft voice. I had to sit close to hear him. He owned the restaurant that I applied to and was surprised to have gotten a callback for. It had been years since I waitressed, but my letter — I noticed when I reread it — was simple and direct. After meeting him I knew that he would have wanted a letter to be like that. And I was direct in person and still had the sort of appearance that drew some people. Life hadn’t been quite what I wanted. I didn’t have the things I would say I wanted most. I was quick and sad and you knew looking at me that nothing had gone quite right. I don’t know. What do we know of ourselves? Some people noticed me in a room. Some noticed, but some didn’t. I don’t believe any, though, held their breath while looking at my finger. I didn’t hold that sort of promise for someone: a new life briefly opening and then just as quickly closing. He was like that for me. I fell in love with his life and his restaurant — the light dimmers, the menu, the basket of aprons, the shallow soup bowls, the way the candles burned my fingers when I cleaned them, and his farm, and probably his wife and little girl, and the chef I would end up with when I couldn’t be with him, and everything, everything he had, for one night, my first training shift at the restaurant.
In the city you had to work several shifts before a restaurant hired you, and I had been offered another job that I was afraid of losing. I wrote an e-mail to him, hoping he would understand. I wrote that I had to take the sure job, the one that I would lose if I waited for my second shift at his restaurant, and that I was sorry, as I liked meeting him, and liked his restaurant so much. Life never quite works out the way you want, I wrote, and I’ve never known what to make of it. He wrote back saying never mind about the second training shift, that if I wanted to work at his restaurant, that would be fine.
An East River Ferry terminal was near the restaurant. The ferry skirted down Brooklyn, landing in Manhattan. I used to take the ferry the other way, take it to northern Brooklyn and be let off among warehouses and duplexes painted red and blue that looked as if they were in a fishing city, some Eastern European city I’d never been to. I’d walk to a Polish café, where I’d get a square of plum cake and find a ledge or the edge of a planter where I’d sit and eat, then walk and look at the buildings. I walked wishing I lived there, near or in one of the red and blue buildings. I would narrow the city down to the river and the ferry and the circle of life around them, with little more than a café and post office and bakery and grocery store and small park to make up my world.
The ferry was never crowded. While New York was overrun with people, the ferry made me feel I was in a city that people had forgotten, where there was enough time for the man who tied up the boat to wish me a good day — every time, always a good day. Subways were so crowded I had to push through, but on the ferry I sat at a table and watched out the window, trying to decide which way the city stretched.
In the city it was a treeless fall. Even where there were trees, the colors didn’t change beyond a leaden yellow. Leaves grew wet and faded and fell and were raked by the weekend crews that cleaned up after summer cookouts. It was as if the city was frozen and time was passing somewhere else. I took the train to New England to find that the trees had already lost their colors and the fields were full of pumpkins. I couldn’t tell if it would have been better to stay in the city and avoid the sadness and confusion of seeing time sped up like that.
It had been a while without love, but I didn’t miss it the way I used to. My last lover rarely held me, and yet that hadn’t seemed sad. It was enough what we did — enough to go to the deli with the racks of doughnuts in the window and to go to parties and through undertones communicate the time we wanted to leave together. Enough time had passed that the loss of my marriage wasn’t so raw anymore. On Sunday mornings, I read the Vows section of the Times carefully, not the simple articles of young people getting married, but about the longer, more tangled relationships, those that had been close to breaking apart. The lesson being not that love conquered all or that love was eternal, but that there was no lesson much beyond luck, timing what life gives you or doesn’t.