“You need to get out of that stupid city,” my sister said. “Get some fresh air.” Four years ago, she and her husband left. They moved to Pennsylvania to an old ramshackle house on the Delaware River. Last spring, she came to visit me with her kids. We went to the park; we went to the zoo; we went to the planetarium. But still they hated it. Why is everyone yelling here?
The philosopher’s apartment was the most peaceful place I knew. It had good light and looked out over the water. We spent our Sundays there eating pancakes and eggs. He was adjuncting now and doing late nights at the radio station. “You should meet this guy I work with. He makes soundscapes of the city.” I looked at the pigeons outside his window. “What does that even mean?” I said.
He gave me a CD to take home. On the cover was an old yellow phone book, ruined by rain. I closed my eyes and listened to it. Who is this person? I wondered.
4
I gave you my favorite thing from Chinatown, pressed it drunkenly into your hand. We were in my kitchen that first night. BEAUTIFUL GAUZE MASK, the package said.
The next morning, I went over to the philosopher’s apartment. “Oh no, what have you done?” I said. He made me breakfast and told me about his date. “Where do you see yourself in five years?” she’d asked him. “How about ten? How about fifteen?” By the time he walked her home, they were thirty years in. I told him it sounded like a duck and a bear going on a date. The philosopher considered this. “More like a duck and a martini,” he said.
You called me. I called you. Come over, come over, we said.
I learned you were fearless about the weather. You wanted to walk around the city, come rain come snow come sleet, recording things. I bought a warmer coat with many ingenious pockets. You put your hands in all of them.
I listened to you on the radio at midnight. Once you played a recording of atoms smashing. Another time wind across leaves. Field recordings, you called them. It was freezing in my apartment and I used to listen to your show in bed with the covers pulled up to my chin. I wore a hat and gloves and heavy wool socks made for men. One night you played a track you’d made for me. An ice cream truck overlaid with the sound of gulls at Coney Island and the Wonder Wheel spinning.
It is stupid to have a telescope in the city, but we bought one anyway.
That year I didn’t travel alone. I’ll meet you there, you said. But it was late when we spotted each other at the train station. You had a ten-dollar haircut. I was fatter than when I’d left. It seemed possible that we’d traveled across the world in error. We tried to reserve judgment.
We did not understand where we were going when we took the boat over to Capri. It was early April. A light cold rain misted over the sea. We took a funicular up from the dock and found ourselves the only tourists. You are early, the conductor said with a shrug. The streets smelled like lavender and for a long time neither of us noticed that there weren’t any cars. We stayed at a cheap hotel that had a view out the window more beautiful than anything I’d ever seen. The water was wickedly blue. A cliff of dark rock jutted out of the sea. I wanted to cry because I was sure I would never get to be in such a place again. Let’s explore, you said, which is what you always said when I started to look that way. We walked for a ways along the edge of the cliff until we came to a bus stop. There we waited, holding hands, not talking. I was thinking about what it would be like to live somewhere so beautiful. Would it fix my brain? The bus pulled up. Three people were employed to run it: one to sell tickets, one to take them, one to drive. This made us happy. We took it to the far side of the island, where the people looked more curiously at us. In a store, I saw gum labeled BROOKLYN and you bought it for me.
5
We passed the antelope diorama. “10×,” I said, but you wouldn’t look at me. “What’s the matter?” I asked. Nothing. Nothing. But, later, in the gem room, you got down on one knee. All around us shining things.
Advice from Hesiod: Choose from among the girls who live near you and check every detail, so that your bride will not be the neighborhood joke. Nothing is better for man than a good wife, and no horror matches a bad one.
Afterwards, we ducked into the borrowed room, fell back onto the borrowed bed. Outside, almost everyone who’d ever loved us waited. You took my hand, kissed it, saying, “What have we done? What the hell have we done?”
When we first met, I had a persistent cough. A smoker’s cough, though I’d never smoked. I went from doctor to doctor, but no one ever fixed it. In those early days, I spent a great deal of energy trying not to cough so much. I would lie awake next to you at night and try my best not to. I had an idea that I might have contracted TB. Here lies one whose name was writ in water, I thought pleasingly. But no, that wasn’t it either. Just after we married, the cough went away. So what was it, I wonder?
Loneliness?
Lying in bed, you’d cradle my skull as if there were a soft spot there that needed to be protected. Stay close to me, you’d say. Why are you way over there?
The reason to have a home is to keep certain people in and everyone else out. A home has a perimeter. But sometimes our perimeter was breached by neighbors, by Girl Scouts, by Jehovah’s Witnesses. I never liked to hear the doorbell ring. None of the people I liked ever turned up that way.
Also there were incursions from within. Mice, mice, everywhere. We borrowed a cat for a month, a ferocious mouser, who caught and ate all of them. His name was Carl and I could hear him up all night crunching their bones in the kitchen. It gave me a bad feeling, worse than the scuttling of the mice even. The boy I’d loved in New Orleans had told me once that his father used to kill mice by dropping them in boiling water. I was too surprised to ask then how he’d caught the mice or why he killed them that way, but later I wondered. His father was from another country so maybe that was how they did things over there.
In my old apartment, the mice had cavorted even more openly. They had no fear, not of light or even brooms, it seemed. They lived in my pantry and one night while we were lying in bed, the door fell off its hinges and thudded to the floor. “I think they saved up for that battering ram,” you said.
6
His mother was visiting when we went to look at the apartment. She pointed out the church across the street. It pleased her that you could see Jesus on the cross if you leaned a little out the window. This was a good sign, she thought, and was not canceled out by the fact that her son no longer believed in him.
When we first saw the apartment, we were excited that it had a yard but disappointed that the yard was filled by a large jungle gym that we didn’t need. Later, when we signed the lease, we were happy about the jungle gym because I’d learned that I was pregnant and we could imagine its uses. But by the time we moved in, we had found out that the baby’s heart had stopped and now it just made us sad to look out the window at it.
I remember that day, how you took a $50 cab from work, how you held me in the doorway until I stopped shaking. We had told people. We had to untell them. You did it so I wouldn’t have to speak. Later, you made me a dinner of all the things I hadn’t been allowed to eat. Cured meat, unpasteurized cheese. Two bottles of wine, then finally, sleep.