On an accidental corner, the night-time man’s spectral presence tugged at her, a leash pulling in the wrong direction. If she existed as a translation from an unforgiving past, he must, too, but translation was too dainty for what had happened to her, or him, she supposed. Words weren’t patches, and the nights didn’t let up, repetition after repetition, but how many ways could he appear, in how many iterations: his cheek pressed against hers, his glance, like a pardon from their past, his sexy compassion — they both had been alive then.
She heard he treated his wife badly, but they might have an open marriage, blind oxymoron. She supposed he lied to his wife, a famous rock singer past her prime, the way he was. On an impulse, he might abandon the singer, no longer the blooming girl who’d obliterated his mortality. The singer might want to divorce him but won’t, because of their child, or because she doesn’t care about his infidelities, since she’s had her own, or none, or because she can’t bear another split when suturing wouldn’t hold after so much scar tissue. What had their life meant, and, anyway, he always returned remorseful or defiant, or both.
Sometimes, passing a building or café, Katherine would recollect a doorway encounter like the one on Fifth Avenue where Lily Bart was spotted by Lawrence Selden and doomed. Behind that red door, in that bodega, in that high-rise on the eightieth floor, strangers and intimates lavished attention or withdrew it, or she did. She had entertained various kinds of intercourse, and the words spoken lay redacted under thick, black lines. She retrieved bits through the interstices of nodding heads.
A delicate young man trembled at the edge of recognition, but his face was now speckled like an old photograph.
She was eighteen and lay in the arms of a married man who respected, he said, her innocence, and held her close, saying he’d always remember this moment, but she wouldn’t, because she didn’t know how beautiful she was. There was a cool slip of a rough tongue on an inner thigh and a sensational confession. There was a Southerner whose sexuality was fiercely, erotically ambiguous. He stayed in her bed too long. She roared here and soared there, dwarfed by three massive white columns as she and her best college friend mugged before a filmless camera.
People often move away from cities and towns when reminiscences create profound debt and mortgage the future. They visit occasionally and discover that the debt has multiplied. Katherine stayed where she was, in her city, along with a majority of others who resolutely called it home and became teachers, therapists, florists, criminals, food professionals, homeless, or worked with immigrants and refugees, the way she did.
Her photographs had been in two one-person shows and several group exhibitions, but Katherine stopped taking her work seriously because, primarily, she couldn’t convince herself that her images were better than anyone else’s. The decisive moment was an indecisive one for her. She earned a degree in social work and dallied with becoming a psychoanalyst, but decided she didn’t want to work with people too much like herself. The agency where she spent five days a week, with occasional nights of overtime because of the exigencies of desperate people’s lives, suited her. The agency was respected and privately funded by well-known philanthropists. Every day people entered the office with foreign-born stories of violence, terror, and humiliation; her shame was nothing compared with theirs.
Two months after the high school reunion, one of the girls telephoned to remind Katherine, agonistically, of why their friendship had ended — remember, the friend urged, senior year. The friend cited her mother’s dying of cancer, her boyfriend’s betrayals — she married him anyway — but all this pain had forced her to abandon their friendship. “I couldn’t help you,” she said, “we couldn’t help each other.” The friend talked and talked until her voice fell off a cliff. So that was that.
Katherine never thought about that friend or her dying mother, but now she pretended to stroll from her childhood house on Butler up Adelaide Avenue to the street — Randolph — and the door of her friend’s home. The lawn was wide and green, so it must have been spring, when sad things occur ironically. She didn’t open the front door, she didn’t want to walk up the carpeted staircase and see her friend cradling her dying mother. The front door swung open, anyway. Her friend’s father had his back to her, at the dining room table, his old head supported in her young friend’s hands. Now the friend turned toward her, disrupting the image, and Katherine ran home. Did that happen?
There he was again. Katherine was sitting on a couch in a lobby, waiting for a friend. She heard his voice, he strode to the elevator, and she didn’t move, her face averted. He looked her way; she didn’t relax her pose. It didn’t matter if the night-time man knew her as she was now. He was a thorn pricking her side, that’s all. Another of his stories appeared, and she read about the protagonist’s having once received a postcard from a girl he’d been cheating with; his wife found it, and it ruined things between them for a while. He never saw the girl again. How true was he being, or could he be. He was faithless, but probably he didn’t think so, not in the obvious ways. He bore an unfathomable loneliness, and he was faithful, in his way, to that.
At the agency, she listened to stories more terrible than the Greek tragedies she loved. When she learned that some friends didn’t return to the books they’d cherished in school, she understood that some people lived as if the past were over. Been there, done that — she didn’t know how. The Greeks would have his wife lose her voice, never to sing or even speak again. He’d suffer a downfall, realizing his hubris necessarily too late, and kill himself. The wife might kill herself too, but not harm their beautiful daughter, who would turn vengeful, without knowing whom to blame, unalterable fate swallowing her whole.
The night-time man played his role in her romance, reciting his few lines. She told no one, because dreams signify nothing to anyone else, and their accidental meetings were psychic jokes — those sidewalk and doorway scenes, the questions they raised, when she compared her life with his, what had occurred between then and now, all to test her self-made being. Startling, what gets kept.
On a dull February morning, a man entered the agency. Curiously, he recognized her name, because ten years back he’d seen her photographs in London, when he was covering culture for an Indian newspaper. He had a work visa — he was a journalist and visiting academic — but he wanted to bring his extended family from Bangladesh. He needed permanent residency, there were political issues, he knew important people and could get letters. He was charming, somewhat coy, especially when announcing that he suffered the curse of a minority writer. She asked what that was. She never presumed anything in the office.
“To be expected to write like a minority,” he said.
“How do you mean.”
“You must write of suffering with some nobility — you people expect authenticity. I bet you first heard about Bangladesh when George Harrison organized that concert.”
It wasn’t a question, and he may have been right. She said she expected nothing from him. It was oddly comforting to assert that, as if he didn’t exist to her the way she knew she didn’t to him. He spoke about the different meanings of displacement. He refused to consider himself an exile, even if one day he would be. Outside, the bare branches of February trees looked like what he was saying, an image she might have shot once — recognizable metaphors, a formally interesting composition — but what did it really do. What was it a picture of.