After a time, then, of nothing, or anyway of practically nothing, I would get up and go over to the phone, but never because it was ringing.
Then one day it rang. It was my downstairs neighbor inviting me to come down. I did. This neighbor’s apartment, though apparently the same overall size and shape as mine, was completely, as to layout, different, and confusingly so. Whereas my apartment was composed of a single short corridor and one fairly large room, this neighbor’s apartment seemed to consist of many short corridors and many small rooms. Apparently, the neighbor explained, each of the apartments in the building were different from each other, which was clearly the root cause of any number of problems, especially, for example, in the area of tenant relations.
I was offered a cup of coffee, which I accepted, in a small room that overlooked a very small, somewhat grim courtyard, or airshaft, it was an airshaft, of which my apartment did not afford any view whatsoever, thus providing me with an explanation for why, on wet evenings, I had been able to hear rain falling behind a four-foot stretch of my wall.
That had been troubling me.
Not troubling me enough to find anything out, but troubling me enough, if you understand what I mean.
So we sat in the small room and steadily advanced our interaction on the now very clear connection between the phenomenon of differing layouts of apartments in a given building with the differing quality of tenant relations, and it really did, at least for the duration of the interaction, seem like a very clear connection, and we agreed on everything, and even at one point shook hands. It was after this handshake that I was offered a tour of the apartment, so that, it was explained, even though startling differences between our apartments surely existed, they would be — once I had reciprocated the invitation — collectively understood differences, and so, in the happenstance, more manageable. The tour was both very short, and, somehow, very long. In “the office” I saw, sitting alone on a shelf above a small red table, a recently purchased hole puncher, which, when the tour was finished, I borrowed.
I never laid eyes on that neighbor again, although on one occasion I heard sounds. As for the hole puncher, after a few days, I left it sitting outside the neighbor’s door.
It was autumn. When I had completed my various tasks, though of course I hadn’t really completed any of them, I began to wander.
It was and is a city of parks split by a river, and in the autumn, both in the parks and along the river, there was and is the daily pleasantry of dead and falling leaves that made small scraping sounds and hit against my face and hands, and at night when I was at home and alone again continued to fall or to seem to fall and to scrape and to hit against me. So in and around this city of parks split by a river plus streets and houses and small public squares I walked, and the cars went by, and I sat in establishments and the people passed and / or surrounded me. In one establishment I struck up an acquaintance or two but of course both of them, after some days, vanished. One conversation I remember, though not too fondly, was about appliances and their correspondences and about the mutual fund of electricity from which they sucked. My acquaintance actually used the word “suck.” This was all said at a very skillfully modulated half-whisper. Frankly, I could not stand the idea of appliances sucking away at electricity, but nodded and listened and contributed and half-whispered in return.
That acquaintance vanished.
The other acquaintance, who also, as I have said, vanished, was the sort of acquaintance for whom one buys drinks and yet from whom one maintains a certain distance, or at least tries to, the exercise becoming quite impossible whenever there is laughter or confidentiality, and there is frequently laughter and confidentiality, or at least in this case there was. I did not inquire about the vanishment of the first acquaintance, but, for the sake of appearances, I did about this second, and was informed quite matter-of-factly that he / she had been ravished off the face of the earth.
It had been days and days since I had placed the hole puncher outside my neighbor’s door.
One morning, a tall woman wearing a hat and sunglasses tapped me on the elbow as I was about to cross the street and said, tomorrow. A little later that day the same woman sat down beside me on a bench and said, next week.
For some days after that it rained, and most of the time I stayed indoors. Three times during that rainy period, however, I went to the shop to buy pens. The first pen was a blue felt tip, and when I returned home, I stood on tiptoes on a chair, held the base of it crimped between the tips of my thumb and first two fingers, and drew a series of unsuccessful clouds, unsuccessful in part because, as I realized upon their completion, clouds are not blue, not even in outline, in part because I don’t draw well. The second pen was a red felt tip, and its story was that I almost immediately lost it. The third was a platinum nib fountain pen, which I had wrapped as a present, but the following day, after an unpleasant exchange with the shopkeeper, returned.
Then for a time I was very seriously and legitimately involved in some business, and that took me along and engaged me completely for that time, which was not inconsiderable, and the early portion of the autumn swept along.
At the end of the business I found myself sitting in a park at a table in one of the outdoor cafés watching, through a shower of leaves, the last of the business, item in hand, walk away. Then it had walked away, and I thought, well that, anyway, is something, which it was — I had done everything they had told me to and had a well-filled envelope in a bag at my feet.
The waiter came over. The waiter went away. Across the park a small recorder ensemble began playing. And at that moment she sat down.
Then began those days, starting with that day, and we sat there and we talked.
Oh, well, you know, not much, I said.
It seemed to me that her hair had grown. She said it had just been cut. Then she said, I need you to help me with another word.
What word?
A ricer.
I told her I did not know this word in any language, but that if she would explain it to me I would do my best to find out.
She did explain it to me, though not immediately, and I did find out and a ricer was acquired, a ricer that is still, I imagine, sitting there on one of her shelves.
She had a world of shelves, and on each of them sat an almost impossible number of objects, the words for which were known or unknown, most by the end, I think, were unknown or unknowable, but for the moment that is getting ahead of myself. Generally speaking, I seem more likely to get behind myself. Once, for example, as the two of us were walking down the street, I was somehow walking down the street behind us, and we got farther and farther ahead of me, so that when we turned into a store and looked at red velvet dresses and talked, she later told me, to a salesperson with an orange hat and a cracked tooth, I missed the turn and kept walking and ended up falling in a ditch.
For the moment, though, which for the moment was just the moment and not the moment I was about to reach or had just missed, etc., what I did not know was the word ricer, and was nervous about the possible consequences of that ignorance, so that all the way through her explanation it seemed to me that, explanation finished, she would abruptly stand up to leave, maybe forever, and in my nervousness once she had finished speaking, I, in fact, stood up rather abruptly, and she said, are you going somewhere?
No.
Well then sit back down.
While the pleasant part of the autumn lasted we met quite often at that café in that park, and then it got too cold.