Augusta’s only brother is single and in the Air Force. He became a hero during the Gulf War, and was immediately thereafter deified by Augusta, who will boast about him at great length if you ever give her the chance. I never give her the chance. Otherwise, she will also bend my ear about her older sister’s married children, and their children and anyone even remotely related to the Manners family.
As a bizarre example of family solidarity, two or three years ago Augusta discovered that her darling daughter Kelly’s roommate — her roommate, mind you — was a distant cousin of someone who taught with me downtown, and this automatically bestowed honorary Manners Family status on both Kelly’s roomy and this math teacher colleague of mine, a nerd if ever there was one, who forever after kept asking me if I’d like to have a beer with him after school.
On the day after the World Trade Center attack, I called Aaron at his office to see how he was. Let it be known that Aaron’s office is on Fifty-seventh and Madison, and the school at which I teach is just off Canal Street, not too distant from where everything was happening that day. Aaron immediately began telling me that Augusta’s sister’s daughter Julianna, their niece whom I’d never in my entire life met, worked in the North Tower, and was twenty minutes late to work that morning because she had a dental appointment, thereby narrowly missing the first plane attack. Not a word about How are you, were you anywhere close at the time, is Mom okay, does Sis know what happened, nothing like that. Just all this shaking of the head and wringing of the hands over Julianna’s narrow escape, and then a long mournful monologue on the vagaries of fate. I thanked him for his concern, and he actually said, “Hey, what are brothers for, anyway?”
I walk away from him now with my fists clenched, thinking of Augusta and her goddamn family, thinking of the bottle of wine that had cost me half a week’s salary, thinking of the nerd math teacher who kept asking me to have a beer with him, thinking of Julianna whom I’d never met and never hoped to meet, thinking of Aaron keeping his secret for sixteen years, hiding from me the fact that my twin sister pissed in public and held a running dialogue with a non-existent person or persons who were attacking her!
I am furious with him.
And with myself as well.
How could I have missed it?
How could I not have known?
Or have I really known all along?
My sister Annie has told me at least a hundred times that she can recall her entire life as if it is on a loop of film. She can play the loop backward or forward, stopping it on any frame she wishes, calling up memories at will.
My own memory is not as accommodating.
But I can remember...
I can remember...
Maggie and I meeting on a bus.
This was in the fall of 1988. I was almost twenty-two years old and a senior at New York University. In fact, I was heading downtown to school. As soon as I graduated in June, I planned to leave for Paris, where I would become Ernest Hemingway. When I sat down beside her, I forgot all about Paris.
She was wearing blue jeans and a rust-colored turtleneck sweater that day. Black hair falling to her shoulders. Eyes lowered, reading The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat. Long black lashes. An exquisitely turned nose in a fine fox face, all high cheeckbones and swift jaw line and patrician brow. Altogether the most beautiful woman I’d ever seen in my entire shaggy bespectacled English-major life.
I dared.
“Any good?” I asked.
She turned to look at me. Raised her eyes to me. Eyes as black as chimney soot.
“Very,” she said, and went back to her book.
I had never heard of the book. I thought it was a comic novel. I tried to think of something brilliant I could say to this utterly exquisite creature engrossed in a comic novel as the bus sped her to whatever her destination might be, where she would step down onto the sidewalk and out of my life forever, but I was completely tongue-tied in her presence. I could not understand this. I was normally a somewhat garrulous student of English Literature at NYU.
“Listen,” I said at last, “I want to marry you.”
She turned to me again. Patiently. She raised her eyes. A slight smile formed on her mouth. Such a beautiful, lovely, stunning, gorgeous mouth with sticky red lipstick all over it.
“Oh do you?” she said.
Faintly amused. I hoped.
Or would she hit me on the head with her book?
“First tell me your name,” I said.
“Maggie,” she said.
“Maggie, I love you.”
“Have you read this book?” she asked.
“No, is it funny?”
“You should read it. I think you may be mistaking me for your hat.”
“Will you marry me?” I said.
“Not just now, but thanks anyway.”
(In the story later based on our meeting, a black guy sitting behind us says, “For Pete’s sake, marry him, lady.” This did not happen. And the story never sold. It was called “Bus Ride.” I think maybe the title was too close to “Bus Stop.”)
“Maggie,” I said, “would you like to have a cup of coffee instead?”
(In real life, there actually was a black man sitting not behind us but across the aisle. He did not pay us the slightest bit of attention.)
This time, she looked me over.
I am not a particularly attractive man. I do not know what Maggie saw in me that day on that bus hurtling downtown too fast through crowded city streets to a destination that would take her out of my life for all time. I never could imagine what she continued to see in me during the three years of our marriage. My sister is the beautiful twin. I am merely a washed-out impression of her, my blond hair what used to be called “dirty,” my nose a trifle too long for my face, my green eyes (my sister’s sparkle like emeralds) too pale and less than compelling behind glasses I’ve worn since I was ten. I don’t know what she saw in me, but she saw something.
She would later rue the day.
But on that September fifth, in the year of our Lord nineteen hundred and eighty-eight, Maggie nodded slowly and said, “Yes, I would like to have a cup of coffee instead.”
It starts over coffee, it ends over coffee.
We went to a little shop on First Avenue, close to Volumes and Tomes. This was the first surprise. Maggie From the Bus was Maggie Knowles, who in turn was Margaret Katherine Knowles who — at the age of twenty-four, two years older than I — was the proud owner and proprietor of a bookshop called Volumes and Tomes.
“So why would a rich lady like you...?”
“Rich lady, ho-ho.”
“... want to marry someone like me?” I asked.
She looked across the table at me. I thought she’d say something smart like “Hey. Buster, back off, we’re just having a cup of coffee here.”
Instead, she said, “I don’t know why.”
Which meant she was going to marry me, of course.
I reached across the table and took her hands in mine. She did not pull them away. I smiled and nodded. She smiled and nodded back.
Actually — though we did not realize this at the moment — there were very good reasons for us to marry each other. To begin with, we looked good together. The classic beauty and the messy would-be writer. Maggie was the one you saw framed at the Met in all those medieval portraits, the long black hair and dark mysterious eyes, the porcelain complexion, the creamy white bosom swelling above a fur-trimmed velvet bodice, I should have tried writing historical romances before I quit writing altogether. And I beside her (though not hanging in the Met), Andrew Gulliver, my muddy blond hair unkempt, my glasses tilted at a rakish Harry Potter angle (though he had not yet been dreamt of back in 1988), my corduroy trousers rumpled, my favorite red maroon sweater somewhat frazzled.