"She had been twenty-three that first night, just out of Princeton and mired in a chronic state of panic-tinged lethargy, no idea she wanted to do next, no idea how it was people actually became adults."
Miriam by Robin Black
Miriam was fighting a cold. She wanted to be fighting it in bed, tended by Ezra and wrapped in a comforter. She wanted, in general, to be comforted, but instead she was making her way through an inexplicably crowded sidewalk, shopping for her nephew, trying to find something, anything, he might like for his fourteenth birthday. She was trudging, she was schlepping, from the toy store for which, she now realized, it was just about five years too late, to the bookstore which seemed more promising though also felt a bit like a defeat, a little dull, when suddenly she saw a man up ahead who had been her boyfriend, her lover, long before; and right away she thought oh, there he is. Just that. Not even his name. As though they were still in their twenties and had separated only for the hour, meaning to meet up later on. As though he didn't require a name. Oh, there he is.
It was dusk, early December dusk, and he was walking maybe half a block ahead in the same direction, and as suddenly as she had seen him, she knew that she was going to break into a run to catch up with him - the moment she was absolutely sure. (This was the part she couldn't stop thinking about in the days that followed. That she would have run toward him, calling out. That she would have found a path somehow through the other pedestrians. That she wanted to reach him, not just to say hello to a man she had loved long ago, but as though it were a run back through time, an erasure of all that had occurred in the intervening years.)
He stopped at the corner and turned around, as though knowing she was there; and of course it wasn't the man who had been her boyfriend, after all. Of course. For one thing, she realized, he was a half a foot too tall. For another, he wasn't nearly old enough, not for a man who had been almost thirty, almost two decades before.
She had been twenty-three that first night, just out of Princeton and mired in a chronic state of panic-tinged lethargy, no idea she wanted to do next, no idea how it was people actually became adults and figured out that kind of thing since it turned out that graduation didn't do the trick. He was the first young widower she'd ever met, a man close to her own age who had already experienced something that to her mind must have blasted from him any shreds of stubborn childhood.
But he didn't like the word, he said. Widower.
She would wonder a week or so later, when she wondering if he might still call, why he had used it then if he disliked it so much. He could have said I was married, but my wife died. He could have said nothing. They hadn't been having the kind of conversation that required personal disclosure. Not right away. They had been having the kind of conversation you have at a too large, too loud party when you find yourselves staring at the same family pictures. Yet, before three minutes had passed, he said "I'm a widower. I have been for almost two years." And then told her that he didn't like the word.
The problem was it sounded like a verb. It did to him anyway. "What is a widower?" he asked as he poured himself a drink from one of the open bottles on April and Frank's wobbling bookshelf. "Someone who widows?"
She told him that she could see what he meant. She said it with a very serious look on her face; though in fact she found what he said to be irritating, in that too, too clever way. And she thought it was a peculiar thing to be too, too clever about. Being a widower. Possibly, also, she felt a little cheated by the lightness of his tone, as though he had introduced the potential for great drama into the scene and then thrown a banana peel on the floor.
But she also understood that she couldn't argue the point with him. It was his word, not hers.
"Is there a word you prefer?" she asked, and for a moment he just stared at her, looking right into her eyes. Then he shook his head.
"No," he said. "No. There is not."
Almost two years later, during a period when it seemed her central task was to realize what she had failed to realize then, it became obvious to her that he had tired of introducing drama into every scene, that his disclosure, so immediate, had to do with minimizing the impact, not with making the most of it, that while she had been thinking it unnecessary to tell her anything, not right away, after all this was only chit chat, he had understood how wrong that was. But by then many of her early assumptions about him were beginning to feel like furniture that couldn't get through a too narrow door. And by then, she had started to do the same thing. "Yes, yes, that's my boyfriend, James. He had a wife who died. More than three years ago, now."
Yes, yes. Now can we talk about something else?
Standing at the end of the endless bookstore line, it having turned out to be strangely easy to find the right book for young Miles, that knot somehow cut loose, she wanted to tell someone about what had happened, about seeing and not seeing him - though the story embarrassed her. She wanted to tell someone how excited she had felt, how willing to run up the block, how anxious to run up the block, as though she had only been waiting for a glimpse of him for all these years. How it was as though she had forgotten her entire life. She wanted to tell someone who would say, oh well, of course. That's a natural impulse. That's not anything really. She wanted to tell the story so that she could be told it wasn't much of a story.
Feeling fluorescently lit, a little dizzy, a little lightheaded, her nose beginning to stream, she realized she was losing the fight with the cold; and she didn't have a tissue, of course. Tissues were the kind of sensible thing she was unlikely to remember. Just as she was about to give in and use her coat sleeve, a large, older man, two people up, took pity on her and handed her one.
"It's never been used," he said, as though that were a virtue but not a necessity.
And this was the story she would tell Ezra when she got home, she thought as she blew her nose. The story of the kind stranger who clearly would have handed her a dirty Kleenex if that was all he'd had. Not the other one. Not the story she so wanted to tell. Ezra was all too unlikely to dismiss that one as meaningless.
Friday, 7 May, 2010
In Character studies
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