Tolstoy Lied : A Love Story (9780547527307) Page 5

  “What about that sweet guy with the flowers?”

  “Him? He was a madman. He showed up for our first date with roses.”

  “He wasn’t a madman. He was crazy about you.”

  “I don’t even like roses.”

  “Still, it was romantic. He was the wrong guy, I give you that. But bringing roses is romantic.”

  “It’s the opposite of romantic. Romance is careful attention to what a particular lover wants or needs. Giving roses to a woman who doesn’t like flowers is not romantic. It’s the opposite of romantic—it’s generic. And if a woman loves, let’s say, auto repair, then buying her a welder’s torch is the ultimate in romance.”

  Yolanda sweeps open the door. “Everybody make way for the love expert.”

  We step out onto the sidewalk. There is a shout. Just feet from us, a restaurant delivery man and his bicycle flip hard onto the sidewalk. In one continuous motion, the scrawny preteen skateboarder who just shoved him bends, nips two bulging bags of food out of the bike’s basket, and is straightening from his crouch—the downed biker and I still inert from shock—when Yolanda knocks one of the bags out of his arms with an impressive kick.

  Still holding the other bag, the kid palms the pavement for balance, slams his wheels to the sidewalk, and shoots away, heading uptown.

  “You want to know why you piss me off?” Yolanda screams after him.

  If I were a zoologist hunting specimens of the indigenous New Yorker, this would be my hunting call. No Manhattanite can resist.

  A block away, the kid slows.

  “Okay, fine. Steal the food. But at least you could stick around and acknowledge what you did to him!”

  Holding aloft his middle finger, the skateboarder turns a corner.

  From the pavement the delivery guy, a ropy black man with skin so dark he almost shines, looks up at Yolanda as though he’s having a religious vision.

  “You okay?” I ask him.

  “Not English,” he says softly, with a thick, eloquent accent. He turns up his palms.

  I point to his leg, where a long, painful-looking scrape extends from the edge of his shorts to his ankle. He smiles to reassure me. “Not English,” he repeats.

  “Denial,” Yolanda tells him, setting a firm hand on his shoulder as he stands. “That’s the problem with the world.”

  “Ah,” he says with fervor, and follows Yolanda with large glimmering eyes as she hugs me goodbye and strides off, smoothie in hand.

  When I get home from work, the number two is blinking on my machine. The first message is Hannah: Adam is back, has already taught Elijah the Russian word for snot, is driving Hannah crazy so nothing has changed. They all want to see me.

  I set down my bag and reach for my calendar.

  The second message is George. It was a pleasure throwing hors d’oeuvres with me yesterday. Would I care to call him?

  I put down the calendar. Then I unload my bag and tidy the papers on my coffee table. I wander to the kitchenette’s narrow window and stand for a long while, my eyes roaming a familiar course across the skyline. Uptown, the high rises are a bright, endless filigree. Though I’ve been hoping for George’s call, I abruptly don’t want to think about him. I think instead about the city. All those lives. All those individual, earthshaking dramas, and threaded through them the workings of history and poetry and the laws of physics and chemistry and biology, all rushing headlong at the same time and none of it forgetting to work for even an instant. This evening, for some reason, it makes me want to feel religious. The tiles chilling my bare feet, I consider some capacious intelligence keeping it all afloat—a phosphorescent world under an invisible cap of stars. I don’t believe in God; I’ve never been able to convince myself that emperor’s wearing clothes. The only faith to which I can comfortably do lip service is an ancestral one, inherited from my grandmother: a petite matron who, when complimenting a family member or voicing her hopes for her grandchildren, would invoke the name of an Irishman (“You should only be happy, Ken O’Hara”). Only in college, in conversation with an Orthodox Jewish classmate—a species as foreign to me as the Amish—did I at last glean the meaning of my grandmother’s Yiddish disclaimer. Kenahora: not to tempt the evil eye.

  I raise the last of my diet soda. Framed mute in my window, the city dazzles. And the hollow sensation I’ve felt since playing George’s message crystallizes into ordinary fear. “To Ken O’Hara,” I say, and drain the can. And dial.

  George is a consultant for a nonprofit specializing in education policy. On the phone, his voice is friendly and reasonable. He’s working on a smaller-schools initiative. Trying to muster public will to fix those overcrowded classrooms. Move the algebra lessons out of converted janitorial closets. Address the thirty-five-kids-per-teacher status quo and the tragic dropout rates. It’s not the kind of work where you expect dramatic victory. The idea is to turn the tide one drop at a time. Meanwhile, he likes hiking.

  Do I like hiking?

  Whatever spontaneity I felt at the reception has deserted me. I do not spill my life story like hors d’oeuvres from a sodden paper plate. In point of fact, I’m practically monosyllabic.

  George grew up in Toronto. His father and sister and three nieces, he says, are still there. He just bought a birthday present for his oldest niece. A ragtime recording. He used to play the banjo.

  Hasn’t touched it though, in two, three years.

  His voice trails off, expectant. After a moment he says, “Not a banjo player yourself, I take it?” His voice is kind. As though he’s worried for me.

  It feels like a decade since my last date. And I’m abruptly and viscerally reminded why I wanted it that way. It was because I detested this exchange—two people reading from scripts, stringing up intriguing details about themselves like bait. Awaiting nibbles.

  George jokes easily, posing the usual questions: family, life, work.

  My script is blank. “Seattle,” I say. “I was born in Seattle.”

  “And did you always know you wanted to go into American literature?”

  This man knows nothing about me. Twelve years’ commitment, books and poems into the thousands, paltry stipend paychecks: all bottleneck in my mind and I open my mouth and out pours eloquence. “Yes.”

  Trying to rouse myself, I force a laugh. “So. Do you have any pets?” I say this in a wry tone. A tone meant to acknowledge our mutual sophistication, as well as the absurdity of two adults starting from zero, gathering information about each other as though we were nothing but gawky kids hoping against hope the other likes our favorite movie.

  The line goes briefly silent.

  “I once had a hamster,” he says. His tone is not wry. It admits, in fact, only two possible interpretations. One: They don’t have wry in Canada. Two: We are gawky kids.

  Dating is—I understand this with thunderbolt clarity—an existential insult.

  “Would you mind holding a second?” I say. “I’ve got something on the stove.”

  With a stiff apology, I explain about my fax machine. Then, gently, warding off the specter of a cackling Yolanda, I set the receiver on the coffee table, nonplused by my own blundering. Odds are, at this rate, that George will never know me well enough to understand that I have nothing on my stove, ever, except occasionally a teapot. I force myself into a full, slow exhale. I know how to talk to a fellow human being. I talk to humans all the time. Obviously it’s been too long since I had a conversation with a man capable of surprising me, even if all he did was throw his food.

  Seconds pass. I’m furious at myself. Then, as from a great distance, I hear George through the receiver, clearing his throat.

  “O Canada!” he trolls.

  Even from this distance it’s apparent that this is a man who could not carry a tune in a Samsonite.

  “Our home and native land! True patriot love in all thy sons command.”

  I can think of nothing to say to a banjo-playing Canadian named George. After fourteen years’ boot camp, I’
m a literary Manhattanite. I don’t wear pastels. I no longer consider the word “earnest” a compliment. I know that patriotism is just another ethos that needs to be put up on a lift and checked for leaks. I cannot date this man.

  It’s only when he belts out True North strong and free that I start, despite myself, to laugh. As he continues, my laughter swells, grows giddy. I’m afraid he’ll hear. Can he? He draws a deep breath, and yodels. “From far and wiiiide . . .”

  I pick up the receiver gingerly, afraid I’ll guffaw. “Hello?”

  He keeps singing. Now he’s rolling his R’s, booming and operatic. “O Canada, we stand on guard for thee.” He finishes with a vibrato sufficiently grand to wilt maple leaves. The line goes silent.

  “Encore?” I suggest, more meekly than I intend.

  “Not a chance. You have to go on a date with me if you want the cabaret version. Ms. New York Sophisticate.” His voice turns gentle on these last words. I’ve been forgiven. I’m not sure I sinned—in Manhattan hard edges are a moral imperative. But after I say yes, my temples pounding, after we agree on a plan and I set down the receiver, relief floods my apartment so thoroughly I open a window and lean out onto the sill, sipping the air of the city that floats and shimmers to the horizon.

  The office is in a brick building on Thirtieth Street, with grimy but dignified stonework and thick, scratched windows. I’m cleared for entry by a taciturn woman who finds my name on a clipboard and motions me to the end of the hall. George warned me over the phone of the irony: his education-policy group rents office space in a failed school, a building rezoned for business in the 1960s.

  The stairs are shallow, covered in speckled tile, wide and echoing. As I climb I bear to the right and hold the rail, cornering apprehensively as though a crush of oncoming student traffic might knock me backward at any moment. I mount three floors and find the door propped open.

  He sits at a large black desk. A single folder is spread before him, and he holds a capped pen. He’s looking at the folder’s contents, but from the set of his shoulders I guess he’s not reading. I step through the door, and stop. The room is large and otherwise deserted, with four cluttered desks arranged conversationally around the sparsely decorated room. Jazz plays from a small radio on George’s desk, and before greeting him I pause to listen. The music is a walking bass line, quiet and so low it hardly registers as sound but rather as a shift in the atmosphere—the change your skin or inner ear responds to before you take in its meaning: a rainstorm blowing in from over the next hill.

  He flexes his shoulders, stretching. Then, with those just right hands I remember from the reception, turns a page.

  The tingle that runs my spine is the stuff of centuries-old romantic literary cliché; it’s accompanied by a hit of pure sexual longing that would never have made it into print.

  My shoe squeaks on the floor. George startles.

  “Hi,” I say softly, an apology for sneaking up.

  For a fraction of a second there’s a peculiar expression on his face. It’s neither sad nor happy, though it’s a relative of both. It’s something I can’t put my finger on, and there’s no opportunity to linger over it; as George rises from his seat he’s already wearing the bemused smile I recall from last week. He’s dressed in a sweater and jeans, and he’s just as bright-eyed and lanky as I’d remembered, long-jawed, studious-looking. This time he’s wearing a touch of cologne—a faint, warm smell. He greets me with a firm kiss on the cheek.

  “Nice office,” I say, the smell of him still in my nose.

  “Thanks.” He tilts his head, appraising the room, then gestures toward the nearest window, which faces into a narrow air shaft of soot-stained brick. “I first fell in love with it for the view.”

  My laugh comes a second late. I glance at his desktop, which holds a neat pile of well-worn textbooks and thick binders, a notebook filled with sloping script. A crowded-looking desk calendar. A scattering of pens and pencils. Behind his desk a printed sign is taped to the heavily marked chalkboard: GRAVITY: IT’S NOT JUST A GOOD IDEA. IT’S THE LAW.

  While he bends to load his briefcase with a sheaf of papers, I concentrate on his face. It’s a nice face. Honest. A face that seems incapable of dark secrets. Viewed from above, his lashes are thick, feminine, his forehead wide and vulnerable. There is something about seeing a tall man’s forehead from above that invites tenderness. Before me, I say to myself, stands a kind man: bending over a briefcase, packing it with care, traveling the city to work with schools in crisis.

  A man who looked hopeful when his date walked into the room. Now that it’s had time to register, I realize that that was what played across his face when I startled him: hope. As though he were lonelier than he wanted to let on. Something in me says, Remember this.

  We step out onto Seventh Avenue. The air is cool but mild. A perfect evening. We slow in unison. The street is devoid of honking, brightened here and there by yellow-crested trees, lit with that evening glow that sometimes overtakes Manhattan. Every few paces I bump against a vague obligation to speak, but something emboldens me to resist. This silence, unlike those on the telephone, seems to stitch something together. George says nothing. I can imagine us from a vantage point over the avenue: two companionable figures moving unhurriedly downtown. Every now and then I sneak a glance at him.

  We reach the restaurant, a cozy affair with green tablecloths and steamed windows. At our table we survey the menu. The waiter arrives with a plate of glistening black olives, takes our order, and leaves.

  We both begin to speak, then stop. George lifts an olive in salute, inviting me to go first.

  “Tell me what brought you to New York,” I say.

  He chews his olive thoughtfully, pats his lips with his napkin, and only then answers. “I came to New York mainly to get away from Toronto. Part of a difficult break from the way I was raised. I was, in my younger days, a fundamentalist Christian. In Canada that’s a rare and diminishing breed.”

  “I’m Jewish,” I offer, spooning a few olives onto my plate.

  He laughs. “I didn’t invite you out to talk you into a personal relationship with your savior.” Then he smiles a complicated smile, at once bright and mournful. “Getting out wasn’t simple. I had to smash some idols, and I’d have to be a jerk to feel good about that. But I’ll spare you that story for tonight.”

  “Sounds like your life is quite different these days.”

  “Understatement.” He winks. “But you meet me now at the pinnacle of my evolutionary journey: I’m a left-leaning die-hard city dweller.”

  The waiter brings a wicker basket of bread and two glasses of red wine. I offer George the bread and sip my wine. “So what brought you to education policy?”

  He pushes back his sleeves, takes a piece and butters it, then sets it down. “My first month in New York, before my business job started, I volunteered in a public school. And I couldn’t get over how much potential was going wasted. The kids were so obviously cheated.” He rests one wrist on the table. His forearms have lightly visible veins. He rolls open his fingers as he speaks—a calm gesture. “I didn’t forget it, though I didn’t get into the field for a few years.”

  As I busy myself with buttering my own slice, something flutters from nowhere into my mind: That this man might turn out to be a lover whose presence I’d carry with me all day—saving up my impressions to deposit in his hands. A man I could laugh with. A teammate. A partner with whom I could rest. Suddenly I realize how deeply I want to rest. The notion is shockingly, alarmingly, seductive.

  When my train of thought recouples, George is concluding a sentence. “—so I decided policy work was the thing. It’s not the easiest line of work, or the most profitable. But at least I feel I’m of some use.”

  I sip my wine and nod enthusiastically. I have no idea how he got into education policy but trust in my ability, honed through years of graduate school seminars, to pick this up later.

  “So you see, it was either education or the ma
dhouse,” he says.

  I laugh. He seems surprised. Maybe I missed something serious.

  “Don’t know what I was thinking, going straight into stock trading after college. Someone told me that was the only way to make it in New York, and I believed it. Decisions people make in their twenties—later we can’t remember what the hell inspired us. Like Stonehenge.”

  I nod gravely.

  “Like disco,” he says.

  I form a miniature smile.

  “Like leeches and bloodletting. Like putting mercury in hatbands and other follies of world history. Like invading Russia just before the first snows.” He folds his arms and looks at me. “I’m not going to stop this until you laugh. Because only that will redeem my original bad joke.”

  I do. He gives a boyish grin and relaxes back into his chair.

  “Tell me about your life,” he says. “For real. Not like on the phone.”

  The waiter brings two steaming plates of pasta; I wait for him to leave.

  “Yeah,” I say. “That was—”

  George shakes his head. “Doesn’t matter. Just tell me.”

  George’s hair is straight and flops over one temple. It’s thinning, but doing so peaceably, without sticky hair-product comb furrows, or the tufted look of men who curry every precious strand. He gives off an air of unconcerned cleanliness that’s undeniably attractive.

  “I love books,” I say.

  “Love them how?” He digs into his pasta with fork and spoon.

  “I love the escape. Academics aren’t supposed to say that, but it’s true. I love to dive into somebody else’s vision, nightmare, utopia, whatever. I love how books put a dent in our egos—turns out we’re not the first sentient generation on the planet after all. Other people have been just as perceptive, just as worked up, about the same damn human problems we face. I love the theory part—trying to link books together with ideas, like a string of nonidentical pearls.”

  “I’m with you,” he says.