Cities I've Never Lived In: Stories (5 page)

The man in the city had eyes like marbles. He paid in cash. He inquired politely about Eli’s grandmother. Eli tried a second time; when he went down to the shop the case was full again. He took the batch to the city. The man said, The pieces you gave me last time were worth more than I’d thought. I should give you a little extra. They were sitting on opposite sides of a desk. From the drawer, the man took out a stack of bills and slid it to Eli. Do you have more? the man asked. All the jewelry was spread in front of them. Eli didn’t understand the precariousness of his position until then. Eli told him he had a painting he would consider selling. Quite old, he said. He described the painting. The man was interested. Eli walked out intending never to talk to him again.

But one night the man called the house, though Eli had never given him the number. Eli recognized his voice at once, the way it layered and withheld. I am inquiring about the painting, the man said. If you decided to sell it.

No, Eli said, my family decided to keep it.

I have to admit I’m disappointed, the man said. I had wanted to see it. It sounded intriguing, and potentially quite valuable. It could be worth more than the jewelry.

There is a family attachment to it, Eli said, almost whispering, trying to keep calm. He could hear his mother in the kitchen, talking to a friend. She had just brought home pizza. He hung up the phone, standing in the dark of the foyer, his hand still on the receiver. She came out of the kitchen, Is that you? What is it? Is everything all right?

He told me that he left for Europe the next week. That he left the painting in the crawl space. That when he returned for his sister’s funeral, he found—as I had—that it was gone.

The man, I said.

Eli shook his head. There were those knife marks, he said, even before me. Someone knew about it. It might not have been him at all.

I remembered the vague light through the windows. The emptiness outside. I thought of someone coming in from that. For a moment I believed him; then I noticed he couldn’t look at me.

We went back to his apartment. He said, Just say it.

It wasn’t yours.

It was a picture of me.

It wasn’t yours, I said. I found a painting that looked like me, but I didn’t take it.

Well, I regret it, he said. I took it and regret it, if that’s what you want.

That’s not what I want.

He touched the side of my face, my cheeks rashy from the cold. I tried to move but he held me. You just need to stand here, he said. It’s okay, just stand where you are. That’s all you need to do. He brought his face in and kissed me, gripping me as if holding me up.

In the bedroom, he didn’t turn on the lights—I didn’t even see a lamp, just a bed and nightstand—but he kept the door open. He stood over me as I sat on the iron bed. Studying me, trying to figure out how to go about it. I wriggled my jeans off and sat there in my wool sweater and underpants. We lay down. He slid the sweater to my armpits. I was bare underneath, with small breasts and nipples scratched red from the wool.

The hall light caught the cream of my legs and the sweater at my armpits. He leaned over to pick up his drink. Cold drops landed on my stomach. He drew a finger connecting them, then we kissed, kissing so hard that it seemed wrong, the way he still held his drink to his side. He paused to take a sip. Stop that, I said.

Teasing you, he said, holding it out for me. As I drank, he pulled down my underwear. He still wore his jeans, and he climbed on top of me so the fly of his pants rubbed into me. He took the drink from me. I took it back, drained it, and put it on the table.

I could do with a cigarette, he said.

Are you going to take your clothes off?

You could take them off for me.

I could, I said. Or you could just do it. Which would be easier.

That’s
sexy.

I’m just saying.

I pushed him away. He undressed. First the shirt, shaking his head when it came off to get his hair out of his eyes. Then the pants, down to his boxers. Sitting next to me, pulling them down to put on a condom, then climbing back on top. After so many years of waiting you wouldn’t think I would have noticed so much about the ceiling, that there were places where it flaked, and blooms of moisture. I even worried there might be serious water damage, and I almost asked, but his eyes were squished, and there was a lot of focus. A lot of the bed hitting the wall. And all that sighing I did when I lifted my arms to clutch the bars and he clutched my arms. To show my pleasure, I lifted my knees to cradle him, because he was about to come, and I wanted him to be cradled when he did.

After, we sat together, still naked on the bed. My knees tight to me. His arm around me, his lips in my hair. Why the fear? he said.

How much did he give you for it? I asked.

Five thousand dollars.

And you regret it?

I regret it. Anything else?

No, that’s all.

After that, we kept meeting at the bar, drinking and going home together. Sometimes we’d stay in the living room, me straddling him on the sofa, his head rolling back and forth. Other times me propped on the kitchen counter with him behind, both of us facing the Frigidaire, the dish towel looped on the handle.

We stayed up late in bed, looking through art books. Wrapping the sheet around me, going into the bathroom to wash up, sleeping next to him in the cold room, waking up too late, the shock of cold from the faucet, running into my classes un-prepared, still with the smell of him on me.

One morning, as I was coming out onto the steps—looking down at the old houses of the West End, slipping my arms into my coat—Franz walked by. My hair disheveled, short strands poking up, my face blotchy. He held his violin case, and wore the thick wool coat I always told him made him look Eastern European. The case small in his hands. He stood under a tree; its roots made the sidewalk rise. He walked up to me and, without any harshness, said, You’ll have to decide at some point.

We walked through the streets, past the trees with circle fences, the bottoms of our coats flapping open then closed with our steps. I don’t mean between the two of us, he said. I’m not an idiot. But here, he said, patting a hand to his chest, with you, you’ll have to decide. Do you understand what I’m saying? I think you’re making a mistake.

Let me do it then, I said. Let me do what I’m going to do.

The answer wasn’t for Franz, but for my mother, many years too late. Once, when I was a child, she took me to a mental health clinic. She knew one of the doctors and wanted me examined. Afterward, the friend let her walk me through a set of doors and down a hallway. The hallway ended at a cube, with windows and children in bright clothing. There were many children, some drawing, some sitting against the wall with dark circles under their eyes. Some crying. My mother behind me, hands on my shoulders, keeping me there, until at last she turned me and we went back.

When we opened the outside door, you could feel the air all hot and open; it’s what freedom would always feel like to me. That’s what I once told Franz, what freedom always felt like to me: like school being let out for the summer and seeing all the school buses in a row ready to take you home. My mother opened the passenger door and waited for me to buckle before closing it. She got in and buckled her belt but stayed with her hands on the wheel, not putting the key in. We were going to drive without keys. I liked that. She stared at the parking space ahead as if concentration was necessary to avert disaster. She said, This is what happens. Did you see those children? Did you see them in the room? Please, Anne. What good does this do any of us?

While we drove, I waited for the ocean; sometimes we would stop and feed the seagulls from tissue-thin bread bags, the bags tumbling in the breeze, floating and sparkling.

Eli eventually moved away. After a few years, I learned from a friend that he had married a painter, a Swiss woman, and was living in Cambridge. I found a picture of him online, taken at a gallery opening, and I almost didn’t recognize him, he looked so happy, so much at peace.

Years ago, I came across an article with the headline “Local History Professor Caught Stealing Maps.” Under the headline, I was surprised to find the name of a man who had once been a friend of mine. Years ago, not long after the girl had gone missing, I had watched him leave the library. I was under the shade of a tree, and he didn’t see me. There was an intensity about him—as if everything was wrapped into one emotion, not sadness, or despair; the closest I could come was confusion, but it wasn’t really that.

After a time his face relaxed, and he continued down the stairs. I felt sympathy for him and thought I understood that moment on the stairs, what it was for him, but I’d been wrong.

In those days, during the time of the lost girl, I was living with my husband in a grand but decrepit loft apartment in an area of Portland that was known as resurgent, a description that carried more than a little wistfulness. Near us, an upscale restaurant was tucked into an old brick warehouse. We would sometimes sit at the bar, eating complimentary cheese straws and ordering the cheapest bottles of wine before sweeping back up the street in our mismatched secondhand clothes, my crimson coat and rubber boots, Richard’s gray cashmere coat that must have once belonged to a wealthy man but now very much belonged to him—the military lapels, the satin lining, the soft matted pills under the arms.

We lived on the third floor of a building that looked vacant from the street. Even when climbing the central stairs—a rattling, metal affair that echoed with every step—we felt an air of abandonment. Our apartment, too, was cavernous. In the middle of the space, we had created a sitting area out of Chinese screens. It was silly, really, looking like something the Red Cross might have set up as a triage area if Chinese screens had been considered appropriate. Inside sat two chairs, a newspaper rack, and a coffee table piled with books and newspapers.

It was here that I first read about a twenty-four-year-old girl who had gone missing near the harbor. With the newspaper on my lap, I told Richard. He asked what day she had gone missing. When I told him, he said that she was a student of his at the night class he taught at the arts school. He had driven her that night after class, to a bar by the waterfront; he’d seen her walking along the road and offered her a ride. The police had been there after class on Thursday. What could I tell them? he asked me. What do I know about this girl?

Over the following weeks, he told me the story several times. He also told me that on two occasions they had gone to a bar together, and she had told him stories about her life. He told me a little about it. I also read newspaper articles, a blog that her friends started, the police transcript. I talked to people at the local paper where I worked—enough so that I began to piece together what had happened.

The night she disappeared had been warm for February, and the warmth had brought the fog in. It would have been hard to see her at the side of the road on the outskirts of the city, where there were a few boarded-up buildings, some empty warehouses. She would have been walking along a strip of sidewalk, the streetlights illuminating the fog.

There would have been a darting quality to her, with her high shoulders and lanky arms. She walked without gloves, without a hat, her hands stuffed into her coat pockets, her breath a cloud in front of her. The fog, the buildings, the streetlights. Her fragility and toughness, the physicality of her walk. I could get that far. And to my husband backing out of the parking space, leaning forward to clear the windshield, arranging the books and papers at his side, fiddling with the radio. He saw a movement in and out of the streetlight. He almost didn’t see her. He cleared more of the window, craned his neck, then eased the car out of the lot. He pulled to the side of the road just ahead of her and leaned across to open the door.

He said, Louise, Louise, and she grabbed the door and put her head in. Her hair fell across her face. Her face, even when she held her hair aside, would have been in shadow, the overhead light having broken months ago.

Do you want a ride? he said.

She lingered with one hand on the door. Okay, yes, she said, thank you. She lowered herself, a puff of air coming up through the cracks of seat leather. She settled her purse on her lap, didn’t buckle her seat belt. She was close enough so he could see her then. Her curls escaping from a loose bun. Her eyes with shadows underneath.

I had imagined at first that he was a sudden flurry of activity, leaning over to swipe at the empty coffee cups as she sat down, but as he told the story, I understood this wasn’t the case. He was comfortable with her, he knew how to talk to her. He said simply, continuing a conversation they’d had at the bar weeks earlier, Why New Mexico?

It was seven years ago, she said. She had left home. Her roommate worked at a snack bar in a bowling alley, and they shared a room in a ranch house with windows only in back; there weren’t any windows in front. The room contained boxes that didn’t belong to them. Someone had tacked sheets over the walls.

She slouched in the seat while talking to him, as if the ride was going to take hours rather than minutes. She laughed quietly, looked over at my husband, thought of the bowling alley, the nacho chips with cheese from a pump, the orange T-shirts the counter help wore. Anyway, she said, I was seventeen and I liked to bowl.

Are you any good? my husband asked, but it wasn’t a real question; he was busy looking for the White Heart, a bar by the waterfront. He slowed the car. The bar was down a cobblestone alley blocked off to traffic. He pulled over next to the barrier and looked at her. He had parked in an interval between streetlights and she opened the door to turn on the overhead light. It’s broken, he told her. You could put in a new bulb, she said. I could, he said.

She slipped out, pulling her purse after her. She said, Thanks, see you next week, and bounded toward the side of the bar. He watched her silhouette, her hand reaching up, feeling the lump of her hair as if tucking it in then swinging open the door—a clumsily balletic move, the dropping of the hand and swinging it out again. Then the door settled closed. He sat there for some time. He told me this offhandedly, had said, There’s something else. Maybe ten minutes after the girl had gone in, I—