Heart of the City (38 page)

“I was the lyricist.”

“You mean you rapped?”

He blushed. “A little.”

“I’m supposed to have dinner at my aunt’s place in Brooklyn,” Sarah said eventually.

“Brooklyn is I think cool,” Daniel said, sitting up and looking excited. “Jay-Z, Biggie Smalls, no?”

“My aunt’s not a rapper, but she and my uncle cook awe-some food.”

“Yeah?”

“I could probably get you a dinner invite. Just wait a sec.”

Over her cell phone, Sarah told Aunt Rita a story about “this lonely French exchange student in my dorm.”

“Oh?”

“Poor guy, he knows no one in the city, and he’s really homesick. I realize it’s last-minute. Is there room?”

With the phone still pressed to her ear, she looked at Daniel, who was shaking his head at the ruse.

At Aunt Rita’s apartment, Daniel, with a kind of old-world courtesy, took turns shaking hands with everyone in the room. Aunt Rita had been a social activist in the 1960s—her first husband was a Black Panther—and Daniel charmed her with his literacy in modern protest movements, a subject he’d studied in college. Later, Daniel and Sarah’s Puerto Rican-born uncle, who loved to cook, had a long, animated discussion about food. Daniel conversed with him in fluent Spanish.

Sarah and Daniel traded lingering looks over the dinner table. Aunt Rita, apparently catching one, winked at her niece, who turned crimson.
Lonely French exchange student
, my derrière, the wink said.

At the top of the subway steps on their way back, Sarah tugged Daniel’s sleeve and made a sultry pout. Daniel bent down to kiss her.

Sarah knew how it went from here—a tryst that blazed for a night or two and then flamed out like a meteorite hitting desert. But back in her dorm room, as her hands moved over him, Daniel asked if they could slow down. He didn’t want to cheapen whatever was happening between them. They stretched out on her bed, their bodies stippled by the streetlight outside the window. She noticed a triangle of smooth, discolored skin on his chest and traced it with her forefinger. “This doesn’t look like a cooking injury.”

“I was born with a problem in my heart.” As a newborn, he told her, he had been diagnosed with interventricular communication—a hole that let blood seep between the left and right passageways of his heart. Right after his birth, doctors were so worried that they kept him in isolation. For thirty days, he had no physical contact with his parents. The scar on his chest was from surgery he’d undergone as a toddler.

“I’m so sorry, Daniel.”

That night, they did nothing but hold each other.

WHEN DANIEL showed up at the bistro the next evening, a Saturday, his boss was red-faced. Daniel hadn’t called to say he would be staying in the city. He hadn’t been scheduled to work that Friday, but still, Bernard said, he needed to know his whereabouts. Bernard told Daniel he was demoted. Rather than cooking or even busing tables, Daniel would be washing dishes. Daniel made little money as it was, but as a dishwasher he wouldn’t even qualify for a share of the tips. Daniel could tell from Bernard’s twisted features that his boss wanted nothing more than to humiliate him in front of the staff.

But it didn’t work. Daniel was in such a mood from his night with Sarah that, even while elbow deep in dish soap, he couldn’t stop reeling off jokes. Everyone in the kitchen was in hysterics. Except Bernard, who was doing a slow burn. After desserts went out to the last diners, Bernard lit into Daniel. “You know what I think?” he said, cornering Daniel in the kitchen. “I think you are trying to steal from me.”

“What?” Daniel said. “How?”

“I don’t how exactly, but I will find out. I think you are trying to sabotage my business, and when I get to the bottom of it, believe me, you will be sorry.”

Daniel could feel heat rise in his temples. He had toiled long hours for scant pay, and, now, to be accused of sabotage? Just because he refused to kowtow to another of Bernard’s perennially sour moods? “You know what, Bernard,” he said, shrugging as he untied his apron. “I don’t need this job. Find someone else.”

Daniel returned to Bernard’s basement, where he had been living, and opened his suitcase. Just two days earlier, he had been searching for a second job. Now he had quit the only one he had. As he shoved in clothes and toiletries, he wondered whether he would have been so rash without Sarah.

The next morning, he remembered the name of a budget hotel he’d stayed at on a family visit to Manhattan as a teenager: The Carlton Arms. Yes, there it was in a phone book. He found it the next day, on Third Avenue and East Twenty-fifth Street, and booked a room at a discounted weekly rate.

WAITING THAT evening by their tree, Daniel looked out over a park that bore little resemblance to the one where he’d met Sarah a few days before. Rain fell from clouds the color of wet wool, and a raw wind raked the concrete walkways. There were no crowds, no pretzel carts, no musicians. Even the drunks had sought shelter. Daniel turned his face to the sky, letting the rain fall on his cheeks. He felt a tap on his shoulder. Turning around, he saw Sarah in a puffy red jacket. He had called her just minutes earlier, and already she was here. She moved toward him, leaning her cheek against his sweater, damp with rain.

“Aren’t you cold?” she said.

“My room is warmer,” Daniel said.

The only time they left his hotel room over the next ten days was when hunger drove them to the deli across the street, often around 3 a.m.

ON THE flight home to Paris, Daniel composed a tortured letter to Elena, his girlfriend of more than a decade. “I spent the last ten days with someone I met in New York,” he wrote, “and the way I feel now, I can’t say I won’t see her again.” That evening, back in his Paris apartment, he read it to her aloud. Elena, weeping, confessed that for the past five months, she, too, had been having an affair.

Three weeks later, Daniel was on a jetliner back to New York. He moved into a closet-sized hundred-dollar-a-week room in a flophouse and spent every free moment with Sarah. In August,
when her mother needed emergency hip surgery for radiation damage caused by her earlier cancer treatments, Sarah dropped out of summer school. “Will you come with me, Daniel?” she asked, her face rippled with anguish.

“Won’t I be in your way?”

“My mother will love you, Daniel. Please.”

Back in Sarah’s childhood home, in Rockville, Maryland, Daniel mowed the lawn and cooked. He added bright touches—including a painting—to the living room where Sarah’s mother would spend her recovery. He read her mother French poetry and took part in a goofy skit involving a vacuum cleaner that Sarah and her sister put on to lift their mother’s spirits.

Every day, speaking with Sarah, her relatives, or the cashier at the coffee shop, Daniel could hear his English grow stronger. As her mother’s condition stabilized, Sarah rejoined her dance company in Washington. Daniel came to rehearsals, taking a seat in one of the darkened back rows. He hadn’t tired of watching her. A stage, he thought, was the perfect platform for her physical grace. Each time she moved across it—or above it, it sometimes seemed—he felt like he was discovering her anew.

And so passed the perfect summer.

Then, in September, a letter from Paris. It was from the business school that had turned Daniel away the year before. He had passed the school’s English test, it said. A spot was waiting for him in that fall’s entering class.

“Are you really going to go?” Sarah asked one night, tenderly, as he lay beside her in her darkened childhood bedroom.

“It’s why I came.”

“But haven’t things changed?”

FOR A short while, after Daniel left, they pretended things would remain the same. Sarah came to Paris for a semester of French. Daniel came to Washington for a summer business internship.
But otherwise, for nearly two and a half years, they lived apart. Soon their relationship started to unravel.

The time difference magnified the physical distance: Sarah would be starting her day as Daniel was ending his, and when they spoke on the phone, their emotional states seldom synced. Business school had brought out an aggressively ambitious side of Daniel that Sarah hadn’t seen before, and she began to question how thoroughly she knew him. Daniel, for his part, saw his admission to an elite business school as an almost impossibly lucky break. His earlier academic record wasn’t exemplary, and his adventure in New York—career-wise, anyway—had been a disaster. He saw a new start and feared he wouldn’t get a better one. When he and Sarah met, he saw now, they had few responsibilities and all the time in the world. But with Sarah’s anxiety over her mother’s illness and Daniel’s growing preoccupation with his career, those things were gone. Over the phone one evening, the tensions exploded. They quarreled bitterly, and the hurt they inflicted on each other felt irreparable. Months passed in silence.

DANIEL GRADUATED from business school, but decided to further his education rather than leap into an uncertain job market. Cornell University, in upstate New York, accepted him into a PhD program in finance. In the fall of 2002, his father and brother flew to America to help him move in. Daniel sent a short e-mail to Sarah around that time, mentioning with few specifics that he planned to take his father and brother to Manhattan for a weekend before their return to France.