Love Begins in Winter (4 page)

T
HE GIRLS IN THE
gift shop at the Beverly Hills Hotel were kind enough to help me pack the stones into the hatbox with pink tissue paper. They asked if I was French. They said it wasn't so much my accent as the way I was dressed. They were excited to be involved in something eccentric.

The younger of the two wore blue eye shadow. She asked me what
“Voulez-vous coucher avec moi”
means. The older woman giggled and said she just wants me to say it. The girl with blue eye shadow slapped her friend's arm.

I asked for more tissue paper, and the younger girl asked why I wanted to wrap stones anyway. I told her it was just something I did.

Before I closed the hatbox, the young shop assistant reached in. I waited with the lid in my hands.

“Stones are really quite beautiful, aren't they?” she said. Her retainer glinted in the shop light.

I walked past the hair salon and then up the stairs. As I passed the Polo Lounge, a woman appeared from around a corner and walked straight into me. The force of her motion was enough to knock me down. I dropped the hatbox, and the stones rolled out with a loud clacking sound. The woman was carrying what I thought were small rocks, and they fell from her hands and scattered across the hard, glossy floor.

She glared at me. And then suddenly an arm of sunlight reached through a high window and opened its hand upon her face. I saw her eyes as clearly as if we had been pressed against one another in a very small space.

A bellboy rushed over and started to pick up her stones.

“Acorns!” he exclaimed.

The woman looked at him in horror.

“Please, I'll do it,” she said. The bellboy was confused and continued to pick up the acorns, just more carefully.

“No, I'll do it, please,” the woman said again. The bellboy looked at me for a few moments and then hurried off.

For some reason I didn't get up immediately. Instead, I watched her collect her acorns. She had beautiful shoes. And then the sunlight fell away and I noticed drops were falling from her eyes. I finally stood up and proceeded to collect the five stones I'd so carefully packed into the hatbox with the girls downstairs in the shop.

“Sorry,” the woman said genuinely.

She had an accent I had never heard. Her hair was very soft, but I kept looking at her shoes.

For a few moments we stood opposite one another. It was awkward. Neither of us walked away. To anyone watching, it must have looked as though we were talking—but we weren't saying anything.

The most significant conversations of our lives occur in silence.

“I'm so sorry,” she said again. I said I was sorry too. I wasn't sorry, but I felt like I should have been.

There were freckles on her cheeks and forehead. Her eyes were very green.

When she walked off, I sat on a bench by the counter and held on to my box. I sat there for some time and even considered leaving my box behind so that I might follow her, grab her arm, and force her to go somewhere with me and sit down. I wanted only to look at her green eyes and to hear the lilting song of her voice, as though her words were the notes I had been searching for, the vital sounds that I had never played.

The most important notes in music are the ones that wait until sound has entered the ear before revealing their true nature. They are the spaces between the sounds that blow through the heart, knocking things over.

I eventually went back to my room.

Later. My telephone flashing. A message from Sandy, my agent, some detail about my San Francisco concert and the music director's belief that my grandfather's chair is too damaged to sit on. I wanted to call her and tell her about this woman but felt for some reason it would upset her. Her daughter's birthday is coming up. Sandy asked if I would buy her a bicycle. Her daughter requested that I give her a bicycle and teach her how to ride it. I think when I am older I will be someone she turns to when her mother is depressed. I think Sandy is depressed a lot. More than once I've found her sitting at her desk in the dark.

I remember when my parents bought me a bike. In Europe of the 1970s, there was less production of things and so many of my toys and clothes were secondhand. In my village there was a weekend before Christmas when people sold bicycles. They leaned them against the wall of the church. From each handlebar hung a tag with the price in francs and the name of the person selling it. So if a child had outgrown a bicycle, on Christmas Eve it would begin a new life. Twenty or so bicycles circulated the village, changing owners every few years.

Sometimes, previous owners, unable to contain themselves, would call out to their old bicycles as they passed at the mercy of new owners.

“Isn't she a beauty—but watch for the front brake!” or “Be careful going over curbs like that—you'll buckle the wheels!”

It's amazing the details from childhood that can surface in a day. That's the best present I ever received. I remember watching parents walk the line of bicycles leaned up against the church, feeling for the money in their pockets, and the children who sat excitedly at home—forbidden to follow, even at a distance.

My bicycle was golden brown with a dynamo light—a small wheel spun by the back wheel that's connected to a small cylinder that uses the motion to power the front and rear lights.

I called Sandy and told her about my first bicycle.

“You get worse every day,” she said. “But you're still my favorite client.”

We straightened out the details for the afternoon concert in San Francisco. No chair, no concert, I told her. Then I tried to call my brother. His assistant picked up his cell phone and told me that he had gone shooting.

“Shooting?” I said.

“But he isn't shooting,” the assistant said, “he's just in the forest with English.”

I laughed. “English” was what my brother called his current girlfriend's father because he wore corduroy pants with small pheasants embroidered into the material.

“So English,” my brother mocked.

“He's always glad when you call,” his assistant said, and then she hung up without saying good-bye.

I never know when to hang up the phone, and try to say one final good-bye even though I can hear the other person has gone.

Then I ran a bath and let the heat settle. Before I slipped into the still water, I thought of the woman who walked into me downstairs. And suddenly I felt an extraordinary sense of hope for everything that was to come, a continuation of what I had begun feeling in Quebec City. It was something I had not experienced since I was a boy. Something I hadn't felt since the days of sitting in fields.

W
HO IS THIS MAN
, who like an apparition haunts my every thought? I thought about him last night in my small, steamy apartment. I took out my photographs of Jonathan and spread them on the kitchen table. Then I went to sleep and dreamed that the man from the hotel was sitting on the edge of my bed. Then I was watching the scene from above, and in the place of my body was stone. A person made of rock in the shape of me.

I thought about him this morning sipping coffee on the patio next to the pool no one ever swims in. There are leaves at the bottom. This man's face is like the end of a book, or the beginning of one.

If I thought I would see him in the park, I perhaps would not have gone. But the urge to see this birdman—another Jonathan. . .or my Jonathan. You never know.

You understand I had to make sure. Grief is sometimes a quiet but obsessive madness. Coincidences are something too great to ignore.

When I arrived at the park, I was of course too early. A few people slumbered under blankets beside their shopping carts. I stopped and looked at a homeless woman. The ridges on her cheeks were so deep her face could have been a map; the story of what happened. I wanted to touch it but didn't. She was somewhere far away in sleep, swimming back to the park through a dream.

All parks are beautiful when quiet and you see things like a book forgotten on a bench read by the wind. Other things too: Someone must have shed their shoes to walk in the grass and then forgotten about them. The shoes had remained neatly arranged for the duration of a night, jewels at their center. I wondered why nobody had taken them.

I chose a bench close to the fountain.

An hour later the birdman arrived. He was much too old to be my brother. And his skin was dark and cracked. His nose was wide and bulged awkwardly from a thin face. The whites of his eyes were impossibly white, but their centers were black. His clothes were beautiful but ruined. How strange that I was actually disappointed it was not my Jonathan. Another way to punish myself, to look behind for someone I feel but cannot see.

And then I noticed the man across the park. At first I wasn't sure if it was him, but then he looked at me and I was sure. He was more handsome than I remembered, and there was something serious in his movements—in the way he sat. A person with important messages but who has lost all memory of where he is going. And then I gasped because that was a description of me. Perhaps all my opinions of other people are opinions of another self.

I don't know why, but I wasn't surprised to see him. His legs were crossed neatly as though it were his favorite way of sitting. He didn't seem surprised to see me either.

Then children arrived and stood around the birdman. They shuffled their sandals in the dust.

He'd dropped his box of stones when I bumped into him. I can't understand how he fell over; I didn't think our impact was so hard. Perhaps he was off-balance. Perhaps he had been waiting all along for someone to knock him down and allow him to drop the weight he'd so faithfully carried.

For an hour or so, we both watched the birdman, laughing intermittently. I noticed he had a baguette next to him and wondered if he'd brought it to feed the birds. The birds flew around the children's heads, seemingly at the control of the birdman. They flew in arcs as though held with strings. The children laughed and jumped. They also looked at one another.

I glanced over at the man often and he looked at me too. It was inevitable that we meet. Like rivers, we had been flowing on a course for one another.

And so, at some point I stood up and walked over to his bench. My shoes crunching the small stones. I counted the steps. My heart bursting from my chest. I sat down and looked at his hands. He looked surprised and I wasn't sure what to do. My hand began to shake and he reached for it. I let him. With his other hand, he took from his pocket a handful of acorns and put them in my palm.

From my pocket I took a large stone and set it squarely in his open hand. If there is such a thing as marriage, it takes place long before the ceremony: in a car on the way to the airport; or as a gray bedroom fills with dawn, one lover watching the other; or as two strangers stand together in the rain with no bus in sight, arms weighed down with shopping bags. You don't know then. But later you realize—
that
was the moment.

And always without words.

Language is like looking at a map of somewhere. Love is living there and surviving on the land.

How could two people know each other so intimately without ever having told the old stories? You get to an age where the stories don't matter anymore, and the stories once told so passionately become a tide that never quite reaches the point of being said. And there is no such thing as fate, but there are no accidents either.

I didn't fall in love with Bruno then. I had always loved him and we were always together.

Love is like life but starts before and continues after—we arrive and depart in the middle.

M
Y FATHER ONCE TOLD
me that coincidences mean you're on the right path. When the woman who bumped into me at the Beverly Hills Hotel approached my bench and sat down, I didn't know what was going to happen, and I didn't care. I only had the feeling that I always wanted to be with her. I had no urge to tell her anything—there was no need; she knew everything she needed to know without having to learn it.

As we sat side by side in the park, two birds dropped upon our knees. The birdman was looking at us. The children were looking at us too. The woman didn't move. She just stared at her bird, but her bird was staring at me. The small bird on my knee didn't seem to be thinking anything. Then he turned and looked at me. He rubbed his beak together and it made a sawing sound. I think he was asking for a seed.

When one of the youngest children in the group screamed, the birdman whistled and the birds flew from us back to his outstretched arms.

“Did you know this would happen?” I asked.

“It's why I came,” she said. I drank down her voice.

“Are you French?”

“The baguette gave it away?”

She smiled.

“Would you like some?” I offered it.

She shook her head. “It looks too precious.”

I ripped its hat off and she took it. She ripped it in half and gave me some. A scatter of pigeons suddenly swooped down.

“Where are you from?”

“The mountains of North Wales.” She bit her lip. “Have you heard of Wales?”

“
Oui
.”

“Good,” she said. “I can take you if you have warm clothes and like sausages.”

For an hour we sat watching the many people who walked past.

Then she said:

“What are we going to do?”

I liked that she asked this. It meant we felt the same way about one another. I was still holding the stone she had given me. She had put the acorns I gave her into a pocket.

“I'm performing in San Francisco tomorrow night—will you come?”

“Who are you?” she said. “Tell me your name at least—I don't make a habit of following strange men around.”

We both looked at the birdman.

“Really?” I said.

When she laughed, her eyes closed slightly.

“Bruno,” I said. “This is my name, and I am just a small boy from a French village who can play the cello.”

She seemed content with this answer. But then said hastily:

“Maybe it's the cello that plays you.”

Then she added:

“I think you must be a very good cellist—a gifted one even.”

“Why?” I asked.

“Because you're like a key that unlocks people.”

“I doubt that.”

“Not just people,” she added.

She seemed suddenly confused, the way a woman does when she feels in danger of saying too much.

“What's your name?” I asked.

She smiled. “You could ask me that every day and get a different answer.”

She bit her nail and looked away.

“That's not a very good response, is it?”

“It's perfect,” I said, and meant it.

“Well, my name is Hannah.”

The present grows within the boundaries of the past.

I asked if she had plans for the weekend. I couldn't believe I was inviting her to San Francisco—that I was allowing someone to trespass into my life, to climb over the gate and start across the farmland to the small cottage where I had been living for decades with just my music, my stones, my baguettes; a mitten.

I thought of the woman I had seen in Quebec City behind the icy window, the nun who wrote the word in the glass.

No beauty without decay. I read that somewhere else.

Every moment is the paradox of now or never.

If my brother back in France could have witnessed this event in the park with Hannah, he would have cried for joy. He cries a lot, and women love that about him, but then he can be stubborn and macho, and they love that too. I can imagine telling him about Hannah. He'll want to fly out and meet her. He'll want to send her flowers, chocolates, cheese—give her the latest Renault convertible. I can see them strolling the fields of Noyant, arm in arm, my brother picking up sticks to throw.

“Come to San Francisco,” I say. “Fly up for my concert in the afternoon and we'll rent a car and drive back to Los Angeles together—this is where you live?”

“Yes,” she said. “I have a shop in Silver Lake that sells prints, posters, and paintings.”

“Of birds?”

“I wish it were just birds—but not everyone is like me.”

“I think I like who you are.”

“Well, it's not what I chose,” she said.

I felt mild humiliation—as if
I
were somehow a part of what she hadn't wanted.

Then I said:

“Sometimes I think it's life that chooses us—and here we are thinking that we're steering the ship, when we're just vehicles for an elaborate division of life.”

“Then why can it end so easily?” she said.

I wasn't sure what she meant. I risked an answer anyway.

“It ends quickly so that we value it,” I said.

She turned her whole body to face me.

“No, Bruno, we value it because it's like that—but why is it like that? Why can life suddenly fly away when those left behind have so much to say? So much that silence is like a mouthful of cotton—but then when it's time to speak, one is capable only of silence. So much that's left undone. What happens to all the things a person would have done?”

I had considered all this.

“I'm not sure I want to know anything anymore,” I said.

She bit her lip. I could tell she wanted to know everything.

We continued talking. Many of the things I said to Hannah in those first, long, heavy days just formed in my mouth without much thought. They formed silently like clouds and then rained down upon her. When we talked, I realized I knew things I hadn't thought I knew.

She agreed to come to San Francisco. And we would drive back to Los Angeles along the cliff—the very edge of a country we had lived in for so long.

Before I walked her to the parking lot, Hannah said she wanted to give the birdman something she'd brought.

We approached him, and the children stepped back to give us room. From her pocketbook Hannah produced a tattered volume. A book. She handed it to the birdman.

It was
The British Book of Birds
.

“Look inside,” Hannah told him.

He did.

It read:

 

To our dearest child, Jonathan,

May the birds you love always love you back

 

“See—this book belongs to you,” Hannah said sweetly.

“No, young lady,” the birdman said. “It belongs to you—but you don't belong to it.”

He leaned in very close to her.

“You belong to you,” he said.