Traveling Light (2 page)

Her window ledge was a regular stop on the circuit. It was relaxing to watch, reminding her of the years she spent between high school and college working in a pet store on Union Turnpike in Queens. Those were the most meaningful years she’d spent working anywhere, explaining to people how to care for their pets, finding homes for the animals—an event always tinged with sadness, but also happiness. Despite all the personal turbulence of her early years, days spent handling birds, guinea pigs, snakes and a mean-spirited chinchilla named Chilly were some of her most enjoyable ones.

During long staff meetings she’d excuse herself to dash downstairs to the basement vending machines. Repeatedly inserting a wrinkled dollar bill, she’d impose her will onto the electronic sensor until it caved. She’d get a Pop-Tart to crumble into small pieces for the birds, lest they think she’d abandoned them.

Guillermo would sometimes glance from his desk, watching as Paula spread crumbs. She could feel him watching. “Ella poulakia,” she’d murmur to them in Greek. How pathetic she looked. The whole staff found the devotion odd, yet glimpses of their boss’s loneliness were too raw to make fun of. Everything else was fair game—the bird-feeding, brilliant, dowdy director who had donned princess jewels and was obsessed with hair-straightening product. She’d given them a lot of material.

So far she’d frittered away the entire morning bird-watching, stalking and swatting flies instead of returning her e-mail. Then the Dean called.

“Paula. What the hell is up?” Christoff slowly enunciated each word. “For God sakes people are calling; they need to know if they’re presenting; you haven’t returned e-mails in weeks.” It was a mouthful and she heard him pausing to lick his lips, as they typically dried out during confrontation. “Is … everything all right … at home?”

It took her by surprise. She’d anticipated a collegial nudge but not a probing. There’d always been special warmth between them since it was twelve Junes ago in Christoff’s living room that she’d been introduced to Roger.

“Take the work home—get a bottle of wine,” Christoff instructed. “Go through the papers and decide. There you can smoke yourself to death.” Six months ago she’d have eaten her own entrails to avoid this conversation.

Funny how no one complained about smoking at department parties when everyone was drunk and puffing away, trading sly looks, being so clandestinely dangerous. Cool like Che Guevara. Paula had grown up to Eleni walking around, lips pursed, gripping a cigarette, farting as she explained how smoking helped her move her bowels. Vassili never
wasn’t
smoking. Even in the shower, an ashtray was balanced on the windowsill. He and Demos would have smoked as they delivered food had it been allowed. Paula would have bet a paycheck Alexandros had smoked as he’d checked for gas leaks. Smoking was their way to give life the finger.

Paula tugged on her dark bangs, a habit from childhood. Humidity was springing them into corkscrew coils. “Shit,” she sighed deeply. One thing was clear; though her work and home life were on the verge of collapse, they also threatened to grind on forever. The boss doesn’t walk away with grant money sprouting on trees. And with a third marriage you force yourself into acceptance.

Life was easier when she alone comprised the Center for Immigrant Studies. But after ten years of meteoric success, grant money pouring in, people begged her for a chance to hop onto the gravy train. The Center had taken on a life of its own; it had reared its quantitative wings and turned on her, confronting her like an alien creature out of her control. Her staff regarded her as an artifact—by their sighs, silences and expressions, she knew. And in the quiet, still moments she believed it, too.

And if the staff elbowed her aside she let them. For better or worse, Guillermo was the hungry one, the ascending boss. She felt it, knew it, and he was better at it anyway. Sometimes gaining footsteps in the stairwell prompted a glance over her shoulder, wondering if he would just as soon shove her down the stairs like some nut-job in late-night reruns of
Murder She Wrote.

Turning fifty last month hadn’t helped. She’d been unexpectedly rattled. Music from the Weather Channel made her tear up. While standing behind a broad-shouldered, heavily tattooed Polynesian-looking man in McDonald’s on her birthday she’d fought the urge to rest her head against his back. It looked so nice and comfortable.

But all hating aside, Guillermo
was
right. A delegator she wasn’t. He was the stronger one. She had neither the heart nor the backbone to tell her staff what to do. It seemed bossy and mean, and she’d gotten enough of that in childhood. And while Greece is long credited with being the Birthplace of Democracy, the Greek family couldn’t have been credited with its conception. She’d more “suggest” to the staff than issue directives. At first they were elated by their good fortune at getting the “cool boss.” But within weeks she’d get the stink-eye when asking them to do something that interfered with their coffee breaks.

Roger was stronger, too. So were the flies she couldn’t kill and the recurring plantar wart on the bottom of her heel for which she lacked the endurance to follow through with the directions on the package and tend to every night.

She smoothed back her hair and sighed. “Dendron,” Eleni likened her hair to the tree-like seaweed that washed ashore on their ancestral island within view of the Turkish coast. Her relatives had hopped from one tiny island to another only to then be stranded with eight million people between two rivers on the other side of the world. Such was her inspiration for creation of the Center—to gain understanding and perspective and maybe even to bridge the gap between grandparents who’d been shepherds on a remote island with no running water and a granddaughter with a Ph.D., who taught at a college, was married to
kseni
and lived in Manhattan.

Paula’s stylist had promised transmutation through a new hair-straightening product. But product isn’t alchemy. Not the miracle tears allegedly cried from an icon of Panayia, witnessed by an old widow living on the sun-bleached island of Kos, where some still hang out the bloody sheet after a wedding night. Paula wound back her hair and clipped it even though it exposed the gray roots. Damn, there were so many things to worry about. Her bangs had spiraled like bedsprings to her hairline; it looked like her grandmother’s 1920 immigrant passport photo.

Roger didn’t mind Paula’s hair. Curly, frizzy, straight, he didn’t care. Neither did he care if she was fat or thin or wore makeup. For months they’d avoided eye contact, and she wondered if he could pick her out of a police lineup. Sometimes comfort is born of neglect—a fine line between acceptance and not caring at all.

Roger was the strongest yet most fragile man she’d every known. He’d take a bullet for her yet wouldn’t move the piles of crap off his bed to clear space for her. Shoulder-high stacks of astro- and particle physics journals served as his foot- and headboards; piles of clothes draped over chairs to form haystacks. The closets were packed and rendered useless long before Paula’d arrived. Yet she’d doggedly believed that the magic of those first months of courtship (along with a Greek church wedding) had formed a sacred union. Her commitment was such that she’d never once doubted that someday one of them would bury the other.

Her first glimpse of Roger in Christoff’s living room years ago had left her thinking that he looked “humanoid.” His shiny pink head and sharp-ridged cheekbones made the skin look newly stretched—dewy, like he’d just stepped out of a pod where he’d been spawned. But, except for Heavenly and Tony, Roger was the only person with whom she didn’t have to fake a laugh.

She was enthralled by his electric blue eyes—alight from years of peering deep within the recesses of the universe, into the spaces between particles—and even more by how his penetrating gaze sought that which bound her together. From that first meeting on, his unusually intense stare made her knees relax and part ever so slightly. “The urge to merge,” he used to joke.

Roger’s eyes were framed by white eyebrows, those you’d expect to see on Santa. After they’d make love Paula would run a finger over one and then the other in wonderment at their silky fur. She’d marveled at the tenderness in her heart. This was the shard that pierced—that he cherished her in a way her parents hadn’t, in a way no one had. She’d kneel on the couch on the lookout for Roger after he phoned from his office at Columbia saying he was on his way. Like a joy-struck, besotted dog at the window, twitching with anticipation for the first signs of her master. Even the sounds of Roger rummaging upstairs at all hours of the night in his vampire way were comforting. It was a landing spot she’d fought long and hard to find. And while she was prepared to do battle to make this one work, little had Paula known that Roger would require full surrender and retreat.

And so it would be until the day she left for lunch and never came back.

*   *   *

The first time she stepped into the foyer of Roger’s brownstone she’d caught a whiff of musty basement odor. As Roger unlocked the door and stepped inside, he must have had second thoughts, and then turned, using his large frame to block Paula’s view.

“Hey—what are you doing?” She’d chuckled and turned it into a game by poking him where she knew he was ticklish. As he ducked and grabbed his sides, she glanced past his shoulder, eager to see what he didn’t want her to. The cardboard boxes.

“You moving?” It was an innocent enough question.

“No.”

She’d squinted in dim light to get a better look. “Looks like you are.”

“Ummm … I’m just reorganizing—ignore all of this,” he issued the disclaimer, and seemed edgy. She’d never seen him unsure or tense.

As her eyes adjusted to the darkness, she panned the foyer. There was a lot to ignore. Boxes piled several high, stacks of academic journals, some to the top of her head.

“Most of this was my parents’.”

Peeking around the corner, she spotted a pile of folded Oriental rugs stacked on top of a piano (she could see the legs) so high they grazed the white plaster ceiling medallion. It looked like a madman’s warehouse.

“I’m sorting,” he’d explained. “Cleaning—I hadn’t planned on company.”

She looked at him. The comment stung. She was on the verge of saying,
Hey, bucko,
you
invited
me
here,
but didn’t. A self-imposed gag order set into motion with a silent agreement.

“‘Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain,’” Roger deflected her with a joke. It worked; she laughed. “And don’t worry,” he said, looking deep into her with those eyes of his, “If we get married we’ll sort this all out and make it
our
place.” He’d lowered his face, his breath tickling her skin.

“Marriage?” she joked, play-shoving him back. She then stepped onto the tops of his boat-like shoes, facing him as he began walking her out the door. She’d slipped her arms around his neck and drew him closer. “Who said anything about marriage?”

And so she’d laughed along with her witty beau. Who keeps a tower of three-legged broken chairs, tangled and intertwined like a strand of DNA? A thick layer of frost-like dust like that doesn’t accumulate overnight? But like many women hopelessly mired in the throes of early hormonal love, Paula turned a deaf ear, instead hearing only refrains of “love will find a way” whirling about in her poor love-starved heart.

The next ten years played out so bizarrely that she couldn’t have explained it with a gun held to her head. One can only explain what they understand. It had been an out-of-the-blue-freak-thing-that-she’d-never-in-a-million-years-seen-coming. But what bride gets married thinking a cardboard box filled with two hundred can openers (saved just in case the one in the kitchen drawer breaks) would be more important than her?

Even after all these years she’d still bump into people who’d swear, “God, Paula, that wedding of yours was the most lovely, heartfelt one I’ve ever been to.” Then her heart would rush with hope. Their words were sincere enough, but chilling. As if the wicked fairy of Sleeping Beauty had been in attendance; perhaps Paula had pricked her finger on the spinning wheel. But she hadn’t felt a thing that afternoon and instead marveled at how she could be so lucky and that finally, finally, her time had come.

But like the fairy tale, it didn’t take long for Paula to sink into a silent sleep.

*   *   *

The cell phone buzzed in her black leather purse. “Fuck.” Paula turned away from the window, cigarette burned clear down to her knuckles. What now? She’d just started to unwind after Christoff’s warning. She looked back out the window, resting her forehead in her hand. Ignore it. Maybe it was Roger calling about the NSF grant. Even so, he wouldn’t call. He was too calculatingly cheap about wasting cell-phone minutes. “What’s the fuss? I’ll see you later,” he’d dismiss. “Go ahead; waste your minutes.” They’d always kept their money separate.

Thank God the phone finally stopped. She sighed and watched as birds gathered, chased each other, and then flew off. Did they ever lose their way? She watched one flapping its wings in a puddle next to the bench. Were they ever afraid of getting lost? Did they make friends? If they did, how did they ever find each other again in the vastness of the sky?

A voice from down on the sidewalk made her look. A middle-aged blond woman chatted and strolled arm in arm with a much taller man who was smiling shyly. How she liked men with shy smiles. Roger’s smile had been like that. The woman sported a yellow plastic tote bag she swung seemingly without a care in the world. What must their lives be like, the stuff nobody sees? Who would suspect how she and Roger lived?

Without thinking, she shoved up the double-hung window farther and switched elbows. Thick air collided with the bone-dry air-conditioned room. The din of street noise was calming, horns from everywhere blended into one long complaint. Bus exhaust and urine, aromas of week-old garbage in alleys across the street, rushed in like a humid belch.

Her desk phone rang and it startled her. No one ever called.