from my thoughts. It was the law of conservation of energy, not to mention the abhorrence of a vacuum, since I’d followed every lead and come up empty. I’d just surrendered my last hope—surrendered it gladly, like a coat I’d always felt too warm inside of—when I saw you buying cheese in Union Square.
You wore a blood-colored parka trimmed with platinum fur, like some sort of Inuit heiress, and held a duck-shaped wicker basket in your fists. It was cold for October, below freezing already, and the breath left your body in tiny, immaculate puffs. You strolled from the cheese stand to a pickle stand to a stand that seemed to sell nothing but napkins. It was too much to take, hitting me like that without the slightest warning, and I had to sit down on the nearest bench. At one point you looked up abruptly, as though you’d heard some alarm, and I hid behind my mittens like a child.
Some manifestations of beauty are period-specific, expressive of the age that nurtures them; others seem to exist outside of history, warping each successive moment as they pass. Yours was the second kind of beauty, Mrs. Haven—at least in Union Square that day, at least to me. I managed to convince myself that I was waiting for an opening, a pretext of some kind; in fact I just stared, stuck to my bench like a barnacle, while you filled that ridiculous basket. It seemed cruel, as I watched you, that anyone should be privileged with such power, and it still seems unjust—though I’ve learned that the injustice cuts both ways. It sucks all moderation from the world.
From Union Square you went south, taking more deliberate steps than you had at the market, your hood pulled tightly down against the chill. As I shadowed you along University Place toward Washington Square, often close enough to catch you by the sleeve, sobriety slowly returned. What the hell was I doing tailing you across lower Manhattan, skulking from store-front to storefront, sizing you up like an aspiring sex offender? What was keeping me from calling out your name?
You continued downtown, moving more listlessly with each block, like a windup toy whose spring was losing tension. You began to stop at the slightest pretense: a fall clearance sale, a sun-bleached Calvin Klein ad, an octopus drawn on the sidewalk in chalk. A man approached you on Twelfth Street, breaking into a halfhearted routine about the loss of his asthma inhaler, and you heard him out in silence, asked a few polite questions, then handed him a fifty-dollar bill. Wherever you were going, Mrs. Haven, you weren’t in any hurry to get there.
At Tenth and University you hung a grudging right—you were dragging your feet comically now, like a cat on a leash—then stopped before a brownstone the same color as your coat. A siren sounded somewhere in the distance. The city had never seemed so ominous to me, or so strangely becalmed. The only other person in sight—a heavyset, gender-nonspecific individual with an armful of comics in bright Mylar baggies—had stopped walking as well, as though the siren were some citywide alarm. I looked from the back of your head toward the comics collector, who stared brazenly back. It was a woman, I decided, though I couldn’t have said how I knew. I was beginning to think she’d been tailing you—or possibly even me—when she crossed the street toward you, mumbled a perfunctory greeting, and climbed the stoop of the brownstone next door.
I began to move again now, convinced retreat was impossible, though it was clear you were lost to the world. The blinds gave a jerk in your neighbor’s front window: for better or for worse, we had an audience. You set the basket down between your boots—you were slightly pigeon-toed, I noticed—then bent over and took out a fat winter pear. It was impossibly green against your scarlet sleeves, illuminated as if from within, a Technicolor piece of Martian fruit.
You buffed it in your palms and took a bite.
All at once the light started flickering, making everything tremble, as though the sun had turned into a film projector. I let out a strangled gasp that seemed to make no sound. We were on camera, the two of us: we were trapped in some forgotten silent picture. In the next shot you’d look back at me and scream.
Months later, I would finally come up with an explanation for this on-camera feeling, and for the faintness and paralysis it brought. It was the sensation—the physical sensation—of time passing: a kind of chronologic wind. Certain people—my grandfather, for example, or my aunts, or the members of your husband’s cult—might have had this feeling on a daily basis; as for me, Mrs. Haven, I’ve felt it exactly three times. And each time I’ve felt that wind, no matter how desperately I fought, it’s knocked me down.
A truck pulled up across the street—VAN GOGH MOVERS : A “CUT” ABOVE THE REST—and the spell was finally broken. Another day, I told myself, would almost certainly be better. I needed time to prepare, to review what I’d learned, to make sure that you would see me at my best. I turned back toward University.
“Walter?”
Your voice was so serene, so devoid of surprise, that I could only conclude that men followed you home all the time.
“Is that you, Mrs. Haven? I didn’t recognize you in that—in that hoodie you’re wearing.”
“I’ve caught you red-handed, haven’t I?”
“Mrs. Haven, if you’ll just—”
“You were going to walk by without saying hello!”
I squinted at you for a moment, my mouth still half-open, attempting to parse your expression. “I wasn’t sure you’d want me to say hello,” I said carefully. “I behaved like a perfect ass the night we met.”
“Like a perfect ass,” you repeated. You glanced over your shoulder. “I’ll confess something to you, Mr. Tompkins. Do you mind?”
I shook my head.
“I’d had a sidecar or six at that godawful party, and I’ve been trying to figure out which of my memories of that night I could trust. Sidecars tend to make me see little green men.” You nodded to yourself. “But I guess that part of it was true enough.”
“Which part?”
“That you look like you’re twenty and talk like you’re sixty.”
“I’ve been told that before, Mrs. Haven. Apparently I’m prematurely aged.”
You smiled at that. “If you say so, Mr. Tompkins.”
Neither of us said anything for a moment.
“Well! It’s been a pleasure running into you, Mrs. Haven. If you’ll kindly—”
“Don’t run away like a girl,” you said, catching me by the sleeve. “There’s something I want you to see.”
I struggled to assemble an appropriate response as you steered me roughly down a flight of steps. It didn’t occur to me to wonder why we were entering your brownstone through the basement until I knocked my head against the lintel.
“Are you all right out there, Walter?”
“Extremely all right! Never better.” I thought of Van and his sailor friend butting foreheads and felt what I can only describe as a rush of nausea and nostalgia combined. Naustalgea, I thought, pleased with myself in a far-off sort of way. Red-and-purple globules danced before my eyes.
“Come on in, Mr. Tompkins! Don’t dawdle!”
Apart from a defeated-looking beanbag and a tidy pile of junk mail by the window, the room I stepped into held nothing at all. There were clues, if one looked closely, that the apartment had once been inhabited: shadows on the parquet where carpets had lain, ghosts of vanished pictures on the walls, scattered stacks of vintage 45s. You sat on the floor and began flipping through them.
“Have you ever listened to the One-Way Streets, Walter? I’m betting you haven’t. I’ll play them for you if I can find the single. There should still be a turntable somewhere. Would you look?”
The bedroom at the back was the barest of all. I crossed its freshly waxed floor to a window that faced a high wall of bamboo. Its sill was as sterile as everything else, but I found a cocktail napkin (Bemmelmans Bar at The Carlyle) wedged between the window and the frame, with a scribbled note along its inner fold.