TWELFTH NIGHT by Kirstin Allio
The after-work crowd is clannish, naked dress shirts, bagpipe bellies. Liver heat in hearts and vessels, jackets passed back to the coat-check, tossed ties, a few featherweight v-neck sweaters. They all know the same jokes, and they all shake the bar peanuts like dice in loose fists before funneling them down their gullets.
Bartender! they call him. A G and T Sapphire!
Two Absolut martoonies!
He can take a drink order in each ear. Gin in one hand, vodka in the other – he’s ambidextrous.
Do you have any other bar tricks, Matthew Evans?
Who doesn’t have a duality inside him? Not to mention a rapt multitude.
Although in his headshots, he’s unassuming. Easy to guess he’s under six feet, just under forty. A casting agent once told him he was the only male in the Western hemisphere who didn’t suffer from height inflation. Who knows how it worked in Asia? His legs are boyishly loose in their sockets, his head is large and beautifully sculpted. His eyes are wise but also streetwise, knowing danger but not wanting to scare anybody, as if a human were trapped in the body of a shaman’s animal.
Unassuming, overall, but with a deep voice like a radio announcer, and a way of smiling sorrowfully behind the bar, averting his eyes when he says, What can I get you. He doesn’t pretend it’s a question. What balm in this world. You and I, he seems to be saying, are deserving because we know we’re undeserving. He’ll raise his glass of water.
He can practically make his rent on any given Thursday between 5 and 7:30. The after-work crowd tips as if they’re hiking their kilts to show off their equipment. Then there’s a lull – suddenly no one’s saddled to his stools or bridled to his counter, and he’ll stop for a moment to look out over that imaginary audience.
How did you get here, Matthew Evans?
How did he get here?
The way almost everybody he knows got to the city.
Youth.
That duplicitous desire of youth for self-knowledge and self-evasion.
His tone is intimate but the acoustics are terrific, to follow a girl, to lose himself, not any girl, his sister, Mary.
He’s a quick pour, the yeasty suds doesn’t faze him, he’ll even look away, abstracted, while the glass is filling. He’s good with the wines, he can pass off poetry without sounding affected, and even though he can pronounce Châteauneuf-du-Pape in almost one syllable, he would never boast of having traipsed all over Europe. He’s never been to Europe. He has a good ear. He’s been here. Waiting to be found or to find her.
What if she’s behind him – now? He’s on his way to work. He whips around on the sidewalk.
What if that’s her, ten people ahead in a line at the bookstore two days before Christmas? He gives up his place. The line fills in like water.
In his wallet he carries a poem his mother sent him not long after he left her for the city.
Sometime when you feel your going
Would leave an unfillable hole
Just follow this simple instruction
And see how it humbles your soul.
Take a bucket and fill it with water
Put your hand in up to the wrist
Pull it out and the hole remaining
Is a measure of how you’ll be missed.
He is the soda gun, the rocks, the twist, and the simple syrup. He has a long-standing unspoken policy that whoever stumps him with a drink drinks on him for the duration.
He himself is an Old Fashioned. At least a wearer of classic undershirts – Althea calls them Guinea tees – and pinstripe boxers. Know any jokes, Barman? she asks him.
His smile has a bit of auld lang syne in it, his humor is earned, but not burnished – A man walks into a bar, he answers.
Spread on the bar, his hands look like neat handwriting. Not his, he’s a sprawling lefty who endured reparative therapy to make him right again. A man walks into a bar, he echoes himself. Pauses.
So? prompts Althea.
He sends a rag out over the polished surface with a half-smile.
Althea looks at him so expectantly. What does he say?
Ouch, says Matthew.
It takes her a moment. Come on!
His face is not symmetrical, but expressive, as a mother’s face is to her child. No stranger to suffering, but absent self-pity. When he rests his hip against the bar and asks, sideways, What’s it like out there? Or, Plans for the weekend? people feel he could fill in, if they’re short on love, or friendship.
The restaurant is at the elbow of one of those Village alleys. He’s seen it through the last three incarnations. He’s probably the only living human who remembers, for instance, when it ran under the name Crescendo Café; then it was Parker’s. Then it was Demi-side. He can recall elegantly bored coat-check girls, German or Italian students from whom he still receives postcards, and he can bring to mind delicate, swaggering, Bangladeshi busboys, a tall, haughty Berber who lorded it over them. The season that cappuccinos first swept the nation (the nation being New York City), a neighborhood girl was hired to make the foam. It turned out she was the fourteen-year-old punk-rock daughter of a famous civil rights lawyer. Matthew was her beefeater.
There were cameo appearances: Shel Silverstein, dressed for Key West down to the white sandals. David and Joyce Dinkins. Olympia Dukakis with a queen’s bearing, looking exactly like she did in Moonstruck. The entire cast of Tony and Tina’s Wedding, along with the Turturro siblings – he should have had a Heineken delivery truck backed up to the delivery entrance. This was pre-Sopranos.
A slim homo with that strange homo combo of shyness and predation – I saw you from the street, the diffident hunter suggested.
But the passersby under peach-colored streetlights, the Jamaican lady with a hat made of bananas and flowers, even the gay pride parade (one year he saw Cyndi Lauper) was a continuous reel.
Yes, Matthew takes it seriously, the edict about staying in one spot in the forest. The commercial seasons change, but in the last well, almost two decades, Mary could have found him here almost any evening.
A table? A beverage?
He’s an actor, he admits, if pressed. Everyone looks for him – for the rest of their lives – in plays and movies.
* * *
Occasionally he runs with the before-work crowd along the river. He nods to the Statue of Liberty; his people came bundling over. Six in the morning and it looks like the water is hurrying in to shore. Little men race by, decoupled. A lanky banker and his feathered Golden Retriever. Matthew would stretch but he’s tired of being hit on. The truth is that Lady Liberty looks cut off, stranded out there on that island.
The color this morning – zinc. If someone told him it was a metal rendering of the Hudson he’d believe it. He turns his back on Liberty, the Twin Towers, the sediment layers of sunrise. His sweat is already drying, his muscles toughening. A disco ball breaks in a big bare tree and a thousand birds are loosed from the branches. The wind gusts them out over the water. A disheveled hawk perched in another tree. He and Mary always used to take the hawk’s side in the forest. Mary was going to be a soloist. She stood with her legs apart like a clothespin, her trumpet a gleaming proboscis.
The last time he saw her, as if this were the root cause, was the night before the high school band trip to the city.
Their mother charged them a quarter every time they took a soda from the refrigerator. Soda was the root cause of diabetes. Their insurance didn’t cover amputation, preached their mother. Their mother was a nurse, it didn’t scare them. She kept right on buying soda and they kept up with the quarters.
That was just some local color.
Mary’s drink was ginger ale. The night before she left with the band, Matthew saw her pluck a Christmas-green can without leaving a quarter.
Was she wearing her band uniform the next morning? Or just jeans and an oversized sweatshirt? Was she hiding her life savings and her toothbrush against her stomach?
Memory is like a silent movie. When he’s alone in his apartment, he puts music to it. The big band numbers she played by ear on her trumpet.
He feels as if he remembers everything. “Assaulted” is the cliché, which happens when he drinks, so he doesn’t. There were months of bake sales to raise money for the band trip, for instance. Rice Krispie Treats and cupcakes with Reese’s baked into their centers, study halls spent lettering banners in magic marker. Band members flipping pork pie hats, their noses too big for their faces.
People gave more to the drama club. Girls with raccoon eyeliner and pretty boys like Matthew in tight Brando t-shirts.
He remembers the stricken music teacher, Mr. Rothko, his wide hips and little round glasses, who lost his union card as a result of losing Mary. Five years until he was hired half-time by a parochial school – they heard – in North Dakota.
He told the detective they had different friends, he and his sister. Their mother was always on Mary about it. But their mother never suggested Matthew make friends with black people.
Here are his professional headshots, his truly sea-blue eyes, Can you play a gay guy, Mr. Evans?
His clothes are loose and baggy, he could be changing bodies underneath them.
You’d prefer to play a hero? says the acid young director. The straight Guy Friday? The coy and show-stealing butler?
Matthew doesn’t answer.
You think it’s a trick question?
In any case, thinks Matthew, he’s supposed to be a cipher, not a celebrity. He’s supposed to be Everyman. Everywhere, he sees Mary.
The foam of dark hair, liquid eyes, long legs, small body like a cricket. Chalky, old lady’s elbows.
Okay, headshots, but let’s play around for a minute. The photographer hands him a pair of suspenders.
Stretching them, clowning, he says in a passable brogue, I came after a girl called Mary. The photographer is a woman in a sack dress. He has the sense that it covers her face, too, with eye-holes.
Look at me like you’re looking at yourself in the mirror, says the photographer.
Matthew squints at the camera’s dark nozzle.
He used to think he’d run into her in a midtown lunch place.
The same kind of place a traveling high school band would take over. He used to imagine people turning from their companions or their coleslaw in slow motion, the atmospheric coffee, the ding of the bell in the kitchen when the food was up. (Working in restaurants you could never not hear that.)
Hey waitress-cleaning-your-nails-like-a-cat. Look up! He and Mary used to chase each other up trees like squirrels.
What did they say to each other when they played they were lost in the forest? Which was their main game, thinks Matthew, hours and hours at it.
You’re supposed to let the search party do the circling. You’re the tree. You are so much the tree that they pass right by you – even the dogs, all riled up, scatter-brained and twitching.
I came looking for my sister.
Here it is, the punch-line of female anatomy. One woman in a thousand has a double uterus. Maybe it’s a million. Their mother is twice the woman. Twice the trouble befalls her.
Woman duped by womb! Fifty cents to see the twins of different races!
In a small town on Long Island Linda Reilly boarded the train to the city. She had a notion to buy a Christmas coat, a coat for herself for Christmas.
Their mother, Linda Reilly. She was twenty-two, firm waist and swishy hair, teaching first grade, possessed by a desire for a coat that no other young lady was already wearing.
A magic coat. Cut from a flying carpet. Something she could wear with glass slippers.
She spent the morning window shopping among other window shoppers. Maybe her dream coat was not in season, maybe she was ahead of the times, maybe behind them. In any case she couldn’t find what she wanted. Footsore, finally, she wandered out of the Christmas crowds toward a lunch place. She sat down at the counter with one seat between her and a soldier she’d seen from the sidewalk.
Matthew has imagined the pheromonic convergence. Their mother tipping forward to order a coffee – she’d been hungry but now she wasn’t – the soldier catching her eye and saying, surprised and pleased: It’s good coffee.
It was clear that neither one of them had ever been to the lunch place.
He was on leave. What war? laughed Linda. He was stationed in Germany. He was coaxing his ma down from the tree of his disappearance. Linda laughed again – his way with words, his devotion to his mother. They moved from the counter to a table in the window. The afternoon hours – You’re a poet! said Linda – never touched the ground. In their world time was vanquished, they had left all battles behind, in their world the only way to be was in love.
They split a sandwich. He handed her one of the toothpicks with the tiny red flags on it. She spun it between her thumb and finger.
Hours and hours, but it seemed as if they each only said a single sentence. Their words to each other were that perfect.
No one bothered them. The thing Linda liked about the city was that there was no wrong time for anything. Lunch, coffee, talk to a black man.
The following Saturday he was already holding a table. Holding a table! You’re strong! She was lightheaded. Love was a concussion, or a corset. He said he wasn’t going back over. Never in his life had he said what he meant but with her there was no sense being guarded. The world was guarded against them. He glanced once around the lunch place and then eased her ginger hair over her shoulders.
Wasn’t hair supposed to be dead, like fingernails? But she could feel him with it. She closed her eyes and she could feel what he was feeling.
Linda Reilly turned twenty-three.
He was thirty. He was playing his trumpet on the weekends. He stopped saying much about what he was doing during the daylight hours when Linda herded and cajoled her first graders.
And then came the saddest part of the story, although Matthew doesn’t think their mother has ever owned up to it; so sad that he still cannot bring himself to flesh it out, fully imagine it. Blink and you’d miss it: A loss of heart? Just a stupid misunderstanding?
Linda had a marriage prospect. One of the sons of Evans Construction. She had known all the sons forever. They were getting all the contracts in Suffolk and Nassau counties.
Linda Reilly and Jim Evans were married.
Linda was pregnant. That-a-girl! said her father-in-law. Jim took a promotion from his father and traveled to Detroit to scout new equipment. Dozers and dumps, he told her. She should stay with his parents. Shouldn’t even take out the garbage, in her condition. Although at two months, she wasn’t showing.
Linda took the train to the city. She just wanted to sit in the lunch place. There were two pale spider plants in the window with their dozens of air babies. She wouldn’t have known how to find him, anyway. She just wanted to sit at the counter and pretend she was waiting. Pretend he would come up behind her, and as if to steal an extra moment, she’d see him in the big faux-gilt framed mirror a moment before he said, Linda.
Had he had the same thought exactly? On that fateful Saturday? It’s hard for Matthew to believe it. Matthew doesn’t think men are like that – telepathic, or, for that matter, sentimental. His own father, Jim Evans, sure isn’t.
She was pregnant.
The best birth control on the planet.
Their mother’s double body gave birth like the separate taps for hot and cold in the bathroom, only Mary was the color of the lashing gray ocean.
He remembers once standing in the doorway of their mother’s bedroom and overhearing her explain to Mary that her stretchmarks were like rope burn.
He knows the big Evans family, you can’t help knowing them in the town he’s from and all the towns around it. But he’s never come face to face with Jim, his father.
* * *
Mary hadn’t come home with the band, they’d waited through Christmas, they’d dragged the forest, even though she was last seen in New York City. Evans Construction had a plan for the forest, so the draggers had doubled as surveyors, and investors.
He couldn’t lie when the detective asked was his sister happy.
This honeysuckle is pulling the fence down! raged their mother. In the winter they could see the wood fence was buckled, the posts wrested from the ground.
But now she was just his mother, not Linda Reilly, or Linda Evans, with long ginger hair that could feel.
Look at this, Matt, she said. You can’t believe it. She scuffed at one of the honeysuckle stitches. She bent down to tug a tough end from the half-frozen earth. Like pulling a suture before the wound has healed. Earth came with it.
The trees come out in body bags after dark, after Christmas, and leave dark stains on the sidewalks. He gets home from work and the snow by the door of his building is two slain sentries.
He’s barefoot in his apartment. His feet are simple genius, like Shaker furniture.
His answering machine light is blinking.
Soon there were thousands of blinking lights in place of the forest.
If she wanted to she could find him.
There’s a mrawling from the yard below and Matthew goes to the back window of his apartment. A girl in his building lets her tomcat spend the night fighting. He’s hurried past her without looking up on several occasions. He doesn’t want to be the resident curmudgeon, but the tom sprays, and the old brick is a sponge. The whole building smells like the girl’s hit-man tomcat.
He presses the answering machine button and it’s Althea. He certainly never imagined himself with an Althea, but it’s a great name. It adds character not just to her but to everything. Her voice is too loud against the bare floors of his apartment. He may be too old for her but she seems to like the idea of the old-fashioned barman, as if time were monotheistic.
He likes how they met, how she got up and carried her plate over to the bar, like the bar was Matthew’s provenance. A world-weary busboy had followed with her napkin. She told Matthew he reminded her of a certain sensitive actor whose name she could never remember.
Her martini glass had a meniscus and dry sides when he placed it before her, but she couldn’t get it to her lips without spilling. He was swiping with a bar mop before she even finished her swallow. She said, Oh. She paused. I like that. They smiled unarmed at each other for a moment.
Gin, vodka, vodka, gin, vodka . . . the pattern of total orders favors vodka.
It’s three-thirty in the morning. He returns Althea’s call. Her out-going message to the world: Do I know you?
It becomes her. Matthew always has the urge to leave his message in some audition accent. It’s what she wants, isn’t it? Do I know you? It’s Althea’s way of taking control of the fact that she lives among seven million strangers.
How would he describe her? First of all, California. It fits that she’s a little bit heavy, but sleek like a porpoise. She’s half Danish, with a glossy bob the color of redwood. Thanksgiving he drove to California to meet her stepmother, who is her only extant family. She talks like she killed them off, it’s a cover for her sadness. She took him to a park where he had the opportunity to drive his car through the giant, up-ended cross-section of a redwood. Redwoods are the dinosaurs of the tree world, read the sign, your contribution can help prevent their extinction. Matthew stuck a five-dollar bill in the varnished wood coffin.
Instead of flying back separately, Althea drove with him cross-country. She talked a lot about her childhood. He listened. Doing something toward love is better than doing nothing.
She scoured their lives for people they might have in common. At first he thought it was her way of getting to know him, sweet and quirky. But then she seemed almost desperate about it, and superstitious. As if it were coincidence itself that would bless their union. As if without coincidence Matthew would be a perennial stranger.
After twenty-six years on the planet she didn’t want to start all over. He had laughed at her. Twenty-six! But she wanted them to be “old souls” together. New souls, said Althea, were ungainly – even monstrous – in their innocence.
Alright, she had said flatly, after several weeks of coming up with nothing. We’re starting a new lineage. She wasn’t pleased about it.
She stages her apartment with candles as fat as tree stumps, strings of Christmas lights. There are equal parts light and shadow, like a theater. She’s an events coordinator. She cooks carelessly, but happily, and she doesn’t believe in cleaning up till the next morning. When they’re finished she sidles close to him on the sofa with her photo albums. She has that after-dinner effect on him: he’ll do anything. He’ll listen to her dreams, he’ll look at her photos. She tips her head at him.
I love your profile, Evans. She’s trying out different names for him.
He’s seen baby pictures and summer car camping. He’s seen fifth grade Disneyland and sixth grade Yosemite. He’s seen her parents’ funerals. He’s said the right things, or close enough, and he can’t really argue with her compulsion to remember.
Tonight we have Althea Takes New York, says Althea.
There’s the trusty Pathfinder that got her across the country, there she is in her road-worn University of Colorado sweatpants. And no, for the record, Matthew knows absolutely no one from Colorado, a one-airport state, he’s pretty sure; he’d be hard pressed to name the capital city, or the airport.
She weights his arm across her shoulders like a beanbag door-snake. Those things that keep the drafts out.
Here she is with her coworkers at a restaurant, red-eye like tail lights, she points people out to him, and Ah, he says, when he recognizes someone they’ve talked about. She does a puppy wriggle.
He feels lulled by his single glass of wine – he’s taken a chance – the flickering candles. He senses, gratefully, that Althea might even be getting tired. He could stay or he could go home tonight; he’s grateful, too, to be at the point in the relationship where either is acceptable. Close to love, maybe, but savoring the approach a little longer.
There’s a series of snapshots that chronicles a trip to the supermarket. Althea laughs, she almost forgot they did that, she and Deirdre. Here’s a shot looking up the long legs of Sixth Avenue, here’s the D’Agostino’s. Althea’s college roommate – that’s Deirdre – is visiting and they’re making a documentary.
You know, after college? You feel like why isn’t my trip to the supermarket some witty art film? Wittgenstein? Was he the filmmaker?
Let’s see if you can guess what we’re having for dinner from the pictures, says Althea. Matthew dutifully takes the photo album onto his lap for closer inspection. Individual pictures of all the ingredients, like supporting actors.
Meatloaf? says Matthew.
Althea has large, still eyes, and it occurs to him that she abuses her loneliness. Matthew turns the page. As if her loneliness were a starving dog she kept chained in the basement. But now she’s following her pictorial history avidly. There’s a shot of the check-out girl, a coffee-and-cream-colored sixteen-year-old: She’s examining the credit card, the strip must be scratched, she’s going to have to punch in all those numbers. Her dark hair is glazed into a ponytail. Weird, thinks Matthew, to have a picture of a stranger in your photo album. Almost creepy. He feels sorry for the girl at the check-out. He can read her gold script necklace: Marisa. Another frame: Marisa hands back the credit card. Her face is shockingly open. Has she seen the camera? Matthew thinks he will go home tonight. Whenever, in fact, he can smoothly exit.
Finally, Althea and Deirdre are leaving D’Agostino’s, but Jesus, it’s really too fetish for Matthew. They’re posing, tourists in front of a monument, a monument to themselves, they’ve asked a stranger to click, each girl with two plastic grocery bags cinched in each fist, like egg sacs, their heads inclined toward each other. They look an awful lot alike, actually – how had he missed that fact that they’re dressed identically? Jeans, boots, black t-shirts with glittery stripes horizontal across their stocky torsos.
Now the camera looks straight at the exit. All that weird rubber around the automatic folding doors, like the soft black muzzle of a horse, thinks Matthew.
He turns the page. There’s one last picture. The camera has caught someone entering as Althea and Deirdre exit. Matthew doesn’t even have to look closely. He doesn’t have to change his position on the sofa. I came looking for my sister. He is looking straight into the twin brown eyes of his sister Mary.
* * *
What if it weren’t true? The coffee, the counter, Linda Reilly and the black soldier. It had never occurred to Matthew that Mary wasn’t proof of love, and proof of its loss. But if it weren’t true – their mother’s love affair, the lunch place – then there was another story. An infinity of possible stories. Last night, uncountable baby spiders had hatched on the ceiling of Matthew’s shower. Is he supposed to pretend they’re not there and just turn on the water?
An old guy orders a Bob Dandy.
Just to humor him, Matthew scratches his head, wonders aloud, Now what goes into that one?
He looks off into the distance. He’s campy at heart. He’s playing a part – always.
Naw, Matthew says quietly. It was my dad’s drink.
He makes everyone feel connected.
Althea wants to try what’s left in the shaker. In the squares of her pupils Matthew finds his own reflections. Are you listening? demands Althea.
She’s wearing a vintage tweed suit the color of a Tootsie Roll. A fox collar. The skirt is short enough to show her chubby knees, she might have taken the hem up. The cropped jacket is tight across the bust: in fact she looks gorgeous, thinks Matthew.
He pours out the shaker in a wine glass. A beautiful redwood, for Althea.
I have a proposition, says Althea.
She makes these little games up.
You, darling, are to disguise yourself.
She winks at Bob Dandy.
It’s extremely simple.
She explains that she has one shot to go up to the right person on the subway platform. If she doesn’t recognize him, Matthew is to board the train without her.
There it is – she invites her loneliness, invents his betrayal.
Bob Dandy politely requests a cherry. Sir, he says, self-conscious in Althea’s presence. Matthew passes him a bread plate of maraschino cherries, probably ten, like crimson, waxen olives. He thinks, it can’t be a costume that looks like a costume.
Althea is watching him intently. He catches her at it and she flashes him a smile.
Too obvious to dress like a woman. In any case, Althea will probably be looking for him to be a woman. He hasn’t told her about Mary – neither his sister’s existence, nor the fact that she has a cameo in Althea’s photo album. Althea would claim it turned her on, if he dressed like a woman.
I’m good for his acting, says Althea.
No mustache, sunglasses. No boom-box or attaché case. If he were a type, she could say, and read into it like some ten-dollar astrologist, A Wall Street lawyer! Well then what are you doing behind a bar, loser?
Recognition is an aphrodisiac, Althea is saying. I guess I’ll take one of those, since you’re mixing them, Barman.
Just once, in almost two decades, he went up to the wrong person. Night, starry lights in the black fountain in the gleaming plaza of Lincoln Center. He’d sat through a jazz concert. The trumpet was a grotesque white man – heavy, stunted, little piggish eyes and a low forehead.
A skinny girl in a cap was standing with her back to him before the fountain. She wore black leggings and motorcycle boots, one of those bomber jackets from a show. As he got closer, he saw the embroidered “Alvin Ailey.” So, a dancer. Of course! His heart skipped like a record, fast-forwarded like a cassette tape – he forced himself to slow down, he had to be sure it was Mary.
It was as if he were looking inside himself to recognize her.
Mary!
She turned around.
His first impression was that there was no face at all. His own face must have showed his horror for the girl threw up the hood underneath her company jacket and strode off toward the busy lights and traffic of Broadway.
Their agreement was that Althea would say his name when she found him. Hide-and-seek among human disguises.
Matthew. She had to commit herself. When she said his name the game was over. No testing: Do you have the time? while doing a preliminary once-over. If she got it wrong, Matthew would get on the next train, without indication. God, that was depressing. That was the dark and bully side of Althea.
They had decided on West Fourth Street. As he dropped underground he could hear ungainly violin music, someone bowing “Für Elise” for quarters: an out-of-tune music box, the same phrase over and over. It occurred to Matthew that Althea had commissioned the musician in order to create some kind of heightened experience. An event. Her métier, she called it. Matthew made his way down the platform. He wore hefty tan Carhartts, big blond boots, a hard-hat. His t-shirt was dirty. In fact he could see in his mind’s eye the Evans Construction logo. No tool belt, though, or mini cooler.
If only a splash of spare change would shut the busker up instead of fortify him. As Matthew got closer he saw that the violinist was a young man with Down syndrome. Matthew placed a dollar in the butterflied violin case and immediately regretted it. The manchild had to stop playing, reach down and secure his money. When he started up again, it was to serenade Matthew.
He waited. He wondered if anyone noticed he let the trains come and go without him. Wasn’t Für Elise for the piano? When he finally saw Althea on the stairs, it was nearly an hour later than the time they’d agreed on. He might have been annoyed but there was something in her careful walk that stopped him. It occurred to him that she was giving him time to get here. He felt almost sick imagining her anticipation.
He ambled toward her. The idea wasn’t to hide, certainly. He saw that her eyes were red and her face was bulgy from crying. Something had clearly happened. This wasn’t in the script. Should he be the one to break the spell, cut, as it were, the bullshit? Because that was what it was, and he couldn’t believe he was down here in a glorified sewer hoping to be recognized by heart in metaphorical darkness. Jesus. You couldn’t choreograph coincidence. It was a cheap fairy tale, coincidence; not the logic of destiny. Why hadn’t he seen that?
Just as he was going to say her name she moved purposefully toward an old lady seated on a bench underneath the staircase. The crone had a gauzy purple kerchief over her head and beads falling through her fingers.
Two props; plus hospital shoes, and a face like an aerial view of the wrinkled Rocky Mountains. Her state, Colorado. A black woman, come on, how did Althea think he could achieve that? He wasn’t an actor with a staff of make-up artists.
Just like they’d agreed, Althea spoke. Matthew?
The old lady didn’t even look up from her counting. So accustomed to crazies, crazy herself, talking to God, Matthew allowed for it. He watched Althea wait for him to emerge from the costume. At least her face looked a little less blotchy. He watched her wonder if he was prolonging the suspense, masterfully.
Then – and this part did seem choreographed, even destined – headlamp first, a train swam up out of the darkness. It mated with the platform, and Matthew took one sideways step onto it. Althea didn’t even have time to look around, make other guesses.
He didn’t call her. She didn’t call him, either. It seemed like she should have called because it was her game, and finally, he felt used by it. Days went by, then a week. She didn’t show up at the restaurant; he never saw her pass by outside on the sidewalk.
He had slipped the picture of Mary entering D’Agostino’s out of the plastic pocket of Althea’s photo album. He couldn’t quite shake the feeling of having jinxed Althea’s experiment. He carried the picture around with him in one book or another – it didn’t fit in his wallet. He took it out a dozen times over the course of an evening, held it below the lip of the bar, his own backstage. He took it out on the subway home again.
In fact, any sense he had of her, Mary, disappeared when he looked too closely. When he looked too closely she was any (as white people said) half-black 37-year-old woman with molasses brown eyes and a cosmopolitan Afro. She could be an extra. Just a look of: What am I going to pick up for supper?
* * *
The first week of April Matthew is walking across town, west to east, from the restaurant. He has a part in a graduate student production of Twelfth Night. Which part? Of course, Sebastian. The long-lost brother. Twelfth Night – he’s reading it for the first time – takes a lot of stories to make up one story. Like anything in nature, a close-up of a flower, bubbles in a bottled soda, skin at the cellular level.
Something he’s never done – he’s taking off work for evening rehearsals. Of course he’s not getting paid, but the truth is he’s not a starving artist, he’s a rather flush bartender. Tonight’s rehearsal is going to be practically under the FDR trusses. There’s a strip of park along the river, the graduate student director assured him, but Matthew wants to lay eyes on it before the rehearsal.
The restaurant isn’t open till noon, but he had a cup of coffee with the kitchen (Angelo, the best of them, scrambled a couple of eggs for him), and finished the wine inventory. Strange not to come in tonight. He tries not to read into it. It could be the beginning of something or it could be – nothing. He takes comfort from the fact that Angelo doesn’t really care: just so long as his salad prep or his dishwasher doesn’t play hooky. Bartender? Just another white guy, says Angelo good-naturedly.
He passes a small park he’s never noticed. Is there a chance he’s never actually walked this city block, never chosen this stretch above all others? Since when did he presume to have covered every single block in the city? For some reason he thinks he certainly has no business here; he couldn’t explain himself.
The park is elevated, like a stage, although obscured by scaly sycamores. Probably built on a heap of 19th-century garbage, “urban renewal.” There are five or six steps leading up to the iron gate, and it seems to Matthew that there’s something slightly off about it. A movie crew somewhere? Strange light, like an inverted halo.
Is it a park within a park, for instance? He laughs at himself. Too much Shakespeare.
A single person is sitting on a bench eating a sandwich. Slight and girlish, with a sympathetic tip to her balletic neck, thin-as-shell shoulders. Her dark hair is combed and twisted with a big plastic clip from the hairdresser’s. Fat pigeons nod and coo around her.
She seems at once misplaced, and familiar. Before he thinks it through, Matthew starts toward her.
It takes him only an instant to realize.
He watches her look up and do the same double take. But there’s nothing now except to complete the approach, they’re the only two people – as if they’re the only two people in the entire city. This scene is going to be a real clunker, thinks Matthew. Reluctantly, she places her bread roll on its waxed paper and stands to meet him. They have given themselves away, and now they mirror each other’s disappointment.
Is it Tanya? says Matthew, as generously as he can muster. She nods, mildly annoyed, only mildly curious. She gestures up towards one of the flat-faced office buildings that rise around the park.
This is where I work, says Tanya.
There are a few leggy rosebushes with a few yellow leaves that have hung on through the whole winter. The sycamores in a row are especially drab: the pigeons of the tree world. The undersides of their leaves are peltish. The confetti of green that’s sprinkled elsewhere (April) – well, this forgotten park is in a canyon of cold skyscrapers.
Up close, her eyes are wet, glittery. Her front teeth poke out like a rabbit’s. He thinks they are a great distance from the apartment building where they are both tenants.
If you don’t mind, says Tanya, waving apologetically at her sandwich.
Sure, says Matthew. It comes out as if he were a petulant god disappointed in his own creation. She sits back down on the bench and takes a half-hearted bite. She’s probably the kind of woman who hates to be watched while she’s eating.
Could he even claim they have an acquaintanceship? He knows she’s single, like he is, and with undue ire he realizes suddenly that she flaunts it by keeping that tomcat with dark circles under his eyes who hunts all night in the basement. Takes his brawls out to the back garden. Matthew’s apartment, too, smells of rank, skulky tomcat. Had he caught himself quicker, he would never, of course, have crossed the park to greet Tanya Varga.
Girlish – more – there’s something childish about her. She’s younger than he is, to start with. Even younger than Althea? Clear skin, a non-drinker. Overly devoted to nephews and nieces. She has cheap rings on every single one of her fingers: gold-plate, rhinestone. A tiny, frayed piece of deli turkey on her dress front. On her breast, actually. Someone could find something erotic about it, but not Matthew.
I’m sorry about that cat, says Tanya.
Matthew raises an eyebrow.
My old roommate finally came and got him.
I didn’t know you had a cat, says Matthew stubbornly.
Oh, says Tanya, relieved, her plentiful mouth relaxing into a smile. I thought all the neighbors hated me.
Her eyes are actually kind of flashy. Green? If she were his type, she’d be beautiful. Now what does that mean? Well, the marine-blue twin-set, the stockings that come in a plastic egg from the drugstore (his mother wore them) . . . How pathetic, really, about the tomcat. Living in fear of her neighbors.
He laughs rather fraternally. Saying he never hated her is not the point. Embarrassingly not the point, he tells himself. But what is the replacement point? He feels suddenly muddled.
He says, See you back at the ranch, Tanya.
Okay, she says, gamely.
He walks away. Of course, now he’ll probably run into her on a daily basis. He walks uptown for a while, in some consternation. Beautiful – if he were another man – Jesus. That was the way he used to feel about Mary. Is that why he aspires to be an actor? If he weren’t Matthew?
He remembers their mother winding up, slamming a magazine against the table. Do you two ever enjoy a moment of silence? Be quiet, oh please be quiet! Their mother sank to her knees before them. It had shocked them and they were quiet. Then their mother got on with cooking dinner. And he remembers their mother saying to him in private, Now Matt, you’ll look out for her at school, won’t you?
And then, No one should have to apologize just for being a girl, said their mother tightly.
She was capable though, Mary, toting her trumpet between the buildings in the middle school complex. When he told her – bragging, to get her attention – that their mother had charged him with her protection, Mary had shut him off with the hard angle of her shoulder.
Matthew glances around him. He’s overshot his cross-street. How did that happen? And he doesn’t have the book he was carrying. The book he left his apartment with this morning, left the restaurant with, in which he’d slid the picture of Mary. His heart races. He forces himself to stop and open his backpack. He knows it’s not going to be there, and it’s not. That park? He turns around and starts jogging.
This time the park is empty – of books and of people.
A small wind comes up and the sycamores take it in their empty branches. Matthew can remember, suddenly, clearly, how he set his book down on this rim of cement, this half-wall (he touches it), as he was talking to Tanya.
The next day, she’s spitting mail from her mailbox into the trash can when Matthew enters their building. She looks up from her sorting. Hi, Hi, they overlap each other.
No love letters? says Matthew.
Oh they’re breaking down my door, says Tanya.
Right. Matthew laughs in spite of himself. Of course she’s the desperate-for-a-husband type of twenty-five-year-old.
Her hair is down – she looks even younger. Fine dark hair, cinnamon where the sun’s touched it. You didn’t by chance – they’ve spoken in perfect unison. They look at each other in astonishment.
You didn’t – she starts, and he accidentally interrupts her – Did you – . She holds up her hand. Her enormous pie eyes are laughing. Pie eyes! What their mother used to call Mary’s. A book? she manages.
Matthew doesn’t dare speak. He nods. She has a big knotty shoulder-bag and she reaches into it and produces his book. He doesn’t dare page through it for the picture. In private. But now – he’s not sure if he can move past her. He’s not sure that if he starts she won’t start too, simultaneous. He bunches forward. He opens the inner door of the entryway. Holds it open. Are you coming or going? he manages.
He hadn’t noticed: blue eye shadow and braces on her teeth like the metal from a single, unfolded paperclip. Is she going to that geometric hull that rises above a dingy little park with flaking sycamores? It’s Saturday. But he works, later. On other days, does she have to eat her sandwich standing up because a bum has bedded down on her park bench? He’s sort of sweating. Or is she heading upstairs, like he is, to her one-man show, excuse me, one-woman? He’s still holding the door for her, if she wants it.
She says, Oh. Go ahead. I’ll be a minute.
Alright, he tucks his tail for his own benefit, playacting, as if he were this hopeful pup, in love, like the guys he faces every night on his barstools.
He skips stairs on the way up to his apartment. What’s that? Something under the door, a folded piece of notebook paper. His own heart hammering? He puts his hand on his heart, this is crazy. What’s going on here? It’s from Tanya. It must be. It’s the love letter he just teased her about. He’s certain of it. He snatches the paper up and jabs it in his inside pocket. He bounds back down the stairs to the entry-way of their building.
She’s already halfway down the block, past the useless shoe repair shop, past the payphone with the phone always dangling out of its holster, clattering around the pole soldered into the sidewalk.
Tanya! he calls, starting after her. He has to run to catch up to her. She stops and turns toward him. Her eyes are lit up with the new greens and browns and yellows.
He holds out the folded paper.
What is it? says Tanya.
Her eyes are shining.
It’s a love story, and he knows the ending. Still, he unfolds the paper. If he could take his eyes off her he’d read it.
Kirstin Allio is the author of the short story collection Clothed, Female Figure (Dzanc Books, 2016) and a novel, Garner (Coffee House Press, 2005). Her stories have appeared in AGNI, The Southern Review, Seneca Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, and The O. Henry Prize Stories 2010.