The apartment I share
with Erica is three tiny rooms in Boston's South End. It never
gets completely quiet and it never gets completely dark, so there is no
danger of tripping on the open backpacks sprawled on the bedroom floor
at five in the morning. On the desk sit piles of books: The Chicago
Manual of Style, The New Roget’s Thesaurus—those are
mine; A History of Graphic Design and The Elements of
Typography are Erica’s. The iMac casts its shadow on a photograph
of the two of us at the top of Mt. Katahdin. Our plane tickets are also
there, right under our house keys so we can’t forget them. When I was
living in London I constantly missed train departures. Now I check
tickets and times compulsively. JFK to Heathrow, departing 7:30 PM
today, arriving 7:30 AM tomorrow. Check in two hours in advance. One
carry-on per person please.
For as long as I’ve
known her—nearly two and a half years—Erica has wanted to go to
England with me. She’s never been. I always said, “Sure, we’ll go
some time.”
But one day she pushed
the Boston Globe across the table at breakfast. It was
folded open to an airline ad in the front section. I thought she was
going to comment on the design, which was, as even I could see,
unimaginative. “God, can you believe how cheap these are?” she said.
“Tim, we have to go.”
“Sure,” I said,
scanning the page and returning to the article I was reading about the
death of a Mexican Nobel laureate in literature. “We’ll go sometime.”
“You’re afraid,”
she said. “Why are you afraid?” She held my gaze until I had to
answer her. She does that. She does it so well that sometimes I don’t
realize it until after I’ve spoken.
I started to say, I’m
not afraid, but I stopped. Instead I said, “I don’t know.”
She called me at work
later. I’m the assistant editor at a literary magazine. Most of my
phone calls are from authors, or Erica. She said, “Can you get off
work the last week of May?” She is not usually impulsive. She saves
her acts of whimsy for very special occasions.
So we’re going.
Tomorrow. We’re going to London and anywhere else on the island that
strikes us. Erica never did the backpacking thing in school—she spent
her summers at internships like a good career-minded student should—so
she wants to “go rough.” I tease her about it and she laughs. She’s
read too many budget travel books. She doesn’t really want to go
rough. She just wants to carry a big backpack and travel without an
itinerary. We won’t be staying in hostels; they only have single beds
and you have to share your room with strangers. And I keep having to
remind her to pack less. She’s afraid she’ll run afoul of the
European fashion police.
“They have clothing
stores over there, too, you know,” I told her. She threw a pair of
jeans at me. But somehow I know that most of what is in her bag is going
to end up in mine by the end of the trip, just like I always have to
finish her meals at restaurants.
I climb over the
backpacks to the futon bed and lie on my side, facing her. It’s always
too warm in here; she’s tossed the sheet off and is on her back, with
one hand under the pillow and the other across her stomach. Sometimes I’m
glad that she sleeps so soundly. She won’t wake up to see me watching
her.
Erica never sleeps in the
nude. She says her breasts get too cold, even in our overheated
apartment. She has dozens of little cotton camisoles and matching
panties. The ones she’s wearing tonight are a color she calls
cinnamon. As she sleeps, the harsh light coming around the window shade
makes her skin pale and her hair so blond it’s nearly white against
the dark blue pillowcase. I can’t see her freckles tonight, but I can
see that her eyes are moving beneath her lids. I also know that Erica
sleeps too deeply to remember her dreams.
I lie back and picture
London, while it’s still 3,000 miles away and ten years in the past.
***
It was the summer of
1993. In London it stayed light until ten o’clock and the pubs
closed at eleven. A pint of Guinness cost a pound and it flowed from the
tap like oil.
At 11:30 on a Thursday
night in July, my best friend Liesel and I were loitering outside the
door of the flat she shared with her cousin, the gay drag queen. His
flat mate had suddenly had an urge to move to Paris, conveniently enough
just a few weeks before Liesel showed up. So here she was living with a
drag queen in a newly renovated building right on the Charing Cross
Road, while I was exiled out in Shepherd’s Bush in a house with three
other Americans.
Back then in London, IRA
bomb threats were almost as regular as the British Rail schedule,
unemployment was high, tourism was low, squatters would take your flat
if you left it unattended for two weeks, and John Major was the favorite
target of every English person we knew. The second favorite was Margaret
Thatcher. And Americans who had just graduated from college lived and
ate and drank and fell in love there. They paid less rent than they
would have paid at home but they earned less, too, and dreaded going
home to face their student loans.
I had met Liesel only a
month before, at a pub in Soho. She’d been drinking beer with her
American friends and I’d been drinking beer with my American friends,
and they turned out to be the same friends. It was hot and dry, for
England anyway, and we were all at a table on the sidewalk. Cigarette
smoke and ABBA floated through the pub’s front door.
“Hey, Tim,” one of
them said to me, “Liesel here’s from Boston too.” From the suburbs
really, both of us, two suburbs away from each other. After the pub
closed, Liesel and I went to the Old Compton Café, which was (and I
assume still is) open all night. We talked about politics and literature
and art and the best restaurants back home. As I walked her back to her
flat in the sunrise, I could not believe I had met her just before dark.
Liesel had actually been
named after the girl in The Sound of Music, and it did not suit
her at all. She always spoke quietly, as if she were sharing secrets,
but what she said was uncensored. She was tall and thin, with long hair
dyed unnaturally red. She had a habit of standing with one foot crossed
in front of the other, and she’d sort of sway, standing like that. She
seemed to belong in London, much more than any of the rest of us did.
She moved through the crowded streets like she’d lived there all her
life, so much so that tourists would stop her to ask for directions.
After that first
inseparable week, we reached our agreement. Well, she reached it, and I
had no choice but to agree. “Tim,” she said to me at a table outside
a pastry shop in Leicester Square, where we were drinking horrible
English espresso, “we’re just going to be friends, right? That’s
all you expect out of this, right?”
I had to look away from
her for a second, and I didn’t like it. I should have known this was
coming, but I hadn’t.
Liesel had a boyfriend, a
German she had been dating since her junior year abroad in Freiburg. His
name was Matthias. When she graduated, she was supposed to go back to
Freiburg but had somehow ended up in London instead. As far as I was
concerned, if you blew off your boyfriend when you were supposed to move
in with him, that was a pretty sure sign the relationship was over. “We’re
reevaluating our relationship,” she’d said. I didn’t know what
that meant and I didn’t know how to ask. I just knew that Matthias was
in Germany and Liesel was here with me.
“Uh,” I answered,
still pretty sure she’d change her mind after we spent more time
together, “Yeah. Yeah, of course, we’re just friends.” She smiled
and kissed me on the cheek. Kissing on the cheek was safe. Hugging at
the door, holding hands in the line at the Hare Krishna restaurant where
the all-you-could-eat buffet got less expensive as the hours ticked
toward dark, walking with our arms around each other in Kew Gardens,
watching television at her place with my head in her lap—those were
all safe.
Now, on her front step on
another hot London night, she stood with her back against the door and
smiled up at me. We both had to work in the morning—she as a
receptionist at a law office in the City, I folding khakis at the Gap in
High Street Kensington—but neither one of us seemed to want to go
home.
Liesel was wearing a
black tank top and a long black wrap skirt she had bought on Carnaby
Street the past weekend. She was a compulsive shopper but she never
shopped at the Gap. A hot, sooty wind blew her hair around her face in
waves. On the other side of the street, bouncers monitored the noisy
queue outside a nightclub called The Vault. Down a side street was LaRue’s,
the bar where her cousin the drag queen spent most of his time.
“So,” she said, “we
meet up with Colin and Noah and Christine tomorrow night at World’s
End in Camden, and then on Saturday we’re going to Canterbury for the
night.”
I had spent my junior
year in Canterbury, and we were going to visit my friends there. I was
excited about introducing her to them and a bit nervous that we’d miss
our train, because that was what I did. But tonight I was having trouble
paying attention to practicalities. Liesel had gotten some sun from
sitting by the river on her lunch hour, and her new clothes fit her
perfectly, the skirt skimming her hips. And she had not mentioned
Matthias in weeks. Two weeks.
I thought of the way she
looked at me, her lips parted slightly with just the faintest hint of a
smile. I always wanted to know what that expression meant, but I never
asked. I wondered, too, what would happen if I kissed her. Sure, we had
agreed to be just friends, but what if we were really meant to be
together? How often do you meet someone and immediately feel like you’ve
known her forever? If you’re sure that person will always be a part of
your life, then how can one kiss be wrong—German boyfriend or not?
Even if it turned out to be a mistake, I could never lose her, could I?
I bent my head down
quickly and touched my lips to hers, ran my tongue along her mouth. I
could feel her breath hot on my cheek and it was perfect. She was
perfect. How could this be wrong? I wondered. Of course it isn’t—
Liesel pushed me away,
her hands strong against my chest. That faint smile was gone.
“Liesel...” I
started.
“What the hell did you
do that for?”
“I don’t...I don’t
know. Because it felt right. Because I love you.”
“I love you too but we
had an agreement, remember?”
“I think I want to
alter our agreement,” I said.
“Well,” she said, “you
can’t. And anyway you’ve just ruined everything.” She shoved me
away once more and pulled her keys out of her bag. Her skirt rustled
when she moved. As she turned the key in the lock I thought, This can’t
be happening.
“Liesel, wait. Let me
come upstairs with you so we can talk.”
“No,” she said. “There’s
nothing to talk about.” She didn’t even look at me as she closed the
door.
I stood there on the
doorstep until I saw the light go on in her bedroom window on the third
floor. I saw her hand pull the heavy wool drapes shut. I leaned my head
against the door. I rang the bell. No response.
Finally I turned and
walked the short block to the underground at Tottenham Court Road. There
were eight stops on the Central Line to Shepherd’s Bush, each one
taking me further from her.
In the morning, I told
myself, I would call her at work, and it would be okay. I’d tell her I
was sorry, and ask her to forget tonight and just go back to being
friends. We would see each other the next night in Camden, and then we’d
go to Canterbury at the weekend. It would be okay because it had to be,
because I just knew I was going to have her in my life forever. I
actually thought that.
In our flat, Colin was
the only one still awake. He was lying on the floor, his head propped up
on a pillow he’d swiped from my bed. On the television a talking head
was talking about the ghosts in Balmoral Castle. Then Colin aimed the
remote and a woman with dark sunglasses was describing travel bargains
in Crete. Next was the midnight news. They had four channels in England
and Colin needed to surf all four of them at fifteen-second intervals.
Balmoral ghosts. Travel bargains in Crete. Midnight news.
I flopped down on the
sofa. All of our furniture had come with the house and all seemed to
predate the Second World War. A spring jabbed me in the back. Colin
twisted his head around to look at me, then turned back to the ghosts at
Balmoral.
“I kissed her,” I
said.
“Who? Liesel? You kiss
her all the time.”
“No, I mean I really
kissed her.”
Colin went through all
four channels three times. Ghosts, Crete, new—four times. Then he
said, “Fuck, Tim. You’re an idiot.”
I did not need Colin to
tell me that. I climbed the stairs to my room and threw a book—John
Stow’s Survey of London, the 1912 edition, which I had
found in one of the used bookstores in Cecil Court—against the back of
the door. Then I lay on my stomach on the bed and stared out the window
until I fell asleep.
After work the next day
Liesel and I argued at a pub near her flat. We went there because we
knew it would be deserted at least until nine. We didn’t go to Camden
to meet our friends.
“I trusted you, Tim,”
she said.
“I’m sorry,” I
said.
The pub, as predicted,
was nearly empty. There were a dozen or so other patrons, but it would
be full by the end of the night. We were in a booth made of some dark
wood, with red velvet seats and red velvet wallpaper that looked like
they’d come from a brothel.
“I thought you
understood,” Liesel said.
“Understood what?”
“I don’t want to have
to think. I thought I didn’t have to think with you.”
“You don’t have to
think. Just do what makes you happy.”
“It’s not that
simple,” she said, shaking her head as if she were speaking to a slow
child. “I have a boyfriend, you know.”
“Liesel,” I said,
trying to sound rational, “Matthias doesn’t make you happy. He makes
you nervous. Why else would you have ended up here instead of Freiburg?”
She clinked a fingernail
against her pint glass. “I told you. I don’t want to think.”
Someone was smoking a
cigar. It was beginning to make me feel sick. “Are you happy when you’re
with me?”
She turned away. She
studied the red velvet wall. “That’s different,” she said.
“It’s not different.”
“It is.”
I wanted to bang my head
on the table. “Tell me why,” I said. “Tell me what makes it
different.”
She sat up straighter,
leaning slightly to the end of the booth, as if she might run. I had
never seen her like that before. Liesel wasn’t afraid of anything, and
suddenly she was afraid of me. “It’s different because it was always
easy with you,” she said. “But you’ve gone and made it
complicated.”
Relationships were
supposed to be complicated. Weren’t they?
“Is it simple with
Matthias?” I asked.
She shook her head again
and slouched back in the seat. “I don’t want to talk about Matthias,”
she said. I had to lean forward to hear her.
I laughed. It was absurd,
this whole conversation was absurd. She was not hearing me. She did not
want to hear me. Why was this so difficult? Why couldn’t she see? We
spent three hours on one beer and one topic.
Liesel left for Germany a
few weeks later. She said she was done reevaluating.
We exchanged a few
letters. Liesel was back with Matthias and I was still in London
throwing back pints with the same Americans every night. Eventually I
decided that it was ridiculous that most of my friends in London weren’t
British, and I started drinking with my coworkers at the Gap a few
nights a week. On the weekends I went to Canterbury. My friends from
university never did meet Liesel.
Colin, my former
housemate, still sees Christine, who still hears from Liesel. Liesel
married Matthias. There’s a baby girl called Elsa, and there may be
another one by now. Colin’s not sure. He thinks Liesel is teaching
English at the Goethe Institute. Her husband is writing his
dissertation. Neither Colin nor I can remember what Matthias was
studying.
I could find out very
easily, I know. I know where Liesel’s parents live. I drove by the
house many times when I first came home, after my visa ran out. I kept
hoping I’d see her sitting on the lawn, drinking beer. Even now, I
could stop by the house the next time Erica and I visit my parents. I
could call and ask Liesel’s parents for her phone number in Germany. I
could send a letter and ask them to forward it. I could ask Christine
for Liesel’s address. I could just say, “Hey, I wanted to see how
you were.”
I am not going to do any
of these things.
***
Erica rolls away from me,
onto her side and curls her knees up toward her chest. It’s morning;
the light coming in the window is no longer artificial. I glance at the
clock. The alarm will go off in twenty minutes. I wrap an arm around her
waist and pull her close, burying my nose in her hair. It’s soft and
still smells faintly of her Origins perfume.
Erica knows about Liesel.
She knows that I wonder sometimes whether I chased The One away. Erica
has a way of making me tell her things. I think sometimes that that
annoys me. I mentally hit myself on the head with a big stick for
letting words slip out. But when I’m honest with myself, I can admit
that I like it. I can’t say why.
I
asked Erica once if she were jealous of Liesel. She said, “What is
there to be jealous about?” Still, maybe this trip is so important to
her because she thinks it will exorcise my ghosts—ghosts that are, by
extension, also hers.
The alarm goes off at
nine, one last luxury before our trip. On weekdays we usually set the
alarm for seven. Neither of us likes mornings very much. Sometimes I
work at home with the manuscript of a book review or an essay. On those
days I try to get up with Erica so we can eat breakfast together. If I’m
awake enough I make her pancakes, with the blueberry syrup her parents
bring us from Maine. She loves that. She always leans over the table and
kisses me, sticky blueberry kisses.
Erica is accustomed to
the alarm; it wakes her immediately. I’ve always been impressed by
this talent of hers. The radio is playing a song we both like, an omen,
I think. She stretches. She rolls onto her back, facing me, and my arm
falls across her ribs. She squints open her eyes and blinks. She smiles.
“England,” she says. “Tomorrow morning we’ll be in England.”
She threads her fingers through mine and pulls my hand back and forth.
“Rain. Beer. Trafalgar Square. Castles. Cathedrals. That noodle
restaurant you always talk about.”
“Wagamama,” I tell
her.
“The place with the
long lines.”
“That’s the one. And
they’re not lines, they’re queues.”
“Queue,” she says
slowly, rolling the word over her tongue. “Bickeys. Crisps. Zed.
Roundabouts. Cheers.” We both laugh. “Will you buy me a Big Ben key
chain?”
“I’ll buy you three
Big Ben key chains.”
“For all those other
homes we have?” She lets both of our hands rest by her shoulder. “Are
you ready?” she asks.
“I can’t wait.”
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