Eight million people in the city of New York, what could the numerical offs possibly be of running into the one person you've told you'll be out of town? But it was Sunday afternoon, on the Fifth Avenue bus, right by the Metropolitan, when someone brushed her on his way toward the back door and paused there, his breath just behind her ear.
"Westchester, huh?" he said, his voice cold as chrome, and she didn't even have a chance to turn around before she potted that telltale seersucker jacket mounting the steps of the Museum of Art.
Without thinking, she yanked on the signal cord, hollered "Getting off!" and plowed her way to the back door. She dashed up the museum steps and grabbed at the sleeve of Edwin's jacket. He turned, calm as only a nonnative New Yorker could be, and faced her on a landing halfway up the imposing bank of steps that served to weed out the faint of heart and bar the cardiovascularly unfit from access to the world's great art. She was at a loss for words. Any excuse would be paltry and disingenuous. She took silence of be a sign of nothing less than death, and couldn't bear it. "I just... I mean... I'm--"
Edwin interrupted. "That was rude of me, " he said. "Not to mention juvenile. I apologize."
"What?"
"I said I was sorry for--"
She cut him off this time. "You're apologizing to me? You can't apologize to me. You've been nothing but perfectly nice and I lie, and then get caught like a kid in the cookie jar..."
* * *
That evening they ate Indian food beneath billowing purple tapestries at a little place on Sixth Street where the curry was so hot she had gulped her own glass of water in one breath and then moved on to Edwin's, which he had pushed insistently toward her without a word. They went to Little Italy the next weekend, and for drinks one evening after work in a tiny brownstone yard turned garden bistro. They strolled the Bronx Botanical Garden, and prowled Greenwich Village, Edwin's architectural guide in hand, and when they stopped for hot dogs on a bench beside a playground, he read to her descriptions of Gothic facades and flying buttresses that sounded, through his Midwestern appreciation and awe, as much as poetry as any verse she'd ever heard.
It was her apartment they'd retire to at the end of an evening since his roommate, a law student at NYU, seemed never to venture out of doors, and though Edwin almost never stayed the night at hers (he worked early in the morning, and as the firm's underling lawyer, he liked to be fresh when he arrived at the office), he almost always stayed until she was just on the edge of sleep, when he would kiss her softly, gather his clothes, and dress in the dark before he let himself out, pulling the door silently shut behind him.
He was not, in any way, a man she would have imagined for herself. He was four years her junior, for god's sake, and he'd never even known a Jew before her, let alone kissed one. He still limped a bit from his injury, and though he wasn't short--five eight, the same height as she was--he certainly wasn't tall. He had fair and honest good looks but lacked even an ounce of the dark mystery, furtive heart, or swarthy sophistication that she had clambered after for most of her adult life. But there was a point at which one tired of clambering, and she wondered if maybe she was reaching hers. A point when you stopped looking for Eden and set down your bags right where you were just to have the weight off your back. And maybe you stopped and built yourself a little house then, not because you'd found paradise but because the land was fertile, the view pleasant, the water clear and cold. When Loralee asked her for details of the clean-cut and exceedingly polite young man she often encountered late at night in the lobby of their apartment building, he on his way out, she on her way in, panty hose tucked in her purse, all she could manage to say on Edwin's behalf was, "I don't know, Loralee. He's not a shit," disbelieving her own words as she spoke them, as though she'd always understood shittiness to be an intrinsic male characteristic, as essential to attraction as musk.
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