Heart of the City (34 page)

After they exchanged names, he asked, “Are you Dutch?”

She laughed. They had left the exhibit and were padding along the balcony overlooking the Great Hall.

“No, I was born in Riga.”

An embarrassing gap in his knowledge. “That’s in, right, somewhere, what, Baltic—”

“Latvia. And you?” She stopped by the railing. Below, a man was pushing a broom across the vast marble floor.

“I was raised Jewish, by way of Jamaica Estates, but I’m not sure what I believe in anymore,” he said. “What about you? What do you believe in?”

“Photosynthesis,” she said.

MANY OF Mara’s would-be suitors had started in with flattery or personal questions, and they typically got nowhere. This guy, this Bob, was different. As they moved through the exhibit, he focused not on her but on the art. He gave her room to speak, to observe. He gave her a safe distance from which to size up his intelligence, his way of seeing. They walked down the grand staircase into the Great Hall, where a guard was making a sweeping motion toward the front door. “Closing time, folks,” he said. “Exit here, please.”

Outside, a light snow was falling.

“Would you like some coffee?” he said.

“Oh, well, no. No, thank you.”

“It’s gotten cold these last few days.”

“Yes.”

They walked in an awkward silence down the steps, the sounds of the city muffled under thickening snow. On Fifth Avenue, they gazed up at the museum, its columns and arches looking in the failing light like some ancient cathedral.

“These snowflakes are big enough to crawl under,” Mara said, feeling suddenly self-conscious. She had rebuffed his invitation. Yet here she was still talking to him. Why?

Bob looked up, smiling. Mara watched a dime-sized flake make a soft landing on his eyelash. He blinked it away, with a slapstick expression that somehow reminded her of Harpo Marx.

“Yes,” she said.

“Yes to what?”

“To beating the cold. Coffee would be nice.”

AT THE L&H Bakery, a café on Second Avenue that resembled some old babushka’s kitchen, they found a corner table.

“What do you think?” Bob said, gesturing at the Eastern European matrons at the counter kibitzing over bowls of goulash.

“Intimations of Edward Hopper,” Mara said.

“A cross between
Nighthawks
and, let’s say, Isaac Bashevis Singer. It’s why I love it.”

Mara told Bob that she’d studied at Brown with John Hawkes, the postmodern novelist, and had written for magazines but that her parents had never encouraged her. When she went to San Francisco for a couple of years after graduation, they sent her articles about rapes and murders. They warned that she would turn into a hippie and wind up in a ditch. “Mara’s run away,” they told their friends, as if they’d washed their hands of her. She had come to New York nine years ago, in 1966, in hopes of finding herself.

“I would have liked to run away,” Bob said, “but never got farther than the Upper East Side. Do you still talk to them?”

“My mom calls sometimes, but only to offer what she sees as solutions,” Mara said.

“To what?”

“To the chagrin my unmarried state causes her.”

“Well, my goodness, what did she propose?”

“More lipstick, of course. And a permanent. The last time we spoke, there was even, as I recall, a quite generous offer to buy me a wig.”

Bob shook his head. “How mothers suffer for their children.”

“How children suffer for their mothers.”

“Maybe, but I think there’s a certain elegance to your mother’s
Weltanschauung
. We waste all this money and time searching our souls. But what if the answer to loneliness really
were
a new tube of lipstick?”

“And yet it’s not anyone’s loneliness that bothers her.” Mara, who had been gazing into her empty coffee cup, looked up, blinking, as if shaken from a dream. This talk of her parents had lasted too long. She reached behind her neck and drew her tresses over her shoulder and down one side of her chest, as if this new alignment were a kind of set change. “Bob, how do you know so much about art? Are you a graduate student?”

“Is it the stubble or the clothes?”

“I ask seriously, Mr. Funny.”

He told her he had been studying philosophy at Columbia, but had lost his conviction. He wanted to leave more of a mark in the world. He had done some acting off Broadway. He was working on a play. He had interviewed writers and artists as the host of a local-access TV show. His dream, though, was to write fiction. It was one of the reasons he was in psychoanalysis; to write about the human condition, he felt, he had to first understand his own psyche.

“That’s interesting,” Mara said. “Because you seem to me like a man of action.”

“I feel lost in a sea of indecision.”

On the street, the snow was coming down in droopy pin-wheels. Bob helped her into her coat and wanted more than anything to kiss her. He wanted to sanctify their chance meeting, to seal it. But something restrained him. When she spun around, her arms now fully through her sleeves, he reached only for her hands. She had not yet put on her gloves, and when their fingertips touched, he could feel a slight roughness. Her fingers, he sensed, had not spent the day on a manicure table or in a pot of cold cream.

“I like your hands,” he said.

“You do?” She turned up her palms as if searching for something she hadn’t noticed before. “Why?”

“They’re the hands of someone who makes things.”

They parted in opposite directions, toward apartments five blocks apart. The snow was falling harder now, hooding the streetlamps in white lace.

BOB HAD recently started work at an education institute at Columbia, but with just three days until Christmas, nobody felt like working. While his co-workers bantered about their holiday
plans, Bob brooded. He was shuffling papers on his desk one moment, pacing the back hall the next.

“Stop working so hard, Bob,” one of his office mates said. “You’ll make the rest of us look bad.”

“Just trying to solve a puzzle.”

“Right on, brother. Feel like talking about it?”

“No.”

He had to see Mara again. She was a rare thing: brainy, eccentric, beautiful. He knew how easy it would be to lose her. He had won her over for a few hours. But women like her weren’t wanting for charming men. One false step, he feared, and she’d vanish, just as she had after he’d first spoken to her, perhaps a little too abruptly, at the Met. He bent his head into his hands, and plowed his fingers through his hair.

On the subway ride home, he read a review of a new French film—
Where There’s Smoke
—playing at the Cinema Studio. It was directed by André Cayatte, a New Wave filmmaker who had made a splash a decade earlier with a pair of films—told from the dueling viewpoints of a husband and wife—called
Anatomy of a Marriage
.

The Cinema Studio had a reputation for arty, intellectual films. Bob tore out the review and smiled.

MARA WAS in her apartment that afternoon, waiting for her clothes at the Laundromat across the street to dry, when the phone rang. It was Bob. A new film was playing, across from Lincoln Center, in about a half hour. He knew it was ridiculously late notice. Would she join him?

Mara was on the sidewalk outside her building a minute later, hailing a cab. She found him at the entrance. Gone were the ratty jeans, saddle shoes, and crewneck sweater. Today he was in a tweed blazer, corduroy pants, a scarf, and polished boots. His hair was combed back in a debonair wave. And he had shaved.

She stood with her hands on her hips and gave him a once-over. “You’re reborn.”

“Frye boots. Just picked them up.”

“I wouldn’t have guessed you were a clothes horse.”

“My outfit yesterday wasn’t, well, representative.”

“But what if I liked yesterday’s representation?”

“Then you’re welcome to pluck it, at your own risk, from the laundry.” Which reminded Mara that in her rush to meet him, she’d forgotten all about hers.

A HALF hour after the opening credits, Bob’s heart sank. The film was a dud. An overcooked police procedural about a corrupt mayor’s race in a Paris suburb. With bad subtitles. He dreaded the moment the lights came up. His face would betray his sense of failure. Then, in the film’s second hour, something happened. A suspect named Jacques hurled himself out a window. There was a quick cut to one of his frustrated pursuers. The subtitle that flashed on the screen said, “Jacques defenestrated!”

Bob found himself quaking with laughter. At almost the same time, he heard a squeal from Mara: she was almost doubled over in her seat. They made eye contact, and that made them laugh more. It was a moment of knowing—and seeing—that each would remember for a long time.