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EMBERS
She found him a few steps up the street with wet hair from the beginning rain. He was wearing a dark raincoat.
“Why did you leave the party?” she asked.
“Felt like I was disturbing them. They only talked about themselves and the parts of themselves they see in others and how they can use what they see. All under the black coat of friendship. A knife in every pocket.”
“Maybe you’re right,” she said. “You didn’t say goodbye when you left. But I didn’t, either. I wanted to follow you.”
“They’ll understand. And talk about it at the next party.”
Pilgrim looked at her and saw the injustice of memory. They lost track of one another a long time ago. He knew her way home ran in a different direction than his; he knew, too, why she was walking beside him now. The rain washed her hair. There was no umbrella between them and they walked close to one another at the side of the street. Streaks of darkness on the pavement. Tales from the past.
“I don’t know why they invited me,” he said.
“I told them about you. I haven’t forgotten anything.”
“Neither of us has.”
She smiled, and it was more than he could have expected. Then he found her smile again in the puddles where her contours swam. They were four with their shadows thrown by street lights, porch lights. Moving close. Away again.
She, a little shorter, slid her hand into the V of his arm, leaned her head against his shoulder. Her hair was moist against his cheek and he remembered. At his building, they stopped and turned their faces up to his second floor windows, dark, reflecting nothing. Would she come up with him? She did.
He entered first and turned on a light. The luggage for his journey waited along a wall. She sat in a chair and faced the window, and her eyes found shadows behind the neighbor’s curtain. Rain poured down the window, and he brought two glasses of wine. Umbrellas floated along on the night street below.
“What do the faces under the umbrellas look like?” she asked.
“Shaped.”
“Shaped? By what?”
“By anything. Everything. The years. Wishes. Dreams. Letters written on personalities. Ciphers.”
“Can you read them?”
“If they let me. Sometimes they hide behind their clothes.”
“Do you hide something?” she asked.
He didn’t answer. They sipped their wine at the same time and noticed the moment. Rain beat heavier against the glass. She touched her hair, aware of herself and him, then rubbed her damp fingertips together and thought.
“More rain coming down,” she said. And waited.
“You want a towel?”
“No, no towel,” she said. “I feel good.”
The light went on in the apartment across the street. A shadow sat down behind the window and a curtain. The light went off, replaced by flickering blue. The shadow sat in the winking darkness, watching moving TV pictures. Repetition without end, broken only by the round voices of pitch men. Calculated salvation between heroic quarter-hours, everything for sale. A world in small measures. Integers.
“I know what you want,” Pilgrim said.
“It was never easy being with you. So secure about yourself. You could have crushed me.”
“But you were with me,” he said, and took the last sip from his wine.
“Was it so long ago? When I saw you tonight, I thought you were there because of me.”
“Doesn’t matter how much time has passed. Anymore, everyone and everything begins with once-upon-a-time. It’s good like this. Nothing new out of old parts. The past is closing.”
His mind loitered around the thought of old parts. First meetings. Scaling one another. Pieces of shared language, spoken and unspoken. The meetings increased. The language became more personal, the sentences tender. Love came, settled in. It took time, more time than usual. Months passed before their bodies threw shadows on the wall beside the bed. A picture hung there. Rocks and meadows and a river running through. Then, the scent of her skin. He pulled her closer and was at home in her recesses. Later, they lay awake in their warmth, looked at the white ceiling and saw different pictures. He remembered every detail, the perfect slant of absent light. Even now, there was only light between them, and the past. It ended as fall was beginning.
Pilgrim stood and poured another glass of wine. The last one tonight. The drinking wasn’t easy and he’d had enough. In the end, they had hurt one another. In the beginning, the light was too bright, Pilgrim thought, and he looked at her back while she watched the images of rain and the neighbor. Old feelings, some wounds still open, lingering wasted. She was known to him, familiar, and he could talk to her like a friend. His only shame in life was repetition.
“I still have all your letters,” she said.
“Throw them away,” he told her.
“I won’t. I’ll re-read them one time. Someday.”
“You never wrote,” he said, and sat down.
“Maybe I will, from now on.”
“And go back? I won’t follow you there.”
She looked at the luggage along the wall.
“You’re already packed?”
He nodded.
“I think I’m always a voyager. With stops in-between.”
Behind the curtain of the next apartment, the blue flicker died. The silhouette of a man pulled the curtain to one side and opened the window’s wings. He stood there for a minute, and Pilgrim saw a glowing point rise to the top of the silhouette, glow deeper, then fall slowly in a half arc of orange motion.
Pilgrim remembered one of his old apartments. It was in front of a prison circled with fence that kept in the prisoners, who sat on the windowsills looking out at what looked like freedom. The men and women were kept on separate floors, and they sat on their barred ledges in the evenings when sleep eluded them. There, too, little glowing points. Sometimes, someone played guitar, and once in a while, voices escaped through holes in the fence.
Even here, prisons of our own, Pilgrim thought. The freedom in his luggage? No. Not this.
The butt of the neighbor’s cigarette fell, the cherry leading the red tumble down the length of the building to the sidewalk, where it sprayed sparks then drowned in the rain. The shadow closed the window wings and curtains. The blue flicker died an instant death in the black window frame. Prisons. Comfortable.
Pilgrim turned his head. She was still sitting there, turning the wine glass in her hands.
copyright 1998
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