Antwone called Mary.
In the end, it was a pleasant call. But he felt a little ridiculous over the phone because he was searching for his words. There were some dead beats on his part, but Mary subtly filled them with ease. She had always known how to talk to him, how to give him the space to talk back…
He remembered that she was always interested to hear what other people had to say, even people who had nothing worthwhile to say or who simply said stupid things. Already as a young girl she’d show patience with things that especially unnerved him. He used to joke about that, about how she had more patience than a fisherman.
“When people talk is because they secretly want something” he had told her once. “So why damn listen to them?”
“The time spent listening to people,” she had replied, “is the time spent turning what they say or don’t say into knowledge and understanding.”
Mary had always known better than him… Maybe that’s why she hadn’t been the first to reach out by phone call after all. She had always known better.
On the phone, she told him she was currently home, working on her computer, doing some research and drinking Baileys to cheer up and keep at it.
Marc wasn’t home; he was meeting new potential clients that evening. They had anticipated landing a project the other day but complications about budget had arisen and the project was now indefinitely stalled and she was trying her best not to get too depressed about it and think positive. She told him she actually needed to free the line; Marc was supposed to call her up soon, some important business information he needed to collect from her. Antwone voiced his sympathy to their predicament as a way to end the call. But then she suggested he could come over to her place if he wasn’t doing anything. If he couldn’t, she was glad he had called. She told him it meant the world that he had called.
Antwone went to visit her. She and Marc owned an apartment in Baldwin Village, somewhere off of South Bronson Avenue. It was a single-story garden home enclosed by a little wrought-iron fence. She had a pet dog, a beagle. She’d named it Spooky.
She served Antwone a drink and they settled in the living room. There were nice upholstered chairs, and a circular bright rug over which rested a low, glass tabletop. There were also framed pictures of Mary and Marc strewn about and an archtop guitar was leaning against a piece of furniture.
“It’s Marc’s,” Mary said. “He likes to fool around with it. It’s a hobby.”
Saying this, she got herself a cigarette and wedged it between her lips. She caught Antwone’s fleeting reaction.
“Hope that doesn’t bother you,” she said.
“No,” Antwone said. “I’ve just been trying to quit.”
“Me too,” she said smiling, as if finding that commonality between them at the start would make the conversation easier going forward. “I don’t have enough will, I guess. To quit, I mean.”
Antwone gave a dandy nod. She looked at him. “How long has it been now since your last smoke?”
“I don’t know. A couple days … almost a week.”
“Is it hard to go without?”
“Sometimes I still get the itch; but it passes eventually.”
She put out the cigarette and turned her face away to blow out the smoke of her last pull. The smoke clouded over then dissipated in front of her face. It made her look prettier swimming in it. With her head still turned sideways, her gaze seemed vacant, as if she had gone somewhere far away, as if she had forgotten about Antwone being there, seated right across from her.
“Did Marc call?” Antwone said to bring her back.
“Yes he did,” she said. “Right after you, he did. He’s hopeful that something substantial will come out of tonight’s dinner.”
“How long has the company been in business?”
“A little over one year,” she said. “We had a false start in Atlanta a few years back. Had to declare bankruptcy to recoup our initial capital. Then we figured we could move out here and start over. But things aren’t quite working out.”
“Look if you need money––”
“—Oh please,” she said. “We’re not in the red or anything. We still have some money saved. But thanks.”
“Well, I just thought I’d shoot it out.”
She poured more Baileys for herself and offered more to Antwone. But he declined. He had barely touched his glass.
“So you’re staying in that three-star hotel?” she asked him.
“Yeah,” Antwone said. “I actually set up house there. It has a beautiful, beautiful view.”
“Oh. So you like living in hotel rooms?
“Well, I’d go somewhere else except I don’t have any other place to stay,” he said. “I have an apartment in New York. And the hotel thing is just a phase. It’s my queer ritual. I travel around and stay at hotels when I have a book underway. It helps me with the writing.”
“Can’t hardly keep a relationship healthy living like that.”
“I’ll admit it’s not ideal.”
“Is it right to assume that you have someone?”
The answer came after a few seconds of genuine introspection.
“Yes, I’m seeing someone,” Antwone admitted. To her and to himself.
“How does she take it? The hotel-living and the moving around?”
He shrugged. “How would you take it?” he countered.
She had her glass tilted to her mouth now. She wouldn’t speak with the glass up there. And she took forever to put it down.
“If I was in love,” she finally said. “I think I’d understand.”
Self consciously, she rubbed her neck. Her long, muscle-toned neck that had a natural bend about it.
“But being in love is easy, Antwone,” Mary went on. “Staying in love is the tricky part.”
“A trick I have yet to learn,” Antwone said.
“It’s not easy for anyone,” she said, finishing her self-applied massage. She seemed less tense afterward and picked at an invisible speck of dust on the outer side of her right thigh. Her legs were crossed and she was wearing roll-cuff shorts which covered her thighs only about halfway down. She looked lovely in them.
“And Marc?” Antwone suddenly asked.
“What about Marc?”
“Do you love him?”
“I wouldn’t be married to him if I didn’t.”
“But you don’t want a family; you said so.”
“And so what?” she said.
“Is he okay with that?”
“Why wouldn’t he be?”
“Because he strikes me like someone who would want kids and barbecues on Sundays and who would be good at that type of life.”
“You sound a little sour, Antwone,” she said, slightly leaning forward. “And I don’t like that.”
“This was a bad idea,” Antwone said, flopping against the back of the chair.
“What was a bad idea?”
She looked at him across the table.
“This––” Antwone said with a hand gesture. “Me ringing you up; showing up here.”
“Why?”
“You know damn well why.” He stood up from the chair. He started pacing around in front of it. He never looked at her directly, but she wasn’t missing any of his laborious steps. Suddenly, he turned to her at once.
“I wish I could just find the words to explain what seeing you right now in this house is doing to me.”
“Antwone––”
“—Twenty years, I’ve walked through hell on my own. Twenty years I’ve been trying to pull my life together…”
“Antwone––”
“—And when I’m finally doing fine, somehow you have to turn back up.”
“Will you please sit down?”
“Why?”
There was an unmistakable hardness in his voice and in the glare of his eyes. And yet Mary was taking his outburst very lightly, as if he was a kid acting up for attention. But he wasn’t a kid anymore. And the influence she once naturally held over him
had worn itself out to nothing a very long time ago.
“Please sit down,” she said again. And despite himself, Antwone obeyed and felt ridiculous to have let his emotions have the best of him. This kind of behavior was unlike him.
Mary stood up after he sat down and went inside a room, adjacent to the living room. He couldn’t see her. The dog came around Antwone’s chair and cuddled against his feet. He petted it down to while away the time.
Mary had always had this way to put you in your place, he thought. She didn’t have to do anything. She didn’t even have to say anything. It was just in the way she handled people with her pronounced, sometimes calculated, silence. And slowly you felt like an idiot.
Now she came back out, carrying a photo album. She handed it to him.
“What’s that?” Antwone asked, in his normal voice.
“Just some pictures of when Dad and I were overseas,” she said. “I thought you might want to see them.”
Antwone opened the photo album. It had hard pages that were thick like cardboard. Pictures were laid out in it in no apparent order and in not a particular yearly sequence.
Mary’s cell phone suddenly rang and she went away to answer. Antwone browsed through the album. In most of the photos he was looking at, she was in a country environment, standing on brown soil and surrounded by limestone edifices. The pictures dated one year after she and their father had moved out of the states. She was just the way he had seen her last. It was amazing how his mind was now swirling back to that time, before their separation.
The pictures were captioned; they guided Antwone through their history. On this one, Mary was posing on the rocky bank of a natural spring water; that one had been taken somewhere in the Limari Valley in Chile. There were many more of her in that kind of habitat. There were also photos of her in front of vineyards and in clubby-looking eateries in the company of local friends, girls her age for the most part, who always plastered this foolish grin across their faces just as the camera was clicking away.
She and their father had remained in Chile for just a year according to a note Antwone found on the back of one of the pictures. Other pictures after that displayed pastoral landscapes, scenic vistas, and gleeful poses with more locals in cafes, streets, schoolyards and even in the outback. Each time, the locals’ likenesses were also quite useful in helping figure out the geographical origin of the pictures.
There were also many pictures of Mary posing with their father. It was almost cathartic to see them both, frozen in time, and seemingly happy being just the two of them. Antwone felt a little pang in his heart. In a perfect world, he should have been there too. He should’ve never been left behind because his father wanted to keep a relative safe distance between him and Mary. But it wasn’t a perfect world. It was a world of hasty judgments where true love did not conquer all, after all, the way it was supposed to. And you just had to keep on living with that knowledge. And that knowledge made for hellishly great writing material.
Antwone felt like putting down the album, but peeking through that window of time, at those snippets of Mary’s life before their fateful reunion, spurred him on and he turned to the next page.
There was a picture of her attending a bridal procession in an Asian-looking street. Seeing that brought a smile to Antwone’s glum face because she was doing a rather funny gesture in it. And when he saw another great picture of her milling around a painted elephant, he assumed the place was India.
Up to that point, all of the pictures had spanned almost ten years. It was a strange sensation to see her change and evolve and become a full-grown woman only through still images. The pictures had definitely bridged some of the gap in her timeline. She was no longer this long-lost sister he hadn’t seen in ages because, just now, he had had a recap of some of the lost moments.
Browsing on, Antwone saw her posing many times with an older man.
The setting for the pictures was a picturesque European town. They were always arm in arm, very much glued to one another and smiling together for the camera. By the way they were carrying themselves on those images, Antwone could deduce that they had been lovers, even though the man, with his grey whiskers, seemed to be pushing past his fifties and she, Mary, was in her ripe mid-twenties.
Antwone didn’t think it was necessary to confer with Mary about the nature of her rapport with the grey old bird. His assumptions could’ve been wrong after all. Plus, it wasn’t as if he really cared to know.
The last picture Antwone saw in the album wound him back to their old childhood house. It was a picture of him and Mary on a reed field by a riverbank. Unbeknown to them, this was to be one of the last days they’d ever spend together.
He remembered it like it was yesterday. They had set the camera on auto timer to do a two-shot. After they had taken their marks to wait for the click, Mary had suddenly jumped on him, with her proverbial playfulness; and he had ended up carrying her on his back and running aimlessly with her, bending reed stems as he waddled through the field while the camera was snapping away at them.
Mary was fifteen then. Their rollicking had flung her long hair back, streaming behind her in the wind. Her face was plain and tamed. Not as pretty as it was right now, but it was how he had liked it most.
Antwone looked at the picture at length, touched it with trembling fingers and finally ripped it from the abrasive surface of the album page.
Amazing how he remembered everything like it was yesterday. That same night, the Borden Flats Lighthouse had shone brightly against the nocturnal skyline. The sky had clouded over and a fog had come over the sea from the mountains. But the lighthouse had shone its brightest through all the gathering masses of vapor. You couldn’t see it in the picture though, the lighthouse, but it wasn’t far from the spot where the picture had been taken.
After maybe five minutes of absence, Mary returned to the living room, hardly making any noise.
“It was Mark,” she told Antwone. “He was reminding me to walk Spooky.”
Antwone showed her the picture he had ripped from the album.
“You kept this all along?”
“Yes,” Mary said. Something changed in the expression of her face. She took the picture from him. “All along. Everywhere I went I had this with me.” She tried to smile. It demanded such an obvious effort that she gave up. “There was this one day I thought I had lost it. And I was glad. I don’t know why. But then, weeks later, I found it again in my things. I could’ve discarded it then. But, I don’t know––”
“—It holds so many good memories,” Antwone said. “Memories I often look back to when I’m dreaming. It would’ve been a real crime to destroy the last token of such good memories, don’t you think?”
“We were just kids, Antwone,” she said. “We’re not kids anymore. Maybe I should stop holding on to this––”
“—Fine, I’ll keep it.” Antwone took the picture back from her. “Just for old times’ sake…”
“Don’t do that.”
“Shouldn’t you walk the dog?” Antwone said, nodding towards the beagle. “Because I sure as hell could use a little walk myself…”
15