Love Maps Read online

  “Conningsby never mentioned that. Why France? Where’s the model now?”

  “In the historical society of Terre Haute. I’ll take you there someday, if you want.”

  Sarah grins so wide her cheeks hurt. Maybe New York is big enough. His fingers curl around her waist. She plays with his thumb, squeezing it gently.

  But she can’t. He is not the sort of man to bask in the pleasure of a good love affair. He’s a marriage-and-kids guy; it’s written all over his face. She lets go of his thumb, then to get his arm off her, leans down and rebuckles her shoe. When she stands up, his hands are in his pockets and he’s frowning at the sidewalk.

  “What’s wrong?” she asks, hoping she wasn’t too obvious. But the pain in his eyes goes deeper than anything she could have delivered.

  “Nothing,” he says. “I mean, Conningsby saved my childhood. I don’t know what would have become of me if I’d been stuck in Terre Haute with only my parents. I wanted to thank him when I went out to Texas. But I didn’t even say goodbye.”

  “You got into a fight?”

  “Not with Conningsby, with a friend of his.” He relaxes somewhat. “I took off in the middle of the night. Never said goodbye. Never said thank you.”

  “Conningsby knew that you loved him. Why do you think you’re here? He wouldn’t have mentioned you in his will—” She frowns down at her bag. “Let’s open them.”

  “The ashes? Now?”

  “No, just the bags. I want to see what the containers look like.”

  They are small tin cups with handles on either side, like the dusty trophies you see on display in diners and childhood rooms. Philip closes his bag first. They start walking again. His arm is no longer wrapped around her. This is what she wanted, but it feels unduly absent. She lights a cigarette, wishing the smoke were warmer and more substantial.

  The sidewalk gives out. They stop and look ahead: a dark road with dark shadows of houses and dark shadows of trees. There are still stars though. Fuck consequences. She wants his arm back around her. He’s a grown man. He can take care of himself. She looks for a constellation. She’ll nudge him, point it out, see what happens. This is bad. She wants it too much. His shoulder brushes against hers. She jumps.

  “You’re shivering,” he says. “Take my jacket.”

  “No. I have to go.” The words surprise her. That’s not what she’d meant to say. But once said, they strike her as correct. She needs to get out of there, and fast. She’s acting like an idiot. She touches his cheek, then touches her neck. “I have to get back to New York.”

  “You’re leaving now? It’s past midnight.” His breath is a warm cloud of Scotch, slightly sour. She puts a hand to his chest to stop him from coming closer.

  “I’m sorry. I didn’t realize what time it was.”

  “Right,” says Philip, retracting.

  “It was lovely meeting you.”

  “You too.”

  “I’m sorry,” she says again.

  He draws himself up straighter. “Don’t be.”

  “Well, goodbye,” she says, stepping backward, still facing him.

  “You better watch where you’re going.” She was about to walk into a fire hydrant. She sidesteps it and walks toward the funeral home’s parking lot, feeling his presence behind her. Anything, the slightest little peep, and she’d stop. But he remains quiet. She gets to her car crying. She should have kissed him. Even a peck. Just one kiss. Something. She wipes her eyes. She hates crying.

  *

  She drives through town, through flat, unseen farmland, on two-lane highways and six-lane interstates. Somewhere near the border of Ohio, she finds herself all alone with no other cars on the road. She turns off her headlights and drives by the light of the moon. The pavement wedges into the darkness of the land. The sky is the same shade of dark, only translucent. She shivers. It’s beautiful. It’s a goddamn interstate, but all the angles, all the planes are glowing with a dark radiance, perfectly composed.

  Chapter 3

  Connecticut, October 1997

  She wanted a cigarette. She hadn’t had one in years, but the urge was as fresh and nagging as if she’d quit yesterday. She loved smoking. She hated it when people went on about cancer and that sort of thing. As if you smoked for your health. Health had nothing to do with it—you smoked for solace, solitude, that feeling of aliveness and fuck-you-ness. Philip hadn’t understood. He had been constitutionally incapable of understanding the joy of smoking. Stop. Stop thinking about him. Why even bother reading his letter? She knew what it would say. Hi Sarah. Here I am, saving the world. Hope you’re well. Damn you. She’d toss it in the trash, mix it up with Sears coupons and fish parts. No. She’d make a collage: Unopened Mail/Male, some kind of semiotic baloney title. That’s what sold these days. She’d put it on the market, make a ton of money. It really was a good idea not reading it. She glanced at the trash can. It didn’t have a cover. She’d have to bury it at the bottom or Max would see, and there was some pretty gross stuff in there. She could burn the letter. But that would be too melodramatic. She’d have to wait until Max went to bed, drop the letter in the trash, then bag it up and take it out. The garbage didn’t get picked up until Friday, but at least the letter would be out of the house.

  Stop sweating. It was October. She had no right to be sweating in October, particularly in front of an open refrigerator. She ought to close the door this instant, and not stand there staring into the stained clean interior, cursing her brain—for isn’t that where desire lies, some dormant withdrawal neuron, freshly awoken, jumping up and down like a child on a mattress? It was just a pack of energy, one of many. She did not need to pay it attention. She crossed her fingers and scrunched her toes. She couldn’t have Just One, it was too hard to stop once she started. No furtive trips to the 7-Eleven, none of that. Last time she’d gotten a letter from him, she’d smoked half a carton in two days. She’d lit the first one before even reading it, knowing herself to be an idiot, hoping for impossible things, declarations of love and erasure as if—even if he did come back—they could ever fit together again. She’d known it, but still, seeing his handwriting arranged so politely and neatly and inconsequentially across the page had driven her through the roof. More than half a carton; Max had staggered around the house, clutching his throat and repeating American Cancer Society slogans ad infinitum.

  She closed the refrigerator door. She’d just given Max a lecture on how they had to reduce their electricity bill. She listened for his footfalls, but the house was empty. He was out front, as instructed, practicing his karate. She opened the letter.

  Dear Sarah,

  I’ve been trying to write you for months. I’ll send this one, no matter how it turns out. I’ve been living in a tent in Goma, in Zaire or Congo, take your pick, the carcass of a country just east of Rwanda. The air around here smells like it did in that hole. Sulfurous. There’s a volcano nearby. It sputters ash and fumes and glows at night. The camps are set on fields of black volcanic rock. There used to be forest around here but the trees were chopped down by refugees wanting to cook their food. There are bodies moldering around the stumps. Death is so common here, more from disease than from violence pure and simple, though there is plenty of that too, and madness. Some have gone back to Rwanda. But loads remain. They need food, water, medicine, plumbing. The sewage is a real mess. You can’t dig holes. The rock is too thick. The crap was piling up for months, that’s what caused most of the sickness. Now it’s getting trucked out. Everything comes in and out via truck.

  My job is to keep the trucks moving. A whole slew of fuckers are attacking them for various reasons, and mining the roads and bridges while they’re at it, blowing up tanks of shit along with kids’ arms and legs. I rebuild the bridges. I do my best to identify places that would make good ambushes and try to make them safer. It doesn’t always work. I have not dabbled in mine removal, though I met a mustached Canadian who you would have liked very much, who is great at it. Did you know that Franco d
efused mines in Vietnam? I remember him telling me that it was a thrill, like pickpocketing an armed man twice his weight.

  There is lots of waiting. Waiting for supplies that might or might not arrive, for bribes to be accepted, for bosses to relent and allow us to do some simple thing that must be done. So many people have lost everything, Sarah. It surprises me that they don’t all lose their minds. The Canadian and I rigged a basketball hoop from a slice of water barrel. It’s got a burlap net and a backboard fashioned from the side of a dead truck. I taught a few of the kids to play. There is one who has killed and who has seen his family killed and yet when he plays, he plays with a kind of joy. As if he has forgotten. He has white teeth and more meat on his bones than the other kids because I feed him.

  I would like to talk with you. I’ve been thinking about the things you told me, or rather yelled at me, in that hole, and a hell of a lot of it was true.

  I gather you do not want to see me, but frankly, I feel I have the right to insist. I will be participating in a conference in NY in October and have a day free on the 15th. I plan on taking the 9:07 (if there is still a 9:07) from Grand Central and should arrive on your doorstep sometime that morning. I am banking that you are still at this address.

  I do, so much, hope that you are well, and that I see you soon.

  Philip

  P.S. Excuse the clunky announcement—the phone number you sent doesn’t work. I’ll try to get the right one when I get to New York. Otherwise I’ll take a trip out to Connecticut and see what happens. This would be easier if you were more communicative.

  She read the last part again several times. Many things had changed, but not the Metro-North timetable. There still was a 9:07. She folded the letter neatly, returned it to her pocket, then strode to the calendar to confirm what she already knew: the fifteenth was tomorrow. Tomorrow. A blank white square in a free Mike’s Service Station calendar. Why did she feel so quiet? Even her nicotine neuron had calmed down.

  “Kiai!” shouted Max from the front yard.

  She splashed water on her face, took a deep breath that ended in a cough, and went out to watch Max. She had conned him into his first karate class by telling him that Philip had been a black belt. It wasn’t true. But if she had told him that Philip was into basketball, then Max would have taken that up, and she’d wanted him to learn a martial art. He needed to know that violence was part of life, not an aberration. At this point, she didn’t need to do any more convincing. Max loved it. She watched him spin and kick, the leaves rustling about him, oblivious to her trembling. He was in the midst of his favorite kata. At the end, he bent down on one knee and with something that he called a knife-hand fist, executed the coup de grâce, a slice right through his invisible assailant’s throat. Sarah clapped, perhaps a bit too forcefully.

  “Please, Mom, you don’t need to clap.”

  “Right,” she said. She watched the next kata, focusing every bit of her attention on it. Max had an athletic grace that made her both proud and retroactively jealous. She’d been a gawky kid.

  “Kiai!” he shouted, raising his legs in a quick double kick, scattering more leaves. Sarah forgot and clapped again.

  “Mom!”

  “Sorry.”

  “Kiai!” Max shouted. She didn’t clap. He had Philip’s hair, but longer than Philip’s mother would have let him keep it. “Why are you looking at me like that?”

  “Like what? You didn’t want me to clap.”

  “You’re looking at me funny. Did you read the letter? Is it from Dad?”

  “What do you mean, Dad? Since when are you calling him Dad? You’ve never met the man.”

  “He is my dad.”

  “He’s your father.”

  “Is the letter from my father?” Max said with exaggerated patience.

  How the hell was she supposed to answer him? If Philip really did arrive on the 9:07, that would be one thing, but she’d be a fool to bank on that. “We are not talking about this now. I’ve got to grade the papers.”

  She went to get them from the trunk of the car. He followed behind her, way too close, as if he were three years old again, pulling at her skirt, wanting every particle of her. Although now he didn’t want every particle of her. He wanted every particle of the letter.

  “I thought you were making dinner,” Max said.

  “Can’t I make dinner and grade papers at the same time?” she snapped.

  Mr. Walpole, the retired accountant who lived next door, stepped out of his house, banging the door behind him. A moment later, he was shaking a bamboo rake in her direction. “Do you even have one of these? Can’t you see your leaves are blowing into my yard?”

  She rattled the trunk key, first right, then left. The Buick was a rusty, crotchety thing. Keys had to be slipped in just so, doors closed at exactly the right angle. She could feel Mr. Walpole’s glare. Both he and Max, staring her down. Couldn’t they see she had a lot on her mind? The trunk popped open.

  “Every day I clean up after you!” Mr. Walpole shouted.

  “What the hell?” she yelled back. Her voice sounded shrill, even to her. But Max broke into a big grin.

  “You tell him, Mom!” He followed her into the house. “That was great, Mom.”

  “Thanks, sweetheart, but I shouldn’t have lost my temper.” She dumped her students’ reports on the dining room table.

  “So what’s for dinner?”

  “I don’t know.” Sarah covered her face with both hands.

  “Mom?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Are you okay?”

  “Just tired, sweetie.” It took her some time to lower her hands. By then, Max had lost interest in her and was picking at a scab on his elbow. His fingers were slender and long, his nails dirty and bitten. His tender regard for his own scab made her want to cry. He scraped it off.

  “Ew! It’s bleeding!”

  “Well, what did you expect?” She laughed, grateful for the diversion. “Let’s wash it off in the sink.”

  Chapter 4

  New York City, May 1981

  Philip’s business card lies on Sarah’s dresser, smudged and soft from her hands. She touches it when she’s going to the studio and when she’s taking off her earrings. She has no intention of calling him. That night in Michigan was too fraught. She’d acted like a teenager, running away like that, crying. But she’s glad it happened. If she hadn’t lost her head, she probably would have driven back without noticing anything. In her heightened state, she’d had that vision of the highway: formal, perfectly balanced. She’s been working out versions of it ever since, rearranging the planes of darkness, the translucent slabs of sky, the opaque land. The results are elegant, seemingly abstract. She picks up Philip’s card, aware that it’s become a sort of talisman. She ought to throw it away. It’s superstitious. She doesn’t want to become like Maya, collecting sacred objects. But she puts it away gently, in a drawer filled with silk scarves. She is just closing the drawer when she finds, much to her delight, the ivory pendant that Maya had given her to wear at Conningsby’s funeral. She fastens the chain around her neck and smiles into the mirror. It’s the perfect thing.

  The party is in honor of Maya’s latest deal. A warehouse in Dumbo that Maya has been eyeing for years now belongs to her, permits cleared, zoning dudes pacified. Sarah has to bribe the cabbie to take her there. The neighborhood is notorious, but gorgeous in a decrepit industrial way. She tries not to gawk out the window, or otherwise betray the pleasure she takes in the vaulting metal arches of the bridge, the boats on the river, the spires of Manhattan shooting up so close and yet so far. She’s never been here during the day—only to parties late at night. The cab stops at a nondescript doorway and Sarah gets out. She could make a mosaic from the red-and-green-topped vials wedged between the cobblestones.

  Maya bursts out of the building, the sun shining down on her hair, the brightest thing on the block. “You are here!” She swoops Sarah up in a kiss. “You’ve been positively locked in that
studio. I haven’t seen you in ages.”

  “You saw me last week.”

  “For lunch. For a second. You should have stayed for dessert,” says Maya, pinching her waist. “You are getting way too skinny. You forget to eat when you are painting.” She gives her a kiss on the cheek, to show that she is not really chiding, and slips her arm through Sarah’s. “You’ve never been here, have you? Let me show you around.”

  The weather is just right for a walk: midseventies, blue sky, the breeze carrying with it a tang from the river. Maya points out a tumbledown gas station where, reportedly, an ex-priest sleeps with a hose to spray anyone who might bother him, an anarchist squat, a concrete slab of waterfront where the Fulton Ferry used to be.

  “And now the warehouse!”

  They enter through the rear door. Sarah whistles. She had been expecting some drafty sheet-metal thing, but this is a substantial building with masterful brickwork, rusty hooks dangling from the ceiling, two-story-high windows. Light shines through them, casting gigantic parallelograms on the concrete floor. Here, an orchestra finishes setting up. There, caterers tuck the last sprigs of parsley onto enormous platters of shrimp and smoked salmon. Maya takes her up an iron staircase to the second level, a platform about twenty-five feet wide that runs along three walls of the warehouse and looks down on the main floor below. Together, they watch the first guests come in, then more and more, a whole slew of them waving to one another, kissing and jostling, enthused by the fresh spring air and the novelty of their surroundings.

  Maya took up real estate in her early twenties, after having experienced, if only for a month or two, the horror of being an international pop star. “Serpentine” had made her so much money that she was able to buy Max and Ma a sprawling apartment on Riverside Drive, start up her own business, and declare herself done with music. No more tours for her. She wanted to figure out how all those people who did not pack up and visit a new city or town every night lived. “I’m going to get myself a real job,” she had famously told Max, defiantly, as if it were Max who had foisted singing upon her.