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By Root 468 0

She had not found Pearl interesting and so assumed he would not interest her either. He had wiped his palm on his shirt. He had seemed ordinary. But then the way he had looked at her in the kitchen had moved something inside her and she had felt seen although she had hidden that from him. She was still very young. Younger than either Pearl or Joe and they had struck her at first as old and sad and only later as experienced. She had traveled. She had been educated. But they had experience. They had sorrow. Maybe it was his sorrow that was looking at her in the kitchen and found hers. A sorrow that lifted when it felt his and soared like a note of music soars. A note of music soars, she thought, because it is trying to find its way back.

She would forget him. Vivian had decided that for the first time on the way home from Joe and Pearl’s apartment. She had a dying father to care for, a distraught mother, a life to begin. She had friends from college, mostly rich girls, not scholarship girls like herself, girls whose families didn’t seem to know there was a Depression, girls who invited her to parties, girls who didn’t know about the latest music and who used her to find out about things that seemed slightly dangerous. She had those friends but she was false with them because they could not understand her life and because she could never have told them about Joe. Years later, when their husbands had died and they had started careers of their own and raised many children and found new husbands or not, years later they would have been sympathetic to her stories about Joe. But for now she avoided most of the girls she knew from school.

Once she had met him again in the pastry shop she avoided almost everything but him. His fingers around the handle of his saxophone case, his long legs on the cobblestone streets, his soulful playing, the way he looked to her for a wisdom which somehow she had but had never really wanted, his voice that had a deep mellow comfort in it, these were the things she did not avoid now. This was the tender misery that she did not avoid now.

We have to say good-bye, she said. This really isn’t possible.

I know, he said. But then he whispered: Let’s just keep saying good-bye.

The woman in the education department of the Brooklyn Children’s Museum looked more closely at her outfit than at her résumé. Vivian could tell that the woman approved of her shoes. You can start on Monday, she said. Vivian liked tying the smocks around the children’s wriggling waists, handing the big brushes into their tiny starfish hands. She sponged tables. She set out paints. She truly appreciated the work they made and hung it up on the walls of the room. Still, the streets at the end of the day stretched on and she imagined that around a corner she might find a glorious church or a wide-open piazza like the places she had visited in Europe. The sound of a wailing instrument played in her head. I am too young to feel this lonely, she thought.

She met him at night at the movies. The curtains were dark red. On the balcony ornate carvings swirled and twisted as if they were alive. The ushers smoked and bent their heads in the lobby while the movie scrolled along and the faces up on the screen were as gigantic as gods come down to earth to impart their complete and utter lack of understanding. They had no answers. They fought and cried. Their enormous velvety eyes and their white marble teeth looked at nothing real and said nothing real and yet their flickering presence made her press more closely into his arms and the feeling in those arms made her less afraid than she had ever been. She thought: This is love. I can’t really have it, but at least I know now what it is.

And then he said that they could be together. He said they would be. She said that he was trying to hold on to something that couldn’t be held, to keep time. He said: Let me try.

She woke up in the middle of the night and this time he was there. They were in Massachusetts, at an inn. All was quiet except the wind outside, which she realized she could hardly