Rules of Civility - Amor Towles [126]
—Yes.
—So I suppose the question now is—despite the rest of it—are you fallen for him still?
After meeting someone by chance and throwing off a few sparks, can there be any substance to the feeling that you’ve known each other your whole lives? After those first few hours of conversation, can you really be sure that your connection is so uncommon that it belongs outside the bounds of time and convention? And if so, won’t that someone have just as much capacity to upend as to perfect all your hours that follow?
So despite the rest of it, Dicky asked with supernatural remove, are you fallen for him still?
Don’t say it, Katey. For God’s sake, don’t admit it. Get off your ass and kiss this madcapper. Convince him never to discuss it again.
—Yes, I said.
Yes—that word that is supposed to be bliss. Yes, said Juliet. Yes, said Heloise. Yes, yes, yes, said Molly Bloom. The avowal, the affirmation, the sweet permission. But in the context of this conversation, it was poison.
I could almost feel something dying inside him. And what was dying was his self-confident, unquestioning, all-forgiving impression of me.
—Well, he said.
Above me, the black-winged angels circled like desert birds.
—. . . I don’t know if this friend of yours genuinely aspired to these Rules, or simply aped them so that he would be better received by his neighbors; but is there really any difference? I mean, Old George didn’t make them up. He was marking them down from somewhere and trying to make the most of himself. It strikes me as all rather impressive. I don’t think I could live up to more than five or six of them at a time.
We were both looking at the statue now with its exaggerated musculature. Though I’d been in St. Patrick’s a thousand times, it had never struck me until that moment how odd it was to have Atlas, of all people, standing on the other side of the avenue. He was situated so directly across from the cathedral that as you were walking out, his towering figure was framed by the doorway, almost as if he was waiting for you.
Could there have been a more contrary statue to place across from one of the largest cathedrals in America? Atlas, who attempted to overthrow the gods on Olympus and was thus condemned to shoulder the celestial spheres for all eternity—the very personification of hubris and brute endurance. While back in the shadows of St. Patrick’s was the statue’s physical and spiritual antithesis, the Pietà—in which our Savior, having already sacrificed himself to God’s will, is represented broken, emaciated, laid out on Mary’s lap.
Here they resided, two worldviews separated only by Fifth Avenue, facing off until the end of time or the end of Manhattan, whichever came first.
I must have looked pretty miserable—because Dicky patted me on the knee.
—If we only fell in love with people who were perfect for us, he said, then there wouldn’t be so much fuss about love in the first place.
I suppose that Anne was right when she observed that at any given moment we’re all seeking someone’s forgiveness. Either way, as I was walking downtown, I knew whose I was seeking. And after telling people for months that I had no idea where he was, suddenly I knew exactly where to find him.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
Where He Lived and What He Lived For
Vitelli’s was on Gansevoort in the heart of the meatpacking district. Large black trucks crowded the curb at odd angles and the faint smell of soured blood rose from the cobblestones. In some infernal version of Noah’s ark, teamsters walked off the trucks onto the loading docks carrying carcasses of different species slung over their shoulders two by two: two calves, two pigs, two lambs. Butchers on break dressed in blood-spattered aprons smoked in the cold December air under the great steer-shaped neon sign that Hank had stylized in his painting. They watched me navigate the cobblestones in high-heel shoes with the same indifference that they watched the meat coming off the trucks.
A hophead in a woman