Rules of Civility - Amor Towles [136]
So it was with mixed feelings that I received this news. Picturing Tinker wandering among the crowds of Manhattan, poor in all but spirit, I felt regret and envy; but a touch of pride too; and a little bit of hope.
For wasn’t it just a matter of time before we crossed each other’s path? Despite all the hoopla, wasn’t Manhattan just ten miles long and a mile or two wide?
So in the days that followed, I kept an eye out. I looked for his figure on the street corners and in the coffee shops. I imagined coming home and having him emerge once more from the doorway across the street.
But as the weeks turned into months, and the months into years, this sense of anticipation waned, and slowly, but surely, I stopped expecting to see him in a crowd. Swept along by the currents of my own ambitions and commitments, my daily life laid the groundwork for the grace of forgetting—until, that is, I finally ran into him, after all, in the Museum of Modern Art in 1966.
Val and I took a taxi back to our apartment on Fifth Avenue. The cook had left us a little dinner on the stove, so we warmed it and opened a Bordeaux and ate standing in the kitchen.
I suppose that for most, the image of a husband and wife eating reheated food at their counter at nine o’clock would lack a certain romance; but for Valentine and me, who dined out formally so often, eating alone on our feet in our own kitchen was the highlight of the week.
As Val rinsed the plates, I walked down the hallway toward our bedroom. Along the wall were photographs hung from floor to ceiling. Normally, I ignored them as I passed, but on this night I found myself considering them one by one.
Unlike the photographs on Wallace’s walls, these were not from four generations. They were all from the last twenty years. The earliest was of Val and me at a black-tie affair in 1947 looking a little awkward. A mutual acquaintance had just tried to introduce us, but Val had cut him short, explaining that we had already met—on Long Island in 1938—when he had given me a ride into the city to the tune of “Autumn in New York.”
Among the photographs of friends, and of vacations in Paris and Venice and London, were a few with a professional bent: There was the cover of the February 1955 issue of Gotham—the first that I was to edit, and there was a picture of Val shaking the hand of a president. But my favorite was the picture of the two of us at our wedding with our arms around old Mr. Hollingsworth, his wife already gone and he soon to follow.
Having poured the last of the wine, Val found me in the hall surveying the photographs.
—Something tells me you’re going to stay up a little longer, he said, handing me my glass. Do you want company?
—No. You go ahead. I won’t be long.
With a wink and a smile, he tapped a picture taken on the beach in Southampton shortly after I had cut my hair an inch too short. Then he gave me a kiss and went into the bedroom. I went back to the living room and out onto the terrace. The air was cool and the lights of the city shimmered. The little planes no longer circled the Empire State Building, but it was still a view that practically conjugated hope: I have hoped; I am hoping; I will hope.
I lit a cigarette and then I threw the match over my shoulder for good luck thinking: Doesn’t New York just turn you inside out.
It is a bit of a cliché to characterize life as a rambling journey on which we can alter our course at any given time—by the slightest turn of the wheel, the wisdom goes, we influence the chain of events and thus recast our destiny with new cohorts, circumstances, and discoveries. But for the most of us, life is nothing like that. Instead, we have a few brief periods when we are offered a handful of discrete options. Do I take this job or that job? In Chicago or New York? Do I join this circle of friends or that one, and with whom do I go home at