Endless Knots

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Page 38, “The Persuasion”

Then came the third morning, daybreak. We’d been talking on and off all that night, dozing for a half hour or so, then starting up the conversation again when one of us shifted position.

“We,” he said a few times running.

“Me,” I’d reply.

Then just as the sun was coming up, we kissed in the way you do when you know you’re not going to stop and then moved very quickly, exploding really, stripping off the other’s clothes, thrashing bodies, and nearly crashing the lamp on the night table to the floor. Ecstasy, I thought, as I tried to crawl inside his skin, then stopped, remembering that this was not the behavior of friends, even good ones, when he quickly withdrew, too quickly, before we were done. He kicked the covers back with his foot, ripped the curtains open, and flopped on top of the blankets.

“What aren’t you telling me?” Tonin arrived in my life searching for what was hidden, beaming light into the darkest crevices. “There’s someone else here.” He sensed another male, sniffed him out.

I said nothing. Still raw.

“I mean it, Mariana. You’ve got to tell me. Or leave.”

My stomach cramped; I thought I was going to be sick.

“I’m not kidding. Leave.”

It felt as if a switch had been flipped. Leave. As if I’d just heard that my mother had died again. How could this be happening? How could I care this much? This soon? At all?

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Page 37, “The Persuasion”

Over the next three weeks, Tonin and I used Paris to launch conversations that would take decades to complete.

He waited a few days to ask about my old boyfriends, which given his hair-trigger reaction to my kindergarten beau, Teddy, indicated remarkable restraint, I thought. Many of my guy friends had shown up as characters in stories I’d told him…but there was one whose name had yet to surface.

We’d begun this particular conversation while walking back to his apartment after our first time seeing “Breathless” (we would eventually see it dozens of times), but, to my relief, he’d gotten sidetracked when he noticed wilting flowers in the planter outside his building, which caused him to go up and down the elevator to the apartment, fetching bucket after bucket of water until he was satisfied the blossoms were perking up again.

As it happened, the subject of my romantic attachments didn’t re-emerge at the most appropriate moment. Or perhaps it did.

Against every self-promise, against every aspect of the strong-as-steel plan I’d forged to fend off any further entanglements, I’d found myself not returning to my hotel that first night. We hadn’t parted since the morning after we met at the Breathless café. We were eating together, falling asleep in the same bed, following each other to the bathroom (maintaining some modicum of respect by standing outside the door while continuing to talk).

“This is happening, Mary Jane,” he said from outside the bathroom.

“What?”

“Us. You and me.” He stuck his head through the door and withdrew it quickly. “Tonin and Mariana. Mariana and Tonin.”

I said what I’d said before. “Good friends.”

“Fine. Take your time. It’s nice out here. You’ll like it. I’ll be waiting.”

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Page 36, “The Persuasion”

A loud knock on my door woke me from a strange dream. The teenager who’d made the cryptic comments in the café was sitting on the bed, giving advice about Tonin. I told her I’d seen her dress before, or perhaps a version of it, a tightly corseted garnet number with a long full skirt, the sort women wore in the 19th-century, but that I couldn’t remember where. She pointed to her hair, as if I should remember that too, said that she always wore it pulled back in a twist of tight set curls, and asked me if I’d like to take the sprig of dark-cherry heliotrope stuck behind her ear.

“Mademoiselle!” The proprietor called, pounding again on the door. “Mademoiselle, il y a un jeune homme vous attendant en bas.”

I grabbed my notebook to scribble down the dream—and realized that the only jeune homme who could possibly be downstairs was the one whose scent was still on my hand.

I pawed through my suitcase for the black lace bra and panties mon ami had bought me when we were last in Paris (so there), pulled my snug red-and-blue-striped jersey dress over my head, zipped up my black boots, squeezed a glob of toothpaste onto my finger and swiped it across my teeth, swooshed some water around my mouth and spit it out in the blue-porcelain washbasin, ran my fingers through my tangle of curls, and, about to close the door behind me, pushed it open again, darted back in, dug into my suitcase once more, this time for the plastic clam shell case and tube of spermicide, stuffed them in my satchel, whipped through the door, and zipped down the stairs, slowing my steps on the final flight.

In the pool of sunlight in the small lobby stood Tonin in a black blazer and turtleneck, jeans, and worn leather boots; in his hand, a bouquet of dark-cherry heliotrope. I flushed.

“Á tu, Marie-Jeanne.” He bowed, extending the flowers, as an old woman in a vintage crimson dress, what my mother would have called a frock, walked through the hotel door clapping.

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Page 35, “The Persuasion”

Sleep and I were strangers that night.

At one moment, the spectre of mon ami rose huge in the room where we’d loved; in the following one, I brushed Tonin’s kiss, still fresh on the back of my hand, across my cheek. Him. Tonin. Men.

My mind, a ferris wheel, a different problem swinging in every bucket.

The dark chestnut curls at Tonin’s throat, his bushy eyebrows curved down all wild around eyes set so deep they seemed from a different time, yet soft as if they’d seen the ages. The way he ran his thumb and forefinger along his eyebrow the way my father had, his unfortunate ears, large, sticking out, and looking not all that intelligent.

I giggled and then I couldn’t remember what he looked like at all as I was back in Oxford, arguing with him about the meaning of time, soaring through unknown universes of the mind with the smartest guy I’d ever met, the only one smarter than me.

I wanted my mother. I wanted to lie next to her in her smoky bedroom and tell her my problems as she lit one Pall Mall after another, tell her how cutting it off with him felt like losing a vital organ, how I’d made a list of pluses and minuses for being in a couple, how I’d decided to go solo until I was at least thirty, how I’d committed that I’d only do my work, how the only word in my head at this very moment was the unusual name of a man I’d only met a few hours earlier.

I should get up and write in my journal, I thought, but I didn’t, couldn’t. I flipped and twisted on the bed, cuddled the pillow in my belly, wrapped the blanket around my foot, and heard four bells strike at Notre Dame, then five.

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Page 34, “The Persuasion”

Chapter 6

Tonin never winced, not once when I opened my hand and exposed the bloody palm of crushed glass that passed for my family tree. He just kept asking questions, telling me more about himself in response, and then performing the magician’s trick of getting me to expose even more.

He wanted to know whether I got my big ears from my father or my mother, a remark that I would have interpreted as an insult had he not quickly followed with his belief that big ears (he had them too) were the sign of great intelligence. He wanted to know the colors of the ugliest outfit I’d ever worn (his was a green jacket and orange pants for a Bar Mitzvah at Central Synagogue); the meaning of my middle name, Ariella (my mother always said a woman needed to be “fierce like a lion,” I explained, to which he nodded as if he believed that too); who the boy was who’d gotten my first kiss (my friend, Teddy, but we were only five and sitting on the bench in front of our school, waiting for our mothers to pick us up). And then he asked whether I was still in touch with Teddy and, when I said that I was, he asked when he could meet him.

Three espressos, two glasses of wine, two croque monsieurs and a salade nicoise later, we were in front of my hotel and I was back to the shape I was in at the Breathless cafe. How did this conversation end? He lifted my right hand. “Bon soir, Mary Jane.” He swiped his tongue lightly across his lips then touched my palm to his mouth. “Jusqu'au demain, ma belle petite amie, Marie-Jeanne.”

Then he drew my hands to his temples again, placing his on mine. This time, he slid our hands down my face, across my shoulders, and along my arms as if he were sealing us together and soon I was doing the same to him. When our hands met, he threaded his fingers through mine then wrapped our wrists and rested his forehead on mine, but did not kiss me.

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Page 32, “The Persuasion”

“I was lucky in a way. If it had happened to, say, Red Bird, she would have had a nervous breakdown. But I wasn’t exactly surprised. Shocked but not surprised if that makes sense. I always figured I'd end up an orphan after my father.”

Tonin put his hand to his mouth, looked off to the left and then to the right, as if he were trying to decide which direction to go.

“So what was the minute-by-minute?”

No one had ever asked.

He wanted to know how I got the news that my mother was dead—the dean had pulled me out of English class, taken me back to her office, and hinted around, using words like “very ill,” “hospital,” and “pack something black” until I figured it out; how I got back to school after the funeral—my mother’s best friend, Rose, rented a car and drove me from Brooklyn, not leaving until we’d unpacked my suitcase, I’d brushed my teeth, and she had actually tucked me into bed; who paid for my education—my mother was such a careful planner that there was enough money, if I could maintain my academic scholarships, for both boarding school and college, after which she figured I’d be able to support myself; and whether I’d lived with Rose after she’d died.

Her will had specified my guardians, her twin sister and brother-in-law, Julia and Irving, Upper West Siders with no children, and that in the event they disagreed—my mother knew them well—over decisions regarding my life, Rose would make the call.

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Page 31, “The Persuasion”

"All good decisions are made over coffee.” He tapped my espresso cup. “It sounds like she treats you like an adult.”

I wanted to let it pass but “treat-ed” fell out of my mouth, just like that.

“'-ed'? Let's expand on this one.”

He wanted me to elaborate? For once, for the only time except for Bird, someone wanted me to make the past tense bigger “on this one.” Most people only got their knees wet in my gloomy waters with a strained “sorry” or “oh, that’s too bad” or “oh, my friend’s cousin’s mother died.” Tonin was plunging in with hip waders, fly rod, fishing net, and a tackle box.

“Tell me.” He turned his palms up on the table as if he could hold anything I had to say, regardless of weight.

Quickly, faster than I could ever remember talking, I spilled out the timeline, how just four weeks into freshman year and on the very day that Bird and I had had our first serious argument about a grandiose remark I’d made...”

“Which was?”

“That I was the most interesting person I’d ever met.”

“Hold it. I’d go along with that.”

His butting in allowed the next words to fall out as neutrally as I’d ever managed…“when my mother died suddenly of a heart attack. She was 53 and I was 14.”

I’d told the story enough times. Repeating that particular string no longer unhinged me when I had to explain why my mother was never around for Parents Day, why I never bought Mother’s Day cards. I’d developed strategies for cutting along the live wire without getting zapped, for explaining without revealing, for reporting and keep moving. I still ached when I thought of her, which was all the time, still woke up crying at three in the morning, but the grief had stopped its sneak attacks in broad daylight. Seven years had gone by and I’d gotten used to it.

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Page 30, “The Persuasion”

“Mary Jane, words. Speak.” He swept his hand under his chin, as if he were throwing words at me. “Speak.” He sat back and stared until I spoke. He slid his chair closer.

“Only child, four when my father died. Polio epidemic, died in ninety-six hours and my mother never married again.”

“Never married again? I find it hard to believe that the woman who gave birth to the beautiful wo-man at this table wouldn’t have.”

Maybe that was how he turned the key that day, just that sentence said that way, maybe that was how he got me to tell him things I never said, especially to men, and even more especially to men I didn’t know. But he did. He got me to tell him how thrifty my mother was, how she’d managed my education, how the September after my father died, she’d enrolled me at Little Red Schoolhouse in the Village, how I took the subway by myself from Brooklyn Heights, how I’d stayed through eighth grade.

“Awwww, such a big girl.” He pursed his lips and made a put-put-put sound. I tried not to smile.

I spilled out how we’d always planned for boarding school after Little Red, how I’d applied to a couple of places, and how my mother and I spent a lot of time at the Montague Street Coffee Shop talking about it, and how three days after I interviewed at The Meeting School, they'd offered a scholarship.

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Page 29, “The Persuasion”

“You don’t like talking about the personal stuff.” He ruffled the air between us with his hand and reached for my nose. I turned my head.

“OK. Your way. I was at the architecture school for six weeks. Too much happening here in Paris—I couldn’t stay away and it was easier to plug into The Movement here than it was being new to New York. So were you in Morningside Heights last summer?”

And before I could answer that I was living in a Barnard dorm at 116th and Broadway and working for The Heights Herald, he was publishing the next chapter: He’d spent the summer in the building at the corner of West 111th and Amsterdam that his grandparents had bought when Janos was a Columbia undergrad. I knew the building well, the one across from the garden at St. John the Divine where I liked to sit and read, and where, it turned out, his parents had married, the church from which his mother never looked back.

“Did you see that incredible fire at 110th and Amsterdam—when everyone thought that Buddhist monk had set himself on fire? Remember that? Everyone fleeing the garden and then the papier-maché dummy fell over on its side? Remember?”

I was tracing the soft crease on his cheek above his shaving line with my eyes, the dip at the midpoint of his upper lip.

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Page 28, “The Persuasion”

“So you are Jewish. You’ve got a Jewish mother.”

“Technically, yes, except I was brought up Episcopalian. My uncle converted and once Erika walked into St. John’s, she never looked back. Too bad for me. No dreidls or Chanukah gelt.”

He undid his collar button and ran his hand along the back of his neck. Hairy just under the Adam’s apple like my father. He might as well have taken off his shirt. “So I’m talking too much. What about you? Parents, grandparents, country of origin?”

I wasn’t used to being the interviewee—“you ask so many questions,” people said—and I was particularly reluctant when it came to family. “When were you born? You first.”

“May 23, 1947. When’s yours?”

I didn’t know what to say. If I spoke too quickly, he’d think I wanted to make something of it. If I didn’t acknowledge it and he  found out later, he might think I actually lied sometimes. Later?

I nodded.

“So? Yours?”

I nodded again.

“You mean...”

I nodded and pushed away a curl that creeping toward my mouth.

“Really. How cool is that? We’ll celebrate together next year.” He pumped my hand. "Deal."

“Stop it.” I pulled back and pointed to the book he’d had under his arm with the Herald Tribune. “What’s with the Chekhov?”

“It’s honest. I didn’t bring it to impress you. Double degree from The Sorbonne, Russian literature and architecture. I started this year at Columbia, by the way—hey, we might have seen each other last summer. Were you there?”

I nodded again. “Can’t you tell a story without interrupting yourself?”

“There’s so much to say, Lois Lane. We’ve got a lot to catch up on.”

“Try chronological order.”