Stuart Dybek - Paper Lantern - Love Stories

“So, how long have you two been involved?”

“Seven years.”

The people we’d come in with were bundling up to head out into a blizzard that had howled in ahead of schedule. We hugged our mutual friend goodbye, and it was only Lise and me left at the table when the waitress announced last call. We moved to the bar, looking for something to cap off the evening and clean away the aftertaste of beer. I suggested grappa. “Perfect,” Lise said. But the bar didn’t stock it.

“How about a couple shots of Drano instead?” the bartender offered.

Lise said she had a bottle at her place that she’d brought back from Rome, a trip she’d taken with Buck, a paintings conservator, during an off phase with the collector. She’d bought the grappa because it was flavored with rose petals; it took pounds of petals, thousands of roses, to make a single bottle. In Italy, the relationship with Buck had seemed a romantic adventure, but once back in the States she began to suspect that Buck, despite the macho way he dressed—the Wolverine boots and his prized Stetson Gun Club hat that he had worn during their trip to Europe—was gay and didn’t know it. She returned to her ne plus ultra—Rey.

“Once someone has taken you across a line into the best sex of your life, you can’t go back. It’s not easy for other men to turn my head from Rey,” she said. I didn’t ask what she meant by “across a line,” and I wondered how many other times Rey had been there to collect her yet again.

The sleety horizontal snow had plastered my wipers to the windshield. Given the alcohol, the hour, and the weather, Lise suggested that rather than find a hotel, let alone trying to drive back to Michigan, I sleep on her couch.

The couch was more about decor than comfort, a quality shared by most of her furnishings. Stuff—chiming clocks, threadbare tapestries, knickknacks, ornate mirrors, and murky oil paintings—crowded her small apartment. The room looked as if it might have a musty resale shop smell. I supposed it was decorated in Great Eye. There was a sense of recycled pasts that brought her phrase “so much history between us” to mind.

“Like it?” she asked.

“Very quaint.”

“Please, the operative term is whimsical. I meant the grappa.”

“The operative term is thank you, I never tasted anything like it. ”

“So what do you collect?” she asked.

“What do I collect?”

“Everyone collects something,” she said. “First editions, baseball cards, saltshakers…”

“Frankly, since moving to Michigan, I’ve been trying to get rid of shit.”

I interpreted the alarmed look she gave me to mean that we were on a subject sacred to her, beyond anything in common between us.

She unrolled an unzipped sleeping bag over the brocade cushions and fluffed a pillow faintly scented by her shampoo against the single fin of the couch. “At least you’ve dared to remove your shoes, or do you always sleep fully dressed?”

“I forgot to pack my footy pajamas.”

“Will you be warm enough without them?”

“If my feet get cold I might need the loan of that fur hat.”

“It’s been a lovely evening. Thank you. Sweet dreams, Jack,” she said, and tucked the flap of the sleeping bag over me.

“No peck good night?”

Amused, she leaned toward me, chastely kissed my forehead, and let me draw her in. Her mouth tasted of rose petals and white lightning. She pulled away, and went about the apartment switching off lights, then, silhouetted against the street glow of the windows, stood as if she might be listening for something. Neither of us spoke—a silence made palpable by ticking gusts of sleet. She was shivering when finally she returned to the couch and slid in beside me under the sleeping bag.

From that first night, I always preferred that room in the dark. The windows above Dorchester, steamy with radiator heat, appeared tinted by the northern lights—an aura reflected from the blinking neon hangers in the dry cleaner’s shop window below. The storm faded to a tape hiss in the background of her breathing as we kissed and she lay back with her mouth open, waiting for another kiss.

“I think we can dispense with the pretense of you sleeping in your clothes,” she said.

“In my wildest imaginings I couldn’t have anticipated this. Not to be forward, but besides no jammies, I don’t have protection.”

“Me neither,” she said. “Just so you know, I’ve never done a one-nighter.”

“I’ve been tested since the last time I was with someone.”

“You’re safe with me,” she said, and though I hadn’t the slightest idea on what that assurance rested, I couldn’t at that moment summon the nerve to ask.

The following evening, when I phoned from Michigan, more than a hundred miles away, I said, “That thing about you never having done a one-nighter, how about keeping your record intact?”

“You’d do that for the sake of my record? I’m glad to hear it because I spent the day thinking about you. Not to be forward, but when are you back in town?”

“How’s this weekend?”

“Not good, I’m sorry,” she said, without explanation. “The weekend after?”

“I’m in New York then, doing a program at the Donnell Library.”

“I love New York. I could meet you there.”

All it took were those intervening two weeks of waiting for our initial effortlessness to turn into anxiety about seeing her again. I didn’t know what I might be getting into, but I knew already that despite the lightness of that first night together, her effect on me was powerful.

I arrived in New York on a Thursday and stayed at a friend’s unoccupied pied-à-terre, a fifth-floor walkup on Waverly Place, around the corner from the Village Vanguard, where Sonny Rollins was playing. On Friday night, after a dinner with my library hosts during which I tried to conceal my distraction, I went alone to the late set at a jammed Vanguard and stood by the bar letting the waves of tenor sax wash over me. It was a practice run of sorts: I imagined Lise beside me.

“Still remember me?” she had asked when I’d phoned her on landing at LaGuardia.

“Everything about you but your face,” I’d said. “Still coming?”

“I can hardly wait. Maybe you’re suffering from prosopagnosia?”

“Is there an over-the-counter remedy?”

“For lack of facial recognition? Not to be forward, but a direct application of moist heat is rumored to be efficacious. And, Jack, don’t be duped by an imposter.”

I could recall her green eyes beneath the brooding brow of a Russian hat, her amber tendrils of hair, the shape and shade of her lips, but not her face, as if that single snowy night we’d spent together had left me dazed.

In the crowd at the Vanguard, I felt as if I were waiting for a stranger, a stranger scheduled to arrive the next morning in a cab from LaGuardia and ring the buzzer. Having already undone the intricate battery of locks peculiar to New York, I’d race down the five flights to where she’d be waiting in the cold with her overnight bag. We’d kiss hello, and then climb back upstairs together. Just like that she entered my life.

* * *

That winter and spring, I gave readings at a literary festival in D.C. and at universities in Chapel Hill, Berkeley, and Miami, from the book of prose poems and vignettes I’d written while working for the Cook County Department of Public Aid. The book began three years earlier as a record of the stories I’d hear from welfare recipients , as they were officially called, which I’d write down at the end of the workday as I rode the L from Bronzeville back to my apartment on the North Side. Working on it had seemed effortless. I’d be lost in a trance of writing on the train, and sometimes my stop would go by before I noticed. It was shortly after meeting Felice that I realized I had the rough draft of a book I had never planned to write. If I cut back expenses, I had enough money saved to get by for five months or so, and I quit my casework job to finish a book that still seemed more like an accident than a gift.