Dinaw Mengestu - How to Read the Air

After a few more minutes of careful observation, and a quick glance at a stopwatch he keeps tucked inside his pants pocket, the guard looks up at me and says, “The park closes in about an hour. You’ll have to leave soon.”

I nod my head. I smile at him. Don’t worry, I want to tell him, these days I always do.

After that night Angela and I had only the semblance of a marriage left, even as we appeared to draw closer. She spent less time at the office, and never had a reason to call again to say she would be late. We began to take long walks throughout the city in search of some minor and relatively obsolete object that Angela had suddenly declared she needed. It was her way of trying to salvage or, at the very least, make the most out of what was left of our marriage. There was a deliberate, almost childish quality behind the effort. Angela had taken my hand while I was still in bed on a Saturday morning and had pretended to drag me out using all her strength.

“Come on,” she said. “It’s beautiful outside and I want you to help me find some things.”

We lived our weekend lives for the next several months as if they were scenes plucked from a movie made to convince one that there was nothing more charming than being young and in love in New York. One weekend we went searching for an old record player, the next an appropriate stack of classic records to go with it. We searched for vintage dresses and matching hats in the East Village, and made Saturday and Sunday markets in Union Square and Chelsea a habit. We busied ourselves with the city in a way that we hadn’t done since we first started dating, and at least in that regard New York seemed endlessly generous to us. The sheer density of the city, which at times we had both claimed to hate, was buying us time.

Those late spring and early summer ventures across Manhattan, and on one occasion Brooklyn, were often riddled with nostalgia, small-pocketed bursts that left holes in our day. During one trip we went to a coffee shop on Bleecker Street that had been closed for at least a year; it was where Angela had passed her first afternoon in New York waiting to meet her future roommates. The coffee shop may have been gone, but it was hard to declare its absence a loss for any reason other than a personal one.

“The coffee was terrible,” Angela noted. “And the bathroom was full of shit.” Still, we went back to it on a rainy Sunday afternoon in May because Angela wanted to be reminded not so much of that first afternoon in particular but of who she was on that day, a young stranger to the city with vast stretches of her life still open before her. A couple of weeks later I took her deep into Brooklyn to stand outside the last apartment that I had lived in before we moved in together. I had been too embarrassed to show it to her, even though I suspected she would have found the building and the neighborhood charming and closer to her own heart than the apartment she had moved into. It was a four-story brown-brick building, squat and half a block long, its sides covered in seemingly meaningless graffiti. Most of the people who lived there were Bangladeshi or from somewhere in Central America, and the building carried on its walls traces of both — a bit of Bengali and Spanish speaking together. We took a shortcut through a large cemetery to get there. A hard winter had meant that half the trees had yet to bloom, and only scattered patches of grass were green, which made the entire grounds seem unbalanced, as if the grass and trees were changing sides as we walked. Angela thought that it made the cemetery, with its angel-crested obelisks and granite mausoleums, look a bit psychotic.

“It’s like it can’t make up its mind whether it wants to live or die,” she said. “It’s unhealthy.”

When we reached the apartment, we spent a good five minutes standing outside watching a few kids ride their bicycles up and down the same block.

“We should have lived here,” Angela said. “There are no kids on bikes where we live.”

“It’s not too late,” I noted. “There’s probably an empty apartment right now.”

Angela seemed to consider the thought seriously, and she might have even tried to picture us setting up camp on this block and eventually having children of our own, but there was a stale, false note in that image that she couldn’t get past.

If these trips sound like the beginning of reparations, they weren’t. We both sensed that they were the prelude to what might be a long, slow good-bye even if we never acknowledged it as such. When my classes ended for the year, Angela found her temporary way out.

“They asked me at work today if I want to spend the summer in L.A. It’s an important case. I’d be working with another firm out there who’s also involved in the suit, but I’d be the only one from our offices there all the time.”

It didn’t matter whether or not it was an important opportunity for her. She wanted or needed to get away, but despite her bluntness and her training as a lawyer, she couldn’t say that to me directly. We went to the airport together in June. I promised Angela I’d come see her in a few weeks, and she promised me that she was going to do the same. We talked every night for the first ten days, but after that we gradually began to skip a day here and there for reasons that we attributed to the difference in time and Angela’s busy schedule. When two weeks had passed, neither one of us had bought a plane ticket yet, and I was convinced that neither of us was going to. I’d be lying, then, if I didn’t admit to being somewhat grateful for the phone call that came in July telling me that my father had died. I announced the news to Angela early the next morning before she left for work. “I’m going to come,” she said. “I don’t want you to be alone,” and before she hung up the phone, “I’m sorry that I’m not with you there now.” By lunch she had a return ticket back to New York for the following night. I met her at the airport; we took a taxi back home, holding hands all along the way while not saying much of anything. When we were finally settled in the apartment, Angela crawled into bed and invited me to join her. We fell asleep partly out of exhaustion, partly out of relief at finding ourselves together again. There was no blame, hurt, or disappointment to be shared or stifled. It was simply us.

The next morning Angela asked me what she could do to help. “I can handle the arrangements,” she said. “You shouldn’t have to do that.”

The thought of arranging anything had never crossed my mind.

“The funeral,” she said, after I had stared at her silently long enough. “And if there’s a will or anything else that needs to be taken care of.”

“We don’t have to do anything,” I told her. “He’s going to be cremated. They can send his ashes by mail if we want them, but I don’t think I do.”

“His ashes by mail?”

“That’s what they said.”

“And what about your mother?”

“I’m sure she knows already.”

A part of Angela assumed that it was grief that had so efficiently reduced my father’s death for me, and so for two days she said nothing more about it. She thought she could console me with a nice dinner out and frequent, spontaneous bursts of affection, and because I was greedy, I took every one of them. After two days, though, she wanted more evidence of mourning. She would often stop and ask me how I was holding up if there was a prolonged silence between us.

“I’m fine,” I told her on each occasion.

“This has to be difficult for you,” she said. “Even if you were never close.”

“If it is,” I said, “I’m not quite sure just how.”

That was when she told me that she hated what I was doing, and that I was “acting as if nothing happened,” although it was the “You’re doing it again” that struck me the most. She returned to Los Angeles three days later.