Dinaw Mengestu: How to Read the Air

Angela joked that we were like a pair of stray cats. “We used to have them in the alleys when I was growing up,” she said, “and I always wondered what they did all night. Now I know.”

Despite us both having lived in New York for years, neither of us had formed any deep, lasting attachments to particular quarters of the city. There were no streets that we were especially fond of, restaurants that we loved, or bars where we had once spent many hours sitting alone. Angela had come in as a serious student studying the law, while I had spent too much time wandering from one neighborhood and borough to the next to claim my stake on anything other than what was immediately before me. We deliberately set out to remedy that.

“I want us to have a café,” Angela said. “Some place that I can always go to and think of as being ours.”

On our fifth night together we found a vaguely French-themed café with marble tabletops and heart-shaped wooden chairs that we settled on as belonging to us.

“Next we need a bench,” Angela said. “You can’t ever be an old couple unless you have a bench. It’s one of the rules of life.”

We dedicated several evenings to trying out benches across the city. It was as close as we would ever come to house hunting, although we didn’t know that at the time. Instead we saw everything we did as a dress rehearsal for a future date in which we would join the ranks of young, happy couples who spent their days and nights searching for what they imagined to be the perfect home.

“I don’t want a bench above Fourteenth Street,” I said.

“And I don’t want one near or on a busy street.”

“It has to have armrests.”

“And a nice view. There has to be some sort of grass or a tree nearby.”

“What about amenities?” I asked.

“A restaurant with a bathroom not too far away would be nice.”

“So would a bodega,” I said. “I get thirsty if I have to sit still for a long time.”

The benches in and around Union Square within walking distance of Angela’s apartment were ruled out immediately — too loud and too crowded, and the crowds of war protesters who congregated there on the weekends made even Sundays a riot.

“No one ever seems to go home around here,” Angela noted. “There’s always people around. We need something quieter.”

We walked farther east until we were at the bottom of the East Village. There, across the street from a housing project and a community garden filled with willow trees, we found a bench that seemed rarely occupied.

“This is perfect. This bench will definitely do.”

“We can sign the lease tomorrow,” I said.

When the summer was over, Angela began her real career at her midtown law firm. She took her first paycheck and moved into her own place — the one-bedroom basement apartment that we would come to share for the next four years. Angela had never been strong on boundaries, and on the day she moved into her apartment she had an extra set of keys made for me.

“You leave work before me,” she said. “I don’t want you wandering around like a cat anymore. I think we’ve done enough of that now. It’s time we got a home.”

I officially carried over the last of my personal belongings to her apartment two months later.

“We don’t have to make a big fuss over it,” she said, even as she handed me the new lease that she had drawn up herself to include space for both of our names. “People do this sort of thing all the time. Or that’s what I’ve been told anyway. It makes sense. The only thing of yours that isn’t here already are the rest of your clothes.”

On the morning I moved into Angela’s apartment we spent several hours deliberately mixing all of our belongings together.

“I don’t want a yours and mine, a his and hers,” she said. “I’ve never lived with anyone before, and if I’m going to do it now I want to do it properly. Here. Give me your suitcase.”

I handed her the one black valise that contained all the clothes I owned. She opened it, tried to stifle a small laugh at how little was there, and then without any direction began laying all my clothes neatly in drawers next to hers.

“What if someone comes in and thinks that those are all my underwear?” I asked her.

“Then they’ll know you spend too much on clothes. What else do you have?”

I pointed to the half-dozen boxes of books I had brought with me — the core of what had once been a sizable collection of paperback editions of poems and novels that had all but completely fallen apart.

Angela emptied her bookcase of the hardbound legal texts she had accumulated in law school and began to fill the shelves with my books, which stood in poor comparison to the formidable, well-bound texts that had once been there. When she was finished she shook her head and went back and cleared the ends of each shelf. She filled the empty space with thick, solid books on constitutional and tort law. It was an effort that we both admired.

“It’s not too much, is it?” she asked. “I don’t want it to seem too deliberate.”

“It looks perfect,” I told her. “And sums us both up just right.”

For at least the first six months we lived together we remained fully committed to the principles established that morning. We were careful to talk always about the things we had, and that we owned, or that we needed.

“How much money do we have?” Angela would sometimes ask, not because she wanted an actual response but because she wanted to revel briefly in that plural possessive that she was free to employ whenever she pleased. Like a magic trick, we had doubled our meager belongings and our even more meager selves, and for a time there we both felt richer for it.

“I’m going to read everything you have,” she said to me one afternoon. “Even the stupid books you don’t want to tell me about.”

“And I’m going to do the same,” I said. I stood up and pulled from the shelf volume one of U.S. Constitutional Law . Angela, not to be outdone, went to the closet and pulled from the top shelf a thick hardbound copy of a thesaurus that had been a college graduation gift from my mother.

“I’ve heard it’s really good,” she said, “and by good I mean: exceptional, superb, outstanding, marvelous, wonderful, first-rate, first-class, sterling.”

After that Angela carried copies of novels she had never heard of with her to work. She made a committed effort to read several of them on the subway, just as I also honestly tried to become a lay expert on the regulations governing international and human rights law, which she said were the only two things she could love about the law.

“The rest to me is bullshit,” she said.

We continued on like that, albeit with diminishing degrees of conviction that everything we said was possible. Angela gave up on my books, and I did so on hers as well. We struggled sometimes to have dinner together more than twice a week, but then again, so did most busy young couples. It wasn’t until I lost my job at the center nine months later that the first cracks in our relationship began to show. Bill called me into his office on a Tuesday morning and with a heavy, somber voice said there were some things we needed to talk about.

“You know we’ve been very happy having you here, Jonas,” he began. He had always had a hard time standing still, even in the most mundane situations. He paced around the corridors of the office throughout the mornings and afternoons often muttering to himself. It was even worse now that we were in his cramped office, which came with a single window that looked directly onto a new apartment building that was going up. He didn’t have enough space to diffuse his anxiety and found himself constantly hemmed in by the desk, the bookcases, the stacks of poorly arranged files that occupied the floor around him. He tripped over one and sent a stack of papers cascading onto the ground. When I bent over to pick them up, he told me not to.