‘As my misanthropic father used to say, you walk down a street, you bump into unhappiness everywhere.’
‘Even on the most glorious of days.’
‘Especially on the most glorious of days.’
‘So if I were to say to you, But look at how happy everyone else appears to be, you’d reply.?’
‘Bless your positive view of the human condition.’
‘But if we all don’t travel hopefully. ’ I said.
‘Hey, I just let you talk me into. ’
With a downward sweep of his right hand he motioned towards the new clothes he was now wearing, then said:
‘So surely this is traveling hopefully?’
He laced his fingers into mine. At that very moment I so wanted him to pull me towards him and kiss me. From the way his grip tightened on me I sensed that he too wanted to do that. Just as I also knew that part of me would have been unnerved and panicky had he embraced me right there, amidst the stream of people on Newbury Street. Just as I also knew that such a kiss would mean the traversing of a frontier I had never considered crossing, Correction: of course I had imagined, at particularly difficult moments, a life without Dan. Of course there were instances when I saw a photograph in some book review of a particularly handsome, clearly intelligent novelist in his mid-thirties and contemplated a night of passion with him. But. between the motion and the act falls the shadow. This is an afternoon of make-believe, with nothing to anchor it to actual reality.
But then I felt my fingers tighten around Richard’s hand. We exchanged a fast, telling look that said everything, but behind which I could also clearly glimpse his own sense of hesitancy, of apprehension. Yet his hand remained in mine until we reached the eyeglass boutique.
‘Well, look at you, sir,’ Gary the ‘spectician’ said as Richard approached the counter. ‘Clothes make the man — and you are evidently in re-fit mode this afternoon. Bravo.’
Richard accepted this comment with a nervous smile.
‘And to complete the new you. ’
Now Richard’s discomfort was manifest again as he looked down at the tray on which his new glasses were displayed. I put my hand on his shoulder.
‘You OK?’ I asked.
‘Fine, fine,’ he said, not succeeding at masking his unease. Gary noted this as well.
‘If I may, sir,’ he said, reaching out to remove Richard’s old frames. Richard initially took a step backwards, as if he was trying to dodge the idea of giving up this last vestige of his old look. But Gary — almost anticipating this — put a steadying hand on his shoulder and quickly pulled the frames off. Then he proffered the tray to him.
‘Try them on, sir.’
Richard reached for the new glasses, then slowly raised them onto his face. Was his anxiety due to the fact that, with these glasses, his outward transformation would be complete? Or because, like me, he too felt we were veering far too close to a frontier he had never been within the proximity of during all the years of his own sad marriage?
Sad marriage. Now I could stand guilty of presumptuousness. Just as I knew I was talking about the domestic life I’d been leading for so many years.
Glasses on, he didn’t look at the mirror in front of him. Rather he turned directly towards me. As before — when he first tried these frames — I couldn’t help but think just how perfectly they suited him, giving him a canny, worldly, academic mien. Seen now with his leather jacket, his black jeans and black work shirt.
‘You look amazing,’ I said.
‘Really?’ Richard said.
‘Madame is speaking the truth,’ Gary said. With a gentle hand on his shoulder he turned Richard around to face the floor-length mirror nearby. Watching Richard now take himself in I couldn’t help but remind myself of the way I stared at myself in the hotel mirror this morning: the fear of casting off my everyday image; the unspoken pleasure in seeing myself transformed into the person I always imagined myself being. Richard was engaged in the same process right now. The old identity, the new identity. I knew just how painful and arduous it was to actually shake off everything you have told yourself you have to be. You can dress up differently. You can change all the externals. But there are still all those ties that bind.
Richard must have regarded himself for a good minute in the mirror — and I instinctually knew it was best not to say anything right now. Gary also was astute here — as he too was watching Richard talk himself out of the anxiety that had overtaken him again as soon as we stepped back into the boutique. And during that very long sixty seconds, I watched as his face divested itself of its dread, his shoulders lost their taut hunch, and a small smile crossed his lips.
‘Thank you,’ he finally said to me.
At that moment I caught Gary out of the corner of my eye. I could register him working out that we were, in no way, husband and wife, and that what had just transpired was, in its own unspoken personal way, rather huge. His only comment was a most appropriate one:
‘Congratulations, sir.’
A few minutes later we were back on Newbury Street.
‘Ready to blend in with the fellow hipsters at the ICA?’ I asked.
‘I feel somewhere between an imposter and—’
‘Trust me, you’re far smarter and more learned than the hip brigade.’
A smile between us.
‘It’s a bit of a walk from here, I think,’ he said.
‘Down in South Boston on the bay. And it probably closes at six.’
We both glanced at our watches. It was now almost four-thirty.
‘A taxi then.’
As luck would have it one was cruising right by. Richard hailed it. Within moments we were being driven down Boylston Street, passing by several upscale hotels, and a long cliff of tall nineteenth-century office buildings and a theater that Richard said now all belonged to a performing arts college. He started explaining how, just down the street twenty years ago, the remnants of Boston’s red light district — better known as ‘the Combat Zone’ — was still in full ‘drug-dealing, porno-cinema, working-girls-on-the-street splendor’. Now it was just a cleaned-up theater district. Though it was a more pleasant environment, ‘there’s part of me that thinks we’ve sanitized everything nowadays, to the point where cities have lost an essential raffishness. not that I am the biggest expert on things metropolitan’.
‘Still,’ I said, ‘you have a point. I made a couple of trips during college to New York with my then-boyfriend. Even in the late 1980s, Forty-second Street and Hell’s Kitchen and the East Village were still the wrong side of sleazy, and we loved it. Because it was so not what we knew in Maine. Then, the one time I’ve been back since. well, Forty-second Street now looked like an outdoor shopping mall in any major city in the country. And the city — though still amazing — struck me as having lost an essential edgy vitality. But hey, having never lived there, having never lived anywhere but Maine. ’
‘That door isn’t shut, is it?’
‘As you said earlier, you have to travel hopefully. And believe that you can reinvent yourself anew.’