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Authors: Stuart Dybek
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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.
There’s a tradition of books that have managed to survive their working titles: Something That Happened became Of Mice and Men , The Inside of His Head became Death of a Salesman, Trinalchio in West Egg became The Great Gatsby. My book was in that company, thanks only to its inept working title, Farewell to Welfare . I had intended to dedicate it to Felice and Starla, but after Starla’s death, the book was published without a dedication. It was my first and, I now thought, possibly my only book, one from which I felt increasingly dissociated. Back when I’d started on it, I had felt there was so much that needed to be recorded in the plain language that people spoke on the street, a language real and by nature
“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.
There’s a tradition of books that have managed to survive their working titles: Something That Happened became Of Mice and Men , The Inside of His Head became Death of a Salesman, Trinalchio in West Egg became The Great Gatsby. My book was in that company, thanks only to its inept working title, Farewell to Welfare . I had intended to dedicate it to Felice and Starla, but after Starla’s death, the book was published without a dedication. It was my first and, I now thought, possibly my only book, one from which I felt increasingly dissociated. Back when I’d started on it, I had felt there was so much that needed to be recorded in the plain language that people spoke on the street, a language real and by nature
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