We came down from Inwood on the A train, which Q has strong feelings about. He thinks the A train is too long and I think he thinks this because the first time I brought him to New York I told him it was the longest line in the system. He stood holding the overhead bar the whole way even though there were seats. I sat and watched the tunnel go dark in the window behind him.
My mother had given me Olivia's number written on the back of a receipt, says she'd run into her at the periodontist's office and they'd talked. I'd had to borrow my mother's phone to call from, which my mother found funny.
Olivia says to meet her at a coffee place on Charles Street at two o'clock, and we were a little early, so we stood outside. Q looked at the menu in the window and says he wanted one of the things with the lavender syrup. I say that's perfume, why do you want to drink that. He says I'm a child. I say maybe.
She came from the north end of the block in a gray coat, and I knew her by the way she walked, there are lots of four-eleven, black-haired women in the world, but I knew it was her right away, her
walking-into-a-headwind stepping, even in still air.
She was thirty-three now, same as me. She had cut her hair.
"Danny," she says. We hugged, which was a little like hugging a stranger, which in some ways she was.
We stood there on the sidewalk. She looked at Q and I introduced them. Q shook her hand. He says "like the letter," and that it's nice to meet her. She says it's nice to meet him too. Somebody has to say something else so I say she looks good. She does look good. She says I look good too.
I'm wearing my leopard coat and my Nike slides, and my hair's still flat on the one side on account of sleeping on the subway, and I look positively homeless. I say thanks.
Inside, we got our drinks. Q got his lavender whatever and looked pleased with himself. We went to the window and sat.
"I'm surprised you called," she says.
"I didn't know you were in the city," I say.
"I wasn't," she says. "I came back."
She'd been in Boston for law school and then somewhere in Connecticut and then somewhere else, and now she was back, working at a firm downtown doing something to do with intellectual property that she explains and I don't really understand, but I say congratulations. Q is looking out the window at the street and the people going by with their dogs. There are a lot of dogs in this neighbourhood. I know what he's doing. He's trying to figure out what kinds of dogs they are.
She asked Q how he and I knew each other and he looked at me and I looked at him and he says through a mutual friend. He touched my foot with the side of his foot and I knew he loved me.
She says, "I heard some of what happened. Your mom told my mom."
She says she's sorry about my brother. I say thank you. There's a silence that Q fills by saying something about the dogs outside. He asks her if she knows what kind the brown one with the floppy ears is. She looks and says she thinks it's a vizsla. Q says he's never seen one. Olivia says they're very affectionate dogs. Q says he can tell.
She says, "Are you in Alaska now? Your mom said Alaska."
"Yeah, Goodluck." I say, and then I say, "That's the name of the town."
She asks what I do there. I say I work at a preschool. I say I'm getting my teaching certification up there. She seems to think both of these things are good.
"We used to fight so much," she says.
"I wasn't," she starts, and then stops. She tries again. "I think I put you through a lot."
I looked at her. There's something I had prepared to feel sitting here, and I could tell it isn't going to happen. Ten years is a long time. I had lost a whole life and made a whole different one, I figure something similar might've happened to her too.
I'd been carrying for years this dull, worn-out feeling about Olivia. The thing I had told myself: that she had made me go to every party, every function, every gathering, made me stand in loud rooms and drink because there was nothing else to do in loud rooms. That this was where it had come from. That she had reached into the normal person I was and corrupted some essential mechanism.
All of a sudden, I feel really stupid.
"I wasn't easy either," I say. This is an understatement of almost comic proportion, but she nods.
I think about trying to explain any of this to her, and don't know where I'd start.
What I say is: "I blamed you for a long time for stuff. For a long time after. Things that weren't your fault." She didn't seem surprised exactly. She asks what things.
I tell her the rough shape of it, and she doesn't say anything until I'm done and then she says, "I shouldn't have made you come to those. I knew you didn't want to."
She says, "I was." She says, "I always wanted you there."
"I wasn't a good boyfriend," I say, and I think about what I want to say in this crowded coffee shop, and we're in the West Village, but I still just say, "I didn't want what you wanted."
And I could see all this sharp come out of her body. She turned her coffee cup in its saucer by a degree, and she says, "Yeah I kind of figured that out later."
Q has identified the vizsla owner as a woman in a red coat and is now tracking her progress down the block. "I'm sorry," I say. "For my part."
She says, "I'm sorry too."
Outside the red coat woman and the dog had gone. Q looked back at the table. He asks Olivia how long she's been back in the city. She says about eight months. He asks does she like being back. She says she does, mostly , she forgot how expensive it was. Q says yeah, he'd noticed that.
She says, "Are you happy out there?"
I thought about Goodluck, which is not a pretty town. The mud in spring. Q's house and the dark in winter, and how the dark doesn't bother me anymore the way it used to. The way I sleep now.
She says, "I'm glad you're okay."
Eventually, it's time for us to go. On the street outside, she walked north, and we went our own way.
After a minute, Q says, "That was good."
He says, "You feel okay?"
I looked up the block where she'd gone and then back at Q and I say I feel fine.
We started walking. The river is very bright in the afternoon. I thought about the first night I met her, how we
sat in her apartment until four in the morning, and because I had class the next day, how I took the train
home alone, and how I was twenty and in New York and the world was not yet entirely closed to me. Q says, "You want to get dinner somewhere, or head back to your mom's?"
I say, "Let's walk a little more first."
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