I remember the winter I stood every morning on the L platform waiting for the express train to arrive, shivering beneath the orange lights that since childhood had reminded me of a toaster oven, except the truth was they never really kept a person warm, only heated the outer layers of skin to a near broil until you were forced despite the cold to step away and back out into the windswept air because it was just too much.
One day that year in January it was that kind of bone cold, and without warning I felt a chill run through me, the rush and ache of fever, flu coming on. I was on my way to work and wearing a coat I had bought the week before and paid too much for, a gray wool blend A-line with ridiculous lettuce-leaf neck and sleeves, when I glimpsed from the outer edge of my periphery an image of Solomon’s face on a billboard. But before I could pick it out again as it floated above the platform, beyond the multi-layered mess of advertisements for E-Z Cash and Payday Express and loans for twenty-three percent interest, the picture of my ex standing huge and sedate and shining amidst the frenzied, sad drabness of the neighborhood, before I could find the face I had lain next to in bed for three years, the train arrived, blocking everything else but the Courvoisier ads, which had been spray-painted the day after they went up, in black-and-silver swirling gangland insignia intelligible only to those in the know. I boarded the train, scrambled for a seat, and turned around, searching beyond the grimy window and the stark snow-laden branches, up and up until my eyes landed again on the picture one block over, an ad for Horn and Kruthers Opticians, a very chi-chi business catering to an income bracket at least two steps above mine, and above Solomon’s. Or so I had thought. In the ad, Solomon was wearing a navy-blue Italian-made suit and a stylish pair of tortoiseshell frames and a serious sexy expression I had never seen on him during the entire time we were together. It was him, alright. Where had he kept that look? I was wondering, and then the train lurched forward and he was gone again.
The L clanged its way parallel to the slate-colored lake, past the Eiffel Tower Panaderia, along streets that in the summer sold elotes and mango-on-a-stick, where in the evenings young men stood smoking in doorways. It plowed through the frozen white wasteland stretch of cemetery and around corners where the windows of apartments were so close you could reach out and touch someone’s hand or shout a message to people if they happened to be sitting on their wooden back porches. There were times I’d almost done it, times when the train was moving slowly and was so empty that I had nearly stood up and opened a smeary window to ask a young child sitting alone on a porch crowded with garbage cans and bicycles and dirty toys and the occasional potted plant, a child sitting alone beneath a string of wet laundry drying, “What’s your name?”
Although I couldn’t see it from the train window, I knew that across Lake Michigan there was more land, that a thousand miles due north lay a continent of ice. I knew that steam rose from the chilly waters of the lake when the ice was just starting to melt. But it wasn’t anywhere near spring. It was winter, it was always winter then.
I had a job as a paralegal in a downtown firm. I had completed one year of law school and then dropped out, unsure of what I wanted, but as far as the firm knew I was just taking a year off to make some money and save myself another year of student loans. Most of the other students were the usual age, fresh out of school and eager to begin their careers. Wanted to fix the world, feed the children, force the money-hungry corporations of the world to stop pouring their dirt into the air and water. But even the hippie throwbacks who the first semester talked about doing pro-bono work for the homeless and for halfway-house residents had by the end of the first year changed their tunes, cut their hair, stopped wearing cut-offs and peasant dresses and patchouli oil, and begun dressing corporate.
They were a nice bunch but young and ironed, nothing out of place, least of all their personal lives. This one was engaged or living with someone, that one was happy to be on her own and able to focus on her career, another had a lawyer wife, well-behaved children attending the right preschools, and was managing properties all over town.
I know how that sounds: sour grapes, the jaded outsider looking for death or destruction or a hint of blood to make her own meager hold on a respectable life seem less tenuous. Envy, jealousy seeping in around the edges as I waited for one of those young, fresh, in-order lives to begin spoiling so I wouldn’t have to feel so alone in the world, alone in my cynicism.
But that wasn’t really it. I liked my fellow classmates, even as I envied them their youth, their uncomplicated lives. And I wanted to see them succeed where I had not. I, who was witness to those first blushes of love they were entranced and ensconced in, the women still costuming themselves in little black dresses and going out with their well-attired boyfriends to attend New Year’s parties where the hosts served catered hors d’oeuvres and excellent wines. The boyfriends who still cared how they looked for their women, working out at the gym and tucking in their shirttails. I watched them closely in their lives, younger than mine by a full decade, because more than anything else, I wanted to retain a sense of hope. That a person could start out relatively happy, fall through a hole in the ice to be dragged through hell, and then manage to find happiness again. That it wouldn’t always be winter.
My friend Jonah came by and dressed me in her red-and-orange party dress late that afternoon to drag me to a curandera she swore by, one with a blinking neon light in the window that depicted two golden eyes peering into a crystal ball. I told her along the way that I had already dosed up on vitamin C and some herbal mess Solomon had neglected to take with him when he left and which I had pondered for days wondering if the forgotten bottle signified a subconscious act of his cloistered love. But Jonah was insistent on taking me to the woman she counted on for a glimpse of the future. She thought what I needed was a cure for heartbreak, a way to wake in the morning and have Solomon erased from my mind, my skin, the soft insides of my arms that ached without his touch.
“No good from the get-go,” she had chided me the day after he left, though we both knew that she was just trying to cover for me and my own stupidity. The truth was, I was the one who had ended things, and I didn’t even know why. Solomon hadn’t asked, had just listened to me talk about my own unhappiness one evening and then packed his things and left, wounded and unwilling to speak.
“No one leaves like that, no man leaves a woman after three years without even figuring out what the problem is and if there is a way to solve it,” she had muttered, noting the emptiness of the apartment without Solomon’s desk or clutter.
“Not unless he didn’t love me anymore,” I had answered without thinking, and Jonah couldn’t think of anything to say in response.
Wearing the red-and-orange dress was imperative. The curandera was a middle-aged woman from a dusty Oaxacan province who believed in the mystical properties of color, Jonah explained as she peeled my feverish body out of a sweater and leggings. She said my own clothes would only depict me as absence, a hole around which the rest of life swirled. That the woman would wave her hand before my face as if in front of a mirror and claim to sense nothing coming off me. I knew Jonah was right; I dressed that year as if attempting to negate my presence in the universe. Everything in my closet was black: black linen in the fall and spring, black wool in the winter. He had been gone an entire four months, had not called once since pulling the door closed behind him. I was thirty-three, thirty-four. I was learning to become single again.
The night I met Solomon I was on a blind double date at the Green Mill, talking movies and restaurants, the latest political scandal, while on stage a bored woman with bleached-out hair and a neon green sheath dress smoked clove cigarettes and sang torch songs, pretending to be Billie Holliday. I was intent on faking my way through the evening as a sort of exercise, with the half-hope that if I could pretend to be enjoying myself it might mean that I actually was. My date saw through me though, mentally pegged me as difficult and not worth it, and by the second set had begun avoiding eye contact, so I switched roles and became the party’s bar maid.
Solomon had sat alone sipping mineral water and studying a commerce text, his slim hand gracefully holding a blue highlighter as if it were a surgical instrument. He was studying corporate law in the evenings and tending bar, working days when the worst sorts of drunks frequented bars, the rock-bottom regulars. I was standing next to his barstool collecting the current round of beers when I turned to see the lumpy back of his head, dreadlocks threaded with blue and red string, a lone gold hoop in one ear, a buttery yellow shirt that looked so soft it made me want to stroke it. I put my hand to it without thinking, and when he turned, surprised, I found that I knew something about his face, the seamed lines around his eyes, the faded childhood scar on his stubbled chin. It all looked familiar to me; I knew that I knew the stories tattooed on his heart.
He wasn’t beautiful. His face was better than that: kind. Heavy-lidded eyes that made him look always half-asleep, a strangely shaped nose, and smooth lips and beautiful white teeth. “Island teeth,” like his mother used to say, although he wasn’t born on an island, unless you counted Manhattan. He was first generation with parents from the islands. On the phone with his mother in Rockaway, he spoke with a rolling lilt that often lulled me to sleep, made me put my head down at the kitchen table and close my eyes, it was that gentle, even when they argued. I was tired of pretty boys, tired of people who rode through life on their looks, which afforded them the opportunity to ignore their souls. Solomon put out his hand to introduce himself that night, taking between his palms the hand that had unexpectedly stroked his shirt.
Maria was her name, Maria Aurora, she had announced, spreading out her stumpy fingers to the painted-on backdrop of the night sky that floated behind her, silver stars overlaid with glitter weaving in and out of cloudbank. Jonah, whose father was from Guatemala and had had enough of a sense of the absurd to give his daughter a man’s Old Testament name, had raised her speaking Spanish, though people never guessed it initially from the gringo genes she had inherited from her mother. She sat knee to knee with Maria Aurora and translated the tangled sentences punctuated with hand gestures. I was feverish by then and didn’t recall a word, only the quality of her whispered voice as she spoke, and the tickle of Jonah’s fingers along the inside of my arm as she repeatedly asked, “Did you get that? Should we write it down?” What Jonah didn’t understand was I wasn’t looking for a cure for heartbreak. I was in it, it lived in me, and I wanted only to nurture it and let the rest of the world melt away. I closed my eyes, lay back and let the swaying voices carry me as the two of them placed leaves and herbs on my arms and stomach and forehead. Afterwards Jonah took me home and put me into bed. She made vegetable soup from scratch and listened to soft jazz and watched me from the doorway of my bedroom until I fell asleep, and then she crawled in beside me and held my feverish body until morning.
“What did you see in him?” she asked me when I opened my eyes the next day, a gravity in her tone I had never noticed, and I couldn’t answer. She knew in her heart that Solomon was good and serious and treated me well; she knew that he had answers to the world’s problems hidden up his sleeve. But she wanted to believe he would graduate and get some fat paycheck to defend the oil companies, stand by while big business raped the world just so he could buy a house and send money back home to his mother. He volunteered at a soup kitchen on the weekends and was a court-appointed advocate for an abused child, and she wanted to ignore that, and the fact that I had loved him.
The truth was that Solomon was nothing but gold, and I know now that I couldn’t value gold in my life then because inside I felt tarnished. Jonah stopped asking about him after my fever vanished, after I told her I didn’t know what kind of lawyer he would become, but that I had seen his face staring down at me from an ad. She tried to take my hand before she left, tried to pull me close so I could see her tear-filled eyes, but I had by then stopped looking at her face.
“What did he give you that I can’t?” she had cried to me through the door and then on my answering machine for months afterwards. “It’s a cycle, don’t you understand? You broke his heart because you didn’t know your own. Then he broke yours, and now you are breaking mine.” But I erased her messages and finally unplugged the phone. The last time I saw her she was entering the Belmont station as I was leaving, and we both lowered our eyes as we went through the turnstile. Such is life.
I saw Solomon once more before I heard that he had moved back to New York and married an old girlfriend from high school. His face beamed down at me from another billboard for the same optical firm, this time with a wide, open smile on his face. I was back in school at the time, about to graduate, and on my way to a faculty party with a professor whose benevolence towards me had strayed in the past month beyond helping me ready myself for the bar exam.
I had learned to dress well without a fuss and had a job offer before me, a new apartment in a better part of town where I didn’t have to watch children on their lonely back porches anymore. I looked up that evening and saw Solomon through the falling rain of summer, the gray iron scent of the rain washing away the car exhaust on a crowded Saturday night street. He was the same, and yet different, a person I had never met.
I crossed the street with my companion and continued walking. I thought about how Solomon and I used to lie in bed in the evenings when we first got together, not talking or making love but just looking into each other’s faces like we knew we were stray animals who had found and rescued each other. We’d fall asleep that way, in wonder and curiosity at the fact of the other person lying on the other side of the bed, or maybe just realizing even then that it didn’t matter how long we’d remain together because we would never truly know the other one’s mind.
The rain fell all that night as I sat awake with the window open and thought about who Solomon was to me. As the sky lightened, I knew that he would remain a mystery, that no color could fill in the outlines of who he was. I would never really know what we were together or why I had sent him away. Sometimes I still dream of his voice.
Susan Dickman is a Chicago area writer and artist. She has published work in Another Chicago Magazine, Best American Poetry, Zocalo Public Square, Left Hooks, Brain Child, Lilith, Rhino, and other publications. Additionally, she has received awards and fellowships from the Illinois Arts Council and a Pushcart nomination. She teaches visually impaired students and is at work on a novel.