Tag: life

My Dinner with Andra

Andra and I met for dinner at Wo Hop on Mott Street. It serves what she calls the most “authentic New York-style” Chinese food. It is bright, loud and crowded. It smells heavenly. And the waiters rush dishes out as soon as they are prepared.

Because her flight from Europe was delayed, we met there at 9:30 pm, shortly before closing.

We sat at a booth in a corner furthest from the kitchen. She’d slept on the plane intermittently and she was ravenous. She ordered for the two of us.

 We spoke for a while about Budapest, her writing, and the course she taught there. She was animated but soon her mood shifted.

She folded her arms in front of her on the table and leaned toward me.

“I am spent,” she said. “I had such great hopes for my year away and much of it was wonderful. But I now feel lost, unmoored, and meaningless to a certain extent and that life, in fact, lacks any inherent meaning.”

“Andra,” I said.

“No, I’m serious. I was there for a year and my classes were going well. I even considered moving there, at least for a few years, but as time went on, I felt the work was dispiriting. I was diligent. I admit, I had high expectations. However, my students were unengaged, uncommitted, at least in the way I had expected them to be: European, whatever that might mean. They were no better by comparison to those I had been teaching here. I began to ask myself, am I making any difference at all in their lives? They certainly were not making any difference in mine.”

“Andra, I know you. You’re a good teacher. Your students speak highly of you.”

“Yes, yes, I know that, but…”

“And this just began in Budapest?

“No. In fact, I had taken the job there because I felt that living here, in this New York bubble, was, with the constant hype, celebrity, needy causes, acquisitiveness, and self-satisfaction, stifling. Don’t you feel that at times?”

“About New York or that I am going through life playing a part of some sort with no meaning?”

“Well, both, but more than that, that life ultimately has no meaning. We fill our days with work and phone calls and dinners out, and futile political conversations without any effect. When, in fact, they are simply diversions from facing that we are alone in the world which cares nothing about us and which itself has no meaning.”

The waiter had brought platters of chow fun, spareribs with ginger and scallion and a shrimp dish I could not identify. I spooned some of each dish onto my plate.

“Andra, I don’t disagree with you at all. The world is, in fact, pointless. But life need not be meaningless or pointless. If you are thinking that because, ultimately, as perhaps you are, we all die, therefore life has no meaning, I disagree with you. If anything, death gives us the opportunity to find meaning in life, in relationships, family, and creativity.”

She was quiet while the waiter filled our glasses with ice water.

“On the flight back,” she said, “I had this terrifyingly real dream that I had somehow contracted a painful and incurable condition, much like when I was younger and had endometriosis which they could do nothing for except remove my uterus which I refused to do, and now I had this disease, equally painful and incurable. I woke up in fear. I may have screamed, because the attendant came over to me and she actually sat down next to me and asked if they should divert the fight for me, and of course I said no, I apologized and passed it off as nothing of concern.”

“That must have been so frightening.”

“Yes, yes, it was, but of course I don’t have such a disease. Not that I know of, but what if I do? It would be all over. How could I go on? Maybe I could. I mean it just shows you how flimsy life can be. Ultimately how meaningless it is. Do you ever feel that way?”

“Yes, I said, “I am constantly aware of the tenuousness of life and, and, how close to death we might be at any moment. Even at this very moment.”

“Doesn’t that terrify you?” she said, “I try not to think about that. I don’t think I could get up in the morning or go to work if I thought like that. But you have not touched the kung pao shrimp, it is truly scrumptious.” 

I took a bite of the shrimp.

“And then,” she continued, “just when I was considering lengthening my stay there, to focus on the book I had started, there was this student, an attractive young man from the Pest quarter of the city, who was clearly one of the better of the group, invited me to lunch after the semester ended. We went to the Espresso café near the Montenegro Embassy. He was an earnest young man and quite well dressed. I admit I felt a twinge of what, affection, perhaps. But as the afternoon went on, I was unprepared for what he began talking about.”

“What was that?”

“Well, at one point over our coffee, he said, conversationally, that he was studying acting and that Stanislavski taught that the essence of acting was to constantly ask oneself, ‘Who am I? Why am I here? Where do I come from, and where am I going?’ And he told me, again quite earnestly, that to truly live we must ask those questions of ourselves. Only then, he said, can we act with honesty, compassion. and empathy. Only then can we live rather than just perform.”

“That is remarkable insight is it not? I mean, for a young man. And, was that not what you yourself had been feeling? Did you see him again?”

“Heavens no,” she said. “Why would he say such things to me? His former teacher. I had no desire to spend the rest of the afternoon at a glorious outdoor café by the Danube or any time or any place, being lectured by him about how I should live.”

“But, Andra, was he not being sincere and caring and relating to you, just as you wanted. Just as we all want?”

She looked at me as if I was talking gibberish.

“I don’t know what we all want, and don’t think you or he know either. I toldhim that what he was suggesting to me was, by implication, impertinent and glaringly inappropriate. I am an educated, aware, and accomplished person. Thoroughly cognizant of my own mortality, and that, as a path to gain authenticity in life that I should engage in some theatrical trick is in any way superior to, say, just waking up each day, having a cup of coffee, breathing in some fresh air and saying, ‘fuck it, let’s see what happens today.”

Her watch beeped. She checked and moved to stand up.

“I am tired now. I am exhausted, and I am going home to sleep. I have come home from a situation which no longer worked for me. And tomorrow I will undoubtedly awaken, say ‘fuck it,’ perhaps out loud, and feel boundlessly better.”

I started to say something when she stood up. She waved me not to, thanked the waiter, gathered up her package of leftovers, and said, “This has been fabulous,” and, pointing to the check, she said to me ,“I have only a few Euros in my pocket. Please be a dear, will you?”

And then she was gone. Her footsteps clacked on the concrete steps up to Mott Street.

The Song We Would Sing

Our children were quite young. We were living in the walk-up in Brooklyn, near the park, when, Sonja, my older sister who I spoke with sporadically over the past few years, called. We were in the bustle of dressing and feeding them, cleaning the kitchen, and dressing ourselves.

“Your father,” she said, “died this morning.” She may have said, ‘Daddy died,’ but I don’t recall that clearly.

“I’m sorry,” I am sure I said.

A graveside service was planned for the next afternoon. We arranged for a hotel room and a rental car.

Driving across the Brooklyn Bridge that evening. The lights of lower Manhattan. Chinatown, the East River bridges, the medical centers. All of it both so spectacular and so routine. I was sad to leave, if only for a day or two.

At the grave side, beside my mother’s, Sonja brought us around to say hello to family. The resemblance among my relatives was unmistakable. People I had not seen in ten years and more. Some not since I was young. Familiar faces. Names. Familiar smiles. Some, too, I had never seen nor heard of before.

How had so many years had passed. Why?

I know the how of what happened. The why was the real issue. I’d moved away after college. Long before cell phones and email. We’d never shared numbers or addresses. I lost track of family.

All those years, benignly estranged. No arguments. Disputes. Nasty words. Just nothing.

“You remember Aunt Minnie and Uncle Fred?”

“Yes,” I said. “The dentist?”

“Well, this is Janice, their great granddaughter.”

“And you remember Ruthie? Ethel’s, granddaughter?

“Yes.”

“This is Rebecca, her daughter’s youngest child.”

“Hello,” I said. “This is Bess and these are our children.” It was so good to feel a connection there with them.

On it went. New people, children of children of aunts and uncles I knew. Cousins of cousins. Generations of births and birthdays and illnesses and new jobs. Lost. Lost to me. An old novel with chapters that kept being written after I had put it down. I wanted now to read those unread pages, though I knew it was not possible. The gaps were inaccessible to me.

We drove back home the next day. Listening to Waze. The radio. My mind present, and also wandering in the distant past.

I had moved away. Never once thinking of the consequences. Caring for only my need to be away.

The kids were asleep in the back.

“What happened?” Bess asked.

“What?” I said.

“How did you lose track of all those people?”

“I don’t know.”

“Didn’t you ever think about them? Ask about them?”

“Sonja would tell me things once in a while, but I never thought more about it. For a while all the names had faces but then they became only names.”

“Doesn’t it make you sad?”

“It does. I feel terrible. I let it happen. Not once thinking about them. As if I left and they disappeared.”

“But, it was you who disappeared. Not them.”

“But my parents never…”

“Never what?”

“Never let me know what was happening.”

“And you never asked them?”

“No.”

“My parents and I didn’t talk much and then they were in nursing homes. And with their dementia it became impossible.”

“That’s not really an excuse, and you know it. There clearly were others.”

“No. Not an excuse really. An explanation. Maybe.”

“Maybe, but let’s never do that to our children, please,” Bess said. “Let’s keep them connected. Show them how important family is. What it is to be part of a family. Making family the most important thing.”

“I didn’t grow up with that.”

“But you did. You remembered your Aunt Minnie, Aunt Ethel. Harold. But then you let them all drop away.”

“I did,” I said. “I only see that now.”

Back home, we returned the car and stopped at the market on Eighth Avenue and 12th Street to pick up milk and bread. Bess put the kids to bed.

I stood by the stove heating water for tea. Mesmerized by the bubbles twisting upward. The larger ones roiling the surface. The warmth on my face. Drifting into another space.

Seeing all those others, how they were with each other. Embracing one another. How easily they embraced me as they did when I was so young.

But feeling, in that mindless space, what I had never said to myself before. I don’t think that my parents loved me. Feeling that so clearly should have wrenched at my heart, but it didn’t. It was, instead, a relief, a validation of, growing up, how lonely I was. Lost. Alone. An observer at some close remove. Awkward. Feeling as though I never had the right or reliable answer to any question. In school. At home. Anywhere. Nothing felt unjudged. Nothing felt safe. Though I can’t ever remember being aware then in those terms. As if the wrong response would be punished by further isolation.

The kettle must have been boiling for a while. Bess came up behind me. She lay her hand on my shoulder, and turned off the burner.

“How are you doing?” She said.

“I’m okay,”

“You sure? Will you tell me what you’re thinking?”

“I was watching the water boiling” I told her. “My mind drifting to yesterday. The past. Not happy thoughts though. Thinking about what it was like for me growing up. But then a song came to me, as if from the rhythm of the bubbles. One we used to sing in the car when we drove from our apartment in the Bronx to my father’s relatives in Brooklyn. The windows down, my father smoking a pipe, my mother on the front passenger side. And, she would begin to sing ‘Merrily we roll along’ and I would join in, and we would sing it a few times until we tired of it, and she would start our favorite one. The one I loved. ‘You are my… sunshine’ she would sing, and I would join in, ‘… my only sunshine…,’ and we would sing the whole song, over, and over again, ‘You make me happy when skies are gray,’ until our cheeks hurt from smiling. And then she would nod to me and slow the tempo down and we’d both deepen our voices, for this last time, the last line, ‘Please… don’t… take… my… sunshine… away.’”

Bess listened to me while she made the tea and set the cups down on the kitchen table.

“I love you,” she said.