Tarry Till I Come…John 21:23
I don’t really know what I’m doin’ here.
I’ve never stayed in one place long, but in the five years since I left Xavier’s little play school, I haven’t been in the same place longer than a week. It’s exhausting, and right now I’m as tired as I can ever remember being.
I’ve circled the entire continent, over and over. North of the border, south, all the states and provinces. I always wind up back here eventually. Never any closer than Manhattan or Brooklyn at most, but here. And every time, there’s this one moment when I actually forget that I’m not here for any particular reason. Sometimes I wake up and get through a whole hour before I remember that I don’t have any place to be. No one’s expecting me.
Strangest thing, but it happens every goddamn time. At that point I usually go and start drinking. You can do that in New York.
It’s pretty fucking ironic, really. I spent fifteen years wishing I could remember my life. The last five years I’ve been trying to forget it. Never thought that would be a problem. I never had to try before; people and places I left behind me just faded into the past and I lived in the here and now.
It doesn’t seem to work that way any more. At least, not when I wind up back here.
So ‘here’, at the moment, is a bar in the East Village. It’s almost two in the morning, but bars in New York can stay open till four and I figure I’ll be here until they close. It’s pretty dark and grungy, but it’s Manhattan grunge. There aren’t very many really seedy places left in this yuppified neighborhood and the place has a consciously grimy feel; its atmosphere is created, on purpose, for style rather than substance. The other patrons are mostly young kids who are playing at being avant-garde and dangerous. They’re not like me.
I finish my beer and signal to the blonde bartender for another. She brings it, leaning over to give me a view of her tattooed chest, which I ignore. She hitches up her leather pants over hips that are a little too fleshy to wear them well. “Six-fifty.” That’s Manhattan for you, charging more for a beer than you ought to pay for a six-pack. I toss a ten on the bar and she gives me my change; I let it sit there.
The door opens and a group of five or six people come in. I don’t look up, until a slightly familiar scent reaches me. I place it just before I see her and just before she spots me too, as she heads for the bar to order.
I forget her name. Some things I do manage to get rid of, but I lived there, and scents I don’t forget. She’s Asian, petite and pretty, and she’s older now than I remember her, of course. She’s dressed in black with a bright yellow scarf tied around her neck and I dimly recall that she used to wear nothing but yellow. I guess some things don’t change. Much.
Her eyes narrow when she sees me and she changes direction immediately, coming to the end of the bar where I’m sitting. I consider getting up, brushing past her, walking out before she can say anything, but I don’t. I’m tired, I just started this goddamn overpriced beer, and from what I can remember, she’d be unlikely to let me go without creating a scene anyway. Then as she gets closer I can make out another scent on her, instantly and viscerally recognizable to me, and I pinpoint it to the scarf she’s wearing. Then I can’t leave even if I want to, because I can’t move away from that. I know who touched that scarf, who probably gave it to her.
And fuck if even with all this introspective bullshit, I hadn’t realized how much that still mattered to me.
“What are you doing here?” She doesn’t bother with greetings or small talk, which doesn’t really surprise me.
“Why? There a law against sitting in a bar?”
She leans up against the bar, her eyes fixed on me. “So what, you mean you’re not here to visit?”
I snort. “I’m not exactly the houseguest type,” I point out.
“She isn’t mad at you, you know. Not any more, anyway.”
And my lips tighten at that as I try not to let her see the lurch my stomach gives at just the reference, however peripheral, and how the relief that her words inadvertently give me washes through me. “So?” I can’t let her know the importance of those words, and I make my voice deliberately cutting.
She doesn’t appear to notice. “You shouldn’t have left,” she opines, and cracks her gum loudly.
“What was I supposed to do? Wait to get thrown out?”
“They weren’t going to throw you out.” She shakes her head, looking disgusted. “You might try giving us a little credit for sense.”
I snort and take another sip of my beer. Us. Yeah, it was definitely an us-and-them mentality at that place, with me firmly in the them category. “Yeah, right.”
“Whatever you thought, you could’ve at least stuck around long enough to say goodbye to her.” That’s brutal, and this time I don’t think I hide my reaction too well. She softens her tone a little, if not her words. “She was really devastated when you didn’t come back. She thought you cared about her.”
Typical female, going for the knife right in the gut. “I did. That’s why I left.” I really do want to get up and leave now, but as bad as this hurts, I want to hear more—no, need to hear more, like an addict needs a fix. “I almost killed her.”
“You didn’t, though.” She tips her head to the side and looks at me curiously. “Look, everyone knew it was an accident. I knew it was, anyway. What did you care what people thought?”
I cared what people thought about her. “Accident, hell. She still almost died. I wasn’t about to wait around for it to happen again.” I should have stayed. I know that, but at the time, seeing in everyone’s eyes exactly what they thought was going on there…it was just too much. And what Xavier told me, that absorbing my sick mind almost made her insane, that didn’t help any. “I didn’t have a choice.”
She’s still staring at me with this curious, sort of questioning look. Then she reaches into her jacket pocket and drops something onto the bar in front of me, onto the crumpled dollar bills and coins next to the beer bottle. Involuntarily I glance at it, and then I can’t look away.
“I don’t know, Wolves. Seems to me if you made a choice, you had a choice.” She taps the card lying on the bar. “This’s her show. It opened last week. You should stop by, take a look.” She starts to turn and leave, hesitates for a second. “Just because you made one bad choice doesn’t mean you have to stick by it the rest of your life. Get over yourself and take a chance.” Then she’s gone, and I’m barely aware of what she’s said or when she’s moved away, because of that postcard lying in front of me. I don’t need to reach into my inside pocket for the picture to compare it to, because I know that scene as well as I know my own face in the mirror. I pick up the card.
The postcard has the name and address of a gallery on the back. On the front—it’s a reproduction of a painting. It’s done in deep, rich tones that swirl and blend into each other, creating an opulent, almost dizzying impression even in this cheap replica. It feels like New Orleans, exactly the way I remember it.
It isn’t exactly like the photograph. The storefronts are just blurs, the lights scattering over the street, and the two figures are undefined. The one in the front—it’s seen from behind, as if the painter was looking over its shoulder, almost through its eyes. The focus is on the other figure, barely recognizable as a girl, probably not specifically identifiable to anyone but me, turning back to look at the other figure, or at the painter.
She made this. She remembers. That’s all I can think as I stare at the scrap of paper in my hand. If she could do that, she must be all right. The painting is beautiful, and I know I can’t leave without seeing the original. Just a glimmer of something like hope is rising, and I get up to leave. That was it, you know. The reason I left—I just couldn’t take the idea that after everything, I was just one more person who’d hurt her. Who’d broken their promises and a little more of her spirit. By the time I’d cooled off, I figured I’d pretty much trashed whatever there was between us.
I can’t have destroyed everything. Not if she could still create something like that, not if she could put that much life and joy into oils on canvas. It’s not much, but it’s damned well more than I had ten minutes ago. I slide the postcard into my pocket, next to the photograph, and walk out into the crisp October air.
The Asian girl is nowhere to be seen, and I wonder if she’ll tell Marie she’s seen me. I’m half-tempted to head for Xavier’s right now, see if she’s there, but it’s late and the gallery is here in New York. I want to be able to tell her I’ve seen her work when I see her again.
When I see her again. I haven’t let myself think that in about five years, and I turn it over in my mind as I walk away from the bar, down the darkened street.
It’s a good thought.
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Author's Chapter Notes:
Logan. A different bar than usual. East Village, Manhattan.