You’re right about the poet—and how right you are. Poets are liars, obsessed with cereal. They try to hammer the atom back to Fruit Loops, life back to paradise, and love back to nonexistent simplicity. You’re right—they shouldn’t do that. It isn’t possible, and they shouldn’t pretend.
This email filled me with unmixed joy. It was what I had been waiting for him to say—that you couldn’t go backward from love, and that he was calling me, that I should go. I felt a kind of peace and relief I had never felt before. Nothing about the birds falling out of the sky like charred pears seemed like a dangerous omen to me, and I wrote back with an open and light heart: Are you busy tomorrow afternoon, or Thursday? I’m free after two. I hit Ctrl-S. It felt like a dream. It was even more like a dream when he wrote back, in Russian: We’ll see each other tomorrow, 3, Wid. steps.
I knew that Wid. had to be Widener, the library, and yet at the same time it seemed that this wasn’t something I actually knew—that I was only guessing.
? ? ?
At breakfast in the cafeteria, a guy I knew slightly invited me to opening night at the repertory theater that same evening. He said it would be a huge favor, because he was in love with the sound engineer. Nothing he was saying made sense. It felt insane to make a plan to do something after I was going to meet with Ivan—like making plans for after my own death. I said I would go.
? ? ?
On the library steps, a group of boys in red tracksuits were posing while a girl in an identical tracksuit took their photograph. A skinny guy hauling a huge tote bag full of books resembled the boa constrictor digesting an elephant. Two girls in headscarves were descending toward me; as they passed I heard one of them say to the other in Turkish, “You didn’t forget your glasses, did you?”
Ivan was there already—he was sitting at the very top. I waved, but he was staring fixedly at a lecture hall across the yard. I started to climb the steps, first one by one, then two at a time. There were only about a thousand of them. I looked up to see how close I was. Ivan had stood up and was skipping down toward me. We both half raised our arms in salute. Then he was very close up—closer to me, it seemed, than he had ever been. We walked down the steps in silence.
“You sat so near the top,” I said.
“I’m sorry?”
“You sat so near the top.”
“Near the what?”
“The top. Of the steps.”
“Oh, the top. Sorry. I was hiding.”
“Hiding?” I repeated.
“Oh, not from you, of course! From my roommate. He’s really curious about you. I showed him something you wrote and he liked it, and now he wants to see you. But I don’t want him to, so I’ve been avoiding him all day.”
I felt like I had swallowed a hard-boiled egg. He had shown his roommate something I’d written? How? Had he forwarded him the email, or let him read it over his shoulder? And now this roommate was at large? I glanced around. I saw: a church, a dog, a tree. Everything looked strangely isolated, as if each item in the landscape had been purchased separately from a catalog.
“Don’t worry,” Ivan said, “I probably lost him by now. He almost definitely just went home.”
We left campus and turned onto one of the side streets leading to the river. It seemed to me that I had never before been on this particular street, and had never seen the basement café located underneath a store selling mirrors. We sat at a table under a yellow umbrella in the little brick courtyard, which was crammed between the mirror store and an iron fence. Ivan was facing the street, and I was facing a window full of mirrors.
I had never actually been to a café—not the kind in a basement where people went to drink espresso-based drinks. I read the menu over and over, like a test I hadn’t studied for.
“What is this Sanka?” demanded Ivan. “I always wonder this. No matter where you go, it’s always the cheapest thing on the menu. It sounds to me somehow Eastern European. What do you think it could be?”
“Decaffeinated instant coffee,” I said.
He blinked. “I’m sorry, what?”
“It’s a brand of instant coffee. Like Nescafé, only decaf.”
“Decaffeinated Nescafé? But that sounds totally useless.” He slowly started to nod. “Aha, okay, I get it—it’s some kind of useless crap, so they give it an Eastern European name.”
The waiter came to take our order. Why were we here, why was he bringing us things? I ordered iced coffee. Ivan ordered peppermint tea. It came in a pot.
“So,” Ivan said, pouring tea through a strainer. “Did you prepare?”
“For what?” I took a sip of iced coffee. It tasted different than I had imagined.
“For this.”
“There was preparation? Did you prepare?”
“Oh, I’m never prepared. My roommate, on the other hand, is completely different, very anal. He asked what I had prepared to say to you, and when I said, ‘Nothing,’ he was horrified. ‘Oh, no, you have to tell her something nice.’ He gave me a poem to read you, can you believe it? Obviously he had written it himself—it was an incredibly shitty poem. The first line ended with “I,” the second line with “sigh,” the third line with “die.” I told him, ‘Look, I’m not going to subject Selin to the poem you wrote. Make one of your friends listen to it.’ But he kept denying that he wrote it! ‘No, no, no, I didn’t write it. Yeats wrote it.’ Yeats, can you imagine?”
“Oh, Yeats,” I said.
“But I found out later that he was telling the truth. He showed me in a book. The poem is really by Yeats!” He laughed and laughed.
I was laughing, too, because the way he did it was contagious. Yeats? What was he talking about?
“How is your coffee?” Ivan asked.
“I think it’s okay,” I said. “I think I don’t like iced coffee.”
“Would you like to order something else?”
“Oh, no thanks.”
“Oh, you ordered it on purpose? I see. I did that in Frankfurt when I didn’t have any money. I’d always order Guinness, because it’s cheap and I don’t like it, so each glass lasted me a really long time and they couldn’t kick me out of the bar.”
“They’ll never be able to kick me out of here,” I agreed sadly.
? ? ?
“Radu, my roommate?” Ivan said.
“Yes?”
“He’s really desperate for a girlfriend.”
“Oh?”
“It’s gotten really bad. He’s even hitting on freshmen.”
“Really,” I said, feeling slightly insulted.
“He follows them around, he spies on them.”
“Do they get mad?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “Maybe they think it’s funny.”
“Maybe,” I said doubtfully.
“Radu is Romanian. Last summer he was working in Washington, but he was in love with a girl back in Romania.”
“Oh.”
“She was in Romania, and Radu sent her a postcard every day. And in these postcards, he gradually revealed more and more of his feelings toward her. He was very careful to make a gradual transition—so she wouldn’t get scared.”
“Did it work?”
“No,” he said, starting to laugh, “because she was in Berlin! He sent the cards to her family house in Bucharest, where nobody was there but her grandmother. The grandmother received every day a postcard from Radu in Washington!”
“Oh no! Couldn’t she have forwarded them?”