Night Film(111)

“That’s kind of how our friendship started,” Hopper said simply. “Writing to each other. She didn’t talk about her family. Sometimes she mentioned her brother. Or what she was studying. Or her dogs, a couple of rescued mutts. Her letters were the reason I didn’t break out of there. I worried we’d somehow lose touch if I did. Once she wrote that maybe I should stop running from myself and try standing still. So that’s what I did.” He shook his head. “When spring break came, I was dying to see her. I think a part of me didn’t think it was actually Ashley that I’d been writing to, but some figment of my imagination. I knew she was in the city, so I went online and found a spot in Central Park, the Promenade near the Bandshell. I told her to meet me there, April the second, seven o’clock sharp. Cheesy as f*ck. I didn’t care. She didn’t answer my email for two days. And when it came, her response was one word. The best word in the English language.”

“What’s that?” I asked, when he didn’t immediately go on.

“Yes.” He smiled sheepishly. “I took three buses to get to New York. I arrived a day early, slept on a park bench. I was so goddamn nervous. Like I’d never been with a girl before. But she wasn’t a girl. She was a wonder. Finally, it was seven o’clock, seven-thirty, eight. She didn’t show. Blew me off. I was friggin’ embarrassed for myself, and I was about to take off when all of a sudden I hear right behind me in her low voice, ‘Hello, Tiger Foot.’ ” He glanced up, wryly shaking his head. “It was my goddamn tribe name from Six Silver Lakes. I turn around and, of course, she was there.”

He fell silent, thinking about it, amazed.

“And that was it,” he noted quietly. “We were up the whole night just talking, walking the city. You can walk those blocks forever, take a break on the edge of a fountain, eat pizza and snow cones, awed by the human carnival all around you. She was the most incredible person. To be next to her was to have everything. When it was daylight, we’d been sitting on a stoop watching the street get light. She mentioned the light took eight minutes to leave the sun and reach us. You couldn’t help but love that light, traveling so far through the loneliest of spaces to get here, to come so far. It was like we were the only two people in the world.”

He paused, looking up at me with a penetrating stare. “She told me her father taught her to live life way beyond the cusp of it, way out in the outer reaches where most people never had the guts to go, where you got hurt. Where there was unimaginable beauty and pain. She was always demanding of herself, Do I dare? Do I dare disturb the universe? From Prufrock. Her dad revered the poem, I guess, and the entire family lived in answer to it. They were always reminding themselves to stop measuring life in coffee spoons, mornings and afternoons, to keep swimming way, way down to the bottom of the ocean to find where the mermaids sang, each to each. Where there was danger and beauty and light. Only the now. Ashley said it was the only way to live.”

After this feverish outpouring of words, Hopper paused to collect himself, taking a deep breath.

“It was how she was. Ash not only rode on the waves and dove every day down to where the mermaids sang, she was a mermaid herself. By the time I walked her home, I loved her. Body and soul.”

He admitted this evenly, his face bare and unafraid. I sensed it was the first time he had truly talked about her. There was a feeling in his unsteady voice, in the words used to describe her, that they’d been submerged inside him for years; they were musty and purpled and fragile, practically dissolving as soon as they hit the air.

“You walked her back to East Seventy-first Street?” I asked.

He eyed me. “Where we were last night.”

“That’s why you knew how to get in,” whispered Nora, astonished. “You’d climbed in before.”

“After the first night we were together, when she didn’t come home, her parents were furious. They kept a pretty tight rein on her. They insisted she be home by one in the morning or they were going to take her away or something, to their house upstate. So, every night that week, I’d drop Ash off at her house at one, wait for her across the street, where we stood last night. At about one-thirty, Ash would climb out and we’d take off, heading to the docks or the Carlyle or Central Park. At six in the morning, she’d climb back in. She’d cut the wires so the sensors on that window weren’t rigged for the alarm. Her parents never knew about it. They still obviously don’t. When I saw the place last night it looked exactly the same. I half expected to see Ash come climbing out.”

He dropped his gaze to the floor and drained the glass of scotch.

“When that week was over,” he went on quietly, “I went back to school and the first thing I did was write a letter to Orlando’s parents, telling them what had happened. She’d given me the courage, even though she never said a word. When I put it in the mail, I felt like a noose had been removed from my neck. It took them a few weeks to write back to me, but the letter, when it finally arrived—it awed me, I guess. They blessed me for coming forward, telling the truth. They asked me to forgive myself, said that they’d pray for me and I’d always have a place in their home.”

Hopper, still awed by this, shook his head. “For the next couple of weeks, Ash and I wrote every day,” he went on. “In late May, for a week I didn’t hear. I went crazy, worried something had happened. Then I got a phone call. It was Ash. I’ll never forget how she sounded. She was desperate, sobbing. She said she couldn’t live with her parents anymore and wanted to go where they couldn’t find her. She asked if I’d come away with her. And I said—well, I said the best word in the English language.”