The Paper Palace(74)

He hands me the ring. “Take it. It’s yours. Even if it reminds you of him.”

“No.”

“Why not?”

I could lie. I would, to anyone else. “Because it also reminds me of you,” I say sadly.

Jonas takes out a pen and tears off a piece of napkin. “I’m giving you my number. For when you come to your senses. Don’t lose it.”

I fold the fragile paper, put it in my wallet. “It’s insanely freezing out there.” I pull on my hat, wrap my scarf around my neck.

“I miss you,” he says.

“Same,” I say. “Always.” I lean down and kiss him on the cheek. “Gotta go.”

“Wait,” Jonas says. “I’ll walk you to the subway.”

Outside the diner, snow is falling in great heaps, dumping fistfuls at a time. Jonas puts his arm through mine, sticks my cold, un-mittened hand into his coat pocket. We walk the seven blocks without speaking, listening to the silent snowfall. The quiet between us is easy, familiar—like walking single file down the path to the beach, roaming around the woods—everything between us resonant but unspoken.

The gray, gaping mouth of the subway comes sooner that I want it to, exhaling bundled, bedraggled people in its stale concrete breath. Jonas takes both of my hands in his.

“You don’t have to miss me, you know.”

I take my hand out of his and put it on the flat of his cheek. “Yes. I do.”

He pulls me to him so quickly I have no time to react. Kisses me with the intensity of every day, every month, every year we have loved each other. It is not our first kiss. That was long ago, underwater, when we were children—when we said goodbye for the first time, knowing it would not be the last. But this time when I pull away from him, it is agonizing. Not found, but lost. I pause, stand on the precipice of memory, wanting so desperately to fall into it, knowing I can’t. Jonas is animal, Peter is mineral. And I need a rock.

“I’ll see you,” I say. And we both understand what that means.

“Elle . . .” Jonas calls out as I head down the steps into the subway.

I stop, but this time I don’t turn around.

“Peter isn’t the ring guy,” he says. “I’m the ring guy.”





23


   1991. February, London.


The Heath is empty. Just a few grim-looking dog lovers, who stand apart from one another watching their shivering pets run off leash, chicken-bone legs covered in mud, having fun at their owners’ expense. It’s raining. Not a lush, fertile deluge, but that endless drizzle from a leaden lowering sky specifically designed to make you pull your socks up. A black dog charges across the field chasing a red ball through the mizzle.

I’ve moved into Peter’s Hampstead flat, with its grand, soaring ceilings and plaster cornices. Bookshelves line the walls, filled with leatherbound volumes on shipbuilding or Agrippa that Peter has actually read. At night, when he gets home from the City, we build a proper fire in the fireplace, curl up together on the sofa under feather duvets while he reads aloud to me from the most boring book he can find, until I beg him to stop and make love to me instead.

The flat would be heavenly if it hadn’t been decorated by his mother in austere velvet sofas with lion’s paws for feet, and prints of hunting dogs carrying limp dead fowl in their mouths. Peter has taped a Clash poster over one particularly heinous Br’er Rabbit death scene, and thrown kilims over the backs of chaises. But I can still feel her here, spying through the eye of the formidable-looking ancestor whose portrait hangs above our bed. I know she wasn’t happy when I moved in. A young American girlfriend is acceptable as long as it ends when she returns to her ghastly country.

On days like today, when Peter is at the office and I’m alone at home trying to finish my thesis, pacing the rooms, eating Nutella from the jar, getting nothing accomplished, I can feel her staring back at me from the walls, the ceilings, as if she has skim-coated them with her disapproval. If only she knew how right she is.

At the bottom of our street there’s an old pub with a hopeful outdoor terrace for sunny days. Beyond it is the vast Heath, its wild, reckless fields and forests smack in the middle of the city. The woods here are gnarled, druidic, their roots extending out around them like fingers seeking blindly for a past they still remember. Little paths lead between them, worn trails that disappear into deep hollows, fecund, rotting, overgrown, hiding fox dens and the men who come here to cruise for blow jobs after dark.

Most afternoons, I walk on the Heath, letting my mind air out after too many hours staring at a typewriter. I’ve planned to take a proper long walk this afternoon, from Parliament Hill to Kenwood House, but the rain starts coming down, heavier now, waterlogging the world, so I change course and make a diagonal cut across the field toward home, past the men’s swimming ponds.

Two old men in matching blue rubber bathing caps and baggy trunks stand at the edge of the public pond, their white, crepe-paper skin translucent, dull rain pattering their backs. I see them here almost every day. It’s a British thing—taking pleasure in duty, maintaining a citizen’s right to swim in a cold, unappetizing pond in the middle of a public park because one can. The same reason Peter’s mother insists on walking directly through her neighbor’s garden or the farmer’s pigsties, ducks and geese scattering as she climbs a wooden turnstile: because it is a public right of way, and the pleasure in walking through, legally trespassing, is so much purer than the ease of walking around.