The Arnolfini Bride

The captured words of another mind lay on the page before her. A virtual page, illuminated from behind a screen; pixellated and whirring, a gentle flicker of electrons bouncing from the flat surface of the screen to her retina and into her brain.

The words that edged into each other and expanded, chasing away the crowded sense of a New York afternoon to reveal a corn field dream of Ohio.

Paused in her aimless, rushing oblivion of connection and connectivity; reminded of the existence of other minds, other voices; she sits and stares at the screen, at this page blundered on so blindly in her search for someone other. The noise of the internet café burbles on around her and she doesn’t hear the crash of coffee cups or the laughter of friends. She is paused in the chaos of her life, made still by the words of a stranger.

She thinks back and remembers; that sense of wonder the first time she looked on the Manhattan skyline; the craning of her neck to look up and up and up, beyond the usual eyeline of shop frontages and pavement and other people’s screwed up faces, hurrying and cursing past the curiosity of this tourist. She remembers how that sense of awe, that spine-tingling joy and disbelief that a fairytale could be real, faded with familiarity. The words on the page, flickering on the screen, remind her of how it felt the first time.

“I never look up,” he said to her.

“You miss so much,” was her reply.

You miss so much with your hurry and your pavement dwelling eyeline. You raise your eyes only to check whether it is safe to cross; if the hand is red or the man a white diamond-encrusted outline.

A pair of shoes, palely pretty, cross-buckled with a kitten heel. His eyes had come to rest on them one day, seated at a café table in the Village. She had paused to check a street sign. He was reading a newspaper, his eyes were lowered, always lowered, but then they rose; up from the shoes, along the line of her leg and past the hemline of her skirt. His eyes rose up to cross the landscape of her body and come to rest on her face.

Outside on the sidewalk at Caffe Reggio, McDougal Street. A mid-morning cappuccino, monk-like habit, and a pair of shoes.

“I’m lost,” she had said, matter of fact, unabashed, unashamed, illiterate in this new language she was struggling through.

He had reached out and taken the scribbled directions from her hand. He had read them, frowning slightly as he tried to decipher what her friend had written.

“No,” he said eventually. “You’re not lost. This is McDougal Street. Minetta Tavern is on a little way from here. Keep going. You’ll see it eventually.”

“Thanks,” she said, taking the crumpled scrap back from him. The paper was beginning to wilt from the fervent clutching of her hand; it resembled the leaf of a plant that saw water a few days ago, but was beginning to feel the need for more.

He, tall with hair that couldn’t decide between dark blonde and light brown, almost let her go but then remembered the sight of her shoes and the pull of her legs up to that face that only vaguely seemed to fit.

“Joe Gould fan, huh?”

She had begun to move off, her attention already returned to the scrap of paper and the route through this unfamiliar landscape to the rendezvous she was minutes away from missing.

She halted. She looked back at him with a smile part nervous, part hoping to disarm whatever conflict might suddenly be arising.

“Pardon?”

“Little Joe Gould. He used to drink there, eat soup there. Thought you must be a literary type.”

“Oh. No. Well, I am, but that’s not the reason. I didn’t know that. I don’t know who he is. I mean…”

“You’re a literary type and you don’t know Little Joe Gould?”

“I’m not from round here.”

She was awkward now. Whatever assurance that normally held her bones in alignment was gone, leaving her gawky and angular like a teenager. The clothes, especially the shoes, indicated that her usual demeanour was assured. Poised, even. He smiled.

“It’s okay. He’s a little known literary celeb.”

She smiled back and started to return to the job in hand, namely meeting her friend at the Minetta Tavern for some kind of lunch or cocktail, he suspected.

“He was a friend of Cummings’,” he offered, looking back at his newspaper, but hoping she would linger again.

The trick worked. He glanced up and saw the sunshine behind her light up the stray wisps of her hair like a halo. He smiled again, pushed at the other chair at his table with his foot, and indicated that she could sit if she wanted.

The gesture, his confidence, something; suddenly everything that made her who she was in her own environment flooded back, and the clothes became one more disguise meant to trick people into false impressions. Her eyes glittered with mischief and her face cracked open into a grin that was at once childlike in its amusement and wicked in its potential.

She sat. He waved for a waiter. She ordered a hot tea, with milk, no sugar. He listened to her British vowels and imagined her dressed in jeans and a t-shirt.

“You’ll be late for your meeting,” he said.

“I’ll say that I got lost.”

“You could always ring and ask for directions.”

“My phone doesn’t work over here.”

“Are you in the habit of drinking tea with strange men?”

“It depends on the man. Which poets he knows.”

“Cummings does it for you, then?”

“Cummings and enough cheek to proposition an unknown woman in the street.”

“Welcome to New York. You might not have heard, but we’re all predators round these parts.”

Her tea arrived. They both looked at it, the conversation stalled by the intrusion of the waiter. She placed both hands around it, staring down into the surface of the liquid, suddenly uncertain again.

“Here on vacation?”

She looked up as though surprised he was sitting there, as though she had forgotten.

“Yes. Visiting a friend. Just for a few days.”

“Never been before?”

“You can tell?” She laughed, and looked sideways, away from him. Her profile was pretty. He liked the curve of her cheek and the way her eyelashes curled up towards her brows. He liked the straight line of her nose and its tilt at the end.

She looked back at him; caught him staring. She laughed and blushed; picked up the cup of tea and, holding the edge of the cup to her lip, blew across its surface.

She took the barest sip and put the cup down again.

“Too hot,” she said. “Needs to cool.”

She kept her eyes downcast for a moment and allowed him to soak up her appearance. He appreciated the effort she was making to feign shyness on his behalf. He had seen the mischief in her eyes, however. He wasn’t going to be fooled.

She remembers all of this reading those words on another person’s webpages, lost to their spell, to the cadence of sweet memory. Propped up by circumstance, she allows herself the luxury of fading out of her surroundings until –

“Are you going to be much longer, lady?”

Startled, she looks round from the terminal to see a teenager boring holes in the back of her head with his stare. She checks her watch. She has two more minutes. She composes herself to return his stare.

“Two minutes,” she says.

Grumbling, the boy moves off, hunting for another terminal that might come free sooner than in two minutes; sooner than that whole lifetime of wasted opportunity that comes in packets of one hundred and twenty seconds.

She abandons the page that paused her life for a moment and sent her tumbling back to the meeting that would change her life. She’s forgotten what she came in to search for, though, so she abandons the session altogether, remembering to log out of different sites and wipe her history from that electronic memory bank.

The youth who woke her from her reverie is far off across the café from her; his back is to her and he doesn’t notice that she has left.

She leaves the building, out onto 8^th Avenue and the bustle of people going about their lives. She is one of them now, no longer a tourist, no longer filled with the awe that the internet poet spoke of. She lost her enchantment long ago, became one of the oblivious, hurrying through the days to cover up the fact that life can be achingly slow.

She crosses Times Square from west to east, heading for 5^th Avenue, aching now to do something with her day that will recapture something of the enchantment of New York.

The Public Library, across from the bookshop where he worked, alongside the park where they would meet, huddled in the autumn air, those first few months after she moved to the city; buildings looming over them, peering down through the branches of trees beginning to lose their leaves. She had just begun to understand that bravery is a form of deception.

That first meeting in the Village, she had taken him along with her to lunch at the Minetta. He had cried off work. She later learned what that meant to him; a day without food, his usual grocery money spent on lunch with her in a place he couldn’t afford, his income cut by an afternoon’s pay.

She had taken him home with her. A snack, her friend termed it. Something about the falling away of circumstance and preconception, being someone other than herself in someone else’s land, made it an okay thing to do. She had snacked and then, months later, she had found herself a job over there.

His bravery in picking her up that day, in allowing himself to be picked up, was a sham. Circumstance and preconception can be different things even on your own turf. He was cut loose by the thought that he would never need to see her again; and although she hadn’t returned for his benefit, her presence in the city became for him some sort of habit. Like a once a month cappuccino at Caffe Reggio on his half day, when he was working for money instead of art.

The Public Library, where they would spend damp afternoons and early evenings listening to talks and wandering through the divisions and reading rooms, getting to know each other’s surfaces.

They had gone through winter months wrapped in each other’s warmth; knowing and needing only the other’s body; skating wide rings around the darker places of psyche and emotion. Nights spent in foreign beds with morning’s ritual of not knowing where to look until clothes were reassembled and breakfast, if there was time for breakfast, had been negotiated. A tumbling of limbs and pretence at still being a tourist in another’s land brought her one spring day to a day without spots of blood at the time they should have appeared.

Courageous and brave, he told her to get rid of it, then shipped out of town on a twelve month tour of Shakespearean theatre. Something, he claimed, he had always wanted to do. Something, she suspected, he needed the correct impetus to commit to.

Her belly swollen, she now sits at a table in the Public Library, reading books about the Renaissance. Van Eyck, Raphael, Holbein, DaVinci all float before her eyes; the influence of the Medici; Guttenberg and Caxton; Shakespeare. Always, somewhere, Shakespeare.

Her belly swollen, she curses Shakespeare and the camaraderie of players. Roommates in a dormitory of poetic invention. She curses Cummings too and shies away from remembering the words mumbled across a sleep indented pillow. Since feeling was first, attention to syntax seemed unnecessary; redundant. The study of rules and patterns had no part to play in their loose ritual.

Since feeling was first, the gut did away with rules and six months on, her belly swollen, she knows she will not see him again.

The poem that she found earlier that day; the poem that haunts her now and reminds her of a time when wonderment and awe were all that mattered in her life; the poem reminds her that there is death again in the trees and life passes achingly slow at times. Twelve months have passed that could have been twelve years or twelve generations, it seems so long since she first stepped foot on this island as a resident.

The richness of new life stirs in her swollen belly. Like the Arnolfini bride in the picture in front of her.

© J R Hargreaves November 2006