He said he couldn’t write for a year after reading Anna Karenina. It was, well, so exact. It was thorough and perfect the way he couldn’t be in his own writing. Yet. He guessed. What did he do for that year? He probably wandered around in his hipster cowboy shirts drinking mochas and making sense. Up and down the streets of a couple specific neighborhoods in Chicago, changing his hair over to the other side of his head six months in.
He flirted with me. When he told me that he hadn’t been able to write for a year after reading Anna Karenina, I had not realized this: that he was in the middle of that year, that it wasn’t over yet, that he’d read Anna Karenina six months ago. The day before I met him, he’d changed his hair. It was a kind of fiction he told me, a past tense about a year in his life that wasn’t true yet. A fiction of the nonfiction to follow.
I had no idea who he was. I didn’t know he’d challenged his ex-girlfriend with his prospective suicide and mentally assisted his last girlfriend through an abortion, his daughter but a crab apple fallen from a poisoned tree. That he had clung to a poisoned tree long past the crab apple was gone, that he’d clung to it. That Anna Karenina wasn’t even on his bookshelf anymore. He hadn’t lent it to a friend. He hadn’t thrown it away. He’d thought about leaving it in a café with his name and number written on the inside, during his current break-up, which was still going on. He told himself, “She who calls to return my book will be the next one.” The next one what? “The next person I’ll fall for.”
Romance happens summertime in Chicago, always has. By winter, one in Chicago would hope he has met someone nice enough to stay with. And how he believed, seething a little bit in the café, where he had borrowed a pen from a pretty girl at least seven years younger than him—he calculated—(the café, a known place of cool people in Chicago, the elevated train just beyond passing through the white docile air, like a knife flashing through a silk pocket)—that Anna Karenina didn’t jump down into the train area, but fell. She fell like a crab apple from a poisoned branch. He shook his head. He wrote his name and number on the inside cover, somewhat close to “LEO TOLSTOY,” which made him shake his head again. He put the book back in his bag and that bag in his closet. The season changed and it was a summer bag. I met him in winter when his cards were down and he was alone.
We stood like Europeans at an American bar. Of course it was American, this was Chicago, but it was so American. Deer Antlers, flags, bread. Well, not bread, but juke boxes, chipped paintings of Rita Hayworth look-a-likes, their nipples frosty pink and monolithic, Christmas lights, pool tables, flannel shirts, jeans, belt buckles, red lipstick, gnomes, trolls, snorks, santas, blacks, Jews, dogs, their bellies almost hairless from lying on bar floors, their owners half asleep, drinking beer, holding the glass with dust-silvered fingers. He wrote on a small square napkin a list of books I should read, which is when he mentioned his plight after reading Anna Karenina.
“After I read it, I couldn’t bring myself to write for an entire year.”
I was just starting to write. Well, that’s not the truth. I had written most of my life, but those were journal entries single-themed, all about hope. When I was young, I was convinced I had nothing. When I was young, even so far as adolescent, I felt like a prospective immigrant, on a ship coming to a country, watching for the telltale signs of that country. I felt the rocking boat (my father’s house) and the everlasting wait. I stood on the deck, watching for the signs, my arms crossed over my chest. When I turned 18, I disembarked the boat that had dipped so recklessly this way and that into waves everywhere, that had made me nauseous, sea sick, so sick, unable to concentrate, unable to do anything but hope. At 18, I disembarked, confused and scared and jobless and worried and exhilarated. When I was 19, I started to write about things other than hope. Life was not all hope. It was also happening. This was good. Things were really good. And he was my first writer friend (which, as other writers know, is a precious thing), although he had not written for six months and wouldn’t write for another six months. I flirted with him mercilessly even though I was already in love with another man.
I told him, with what I think of still as total veracity, that we were soul mates, meant to meet, important people to one another. I went so far to call us “the same.” He leaned into me with his eyes quite close. They were big eyes, two antiquated cowbells, the pupils dinging heavily on the sides. His skin was equally olive to mine, as if we were a breed, I remember.
When I read Anna Karenina soon after it ended, I was reminded of how I felt about him in the scene where Levin and Kitty profess their love to one another. It is a preposterous scene, so fun. Levin writes out the initials of impossibly long and complex sentences and then Kitty easily guesses each acronym. They have an entire conversation, back and forth, in this way, jotting down acronyms. It doesn’t seem possible in the real world. And yet. And yet, when we stood at the bar that one particular night and a couple others during what now seems like an incredibly brief friendship, I feel that we were speaking in acronyms. Our words meant more than they did. Our words were compacted to single letters and for those letters stood whole other words. I flirted with him immensely. Outside of the American bar, by the bike I’d just recently learned to ride, I kissed him. I hadn’t learned, I suppose, that people come from places—places and not the nothingness, the utter hoping nothingness that I had just recently arrived from. That their lives had been happening, taking place, that they had fallen already, and clung already to the feet of the poisoned, or had jumped off poisoned branches and had moaned already with their faces in the ground. That they had met my type before and knew what I might do. Everything to me was incipient. I was like a crab apple just now becoming more than nothing, just now my membrane sizzling growing, just now my insides sparkling with unabashed cells, just now color gushing from me to my membrane, just now my taste positioning itself, and unwittingly I really did think nobody wasn’t incipient, that everybody was me, and the poison, how I didn’t realize it was, as it said it would be, poised.
